President Obama spent a considerable part of his press conference in Seoul whining about press coverage of his Asia trip and criticism of his policies at home. He seemed genuinely befuddled that the media appears to have lost most of its worship of him and have begun to act like, you know, real reporters instead of his press agents:
The president complained several times during his news conference about the U.S. media's coverage of the G-20 summit. He pushed back at the suggestion that he's weaker on the world stage because of the midterm elections and argued that his fellow leaders are no tougher on him than they were a year ago when he was new to the scene and his poll numbers were high."I remember our first G-20, you guys writing the exact same stories you're writing now. Don't you remember that, Sheryl?" Obama said to The New York Times's Sheryl Stolberg.
Asked by CBS's Chip Reid about complaints heard from other leaders during the summit, Obama shot back: "What about compliments?"
Is that the most pathetic statement ever made by a president at a press conference? Since he never mentioned any compliments made by other leaders, we must assume that they were few and far between. In fact, as I pointed out in my article at FrontPage.com , the criticism of Ben Bernanke's QE2 as well as the president's budget policies was not only severe, but nearly universal.
The president also tried to dismiss the idea that the summit was a failure and all but blamed the press for not concentrating on the extraordinarily meager results Obama came away from Seoul with:
He appeared thin-skinned about the characterizations of his time at the summit, saying that nobody wrote about leaders setting the stage for financial regulatory reform at the last G-20 summit because it "wasn't real sexy" and criticizing reporters' "search for drama.""Sometimes, I think, naturally there's an instinct to focus on the disagreements, because otherwise, these summits might not be very exciting - it's just a bunch of world leaders sitting around intervening," he said
The takeaways from the G-20 were incremental. The nations agreed on a "framework of cooperation" for economic growth, including to strive for market-determined exchange rates and to develop early warning indicators that signal trade imbalances. But the agreement lacked specific target numbers and deadlines - the countries' finance ministers are tasked with following up on it next year - and Obama faced questions about whether he'd lost cachet on the world stage.
"When I first came into office, people might have been interested in more photo ops because there had been a lot of hoopla surrounding my election," Obama said, adding that he now has relationships with key leaders, including Chancellor Merkel of Germany, President Lee of South Korea and China's Hu Jintao - all of whom kept Obama from getting precisely what he sought out of the summit.
A total, unmitigated disaster. An embarrassment for the United States. As Tom Lifson pointed out yesterday, we have an "incredible shrinking president" with dire consequences for our position as an economic and military power in the world. With Obama becoming more and more irrelevant, and world leaders dismissing him as a lightweight, it is well to remember that these are our friends and allies copping this attitude.
I wonder what our enemies think?
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
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