This morning, MSNBC asked (via chyron), whether President Obama is “Losing His Luster?”
And if so, CNN — via its own chyron just now — may have located a reason: “Too Much Pres.?”
President Obama is, apparently, over-exposed. There he was, said the CNN anchor, “interrupting your Super Bowl party on Sunday” and then, yesterday, he was just everywhere. He’s been, said the anchor, “hogging the spotlight” (I mean, he made Anderson Cooper sit, against his will, in the Oval Office yesterday and interview him; and CNN has had no choice but to re-air segments of that interview hourly ever since).
To support the suggestion that Americans may be seeing “Too Much Pres.” for their tastes, CNN references Peggy Noonan’s January 30th Wall Street Journal column (written before Obama “interrupted” our Super Bowl Sunday and before yesterday’s five-anchor relay). Noonan wrote, in part:
In the time since his inauguration, Mr. Obama has been on every screen in the country, TV and computer, every day. He is never not on the screen. I know what his people are thinking: Put his image on the age. Imprint the era with his face. But it’s already reaching saturation point. When the office is omnipresent, it is demystified. Constant exposure deflates the presidency, subtly robbing it of power and making it more common.
(Because “demystifying” a powerful “office” is a bad thing? Better that Obama answer fewer questions, then? Play hard to get?)
CNN’s other supporting evidence: US Weekly cropped Pres. Obama out of a recent cover image in order to feature just the three women of the family. (Which they clearly did because they and their readers are so over Barack Obama, already and not because the cover story was titled, “Secrets of a White House Mom.”)
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.