President Obama was "elected to be the smartest guy in the room," said Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News, but he's acting like he just wants to be the "most popular kid in the class." He goofed around with Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show," and for his second act he yukked it up during a long interview with Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes," giggling so much about the disastrous economy that Kroft said Obama was acting "punch-drunk." (watch the video)
It may seem like Obama is selling his economic plan the way a Hollywood star promotes a movie, said Ellen Gray in the Philadelphia Daily News, but Obama is just "going where the people are." This is a major win for Obama, and for the mainstream media. As broadcast networks struggle to compete with cable, "60 Minutes" showed that viewers are still interested in "the kind of long, sometimes complicated stories no one's supposed to have time for anymore."
Obama is just using the big media soapbox to scare people, said Hugh Hewitt in Townhall.com. He's grabbing every minute of media time he can to get across his alarmist message: The economy is headed off a cliff if we don't act fast. But it's just "a tactic in the push for the sort of spending that could never be justified except by such a peril."
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