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October 26, 2009
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Monday, October 26
President Obama’s weekly address HERE
Devastating drop in job approval numbers for Obama in new Gallup survey GO HERE.
Barack's 'Enemies List' SEE HERE.
Obama strategy: Marginalize most powerful critics - CLICK HERE.
War on Fox News diminishes the White House - READ MORE HERE.
Mark Steyn: "White House is trying to intimidate the U.S. media while being a pushover with our foreign adversaries." READ MORE HERE.
Will ObamaCare Pass?
Morris & McGann, Vote.com
Even as Obama's proposals for health care changes attracted two key swing votes in the Senate Finance Committee (Republican Olympia Snowe and Democrat Blanche Lincoln), public opinion is turning ever more hostile to the proposed changes. Inside the beltway, the plan looks unstoppable. Outside it, the legislation looks DOA.
Which version of reality is the correct one? READ it all HERE.
The White House will lose its war against Fox News
Nile Gardiner, Telegraph.co.uk
The White House’s extraordinary assault on the Fox News Channel will end in tears – and not for Rupert Murdoch, Fox’s owner. The Obama administration has embarked on a high-risk strategy of shooting the messenger, in effect blaming its plummeting poll ratings on alleged political bias at the number one 24-hour cable news network. As Anita Dunn, the Mao-quoting White House communications director put it in an interview with The New York Times:
“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
As Dunn’s statement illustrates, this is an overtly political campaign – and one that is doomed to failure, as it will ensure that even more Americans end up tuning in to Fox shows. The United States is a nation built around the principles of free speech, limited government, and free enterprise, and it is highly unusual for a US administration to launch an authoritarian vendetta against an individual news station. It smacks of mean-spiritedness as well as desperation, and is an approach that is already backfiring, with Fox’s ratings receiving an added boost from the huge publicity.
Fox News is succeeding in America precisely because it is not afraid to challenge the status quo, and to take on the power of big government. It is unique in broadcast media in going against the grain of the dominant liberal networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, by providing an alternative perspective in a nation where conservatives are still the largest ideological group according to Gallup. Read article.
Why the White House attack on Fox is backfiring
Byron York, Washington Examiner.com
There seems to be general agreement that the Obama White House's campaign against Fox News is actually directed at other news organizations -- to "get other journalists to think twice before following [Fox's] stories in their own coverage," according to an article in the Politico. Fox is beyond the pale, the White House is telling the press corps: You wouldn't want to have anything to do with that, would you?
But the White House campaign appears to be backfiring. A number of mainstream journalists are reacting badly to the attempt to declare a journalistic organization off-limits. Why the negative reaction? Is it because of solidarity among reporters? A reflexive defense of freedom of the press? Secret sympathy for Fox?
None of the above. The real reason the White House campaign is backfiring is that it offends journalistic self-esteem.
Most mainstream reporters are already ignoring stories critical of the Obama administration that Fox plays up. They famously stayed away from the Van Jones story, and the ACORN story, too, for as long as possible. They were doing exactly what the White House wanted, but they believed they were doing it for sound journalistic reasons, not as the result of any bias, and certainly not as the result of any directive from the White House. Read article.
Media Wars: White House Crosses the Line
Tom Bevan, RCP.com
Every White House complains about its press coverage. A contentious relationship between the Executive Branch and a free and independent media is part of America's DNA. Always has been.
But this White House seems to feel they're different. It's not just that the current occupant of the Oval Office has a particularly thin skin when it comes to criticism - which is especially ironic given that he's been the recipient of more glowing press coverage than possibly any candidate or president in modern American history. But not since Nixon conjured up an "enemies list" have we seen the full weight of the Office of the Presidency brought to bear in such a targeted and deliberate effort to delegitimize a media organization critical of the President.
When Communications Director Anita Dunn first announced the White House's war against FOX News last week, many people from across the political spectrum dismissed it as silly. But two of the administration's heaviest hitters, Senior Advisor David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, went on the Sunday talk shows and made clear that the White House's attempt to delegitimize FOX News is deadly serious.
On This Week, Axelrod told George Stephanopoulos: "[FOX News] is not really a news station. It's not just their commentators but a lot of their news programming it's really not news it's pushing a point of view. "
Emanuel echoed the line to John King on CNN's State of the Union: "The way the president looks at it - we look at it - it's not a news organization so much as it has a perspective."
And MSNBC doesn't push a certain "perspective?" What about the New York Times? Read article.
What Would Mao Do? White House press strategy is about absolute control.
Editorial, Washington Times.com
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told a group of high school students last June that former Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong was one of her two favorite political philosophers, and you could tell she was speaking from the heart. Her earnest appeal to the teenagers to fight their own wars, as Mao had counseled when challenged within his own party, was clearly meant as a call to activism. "You fight your war and I'll fight mine," she quoted Mao as saying, because apparently Mao was all about personal choice.
