The conservative blogosphere, which always seems to be able to whisper a meme or two in the ear of the mainstream media when it comes to evaluating President Obama, has played itself in the past few months by issuing arbitrary expectations for the President's success and then watching him supercede them. First there were the weeks of stock market trouble, which conservatives insisted showed that investors were rejecting the president. Of course, stock market fluctuations are called fluctuations precisely because they, you know, fluctuate, and when the stock market went up again conservatives had little to say. But partially because of the extremely low expectations they set--you know, the end of civilization itself, when the market turned up again it became a moment of political significance for the administration.
Something similar happened with the pirate situation over the weekend, having potrayed Obama, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, as at once an iron fisted Stalin and cosmopolitan pansy, conservatives immediately set up the hostage situation in the Indian Ocean as a test which our weak-willed America-hating President could not pass. Spencer Ackerman notes that, as before, the meme took hold in our liberal media. And as before, it's completely backfired on those pushing it. Michael Shear writes in the Washington Post:
Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.
Ackerman points out that Obama expressed opposition to "dumb war", not war in general. The idea that the use of force isn't always the solution to any given dispute is obviously something the right is struggling with at the moment, what with the ethnic cleansing of phosphates and all. It seems clear, given the media response to the pirate incident, that the beltway press has internalized the simplistic conservative idea that if someone is opposed to a military solution to a particular problem they are a complete pacifist. It's one thing for the right to traffic in this idea, it's another for the ostensibly objective press to accept it wholesale. The problem for conservatives is that, in this case, their ability to inject certain ideas into the mainstream political discourse is backfiring: They keep setting expectations for Obama so low that handling any situation appropriately becomes an enormous triumph. At some point, the right may want to realize that the radical leftist Barack Obama of their mind's eye simply doesn't exist. Of course, it will be better for the president if they don't.
-- A. Serwer
