President Obama didn’t generate a “single blockbuster story” in his “unprecedented” Sunday morning TV blitz, said Lynn Sweet in Politics Daily, but “he made plenty of headlines.” Appearing on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and Univision—but not Fox—Obama said he was undecided on sending more troops to Afghanistan, downplayed racism as a motive for his critics but scolded TV news for rewarding “rude” behavior, and talked a lot about health care reform.
The five interviews in Obama’s “talk show grand slam” were so “eerily similar,” said Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times, they looked more like “a string of TNT reruns” than Sunday morning’s usual “drama of live politics.” His decision to snub Fox News did “raise a distracting fuss”—and “Fox milked it” for all its worth—but otherwise the most “striking” thing was the “lack of spontaneity.”
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