President Obama had one comment when he saw Chuck
Todd’s Obama bashing book in a bookstore. With one word, Obama summed up
Todd perfectly.
According to the New York Post (take it with a huge grain of salt),
Shopping at a Washington, DC, bookstore Saturday, President Obama spotted a copy of “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd’s new book about his presidency.“Oh, Chuck Todd!” Obama exclaimed. “Let’s see what Chuck has to say here!”“How is he writing a book already? asked his 16-year-old daughter, Malia. “Sad.”“He’s just sad,” the president joked in response.
The idea that Todd “wrote” a book is highly
debatable. I am working on a review of Todd’s Obama bashing book, and it
can be summed up as less of an exploration of the Obama presidency, and
more of a dear diary entry from a member of Beltway press centered on
why Obama is big meanie who won’t kiss the rings of the D.C. media
elite. There is very little in Todd’s book that hasn’t been voiced by
President Obama’s critics on the right a million times before.
Chuck Todd is sad. He wasn’t even the first choice to replace David Gregory as moderator of Meet The Press. Chuck Todd was NBC’s safety date, which the network turned to after the people that they really wanted turned them down.
Meet The Press is continuing to flounder, because Todd is David Gregory
with a love of politics. Notice that I used the terms politics, not
policy or journalism.
No one expects the president to be friends with the
people who are covering him/her, but the media’s openly hostile
treatment of this president has more to do with petty grudges than a job
description. The DC media hate this president because he won’t play
their game. He doesn’t suck up to them or buy into the whole DC
hierarchy. If Obama embraced the symbiotic relationship between the DC
media and the White House, the treatment he received would probably be
different.
Instead of playing the ego game that the media
demands, Obama’s White House has consistently demonstrated how
unimportant the DC press are. The most recent example of this came when
the president used Facebook to announce his speech outlining his
executive action immigration.
Faced with a changing landscape that is making them
irrelevant, the Beltway press has taken out their rage on Obama. Chuck
Todd is sad, and I would also add pathetic. He is quickly becoming a
dinosaur facing extinction, because the way political leaders interact
with their constituents is changing and no amount of sad whining can
bring back the status that is evaporating for the mainstream press.
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