Is Barack Obama a master at using the bully pulpit? Does he have a different bully pulpit than past Presidents? And how are the Republicans doing in competing with him and what are their prospects?
When the conservative Republican Tea Party Tax Day protest drew an estimated 250,000 people at cities throughout the country, the media narrative tea was diluted by a serving of something else abruptly poured into the mix:
Lo and behold, right in the middle of news coverage — the wall-to-wall promo and live feeds on Fox News, which seems to see this as a franchise (can it be turned into a weekly series?) and shocked Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz — guess who appeared in the White House and called in the press? Yes: President Barack Obama appeared on cable TV, smack in the middle of tea party coverage, to remind voters that most Americans got tax cuts under his stimulus plan.
“”Obama aides, who mostly ignored the tea party scene until the tea bags thrown at the White House put the building into lockdown, decided to mark the day by reminding voters that most people have gotten a tax cut because of the economic stimulus bill that passed earlier this year.
“For too long, we’ve seen taxes used as a wedge to scare people into supporting policies that actually increased the burden on working people instead of helping them live their dreams,” Obama said, as the protest raged on outside. “That has to change, and that’s the work that we’ve begun.”
This was hardly an isolated case.
One of the most jolting adjustments Americans are having to make about Obama is that he is using the “bully pulpit” of the Presidency — his office’s aura when he appears, the early 21st century’s key infocommunications tools, the new and mainstream media’s news cycles, plus rapid-response media appearances of key administration officials to answer critic’s charges — in a way that has never been seen before. Other Presidents have used their “bully pulpit” but few as cohesively — and relentlessly — as Obama.
Read it in full for more details about his bully pulpit, past Presidential bully pulpits and the challenge facing Republicans.
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.