AP Headline: "’Hope’ And ‘Change’ Aren’t Enough To Inspire Voters"
I don't know about you, but I found the following headline from the Associated Press rather ironic: Obama 2012 Reelection Campaign: 'Hope' And 'Change' Aren't Enough To Inspire Voters Jim Kuhnhenn began his piece (emphasis added): As he weighed a presidential run back in 2006, President Barack Obama displayed a realistic sense of self-awareness: All the adulation he was receiving, he conceded then, was because he was a blank slate on which people could attach their aspirations. As he seeks re-election, his self-awareness is on display again, with a new conclusion. “It's not as cool to be an Obama supporter as it was in 2008, with the posters and all of that stuff,” he acknowledged to an intimate gathering of donors in Miami this week. It's a line he delivered with a chuckle, a variation on a theme that he is using with his base of supporters. But it holds an important truth for the Obama campaign: Obama is now a known quantity and he will not inspire voters this election the same way he did in the previous one . Well, Jim, how much was this “blank slate” due to the miserable job virtually every so-called news outlet in America including yours did in properly vetting the junior senator from Illinois after he first announced his candidacy in February 2007? Maybe if press members such as yourself would have spent their time digging into his background – ahem, kind of like you did going through 24,000 of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's email messages last week – he wouldn't have been such a “blank slate.” Politicians hire advisers to assist them in creating personas the public will buy into. It is supposed to be the job of so-called journalists to pierce this veil and inform the citizenry what candidates are really about so they can make informed decisions when they head to the polls. Unfortunately, in the 21 months that followed Obama tossing his hat into the ring, the press totally abdicated its solemn responsibility to the public by not only refusing to properly investigate and report who this man from Chicago was, but also assisting him at every turn to captivate the electorate with nothing but smoke, mirrors, and empty promises about Hope and Change. This raises a very important question as a new presidential campaign begins in earnest: the public might no longer be conned by Obama's pathetic platitudes, but have the Obama-loving media come out from under the ether yet?
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AP Headline: "’Hope’ And ‘Change’ Aren’t Enough To Inspire Voters"
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on June 15, 2011. Filed under