Bozell Column: Omnipresent Obama

Following his usual mantra that "to watch me is to love me," Barack Obama appeared on five Sunday interview shows and since that wasn’t enough, then the David Letterman show on Monday night. He remains convinced that the more he plays dust speck in the national eye, the further he’ll get in passing his leftist agenda. He’s also confident our media won’t hold him accountable. They just hold him.

"I can't tell you how satisfying it is to watch you work!," a beaming Letterman gushed to Obama. Even during that show, Letterman was still whacking away at George W. Bush as an idiot, unctuously currying favor with the new president. Letterman doesn’t pretend to be an objective journalist, of course. But can you recall him ever voicing his satisfaction with conservatives?

Perhaps the most amazing thing Obama did – over and over – on Sunday was to scold the media for making the national dialogue coarser by allowing his critics to have a voice on the networks. "Let's face it, the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude," he said.

Obama should be embarrassed. This is amateurish and silly (if I say so rudely). It’s also a broken record. When Reagan, Bush I and Bush II were in office, nasty demonstrators – even rioters – were celebrated by the left. But when Democrats take control (Clinton, Obama), any criticism becomes angry, hateful, and now racist.

Obama’s most ridiculous answer came as only one network host – ABC’s George Stephanopoulos – inquired (softly) about the ACORN scandal. "Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Obama claimed, adding he had not been aware that ACORN received much federal money.

This is ludicrous, a little like George Bush claiming he didn’t follow the Texas Rangers, or Dick Cheney declaring he didn’t know Halliburton received much federal money. John Fund laid out the whole history for the Wall Street Journal. In Illinois, Obama served as ACORN’s attorney and a top trainer at ACORN’s Chicago organizing conferences. In 1996, Obama filled out a questionnaire and put ACORN at the top of the list of his key supporters for his state Senate campaign.

Then, during the presidential campaign, Obama leaned on the group for support, but shamelessly lied to the press about the connection. In 2007, in a speech to ACORN's leaders prior to their political arm's endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: "I've been fighting alongside of ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work."

This president is starting to lie with disturbing regularity. Obama’s campaign aides denied he had been an ACORN trainer until the New York Times found records to prove it. Team Obama quietly gave an ACORN subsidiary $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. On their financial disclosure forms, they claimed the money was for "staging, sound, lighting." It must have been one helluva stage. They only stopped lying after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.

This wasn’t the only unpleasant line of questioning that most of the networks avoided. Only NBC’s David Gregory asked about the role of liability reform in cutting health care costs. "You're not saying to the left they've got to accept malpractice reform, or caps on jury awards. You don't even think that that contributes to the escalating cost of health care."

Obama just ignored Gregory’s question. Despite his reputation in the Bush White House as a pushy nuisance in the briefing room, Gregory didn’t even attempt a weak follow-up with Obama. He changed the subject to Jimmy Carter suggesting opposition to Obama was racist.

Only CBS asked the president about his abandonment of a missile defense shield in central Europe. In his final question, Bob Schieffer pressed, "Shouldn't you have tried to get something from the Russians in exchange for doing that?" As usual, Obama said he was doing everything smarter and more efficiently than Bush, and he also blurted that Russia "has always been paranoid" about missile defense.

NBC’s Gregory skipped that question to Obama, but then insisted on putting the screws to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham minutes later: "I want you on the record on the missile defense change from the White House. The Defense Secretary wrote in The New York Times this morning, ‘Those who say we're scrapping missile defense in Europe are either misinformed or misrepresenting what we are doing.’"

At this point, you just start laughing.