He Is, After All, the President

I am not "the last guy to comment on the legitimacy of the president-elect"; I was perfectly willing to accept the fact that Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012, and that he was the president.  I thought he was born in Hawaii and that, while his failure to put that issue to rest immediately exacerbated the debate, what was important was that he indeed was born there.

What was less legitimate was not his eligibility but his treatment.  We all recall (if you don't, here it is) the strange aired conversation between Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose. where right around the election in 2008 they admit that they don't know a heck of a lot about Obama.  They didn't know a lot, of course, because the media collectively issued Obama a huge get-out-of-jail-free card, and failed to do their job.

There might have been a whole lot more investigative reporting on the church he attended, the one run by a certain Jeremiah Wright.  Or his association with a cop-killer, or his adherence to some pretty revolutionary lefties bent on wrecking the USA.  That might have been a real problem for Obama, had it gotten the air time it deserved.

But it didn't.

As if by doing a mea culpa to the wrong side, the media have decided to overdo themselves in their attacks on Donald Trump, who was also elected president, just a few short weeks ago.  Mr. Trump has done exactly one thing since being elected, that being performing the arduous task of assembling the governing individuals who will make up the Cabinet and senior executive positions in all the departments and agencies that make up our bloated bureaucracy.

That he has devoted full time to that exercise is 100% consistent with the person that we saw in the campaign, at least a part of that person.  He gave the impression -- OK, he gave a lot of impressions; this was one -- that he wanted to apply the capabilities of a CEO to the presidency, consulting with successful people as well as accomplished governors, senators and others in politics.

Now he is simply doing what he said he would do; using the transition as the first stage of his project plan.  He is clearly working full-time plus on this and doing nothing else.  In contrast with the passivity of the outgoing president, Trump is working long hours to fix what Obama hath wrought.

That seems not enough.

The press, where they should be swooning over a president-elect actually trying to do the job, working hard at keeping his commitments to the people who elected him, is simply complaining that he is moving too slowly, or too quickly, or without the politically correct specific percentages of women, or blacks, or Asians, or Martians, or whatever.  Apparently, when you have to search hard to make sure you are visibly opposing the president-elect your paper or network opposed, you pick nits rather than applauding.

There is no honeymoon with the 2016 version of the media.  Rather than letting him pick his Cabinet and advisers through a sound, diligent series of interviews, each one who comes before him has to be eviscerated by the press for things they might have done or said thirty years ago, or maybe in a previous life.

He is, after all, the president-elect.  He doesn't need the press to govern; rather, they need him.  It would be a rather decent gesture were the press to give the man a chance to do his job before the criticism that they never gave Barack Obama is unleashed on him.

Time will tell.  Let's at least have time.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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