The overexposed President

One of the concerns of an actor is overexposure. You don’t want to be seen so frequently in so many roles that the brand becomes tarnished. That goes even more for the President who, in addition to being a politician, is also the head of state. Frequent public appearances, press conferences, grand formal speeches, televised productions, along with a deluge of discussions on more minor broadcast venues are fine during a political campaign. But once the campaigning stops and you assume the office, different rules apply. As the head of state you have to be seen as above politics to a significant degree. The number and style of your public appearances must change. Otherwise you risk being seen as nothing more than the ordinary politician, and you will be judged accordingly.

The styles of President George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama are quite different. Bush left himself open to the criticism from the Right that he was not active enough. When he defended his programs vigorously, both his and those programs’ public popularity rose. Bush was seen by many as too willing to stay above the fray rather than hit back, convinced as he was of the ultimate wisdom of his cause.

Obama has the opposite tendency. Conservatives have contended that Obama is overexposed and is cheapening his brand. One cannot deny, though, that they probably have secretly cheered Obama on. Polls have shown that, since late spring, the more Obama talks about policy and the more actively he campaigns, the less popular the policies—and Obama—have become. ObamaCare is the prime piece of evidence.

Obama’s constant presence in the public eye and his grand spectaculars are at best losing him audience and, more likely, causing him to become a diminished figure as people resent his hectoring. He is like the guy who follows you everywhere to comment how you should be doing things differently. Worse, he begins to reinforce in the minds of many those cult-of-personality traits that have dogged him, his supporters, and his administration since the campaign (remember the singing kids, the fainting women, and the theatricality of “Greek columns” in the stadium for his acceptance speech).

Obama holds a speech to a joint session of Congress for health care. Though not unprecedented, that is not a venue normally chosen for a presidential address unless it’s the State of the Union address or a war message. Worse, he says nothing that he hasn’t said in a couple of prime-time press television addresses (another means of communication that he has overused in his few months in office), some televised press conferences, and various televised “townhall meetings.” Worse, still, his speeches are long on generalities, imprecise on the truth of the claims, and short on specific explanations. They look and sound, in other words, like campaign speeches, repeated again and again.

Then, Obama makes a speech before the UN. That is to be expected in his first year in office. However, he also chairs a meeting of the Security Council (televised, of course), a task usually left to some diplomatic underling. No U.S. President has ever done that, and I wonder if any other of the leaders of the Big Five has. Then he hosts the G20 (formerly the more realistic G8, but increased so that US influence decreases), which, again, is fine. But from there he flies to Copenhagen to get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. I don’t know that any U.S. President has involved himself in that effort before. Add to that his world tours in just his first few months, and one gets the impression that he likes the campaigning for the office, the public adulation, and the perks of the office much more than the work and that needs to be done. After only a couple of weeks in office, he already complained how he had to get out of the White House, so he visited a school.

Now, one might think that this is just another criticism of the President coming from a blogger who is unsympathetic to Obama’s program. I must confess, however, that I am warming to Obama’s constant lecturing and alarm-mongering, though, admittedly, for selfish reasons. Initially, he got traction for his programs. But the more he talks now, the less his words matter. Given the time, he has exposed himself for what he is.

But it isn’t just conservatives who recognize this. It is broken clock time. There are now liberals who are concerned that Obama is wasting the prestige of the office, and that his amateurishness and infatuation with himself are harming U.S. interests. More precisely, Richard Cohen, frequently of The New York Times, castigates the President for his electioneering and empty posturing:

“The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.
“Take last week’s G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. There, the candidate-in-full commandeered the television networks and the leaders of Britain and France to give the Iranians a dramatic warning. Yet another of their secret nuclear facilities had been revealed and Obama, as anyone could see, was determined to do something about it — just don’t ask what.
“The entire episode had a faux Cuban missile crisis quality to it.”

It gets worse, as Cohen correctly judges Obama to be losing credibility:

“The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a ‘war of necessity’ — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.
“Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health care legislation — ‘Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town … ’ — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.
“Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran….”
“Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama’s the president. Time he understood that.”

I couldn’t have said that better myself, even as to the (for Cohen non-parodic) reference to Obama as a Supreme Leader.

UPDATE: When it rains, it pours. Another liberal, none other than Representative Charlie Rangel, fresh from amending his income tax returns, has weighed in with his assessment that Obama’s meddling in local matters is not presidential. By the way, is Rangel racist, too, when he criticizes the President?