Obama Just Found Media’s Limit

Commentary Magazine  "At the Washington Post, James Downie reviews the minor kerfuffle blow by blow, and can’t quite believe what he’s seeing:"

•If the White House has spent months working to appear above the partisan fray – as they insist they have – then pulling a blatantly partisan stunt like this torpedoes all of that PR work.

•Pretending the timing was a coincidence has backfired with the press and pundits. Did the White House really think, when it sent Jay Carney to his press briefing, that people would swallow his line that the timing was “coincidental”?

•In the aftermath of the announcement, the narrative of the afternoon on cable news ran in part that the White House had not cleared the date with the speaker, with some outlets suggesting that Boehner’s office had only been given 15 minutes notice. If true, the White House was disrespectful and should rightly be admonished.

Krauthammer: Let’s face it, Boehner should have let Obama speak on the night of the GOP debate  "Simple logic: When your opponent’s in the process of making a mistake, get out of his way. Krauthammer’s theory is that letting The One address Congress that night would have made him look petty (or rather, pettier than usual) while setting up the GOP field for a sweet Obama pile-on at the debate immediately afterwards."

Shelby Steele: Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism   "Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline."

"But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?"