Our political Quote of the Day comes from The Week’s Jon Terbush, who looks at the reports and polls and pundits suggesting that President Barack Obama’s Presidency is doomed. This is the quintessential “conventional wisdom” that creates a narrative that’s increasingly stated with certainty by print and Internet pundits and becomes the assumption of many on talk radio and cable news.
At the end of his must-read-in-full analysis he writes:
There is a tendency in political prognosticating to miss the forest for the trees. Obama is in historically bad shape now (trees), but his circumstances are vastly different from those of his predecessors, and there are signs he could soon turn things around (forest).
Obama does, after all, have three years left in the White House to chart his own course.
The way it works is that if the present narrative proves to be baloney, a new narrative will emerge and the old one will be quietly forgotten as a new pack pundit narrative clicks into gear.
Also be sure to read Andrew Sullivan and Doug Mataconis on this issue as well.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.