Obama Watch

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air put it best on the latest Obama campaign video: "You know, nothing says classy in a presidential campaign like having to bleep out a word from the national campaign manager in a prepared video." Campaign manager Jim Messina tells supporters it's "bulls---" that Obama will run a "billion-dollar campaign." In the shadow of Occupy Wall Street, will the media help Obama implausibly frame his campaign as somehow a small-bore, Mom and Pop enterprise?

Some in the major media have noticed, too, like Devin Dwyer at ABCNews.com, who added "The Obama campaign has never explicitly thrown out the billion-dollar figure and aides have pushed back hard on media reports that they anticipate raising that much during the campaign. They raised a record-high $746 million in 2008. Obama has raised $87 million so far this year for his re-election fight." Is it implausible to guess they'll get to a billion dollars this time? Messina also sent this not-a-billion message in an e-mail to supporters in mid-week:

“After 13 years with ABC News, correspondent Jim Sciutto is leaving the network and TV news. He’s moving to China where he’ll be Chief of Staff to U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke,” TVNewser’s Chris Ariens reported Thursday in noting the latest journalist to join the Obama administration, this time working for Locke, the former Democratic Governor of Washington.

Sciutto should certainly feel comfortable promoting Obama’s interests and how he is a blessing to the world since that’s what he used his ABC News position to do. The night after Obama’s inauguration, for instance, Sciutto delivered a piece for World News with soundbites from naive kids around the world sputtering beauty pageant-like simplicities about how President Barack Obama will bring “world peace” and inspires them to say “yes, we can!”

Let it not be said that the Washington Post are toadies for the Obama administration. They sometimes chastise the White House for not being left-wing enough. 

For example, on Saturday the Washington Post editorial board weighed in to the left of the Obama administration on the recent call by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's move to block the FDA's recommendation to allow birth control pill Plan B from being sold without prescription over-the-counter regardless of the patient being a minor.

CBS’s Steve Kroft challenged President Barack Obama a few times during the two-part 60 Minutes interview aired Sunday night, but managed to ignore the scandals (Solyndra, Fast & Furious and collapse of MF Global run by ally Jon Corzine) while mostly cuing up Obama to knock down criticism of him or pressing him with complaints from the left that he hasn’t done or gone far enough: “They thought that you were gonna be bolder.”

“Since the midterm elections, you made an effort at bipartisanship. It hasn’t worked out that way,” Kroft fretted in crediting Obama with the noble effort before seemingly conveying the liberal complaint the stimulus didn’t spend enough: “There’s a general perception that the stimulus was not enough. That it really didn’t work.”

“In the presidential campaign,” CBS anchor Scott Pelley announced Thursday night, “President Obama fired back today at Republican opponents who criticized his foreign policy using words like ‘timid,’ ‘weak’ and ‘appeasement.’”

Over on ABC, fill-in anchor David Muir trumpeted “a very pointed response from President Obama” to the charge he’s had a weak foreign policy as an admiring Muir maintained “you can almost see him choosing his words as the question is asked.” Both then played Obama’s response from a late morning news conference:

The Democratic National Committee blasted ABC reporter Jake Tapper in an "open letter" for declaring on his Political Punch blog that their ad was "deceptive and false" on Mitt Romney's position on the stimulus (as we reported first here.) Ben Smith at Politico reported it, and noted it has now been unpublished. This is probably why: DNC National Press Secretary Melanie Roussell charged,  "If you had only done your due diligence, you might have learned that Mitt Romney expressed his support for the Recovery Act on more than the one occasion."

Her problem? The example she cited was quoted by Tapper after he talked to someone at the DNC, and he then dismissed it as a non-starter. Who wasn't doing their "due diligence"? As part of a too-regular pattern, Tapper has faulted Team Obama on his blog, but ABC doesn't quite accomplish it on the airwaves to a much larger audience. Here's how it went down:

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds the support for ObamaCare has dipped yet again, with just 34 percent of Americans favoring the president's signature health care overhaul.

What's more, just 52 percent of Democrats support the law, a troubling sign for President Obama a year before Election Day. Thirty-one percent of Democrats view the law either "somewhat" or "very" unfavorably.

We'll be monitoring the major networks to see how much if any attention they devote to the new numbers. Here's an except from Times Washington bureau reporter Noam Levey's October 28 story:

All three network morning shows on Wednesday cheered President Obama's Tuesday appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. At the top of ABC's Good Morning America, co-host Robin Roberts declared: "Comedian in chief. The President hits late-night TV talking about all the people taking swings at him right now. And why what he's really worried about is what the First Lady's giving out for Halloween."

