It was so full of promise, the ideal candidate with grandiose plans to fundamentally transform America had won. The man the New York Times had worked so hard to help elect was about to usher in a period of utopian hope and change: a chicken in every pot and a Chevy Volt in every driveway. Of course, Chevy Volts turned out to be explosive junk and President Obama’s hope and change has an equally illustrious track record. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, ever the optimistic Obama cheerleader, realizes that Obama has not succeeded. Nevertheless, she constructs an argument explaining where the disconnect originated.

Following on the heels of Newt Gingrich’s overwhelming victory in the South Carolina primaries, Dowd penned a piece entitled “Showtime at the Apollo”. Her opening graph is a tear-jerker:

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.

“I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on.

That doesn’t sound desperate at all. Imagine the thrill of being at the Apollo (as opposed to the usual $30,000 per-plate cost, the man of the people would allow participation by the peasants for a mere $200 to $5000), the goosebumps resulting from the dream of what might have been … if only Obama’s presidency was not an overwhelming and abject failure. His record is impossible to ignore, and unless Obama wants to guarantee his loss, his campaign will have to utilize other tactics. Dowd posits her winning idea:

The song would make a good campaign anthem: “Let’s stay together, lovin’ you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.” Don’t break up, turn around and make up.

The latest polls indicate that the American people have already made the decision to break up. President Obama’s class warfare messaging and embracing of the Occupy Wallstreet fecal-fest have done little to encourage Americans to make up. Neither has the high unemployment or blatantly anti-business environment created by his administration.

When those tactics fail, one of the Left’s favorite tactics is to gloss over the president’s flagging record by blaming his predecessor:

The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal, dragged down by W.’s recklessness and his own inability to read America’s panic and its thirst for a strong leader.

Blaming Bush is never out of style. The problem is, even DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz admits the Democrats own the economy. This dog won’t hunt anymore. Three years after Obama’s immaculation, Americans want jobs, not excuses.

Finally, Dowd gets around to expressing her true elitist confession about Obama’s failure:

(more…)

In the March 2009 issue of Vogue in an article entitled “Leading Lady,” editor at large André Leon Talley pays homage to Michelle Obama, who he believed was “poised to be the most transformative First Lady in history.” In the opening paragraphs of the article Talley describes Michelle Obama, two weeks prior to the Inauguration, standing in front of a window in the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the Obamas had moved so Sasha and Malia could start the spring semester at Sidwell Friends School.

It was there that the woman Talley described as a “long, lean…Alvin Ailey [dancer] in another life,” turned to her smitten admirer, pointed across the street, and asked him the question: “Do you see our new house?”

The “No-Churchgoing” Mrs. Obama told Talley that after “checking out churches to join [and] helping her kids adjust to unfamiliar surroundings,” she intended to “open up the White House again.” After implying that there had been years of exclusion, with Michelle as grand hostess, Talley looked forward to a day where “in a spirit of diversity and inclusion,” life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would finally become a “collective experience.”

The following month, Michelle’s BFF Oprah Winfrey interviewed the First Lady for O Magazine in an article entitled “Oprah Talks to Michelle Obama.”  In that article Oprah shared that Michelle, while contemplating what Winfrey called the “weight of history,” oftentimes said, “This is not about us.”

In that same interview, Oprah observed “Yet for all the majesty of the White House, the First Lady has already infused it with a palpable ease; her presence makes the place feel open and approachable. When we sit down to talk, she seems as relaxed as she did when I first interviewed her and her husband in their Chicago apartment in 2004.”

Now the American public comes to find out that in “The Obamas,” a new book by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, the woman who Oprah said was excited about living in the White House because “if you want pie, there’s pie,” and who Talley perceived was “like the neighbor organizing a block party,” really wanted to stay in Chicago and delay moving to Washington DC.

In one section of André Leon Talley’s article, the part-time fashionista goes on and on about Michelle Obama’s sense of community and how Chicago’s South Side native exudes the impression that once in the White House,  ‘everyone is invited’ to the “ never ‘me’ and ‘mine’ and ‘some,’ but ‘we’ and ‘our’ and ‘all’ people’s house.”

If that was true, then why, according to Jodi Kantor, was Michelle so “worried about her children bumping into White House tourists during play dates?”

Admittedly, it is easy to understand the difficult transition from Chicago, which Michelle told Talley was the Obama family “Kennebunkport,” to what she soon felt was a “tough life in Washington DC.”  But, to say that the woman who had the water dyed green in the fountain on the White House lawn for St. Patrick’s Day a few weeks after moving in was “alone, frightened and unsure of what to do next” may be stretching it a bit.

When Oprah asked the first lady if she felt the glare of the fishbowl, Michelle said, “I don’t pay attention to it. There isn’t a bigger fishbowl, but I don’t own the glare.” In Jodi Kantor’s book the author differs when she claims sources told her that Mrs. Obama said, “Sometimes it becomes difficult to live in what we call a bubble.”

(more…)

Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story.  Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”

“Clueless Clark”

Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column:  “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

And they say the Times has no comics section! (more…)