Newsweek’s Jon Meacham scored an interview on Air Force One, and all he really got out of it was this one quote:
“The American people, I think, not only have a toleration but also a hunger for explanation and complexity, and a willingness to acknowledge hard problems,” Obama said. “I think one of the biggest mistakes that is made in Washington is this notion you have to dumb down things for the public.”
I love the quote, but what happened to the rest of the interview? Meacham tells us that Obama watched Star Trek to find out why people were comparing him to Spock, and then he tells us:
After a series of questions about what he has learned in his first months in the White House, I asked him whether he would read over a paragraph from his book, The Audacity of Hope, and react to it.
Where are his answers on what he’s learned in the White House? Insofar as Meacham provides those answers, he does it in his own words, giving us gems like this:
What he has learned is that he likes, and enjoys, power—the capacity to shape reality in his image and by his lights—and that he finds crisis defining, bracing and useful. That a president feels suited to power is hardly a startling observation, but that Obama so revels in it—in the understated way Obama revels in anything—confounds the competing popular impressions of his persona. Many of his followers see him as the embodiment of a kind of utopian progressive politics in which the brute application of power is passé, a relic of the ruins of the Age of Bush and Cheney. Many of his critics, meanwhile, think him weak, a crypto-socialist one-worlder who wants to offer rogue nations tea and sympathy.
Maybe next time Obama grants an exclusive interview on Air Force One the reporter can write down his answers and give them to us? If I wanted to read Georgetown pseudo-psychoanalysis I could stick to reading Peggy Noonan. Jon Meacham sucks.
He has the vices of his virtues. His fluency with policy can make him seem abrupt when he feels a meeting is covering ground he already knows. His confidence and self-reliance—honed in a fatherless childhood—sometimes creates the impression of iciness, even to those devoted to his success. His pragmatism and willingness to change his mind when confronted with new information occasionally drives the liberal element of his coalition to distraction.
I thought Meacham interviewed Obama, not some liberal element or people dedicated to his success. Jon Meacham sucks hard.
