Journalists don't like Obama's chill temperament, but it's served him well

[babylonsister]

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/24/7053903/josh-green-obama-crisis


Journalists don't like Obama's chill temperament, but it's served him well

Updated by Matthew Yglesias on October 24, 2014, 9:10 a.m. ET @mattyglesias [e-mail]


snip//

A president, not a pundit

Journalists have systematic professional incentives to overreact. You don't get ahead by writing boring stories, so you develop a nose for the provocative and start dealing in superlatives. Yet few people can make it through life acting purely out of cynicism. It helps enormously in this profession to be a genuine temperamental over-reactor. Certainly it's helped me.

The hot temperament consequently tends to dominate in the ranks of the media. And the media love nothing quite so much as a politician who shares their disposition. It's not a coincidence that McCain is, on a durable basis, the media's favorite senator.

He approaches his job as if you gave a Senate vote to a cantankerous but sharp newspaper columnist. But that path was never available to a young African-American liberal from Chicago. The alternative to cool and cerebral was "angry" and radical, a non-starter with white America.

But more than a political pose, an aversion to purely symbolic action has genuinely served Obama well at critical moments. Less cool heads would have abandoned Obamacare in January 2010. Obama persevered and it's worked. Obama's approach to the economy has been far from flawless, but it's not a coincidence that the USA has performed better since 2008 than Europe or the United Kingdom and weathered its financial crisis far better than Japan did in the 1990s.

The Deepwater Horizon crisis passed. The American Ebola crisis will also pass. HealthCare.gov got fixed. The Russian economy is reeling in the face of sanctions. Osama bin Laden is dead. The economy is growing. Obama hasn't always been a very effective pundit-in-chief (acute crisis moments aside, his inability to articulate public anger at Wall Street has been remarkable) but that's not actually his job. On the big stuff, he's been effective. And that's not a coincidence.

[Fred Sanders]

1. The Calm of Obama drives the drooling ratings thirsty hair on fire media mad with confusion.

Avoiding symbolic actions to satisfy their blood thirsty temperments must be ever so foreign to them.

[Aristus]

2. Damn right!

And how much better off is the country with President Obama, cool temperament and all, at the helm, then we were under that shoot-from-the-hip shit-for-brains who grew up on too many John Wayne and Rambo movies?

Immeasurably...

[SleeplessinSoCal]

4. Right on, right on, right on!!! n/t

[SleeplessinSoCal]

3. He's the first POTUS to have to deal with a well funded propaganda machine like FNC for eight years.

He deserves an award for that alone.

FNC was well underway under W. Launched in 1996, it didn't really hit its stride until 2001. 9/11 gave it the green light to scare the hell out of America and it never looked back.

Salon has a really good article today which shows what Obama has to deal with and balance that with the rather daunting problems out of every corner of the planet. He needs to put on armor to deal with this crap.

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/24/why_conservatives_prefer_propaganda_to_reality_partner/

[sheshe2]

5. Excellent Read!

Here's how Michele described him:

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we're all sweating it – when we're worried that the bill won't pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise.

Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward...with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

And he reminds me that we are playing a long game here...and that change is hard, and change is slow, and it never happens all at once.

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/04/160578836/transcript-michelle-obamas-convention-speech

I prefer his cool calm any day over the hair on fire GOP that only preaches fear.

[MarianJack]

6. Well Said, babylonsister!

PEACE!