Mimi Hall

“Will doing 'big things' wind up costing Obama?” a Wednesday USA Today front page article worried, accompanied by a photo of contemplative President Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln in a painting peering down at him. The caption: “History book bound?” The subhead for the story by Susan Page and Mimi Hall: “Voters' anxiety clouds his historic successes.”

The effusive lead presumed Obama deserves credit for great achievements the public has been slow to recognize:

Big problems. Big achievements. Big costs.

Historians say President Obama's legislative record during a crisis-ridden presidency already puts him in a league with such consequential presidents as Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. But polls show voters aren't totally on board with his achievements, at least not yet, and the White House acknowledges that his victories have carried huge financial and political costs.

“There are always costs in doing big things,” Obama told USA Today.

The duo later declared: “Historians call Obama's record incomparable.” And they meant that as a glowing positive. (Larger jpg of the front page headline and photo)

“President Obama may not have delivered on all the policy changes he promised since his election a year ago, but he and his family have brought dramatic social change to the nation's capital and to the country's collective image of its first family,” USA Today's Mimi Hall and Maria Puente gushed in a front page story on Tuesday marking a year since President Obama's election, “With cultural 'flair,' Obamas updating first family's image.” The two reporters began by describing Barack and Michelle Obama as just like any other hip couple:

He carries a smartphone on his hip, goes out for burgers and plays pickup hoops. She goes to their daughters' soccer games, works in the garden and loves listening to her iPod. Together, they host poets, artists and musicians at their house and invite neighborhood kids to drop by.

The journalistic duo soon featured this glowing assessment: “'The Obamas' White House is the most open for cultural and intellectual activities since the Kennedy administration,' says Douglas Brinkley, author and presidential historian at Rice University in Houston. 'It's not simply a matter of doing events of statecraft and cultural gravitas. They have a great flair for American pop culture.'”