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you mean "dumb"......like this thread?
Barack Obama's dumb 'Daily Show' Jon Stewart appearance and the President's diminishing brand
Joshua Greenman
President Obama should make the most of his "Daily Show" appearance on Wednesday night - charming the pants off Jon Stewart and the crowd, as he did when he showed up there two years ago. It's a terrific show, Stewart is a great interviewer and Obama makes good television.
Then, the President should cancel all future trivial media appearances. While they may have kept him personally popular, in broad terms they've degraded the Obama brand.
Obama's handlers were supposed to be smarter than this. They were supposed to use his celebrity strategically to advance his agenda. Instead, they've been indiscriminate, carpet-bombing Americans with the man they elected rather than launching communications smart weapons.
The result is that for millions of Americans, the very likable, charming Obama has become a constant tone in the background rather than an occasional, convincing, presidential voice in the foreground - the kind that makes your ears perk up.
Consider all the quasi-entertainment media appearances he's made, most of them frivolous.
He went on ESPN twice to announce his Final Four picks. He went on "The View" (drawing 6.5 million viewers). He had a "Christmas at the White House" special with Oprah Winfrey. He went on Jay Leno - becoming the first sitting President to appear on a late-night show. He was on the cover of Rolling Stone, giving a revealing interview looking back on his first 18 months in office. In December, he'll be going on the Discovery Channel's "MythBusters."
All that's left, apparently, is to be a guest voice on "The Simpsons," though I'm sure that's in the offing. Banksy will animate.
This "Daily Show" appearance makes a second strategic mistake. By chumming it up with Stewart just days before the Rally to Restore Sanity, Obama and Stewart are coopting each other. The President is killing two mockingbirds with one stone.
Without Obama's and Oprah's fingerprints on it, the rally might have looked like a semi-spontaneous uprising by moderate-as- Americans sick and tired of the extremists. Now, it'll appear to be a Democratic Party event, through and through - appearing to opponents every bit as "Astroturfed" as the biggest Tea Party events seem. (In truth, I don't think either the Tea Party gatherings or the Rally to Restore Sanity are staged; they're both authentic and filled with genuinely concerned voters. But this is as much about appearance as reality.)
I know what David Axelrod and other presidential handlers must be thinking: Obama is an amiable guy. He's a good spokesman. And the new media landscape is endlessly fragmented and hopelessly partisan; to reach people, you've got to branch out far beyond the big three networks and the cable news networks, as often as you possibly can, if you're actually going to make inroads.
They're right that a 21st century President must be new-media savvy. They're wrong that this argues for saturation.
As with anything, there are diminishing returns. When the President is always everywhere, people are less likely to stop and watch him at any given time. His face starts to look like just another talking head. His logo starts to look like just another corporate logo. He's always down in it rather than rising above it.
And with Obama's media dial always at 10, he can't turn it up when it is, say, election crunch time.
There's a final problem: By spreading himself so thin, Obama appears to be using pop culture as a crutch.
Remember the 2008 campaign: John McCain, sensing a vulnerability, mocked Obama for being a celebrity who wasn't ready to lead. The commercial is gone, but the reservations are not.
People start to wonder why, if you're the President in very serious times, you can find a slot in your schedule for frivolity like picking NCAA brackets - but not for more than one true news conference every couple of months.
They start to wonder if your overexposure is not a form of overcompensation.
The question should be asked: How do these appearances rise to the top in a tightly controlled White House, when there are thousands upon thousands of requests for the President's time, most of them with hard-news outlets?
Yes, Presidents are allowed to have fun. Yes, George W. Bush spent tons of time clearing brush on his ranch. No, they don't have to be all business, all the time. But Barack Obama doesn't need to be, for media purposes, his own First Lady.
Last March, in a column led "The Obama Everywhere Gamble," I wrote: "The American people are remarkably savvy media consumers. Over time . . . a critical mass of people may start to suspect that the President and his men are wooing us relentlessly through a permanent campaign through the culture in order to win us over on policy. And nobody likes to be manipulated, not even by a great communicator."
I can't end this column any better than I ended that one.
EDIT> le should be "dumb" Daily Show appearance
you mean "dumb"......like this thread?
dumb = darrins
the article still had a few respectable points. stewart should have distanced himself from the president and oprah in order to make his rally more neutral but now it seems more hollywood than it had before. and while a president should not have to distance himself from the public, obama seems to be doing more damage control than anything else. stewart only broached a few tough subjects but then seemed to back off. why ?
on the other hand, the writer sure loves himself:
he actually quoted himself. pretty funny.Last March, in a column led "The Obama Everywhere Gamble," I wrote: "The American people are remarkably savvy media consumers. Over time . . . a critical mass of people may start to suspect that the President and his men are wooing us relentlessly through a permanent campaign through the culture in order to win us over on policy. And nobody likes to be manipulated, not even by a great communicator."
I can't end this column any better than I ended that one.
Obama is a joke of a President; therefore it is quite fitting that he appear on The Daily Show.
the cow from cowtown has spoken.
