President Obama as the Traveling Salesman
Matthew Vann
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America is truly fortunate to have one of the most gifted communicators in its history - Barack Obama - to serve as President of the United States after the fall of anti-intellectualism.
President Obama has, by and large, dominated the news cycle for most of these past few weeks.
This, however, is not by any chance an isolated incident.
During FDR's presidency, the president would often communicate with countless people who had been beleaguered by the dismal state of the economy to give his New Deal legislation the chance to work and to assure an unsettled nation as it entered World War II.
Getting out of that isolated presidential bubble that many presidents have fallen into is precisely what Barack Obama has been trying to do during this critical juncture of our history. Reaching out to people who have lost faith and hope in the political process in these dismal times have been the bold attempts that the president has engaged in.
At the town hall meeting in California, Obama said something that for an American president may be quite unprecedented. He said that he'll "take responsibility" for the AIG bonus fiasco. It seems to be something that is relatively easy to say especially if you weren't directly involved in the contract negotiations going on at the company, and you weren't the author of a recent stimulus bill that made the provisions for those bonuses possible.
From the "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno, to the cover of GQ Magazine, Obama has really used his media prowess to his advantage. To connect with an even larger audience than the one he usually reaches through weekly presidential radio addresses and prime time news conferences, President Obama even made an appearance on ESPN to fill in his top picks for the NCAA tournament. However, President Obama's omnipresence throughout the media does bring about the risk of possible overexposure. "That can degrade respect for a government official," said the publicist R.J. Harris to Politico. "They are not pop stars, and it is inappropriate and risky for them to try and maintain a pop-star-type image. Too much of that and people stop taking them seriously."
Given the critical state of the economy, our unresolved wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the egregious $165 million dollar AIG bonuses, why shouldn't Obama spend most of his political capital now before it quickly erodes? Obama's appearance on the "Tonight Show" was probably the best way for him to line himself up with the late-night television talk shows that were going after AIG just as hard as many members of the public sphere seem to be doing.
"Who in their right mind, when your company is going bust, decides we're going to be paying a whole bunch of bonuses to people," asked Obama on the "Tonight Show". "And that, I think, speaks to a broader culture that existed on Wall Street, where I think people just had this general attitude of entitlement, where, we must be the best and the brightest, we deserve $10 million or $50 million or $100 million dollar payouts."
Through distributing bonuses to top executives, AIG basically issued a slap in the face not only to the government that bailed it out, but also to the American people whose tax payer dollars funded these bonuses and go through life knowing that they themselves haven't got the slightest prospect of getting a government bailout.
Then there is the rogue idea that Obama may be trying to do too many things all at once. David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, shrewdly defines this as "perverse cosmic myopia, an inability to focus attention on the most perilous matter at hand." With concern to AIG, Brooks later added that "the Obama administration is at least distracted by important things."
Yes, the Obama administration needs to focus its attention on fixing the economy, but the other problems such as immigration, crime, energy, education, and those that lie far beyond the country's borders will not wait for America to get back on its feet. Furthermore, if the president can continue to clearly articulate his policies in these areas and get some substantive results because of it through any medium he chooses, we will be better off for it.
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