A week from tomorrow, at noon, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. At the same moment, George W. Bush will become private citizen Bush, in another peaceful transition in government that is the envy of the world.
Today, President Bush held his last news conference and at it he said that when his term ends next week he will get off the stage, which creates an interesting dilemma. What will the main stream media do now?
For the past two years their view of fair and balanced is to bash Bush, fair, and praise Obama, balanced. No matter what the topic of the day, they always had Bush dressed and ready as the villain. Any serious writer can tell you that for a good story you need conflict. Who will be the new villain? Sure, they’ll still be firing away at Bush as he rides off into the sunset, but eventually he will dip below the horizon, and they will have to find a new target.
I can’t imagine the White House press corps at a press conference just pitching softball after softball to Obama to hit out of the park. The news outside the building will be real and it will not always be sunny. You will have members of Congress who will try to hold hearings to round up anyone who ever served in the Bush administration and try to throw them in jail, but I don’t think Obama has the stomach for it. He has more important things to tend to.
The press has built the expectations for Obama so high, I truly feel sorry for the guy. I think with his speech on the economy and that it will be a long hard slog, is at least partially an attempt to lower those expectations, but I believe the damage has been done. The Democrats now hold both houses of Congress and the White House, who can they blame if they don’t start delivering on their promises and get the economy going again? And how is the press going to handle it?
As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. There is also an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” It will be very interesting.