Of course, Mao's usual response to those who questioned his authority was to have them killed, but mentioning that inconvenient truth might detract from Miss Dunn anointing him a philosopher.
Miss Dunn's quotation of Chairman Mao as one of the two people she "most turns to" has created a media sensation. A bewildered Miss Dunn, discovering that not everyone reveres mass murderers as sources of valuable life lessons, claimed she was only quoting late Republican political operative Lee Atwater's views on the Chinese Communist Party chairman. But there is a significant difference between uberconservative Mr. Atwater making a joke about Mao and reverential views coming from one of President Obama's mouthpieces.
"What would Mao do?" seems to be the guiding question in White House communications strategy. Read article.
Obama's Moral Leadership Balloon Crashes — No One Inside
Mona Charen, JWR.com
The world thinks better of the United States, we are told, because Barack Obama is in the White House. Maybe the world is wrong.
It's fanciful, of course, to speak of what "the world" thinks about anything. It's safe to say that among Norwegian prize givers and Canadian avant-garde filmmakers, Obama is extremely popular. And certainly among bien pensant Americans, the advent of Obama is viewed as the moral pinnacle of American history. It has always been a particular vanity of the left to believe itself morally superior to others. But the claims for this presidency have been beyond extravagant. Global human rights, morality, and justice took a "great leap forward" (as Anita Dunn's favorite political philosopher might say) on Jan. 20. But in the space of just nine months, the Obama administration has betrayed the cause of human rights around the globe.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped set the tone in February by swatting away a question about human rights abuses in China. Those issues, she said, "can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis." Political prisoners, Tibetans, and religious minorities may have been dejected by this stony dismissal, but the Chinese government was delighted. "This type of realistic attitude could be followed by other Western leaders," an official newspaper noted with satisfaction. Read article.
Does Obama Believe in Human Rights?
Bret Stephens, Online WSJ.com
Human rights "interfere" with President Obama's campaign against climate change. Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama's decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month's 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany's reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?
To this day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, remains a high-water mark in the march of human freedom. It's a march to which candidate Obama paid rich (if solipsistic) tribute in last year's big Berlin speech. "At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning—his dream—required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West," waxed Mr. Obama to the assembled thousands. "This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom."
Those were the words. What's been the record? Read article.
Alienated & Radicalized
Pat Buchanan, Townhall.com
Is all this due to Obama's race?
Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.
With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.
Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993, and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.
They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care, and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on -- then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.
They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.
They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right. Read article.
Unions Calling in Their Chits
Linda Chavez, Townhall.com
"That's not the change America voted for." The implied criticism of President Obama comes not from Rush Limbaugh or Fox News but from the AFL-CIO in a newspaper ad this week letting the president and congressional Dems know unions' "bottom line for health care reform." The unions are calling in their chits. If health care legislation doesn't include a public option, they won't support it. And if it does include a tax on so-called gold-plated plans, they'll oppose it.
No wonder White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been meeting behind closed doors with Democrats trying to craft a final bill. He's more afraid of a few union bosses than he is the thousands of voters who have flocked to town hall meetings to oppose health care reform. Without the unions and their money, no Democrat can win the White House and Democratic control of the House and Senate might slip away.
The irony is that unions helped create the health care mess in the first place. Ever wonder why most Americans receive their health insurance through work? After all, we don't get our home or car insurance through our employers. Nor do most employers pay directly for other essentials like housing or food. Read article.
Excuses wearing thin for Obama, media pals
Steve Huntley, Chicago Sun Times.com
Have you heard the news? President Obama inherited an economic mess from the Bush administration.
You say that's hardly news? But it's been the message sounded over and over by the White House. Top Obama adviser David Axelrod said on one of the Sunday news shows, "He walked in the door, we had the worst economy since the Great Depression." In San Francisco, Obama talked of being "busy with our mop." White House heavy hitter Rahm Emanuel used the worst-economy-since-the-Depression line on a public TV news show.
You'd think it's October 2008, the final month in the Obama presidential candidacy, rather than October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency. Yet the Obama White House is in full campaign mode -- maybe because it needs to mask the shortcomings of the Obama presidency. The White House trying to dictate who's a news organization. Democrats out to gut a business group. Obama media allies damning Americans as racist, unpatriotic and treasonous. Is this the America Obama promised when he campaigned to end the cynical and divisive politics of the past?
The White House trying to dictate who's a news organization. Democrats out to gut a business group. Obama media allies damning Americans as racist, unpatriotic and treasonous. Is this the America Obama promised when he campaigned to end the cynical and divisive politics of the past? Read article.
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