Last year at this time, as a media and TV critic, I was delighted at the thought of having the most savvy TV president since Ronald Reagan to write about for the next four years.
Today, as a citizen, I am utterly dismayed by the way those TV skills have been used to paper over what appears to be a lack of vision and sustained effort from Barack Obama, the man behind the video image.
I wrote those discouraging words earlier this month, but they perfectly summarize what I am feeling today on the eve of the President's White House healthcare summit at Blair House Thursday -- a much ballyhoed event that has all the earmarks of a made-for-TV, cart-and-pony show intended to give the illusion of a chief executive trying to reach across the aisle to reform healthcare while the real president is doing nothing of the sort in the trenches where the real work of governance is done.
I was wondering as I wrote those words about all the praise President Obama was receiving in the mainstream press for his performance in Baltimore in a televised meeting with Congressional Republicans on Jan. 29. I was astounded that after a year of failing to accomplish anything of substance despite having one of the largest Congressional majorities in recent history, the president would would be awarded with such accolades for merely being glib and striking a pose of conciliation with Republican House members before the TV cameras.
I wondered if substance counted for anything in Washington any more. Maybe we've become such a media obsessed culture, that it really is far better to look like an effective president on TV than to actually be one. And come on, how hard is it to look better than the House Republicans? It's like winning on "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" -- isn't it?
And here we go again on-screen tomorrow starting at 10. The White House has already signalled that it is going to try and ram through a modified version of the Senate-passed healthcare bill using the decidedly non-bipartisan process known as reconciliation, so why the TV Kabuki play -- or show trial -- depending on your point of view?
Still, I'll be watching and blogging, of course; there's a book here in how this president is using TV like it has never been used before. Personally, I'll watch on C-SPAN, but I suspect all the cable channels will be there to start. I know Fox News and CNN have extensive coverage planned throughout the day.
The White House has scheduled the event for six hours -- that's a lot of time for anyone to be onstage even someone who seems to be as in love with cameras and his own TV image as Obama.
But maybe thinking of it this way will help. Think of Thursday's TV summit as the president moving up from starring in a made-for-TV movie about a wise, caring and conciliatory president, to Obama taking the lead in a major mini-series about a wise, caring and conciliatory president.
Or, maybe, given what some critics see as the narcissism of the leading man, think of it as Warren Beatty in the badly-in-need-of-an-edit 1981 feature film, "Reds."