While the the front page of today's Washington Post is actually reporting significant developments in two of Barack Obama's trifecta of scandals, the Washington Post Company-owned free tabloid the Express is busy lamenting if the president will ever get "A Break from the Storm?"
Perhaps, as "advisers say," he "should stage a major economic speech to drown out the noise [emphasis mine] of recent scandals," Express editors helpfully offered in a caption for their front-page photo illustration, which depicted a grimacing President Obama getting drenched in a downpour [see image below page break].
"Last week was so bad for Obama that even asking for an umbrella brought controversy," whined another caption accompanying the Express story.
The actual story teased on the Express front page was an 8-paragraph item by the Associated Press's Jim Kuhnhenn and was headlined "'Get Above the Maelstrom': Obama's advisers press him to push past controversies and sell his agenda." "Get above the maelstrom" was a line pulled from Obama adviser David Axelrod, who was quoted in the fifth paragraph:
"The hardest thing in the hot house of Washington in weeks like this is to get above the maelstrom and really define major issues in your own terms," Axelrod said. "They need to find big platforms."
Besides Axelrod, Kuhnhenn quoted former Biden staffer Jared Bernstein who worried that "There does seem to be a risk of getting bogged down in noise" and that Obama "doesn't need to get out to talk about Benghazi and the IRS and the budget deficit. He needs to talk about investment in the nation's productivity."
No Republican critics were quoted in the article, much less the rarity of liberal Democrat like Kirsten Powers who has called the president out on his scandals.
By contrast, the Washington Post front page featured an above-the-fold story by Ann E. Marimow revealing that a Fox News reporter was also swept up in the Obama/Holder Justice Department's probe of journalists's phone records (see story here) and one below-the-fold about "How the IRS seeded the clouds for a political deluge" with its singling out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny in the approval process for 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) applications.
