Only in Newsweek–which has devolved into nothing more than an echo chamber for the Obama administration–can you see a headline that asks:  Is Obama More Catholic Than The Pope?

When Obama meets the pope tomorrow, they’ll politely disagree about reproductive freedoms and homosexuality, but Catholics back home won’t care, because they know Obama’s on their side. In fact, Obama’s agenda is closer to their views than even the pope’s.

The piece, written by that paragon of Catholicism, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, is a major stretch.  So, because American Catholics agree (supposedly) with Obama on a few issues unrelated to faith, that makes Obama more Catholic than the Pope?  Nonsense!

Anyway, this notion is not supported by recent polls.  Let’s just take the issue of abortion.  According to Gallup, 52 percent of American Catholics call themselves ‘Pro Life’.  So how is Obama really ‘on their side’ on this matter?  Is Kennedy-Townsend stuck in a time warp? 

In fact, the majority of Americans overall now call themselves Pro Life, which means that if you take Newsweek’s obtuse reasoning, Obama is actually less American than the Pope because more Americans agree with the Church on the issue of abortion than they do with the President. 

The other alternative being that he’s just more German than the Pope…

There has been a clear drop in Obama’s approval ratings, but the mainstream media still continues to insist they are ‘really high’, as exemplified by this bit in Time:

Obama has so far been able to maintain high approval ratings.  Even though he’s showing some weakening in his approval rating, they overall remain very high.

According to the latest Gallup Poll, Obama is at 61 percent approval, up from 58 percent a few days ago.  Rasmussen, which has consistently been the most accurate election poll, has him at 56 percent.

The point is that while these aren’t particularly low polls, they aren’t particularly high, either.  If you look at the history of Presidential approval ratings, Obama is somewhere in the middle–not as high as Kennedy or Eisenhower and not as low as Ford or Clinton in the early going.

Obama’s ratings are not so strong that he is impregnable, despite what the press likes to tell us.  To me, it sounds like a bunch of wishful thinking on their part.

Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson breaks it down:

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment; but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America.

…The press should not be hostile; but it ought to be skeptical.

Mostly, it isn’t. The idea of a “critical” Obama story is a tactical conflict with congressional Democrats or criticism from an important constituency. Larger issues are minimized, despite ample grounds for skepticism.

Too bad Samuelson is the only mainstream media member bringing this up.

David, isn’t the problem here that Obama maintains a rhetorical opposition to the Bush/Cheney policy while, in fact, producing results that differ very little in actual substance?  I think, based on your post, that you’d agree.

But maybe it just points to the problem with this debate:  It’s basically over.  The reason Obama won’t take the genuinely opposite approach as Bush/Cheney is that to hold such a belief would be immensely unpopular with the mainstream and potentially damaging to his overall agenda.  Eight years after 9/11, Democrats still fear being labeled as soft on terrorists.

Essentially, Obama is trying to wiggle his way out of this without pissing off the people on your side of the aisle too much.  But you are right about the media set-up, though perhaps it is just another instance of Obama-coddling by an over-nurturing Fourth Estate.

Freedom of choice can be a dangerous thing.  That’s why our splendid republic tends to restrict our options to equally anodyne alternatives: Coke or Pepsi? Kris or Adam?  Democrats or Republicans?

Last Thursday, we were treated to another empty selection: Obama or Cheney?  The media portrayed their near-simultaneous speeches on national security as the ultimate showdown between two diametrically opposed views. Time Magazine played up their Beltway duel—Obama at the National Archives and Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute—as a heavyweight prize fight.  (And by the way, is there a moronic Beltway meme that Mark Halperin won’t parrot?)

Jack Goldsmith, former deputy AG in the Bush administration, has thankfully explained how Obama and Cheney fundamentally agree about most of the core issues:

Former Vice President Cheney says that President Obama’s reversal of Bush-era terrorism policies endangers American security. The Obama administration, he charges, has “moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11.” Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence. But there is a different problem with Cheney’s criticisms: his premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric.

On the issue of habeus corpus rights, to take one example, Goldsmith writes:

During the campaign former professor Obama spoke eloquently about the importance of habeas corpus review of executive detentions of enemy soldiers. Habeas corpus is “the foundation of Anglo-American law” and “the essence of who we are,” he said. But his administration has applied this principle in the same narrow fashion as the late Bush administration. It has argued that Guantanamo detainees can challenge the “fact, duration, or location” of confinement on habeas review, but not their “conditions of confinement.” It has maintained that “the Geneva Conventions are not judicially enforceable by private individuals” in habeas proceedings. And it has made clear its belief that the limited habeas rights it recognizes for the two hundred or so detainees on Guantanamo Bay do not extend to the 600 or so detainees in Bagram Air Base. This latter position might prove more controversial for President Obama than for President Bush. The new president’s enlarged military commitment in Afghanistan and Pakistan, combined with the forthcoming closure of Guantanamo, means that the number of suspects detained in Bagram–without charge or trial and without access to lawyers or habeas rights–is likely to increase, perhaps dramatically.

Go ahead and read the rest.

No matter what your politics or your views on national security, I hope you agree that the relevant issues deserve a serious discussion between genuinely opposed sides.  The Obama-Cheney “debate” is just another faux choice served up by our faux democracy.

My memory isn’t what it used to be, but didn’t the media and most political commentators used to love Moderates? 

It seems like under Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, the media was always preaching that it was the Moderates that had to be accommodated to slow down the Conservative agenda.  Moderates had the wisdom of Solomon and not too long ago you could see figures like Mike Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover of the weekly magazines, with glowing articles portraying them as the pols of the future.

Now that Obama is in power and moving the country’s policies to the left, you don’t hear much of that anymore, do you?  Where is the call to moderation to slow Obama’s agenda?  Where is the call for Obama to move to the center?  That sentiment doesn’t exist among mainstream commentators like David Broder, Joe Klein, etc.    The size and scope  of the Federal Government has grown beyond anything we’ve ever seen, but they are keeping quiet on this note. 

I guess this is what they wanted all along.  But I am sure that moderation will once again become quite popular should the GOP ever regain power.