CJR: Chuck Todd’s Obama book says more about the author than it does about the president

[CBHagman]

[url]http://www.cjr.org/review/chuck_todds_obama_book_says_mo.php?page=all[/url]

Chuck Todd’s Obama book says more about the author than it does about the president

‘The Stranger’ underscores a broader problem with the way we cover politics

By Elbert Ventura


The Stranger centers its narrative on a president elected to change Washington, but who has found himself swallowed by it instead. “Obama’s logic had no place in an age of ferocious unreasonableness,” Todd writes, a pithy diagnosis of his—and our—predicament.

To his credit, Todd ascribes much of this “ferocious unreasonableness” to the right. To read The Stranger is to be reminded, after these numbing years, of just how berserk our era has been. There was a time when calling the president un-American was a beyond-the-pale transgression; now it’s not even news when a news anchor or an elected official does it. Birch-ian conspiracies once left to fester at the lunatic fringe of our politics have encroached onto center stage. It sends a shiver to recall that this president once had to stand in front of cameras in the White House briefing room and insist that, yes, he was born in America.

Then there are the numerous instances of GOP implacability. Todd reminds us that when Obama praised Republican Marco Rubio’s tax-credit proposal, Rubio had to go on talk radio the next day to appease Republican foot soldiers riled up by the president’s seal of approval; that Obama once invited GOP-ers to a White House screening of Spielberg’s Lincoln, and no one showed up; that even after furious courting by the president, not a single Republican voted for a healthcare reform bill modeled after a Republican governor’s plan.

But far too often, Todd falls back on lazy, a-pox-on-both-houses thinking. He lambasts the GOP for its obduracy but upbraids Obama for not trying harder to win Republicans over anyway—this despite Todd’s own observation that Republicans had “perfected” the strategy of total obstruction, and that Republicans had come to see opposing Obama as a simple matter of “self-interest.”

[Faux pas]

1. chuck todd

is a phuck wodd. That is all.

[gordianot]

2. Chuck Todd has no integrity no journalistic ethics.

He is as much a product of his times as the Radical Republicans that he claims he does not favor. Chuck's claim to fame no one trusts him or can stand his swarmy smirk. The asshole of all seasons.

[Paladin]

3. Media credentials for the 2016 Democratic Convention?

Sorry, Mr. Todd---you've disqualified yourself.

Nasty little right-wing hack.