Thursday, November 18, 2010

Obama: Too Tiny For The Office?

In its current issue Newsweek is arguing that the presidency is just too big for one man?
Is the office to big for one man or is the man who's in the office to tiny for the job?
Now, NewsBusters has discovered that the Washington Post used pretty mush this same argument in the 1980 when it tried to defend another failed president, Jimmy Carter. The Post then owned Newsweek.
Here's how NewsBusters tells it:

In the November 22 issue of Newsweek magazine, Daniel Stone defended the Obama administration by blaming the institution of the presidency for failures rather than the chief executive himself: "The issue is not Obama, it’s the office....Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency?" The same argument was used to excuse an overwhelmed Jimmy Carter 30 years earlier. 
The sub-headline for the piece read: "The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world." At one point, Stone explained: "Among a handful of presidential historians Newsweek contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated." A January 13, 1980 Washington Post article made a similar conclusion about the beleaguered Carter administration: "Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House."
Of course Newsweek was wrong when it said we would never have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House. Within a year Ronald Reagan took the oath of office and America was once again on its way toward having another "heroic, larger-than-life" figure in the White House.
Over and over the liberal media get it wrong.
But they never learn -- and they never change.
And neither do the people who follow them, or so it seems.
Click here to read the full NewsBusters report.

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