Later, fellow co-host George Stephanopoulos noted how Obama was "trying to warm up his image with a few laughs on Jay Leno's couch." White House correspondent Jake Tapper described how the President "made certain to have a few laughs" at the expense of the Republican presidential candidates. A clip followed of Leno asking if the commander in chief had been watching the GOP debates, with Obama replying: "I'm going to wait until everybody's voted off the island."

NPR's Michele Norris, an anchor on the evening newscast All Things Considered, will temporarily step down as anchor while her husband Broderick Johnson accepts a senior position with the Obama re-election campaign. She will keep reporting what NPR calls "signature pieces" for the show (but not on politics), and plans to return as co-anchor after the 2012 elections.

Norris recused herself without an announcement in 2004 when Johnson aided Kerry's congressional outreach, but not in 2008 when he was unpaid adviser to Obama’s campaign. In a message sent on Monday morning to NPR staff, Norris said:

A Baptist minister from Washington, D.C., who in a sermon once indirectly compared President Obama to Queen Esther -- the biblical figure whose intercession saved Jews from extermination -- has been tapped by the president to "bolster support for President Obama among black and religious voters."

Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein gave readers of the October 21 Metro section a positive 13-paragraph profile of Rev. Derrick Harkins, "a popular D.C. pastor with a shaved head and a remarkable resume." Nowhere in her article did Boorstein examine how Harkins will address conservative religious voters' concerns over Obama's stance on issues such as gay marriage, gays in the military, and abortion, particularly taxpayer-subsidized abortion possible through ObamaCare.

Hundreds of Coptic Christians traveled to Washington D.C. yesterday "from as far as New York and Chicago" to call on President Obama to push Egypt's government to protect their brothers and sisters from persecution.

Kudos are in order for the Washington Post for devoting a 14-paragraph story on page B3 of the October 20 paper. Editors also published a large photo from the demonstration, headlined, "At the White House, Coptic Christians demand an end to 'horrible nightmare,'" on the front page of the Post to direct readers to the Metro section story.

The front page of The Washington Post carried a story Tuesday on black liberals demanding all blacks stand with President Obama -- just because he's black. Krissah Thompson's story carried some noteworthy "get in line" quotes from the forget-the-black-unemployment-numbers crowd, but the closest thing to a moderate or conservative in the article is a man suggesting Obama is not God.

On the front page, Thompson quoted from radio host Tom Joyner on his BlackAmericaWeb.com blog. “Let’s not even deal with the facts right now. Let’s deal with just our blackness and pride — and loyalty. We have the chance to re-elect the first African-American president, and that’s what we ought to be doing. And I’m not afraid or ashamed to say that as black people, we should do it because he’s a black man.”

The New York Times today has a piece entitled:

Auto Bailout Done, Obama Looks for Payback 

Two problems - with just the headline.  Which the Times either ignorantly doesn’t know - or knows and willfully ignores. The auto bailout isn’t “done.”  

Two more shoes dropped in the Solyndra scandal today, but it remains to be seen their sound will stir the sleepy liberal lapdog media.

Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison resigned last Friday, the Associated Press reported early this afternoon.

Oh, and while the media of late have cheerleading the Democratic push for a new surtax on millionaires, don't expect the news media, particularly MSNBC, to note how a key Obama donor who pushed for the Solyndra loan has been delinquent on his evaded federal taxes for years. As Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott noted this morning:

On Wednesday's the Ed Show, MSNBC host Ed Schultz berated centrist Democratic Senators Ben Nelson and Jon Tester as "turncoast Democrats" for voting against President Obama recent economic plan, lambasted Democrats for not doing more to call out their centrist colleague and support and Occupy Wall Street Movement, and advised Democrats to embrace the term "tax and spend liberal." Schultz:

As a service to the 10 people who will somehow manage to find the Bloomberg Television channel on their cable box tonight in order to watch the network's GOP presidential debate, Bloomberg News today published and the Washington Post syndicated a "Viewers' Guide to Economic Jargon."

While most of the article is helpful and unbiased, Bloomberg News seriously downplayed the scandalous nature of the ill-conceived Solyndra loan. Here's how Bloomberg defined the controversy surrounding the firm that was raided by the FBI in early September:

The media said there was "good" but "not great" news on the unemployment front in September with 103,000 jobs added, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate remained 9.1 percent.

But even with that growth, Obama's jobs promises have fallen far short. His economic policies were supposed to create 4 million jobs by the end of 2010. Now, ten months later the economy is still dealing with net job losses of 2,229,000 since February 2009.

I'll be live-blogging the questions from reporters below the page break: