Obama the poser

Maggie Gallagher:

Obama has a problem: What do you do when you're a lightly accomplished one-term senator, a former state legislator from Illinois, a Harvard law graduate who has no substantive record of accomplishments, and you are running against a war hero whom polls show that Americans overwhelmingly view as far more fit to be commander in chief?

Pose, of course.

What else can a guy like Obama do?

So the man who would be president of the United States of America flies around the world in the middle of a political campaign, enlisting the U.S. military and the Berlin Wall as free campaign commercial backdrops, to lend him the emotional weight and substance -- the aura as a commander -- that he hasn't yet earned on his own.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell was the one journalist with the courage to name what she was actually seeing happen: Obama faking even being interviewed by the press.

"Let me say something about the message management. He didn't have reporters with him, he didn't have a press pool, he didn't do a press conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call 'fake interviews,' because they are not interviews from a journalist," Mitchell went on.

Mitchell understands very well that this contrived image management is powerfully all to Obama's political advantage. He's shameless when it comes to managing his own image. "Politically it's as smart as can be," she conceded before noting the big obvious truth nobody else in the media was bothering to expose: "We've not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before."

The whole Obama campaign is something we've never seen before -- at least not executed to this level of perfection with a media willing to go along because, well, so many of them want it to succeed.

Poor John McCain. He's so last-century. Still living in a world in which deeds matter, policies matter, what you would actually do with the power entrusted to you matters.

...

It appears that substance continues to be subtracted from the Obama campaign. When the media lets him get away with this kind of posing it is not doing it job. There has been many who believe this trip has been a huge success for Obama, but the fact is he has been exposed by correspondents from both ABC and CBS. Katie Couric's interview is worth watching to see just how he blows the question on the success of the surge. Perhaps that is why he is trying to fake it.