The media is out of love with the man, not the agenda

The American people and the media are both souring on Barack Obama, but there’s a very different tone to the changed attitudes.

American people were promised, and voted for, a post-racial, post-partisan black man who was politically moderate and sufficiently brilliant to handle an executive job (tho’ he’d never had one before).  (And it helped that he was not George Bush.)  While those of us who were paying attention knew that every one of those attributes — but for the “not Bush” one — was false, ordinary people were stunned to discover that they’d been lied too.  Obama is, in fact, a racially obsessed, anti-American, political extremist who, thank goodness, is a fairly inept executive.  They dislike what he stands for and the policies he pushes.  And so the poll numbers fall.

The media’s disillusionment is quite different.  Media members knew that Obama wa not post-racial and was not moderate.  They truly believed, though, that he was competent.  Unlike members of the American public, media members liked Obama’s well-hidden agenda.  Their problem isn’t that they’ve discovered Obama is a racially obsessed, anti-American political extremist.  Their problem is his executive incompetence, which means he currently does not seem capable of passing the secret agenda that media members so desired.

Because the media’s and the public’s disappointment in Obama stem from two radically different sources — with Americans upset that the agenda was a lie, and the media upset that the ability to carry out the agenda was a lie — I wonder how that will affect (a) news coverage and (b) Americans’ response to that coverage.