On things like the deficit, ObamaCare, and many other issues, the MSM can help Obama greatly by spinning madly as he blunders around.
This often works because of the low information people who only know what they see in the mainstream press.
Because they don’t closely follow political news they can quickly forget what Obama and his administration said about a particular subject or never heard him say it in the first place. This helps the MSM greatly when it comes to distorting what actually happened so they can spin it to keep Obama looking smart and above it all.
Take a look at such an example from ThinkProgress, which is now trying to spin ObamaCare-related loss of health insurance coverage by part-time employees as a sign that ObamaCare is working.
However, this kind of helpful lapdog activity gets MUCH HARDER to pull off when:
1. There is no gap of time between Obama’s blunder & the MSM’s attempts to spin it. The longer the gap of time between the Obama blunder and the time the media begins spinning, the better the spin works because people forget what actually happened. The passage of weeks, months and sometimes years allows people to forget what was actually said or done. This gives the MSM an incredible amount of wiggle room when it comes to trying to rewrite the history. But what if the blunder was so bad and so evident the MSM *doesn’t* have that gap of time? What if they have to start spinning within hours of the blunder, not days or weeks? When that happens it becomes even more obvious what they are doing.
2. Obama is on a national stage with the country watching him when he commits the blunder. It’s not closed door policy stuff or a speech only a handful saw him give weeks or months ago and now something problematic has developed about it. His profile during the blunder is so high, spinning it becomes extraordinarily difficult.
This is why Syria is damaging Obama so badly. Obama blunders around & the MSM can’t wait a week or so before beginning spin what happened. They have to start immediately. And because of Obama’s high profile during all of this war talk, way more people saw and heard what he actually said or did, so the spinning of it has only limited effect.
Consider the huge gaffe Secretary of State John Kerry committed when, in his zeal to try to sell Congress on the virtues of attacking Syria, he claimed any attack that is launched won’t lead to escalation by America in the region since it would be ‘unbelievably small’.
Why, this strike will be just a speck, just a spot! It’ll just barely be a dot!
This mistake by Kerry necessitated President Obama having to go out before the country in a national address on September 10 and directly contradict his own Secretary of State:
“Let me make something clear: The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks. Even a limited strike will send a message to Assad that no other nation can deliver.”
Another example: Kerry making an impromptu, off-the-cuff statement about the United States calling off it’s intended military strike on Assad if he agrees to put his WMD’s under Russian control. When Putin and Assad then spoke up and said “Great! Let’s talk about that!” Obama and Kerry immediately did a 180 and pretended this had been their strategy all along, that they totally intended for this development to occur.
Ezra Klein at the Washington Post certainly did his part to attempt to transform this blunder into a ‘win’:
I can’t believe the White House’s strategy on Syria is working out this well. I doubt they can, either.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) September 10, 2013
Of course, as it turned out, Putin wasn’t really throwing Obama a life preserver as much as he was tossing him an anchor. Only after the White House had rushed in to agree to let Putin lead the way in brokering a deal for Syria’s surrender of it’s WMD stockpiles did Putin and Assad reveal they were playing the White House.
Putin immediately demanded any future military strikes against his lackey Assad be taken off the table before any serious discussion of this new Russian plan would take place. Assad then chimed in and said he wouldn’t agree to any deal to surrender control of his WMD’s until Obama stops arming and supporting the rebel groups that are seeking to topple him.
As Mark Steyn discussed in his new column the other day, America’s allies around the world are currently aghast at the spectacle of Obama’s inept ‘leading from behind’ strategy that has now resulted in the putting forth of Vladimir Putin as the new leader of the free world.
Naturally the media wants to spin this ineptness and keep people from realizing just how bad Obama is hurting America’s standing in the world with his stumbling and bumbling around. As the Ace of Spades blog showed the other day, here’s how Time Magazine found a creative way to de-emphasize the change in leadership on the Syria issue – and a whole lot more – that occurred last week.
Time’s cover this week for everywhere in the world *except* the United States
Time’s cover this week for what Ace caustically dubs ‘The United States of Obama’
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