It sounds as if President Barack Obama is at peace with himself no matter what polls and the (see sawing) conventional wisdom say about him. Here are some excerpts from his upcoming interview with ABC News Tonight’s host Diane Sawyer (who is giving the show a ratings boost since she took over):
“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he told ABC’s “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview today
AND:
“You know, there is a tendency in Washington to believe our job description, of elected officials, is to get reelected. That’s not our job description,” Obama said. “Our job description is to solve problems and to help people.”
The president said he was not deterred by the problems with the health care bill.
Seated across from Sawyer in the White House, the president added, “I don’t want to look back on my time here and say to myself all I was interested in was nurturing my own popularity.”
AND:
“I went through this [in] the campaign. When your poll numbers drop, you are an idiot. When your poll numbers are high, you are a genius. If my poll numbers are low, then I am cool and cerebral, and cool and detached. If my poll numbers are high,” Obama said with a laugh, “boy he’s calm and reasoned all right.”
Hey, it does sound like he has figured out how political media narratives and conventional wisdom work (only when a narrative and conventional wisdom is outdated it gets quickly swept under the rug as the new punditry “certainty” takes hold.).
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.