It sure "[m]ust be nice to be a Democratic president" given the media's air cover for your foreign policy/war-on-terrorism failures, The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway sighed at the end of her December 15 piece detailing all the ways in which the media are "Being Pretty Quiet About Obama’s Failures."
Hemingway – who, you may recall, won the first annual Noel Sheppard award earlier this year – began by noting how "President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign was built on the claim that he was not just tough on terrorists, but also he was successful in fighting them."
From there Hemingway laid out the various ways in which the team Obama predicated their case for reelection on how safe they were keeping the country (emphasis mine):
“President Obama has placed the killing of Osama bin Laden at the center of his reelection effort,” began one Washington Post story about the effort.
Vice President Joe Biden was sent out on the campaign trail to repeat the mantra daily: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!”
And it wasn’t just bin Laden. The campaign wanted to emphasize how successful Obama’s strategy was when it came to containing Islamist terrorism. Throughout the 2012 campaign, Obama described al Qaeda as being “on the path to defeat” or “decimated.” One media outlet counted 32 instances of him saying this even after the al Qaeda-linked attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
At a campaign stop in Colorado, he said, “Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq — and we did. I said we’d wind down the war in Afghanistan — and we are. And while a new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.”
Hemingway then systematically eviscerated "a few Obama talking points that very quietly took a beating in recent weeks" before concluding:
In any case, it’s 2015. We’re at war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, helped destabilize Libya and Syria, have seen the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, have no ability to vet visitors and entrants to the country or otherwise protect our borders, and have no coherent strategy for dealing with ISIS. We have a president who actually claims that climate deals are a good way to fight ISIS, and a press that treats this as a reasonable claim to make.
Must be nice to be a Democratic president.
Were Obama and Clinton Republicans, there's no way the media would be stifling yawns at all the ways the president is failing to live up to his own hype.
You can Mollie's read the full piece here.