Don't be a hater. Aint nothin' wrong with cowtown.
i don't know much about it........except that a cow lives there.Don't be a hater. Aint nothin' wrong with cowtown.
Get over it. Cows make awesome steak.
you could kill a talking cow?..........er, typing cow?
Obama has certainly behaved like he's more interested in being the celebrity president than the actual president.
i don't think that is it as much as he is using other venues to campaign. the daily show appeals to a more moderate audience or at least one that can make fun of the democrats as well as the GOP and he took advantage of the opportunity to get on the air and modify his "time for change" rhetoric to more of a "one step at a time" speech although he never really stated how he saw the current healthcare reform evolving into one that is a single payer option plan or how it is that we could eventually progress to the point where the public's interests trumped corporate interest (he really did not even ackowledge that they conflict).
dump = DarrinS' threads
nukular..
"The image translators work for the construct program. But there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I...I don't even see the code. All I see is Ribeye, Sirloin, Porterhouse. Hey, you uh... want a drink?"
Irony.
i forget, which color pill is the truth?
lol..the next sentence: "You know, I know what you're thinking, because right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here. Why, oh why didn't I take the blue pill?"
i don't care what anybody says. i like that movie.
Jon Stewart's Comic Relief 2010
By George Neumayr on 10.28.10 @ 6:08AM
Once upon a time jesters courted kings. Now enfeebled kings court jesters. Panting after the approval of the smug comedian Jon "Stewart," Barack Obama taped an interview for The Daily Show on Wednesday.
The smirking jester is also scheduled to hold a kind of charity benefit for his sickly king this weekend, a Comic Relief 2010 called The Rally to Restore Sanity. Obama and the Dems are suffering from a debilitating political disease, but Jon, Whoopi, Robin and Joy, among other celebrity jesters, stand ready to help them in their affliction.
No cure appears likely, though. Comic Relief 2010 may raise a little money and get some college students to the polls, but it is surely too little too late. As many dismayed Democratic strategists even suspect, Obama's ill-advised Daily Show appearance is a harbinger of defeat.
It is reminiscent of John McCain's odd decision to host Saturday Night Live shortly before election day in 2008. McCain's campaign started as a joke and ended as one, with McCain fishing for laughs off SNL parodies that were predicated upon his imminent defeat.
At a time of high unemployment, Obama is content to play the empty celebrity, appearing on shows as shallow as his policies and delivering trendy messages about the latest anxiety of the coastal elite -- the "gay teen suicide epidemic."
"Can The Comedian Save The Vote?" asks Matt Drudge of Stewart. No, this jester can't save his king. Still, Stewart is feeling his oats, basking in near-universal approval from the liberal elite. They can't get enough of him and live in dread fear of losing his approval. A desperately contrite Rick Sanchez, so grateful to Stewart for taking a reconciliation phone call from him after his firing, pronounced the comedian the "classiest" guy in the world.
While Stewart engages in a lot of cutesy mugging and seemingly self-deprecating humor about such accolades, he takes himself very seriously indeed. His own liberal assumptions are exempt from mocking, and he claims to be deeply pained by "phoniness" at the highest levels of society. Yet somehow this concern about phoniness doesn't extend to something as basic as his own name, which is not Jon Stewart but Jon Leibowitz, or his own role in high society. The self-proclaimed puncturer of all things phony has a phony name, and the jester has no intention of dropping his mask or reforming his juvenile ways.
The most respected liberal in America, according to one recent poll, throws his spit balls, then makes sure to hide in the bushes. On Crossfire several years back, he made it clear that he thinks others -- but not he -- are "hurting" society.
A y celebrity wanting it both ways is hardly news, but it is notable that the Democratic Party is now led in large part by comics. Stephen Colbert testified before Pelosi's Congress as an honored guest; SNL alumnus Al Franken sits in the Senate; comedienne Joy Behar vets presidential candidates on The View; and Bill Maher is treated like Mark Twain.
Had Joy Behar lived a century ago, she would have been a lewd barmaid somewhere. Now she is an important Democratic "opinionmaker," browbeating this or that public figure. She stomped off the set in an elephantine huff the other week after Bill O'Reilly failed to pay sufficient homage to Islam. But this week the defender of religions of peace cast Sharron Angle into the fires of " " and called her a " ."
One wonders how long Behar would avoid a stoning if she ever talked like that in Saudi Arabia. The ladies of The View are lucky the show is not shot in Riyadh.
Liberalism, perhaps under the influence of its foul-mouthed jesters, has suspended some of its old sensitivities, as its prac ioners call Meg Whitman a " " (an honorable if insufficiently regulated line of work from liberalism's point of view), Angle a " ," and everyone from Juan Williams to Christine O'Donnell "crazy." Is that any way for liberals to talk about the mentally ill? And who knew that New Age NPR executives used "feelings" and "psychiatrist" so easily in punchlines?
Obama himself, trying hard to impress Jay Leno early in his term, used the "Special Olympics" as a punchline during that late-night appearance. But it is his administration and party which look increasingly lame and laughable as they court comics.
I can't believe how much Darrin's butt hurts.
The is a neumayr?
"Pun Intended."
Nah dude. You lie.
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