President Obama’s media supporters are abandoning him. Even the liberal culture seems to be abandoning him. And as he slips into the low 40s in two recent polls, it’s hard to see how he recasts his once-glittering image.◼ Is Barry Whiffing? - Maureen Dowd/New York Times
This is the kind of sea change that goes beyond polling numbers. The very mass culture that celebrated Barack Obama, that turned him into an international icon, is now migrating toward the darker side of his legacy, perhaps fueled by a sense of frustration and disappointment.
On the pundit front, the president’s self-description on his Asia trip as a man trying to hit singles and doubles, along with the occasional homer, drew a stinging rebuke from Maureen Dowd. The New York Times columnist’s message: Stop whining....
This comes after her Times colleague David Brooks questioned Obama’s manhood in the Middle East, and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank called the president’s Asia trip aimless and said he didn’t project much of anything.
But it’s not just the Beltway types who have soured on the president.
Now Obama also has Captain America against him. A New York Times piece says the new movie is set against the backdrop of an infiltrated U.S. government with evil assassins and killer drones--inspired, the director says, by "the same sort of questions Barack Obama has to address."
"What many screenwriters, novelists and visual artists have seized on is not an inspirational story of the first black president. Instead they have found more compelling story lines in the bleaker, morally fraught parts of Mr. Obama’s legacy."
The piece adds that "the public relations machinery of the White House assiduously tries to control Mr. Obama’s image and legacy, but there is nothing it can do to stop artistic interpretation of his policies."
◼ Apathy in the Executive - Peggy Noonan/Wall Street Journal
...Popes aren't presidents, and presidents aren't saints. Both operate within wildly different realities and have wholly different obligations, so to compare the two isn't quite just. And yet I couldn't help think the past week of President Obama, whom I started to think of as poor Obama—whose failings as a leader are now so apparent, and seem so irremediable, partly because they spring from not only his nature and personality but his misunderstanding of what leaders do....
The aspect of the presidency he seems to enjoy most is the perks—the splashy vacations, the planes, the hoops, the golf. When his presidency is over there will be the perks of the post-presidency—foundations, libraries, million-dollar speeches, staff, protection. A literary agent estimated he'll get up to $20 million for his memoirs, Michelle Obama perhaps $12 million....
