Obama Is Everywhere! But Is That A Good Thing?
President Obama speaks about executive compensation Wednesday in Cross Hall at the White House, one of many appearances for the president who promised to be transparent.
President Obama speaks about executive compensation Wednesday in Cross Hall at the White House, one of many appearances for the president who promised to be transparent.
Obama talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland before speaking to the House Democratic Issues Conference on Thursday in Williamsburg, Va.
Obama talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland before speaking to the House Democratic Issues Conference on Thursday in Williamsburg, Va.
Hollywood has its own version of Obama — a life-size poster on Hollywood Boulevard, where a man offered to let tourists take a photo with the president Monday.
Hollywood has its own version of Obama — a life-size poster on Hollywood Boulevard, where a man offered to let tourists take a photo with the president Monday.
President Barack Obama is everywhere!
He's here at one news conference on Friday. He's there at another news conference on Monday. Turn on the TV and you're liable to see him in one day addressing a prayer breakfast group in the morning, speaking at the Department of Energy in the afternoon and gabbing with House Democrats in Williamsburg in the evening.
On a recent Tuesday, he sat for interviews to be shown on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, ABC's World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson, Anderson Cooper's AC 360 on CNN and Fox News with Chris Wallace.
The president who promised to be transparent is actually omniparent — appearing all over tarnation. On TV, on the radio, writing an op-ed in The Washington Post on Thursday in defense of his stimulus package. Wait, there he is at an elementary school!
Can a music video or Sesame Street skit be far behind?
Obama Overload Already?
Allan J. Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University, says that Obama's omnipresence "is legitimate, given the depth of the crisis we are in."
Getting the president out there, among the people, in the limelight, hither and thither "is a reasonable strategy," Lichtman says. "Of course, it may not work."
There are all sorts of models for how public a public figure should be, Lichtman says. Bill Clinton staged 38 news conferences his first year, the largest number since Harry Truman in 1945.
"Clinton was so transparent," Lichtman says, "he even talked about his boxer shorts."
Franklin D. Roosevelt set the record for a newly elected president, with 81 press events his first year, Lichtman says. "He was the first president to regularly talk to the people through his fireside chats. At the time, the crisis was so great, people were hungry for leadership after the failures of the Hoover administration."
On the other end of the scale, Ronald Reagan held only six news conferences during his first year, Lichtman says.
"President Obama is a unique figure," he adds. "He's a combination of politician, rock star and icon. He's Lincoln meets American Idol meets Muhammad Ali."
Like Chicken Man, gossip, online spam or bad economic news — he's everywhere!
Not everyone wants to see All Obama All the Time, however. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan wrote, "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 of president is represented everywhere, she continued, "it is demystified. Constant exposure deflates the presidency, subtly robbing it of power and making it more common."
She added, "I keep the television on a lot, and somewhere in the 1990s I realized that Bill Clinton was never not in my living room. He was always strolling onto the stage, pointing at things, laughing, talking. This is what the Obama people are doing, having the boss hog the screen. They should relax. The race is long."
The Organizer Comes Out
But Obama may be the first president to pull off a very public presidency along with marathonic work. He is, after all, a community organizer — someone who gets out among the crowd and rallies the people around common causes and missions. He is taking on the largest community project in the United States, that of reuniting the states.
Plus, says Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, presidents go out into the public for all kinds of purposes. If they go to the Department of Energy or Health and Human Services, for instance, "it's to show their interest in a particular issue or in a bureaucracy," he says.
If there is the perception of overexposure, says Hess, who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and as an adviser to Presidents Ford and Carter, the problem "is on the media side. Suddenly everything a president does is constant news."
Presidents have always been busy every day, he says. "It's just that in the past it's not reported or notable in same way."
When, for instance, Eisenhower greeted some visiting dignitary at the White House — "the so-called 'Rose Garden rubbish'" — Hess says "it wasn't particularly newsworthy."
He says that Clinton's press secretary, Joe Lockhart, once told him that everything a president does these days has to be scripted because everything will be reported.
Also, says Hess, echoing Lichtman, perhaps desperate times call for publicized measures. Obama is spending his honeymoon selling a difficult stimulus package in hopes of defibrillating an ailing economy. The scenario is a lot different from the early days of George H. W. Bush, for instance, who was following eight years of Republican rule. He was not in the public eye nearly so much.
Obama's obvious decision to be a centerstage president, Hess says, can ultimately be attributed to three things: "the needs of the time, the style of president and the growing need of the media to just fill the moments of our lives."
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