Wire Watch: AP's Ben Feller Shamelessly Spins Obama Talking Points

It’s not exactly surprising to see a writer for the Apparatchik Press — er, the Associated Press — compose an in-the-tank item sympathetic with the Obama administration.

But Ben Feller’s unlabeled analysis Monday morning (“Obama’s challenge: Anger is replacing hope”; saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) is so over the top and totally backwards that it may merit its own place in the journalistic Hall of Shame.

Feller’s fantasizes that the problem Obama faces is not that his policies and proposals are unpopular. No-no-no. Instead, the president merely has to overcome a “complex communications challenge” to deal with the growing anger out here in the real world and get people over his side.

Here are key execrable excerpts:

Thrust into office on the veracity of hope, President Barack Obama is trying to get himself on the right side of a remarkably different national sentiment these days: anger.

Obama’s expansive domestic goals are largely the same, but his message is changing, now constructed around a concession that the public is disillusioned and wanting results. If he cannot show people that he understands their frustration and is working to fix it, the risks are real.

All that angst that Obama wants to harness as a force for change – as he did in his campaign – will turn against him. That means eroding public support for his agenda and potentially big losses for his party this year in congressional midterm elections.

So it was telling when Obama offered this take on Republican Scott Brown’s Senate win in Massachusetts last month, one that weakened the president’s hand: “The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they’re frustrated.”

A new White House talking point was born, and it was hardly hope and change.

Seldom has anyone packed so much rubbish into so little space.

Ben, Obama’s problem has nothing to do with some kind of “communications challenge.” It has everything to do with his “expansive domestic goals,” which haven’t changed one bit.

Disgust, outrage, and flat-out fear of the long-term implications of those “expansive domestic goals” are the things that drove Scott Brown’s election victory. What drove Obama’s election was his mostly effective and totally false presentation as some kind of third-way moderate — aided and abetted heavily by the AP and the other organs of establishment journalism — when at bottom he is by leaps and bounds the farthest-left president ever.

Feller only got two out of his four identified “fed-ups” right. The problem is that they are direct results of Obama’s decisions and policies:

• Unemployment is high, and people are fed up with it, because at crunch time Obama and his party chose historically proven ineffective, corrupted-by-cronyism “stimulus” over historically effective tax cuts.
• Government is bigger, and people are fed up with it, because Obama and his party opened up the federal spending spigots to an unprecedented degree, because Obama has chosen to surround himself with so many czars you need a scorecard to keep track of them, and because he decided that owning two of the nation’s three domestically-headquartered automakers and running roughshod over certain classes of their creditors in bankruptcy was good public policy.

The other two “fed-ups” — partisanship and bankers’ bonuses — are inventions of Ben Feller’s fevered mind. If voters in reliably Democratic Massachusetts wanted to end partisanship, they would have elected Martha Coakley in a landslide and given the Democrats in Washington a 12-month rubber stamp. They didn’t. As to the bankers’ bonuses, Feller “somehow” forgot that just last week Obama did not object to two multimillion-dollar whoppers, demonstrating that neither party is in a position to capitalize on whatever executive pay-related anger may exist.

The Associated Press is a wire service that expects its subscribers and ultimately its readers to believe that it is an objective disseminator of news. That expectation is more than a little hard to take seriously when one of its more experienced writers outs himself as a shameless, truth-distorting, illogical apologist for a failing administration.