To be clear, this criticism is not of President Obama. It is directed at the Associated Press's Jim Kuhnhenn, who seems to think that the impact of any and all events in the nation and the world on the status of Obama's "presidency" is more important than any other consideration.
I don't see any other way one can interpret the opening paragraph of Kuhnhenn's early Saturday dispatch (also here):
Yes, Jim Kuhnhenn really wrote that it's "been a trying five days" for Obama's "presidency."
At the conclusion of his full statement Friday evening, seen in a video currently at the White House's home page (direct YouTube is here) at the roughly 6:20 mark, Obama said the following (commas added to indicate pauses to reinforce the point of this post):
All in all this has been a tough week. But, we've seen, the character, of our country once more. And as President, I'm confident that, we have the courage, and the resilience, and the spirit, to overcome these challenges, and to go forward, as one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much everybody.
The President has been criticized in the past for appearing to make events all about him and not those affected. That cannot be said about the excerpt above, or about Obama's statement as a whole.
So it's the AP's Kuhnhenn who has made the impact of the events of the week on Obama's "presidency" more important than its impact on the nation as a whole. He shouldn't have mentioned it at all, since Obama didn't -- and when he did, he mentioned it first.
Kuhnhenn even attributed the sentiment relating to impact on Obama's "presidency" to Obama, by claiming that he (Obama) "acknowledged" it. Obama did no such thing, neither in his words nor his body language.
In the process, the AP's White House and politics reporter, who may be thinking that what he wrote enhances the image of his Dear Leader, instead very unfairly made Obama look very small -- and in the process betrayed an intensely irritating Washington-centric worldview.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
