http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090327/COL05/903270369/1004/COL "He's not a real president, but he plays one on TV."
I heard that caustic comment on talk radio and thought: That could stick like glue.
The cartoon we draw in our minds when we think of a president is a lot like epoxy: It's made by mixing different compounds that react with each other and bond together. If you don't work with it before it sets, it hardens and you can't remove it with a hammer and chisel.
The image we're forming of Obama is still soft, but it's starting to dry. And it's beginning to look like a guy who is more infatuated with being a celebrity than a president. Someone who would rather play with the White House toys than get to work.
He is becoming the Billy Mays TV gadget geek of the White House. He's everywhere.
Some of the tacky Obama swag is beyond his control. He didn't ask for Obama dinner plates and action figures. He didn't ask to be on all the checkout magazines.
But he has aggravated the assault on our living rooms with too many town meetings, press conferences and TV appearances.
Just lately he did the "Tonight Show" (insensitive remark), "60 Minutes" (awkward laughter) to explain his NCAA Tournament bracket.
"Somebody said that we're not in President Obama's Final Four, and as much as I respect what he's doing, really, the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets," said Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski - making me almost want to root for Duke.
Joking around with Jay Leno doesn't mean Obama's not working on the economy. But it looks that way. There's no proof that he gave more thought to his bracketology than to the moral hazards of stem-cell research. But it looks that way.
Even some of Obama's love-sick supporters have head-slapping buyer's remorse. Christopher Buckley: "It seems as good a time as any to ask: Ought a sitting president be cozying up to late-night comedy show hosts? ...Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson."
I can't even picture President Bill Clinton on "The Bad Girls' Club." But I can picture Obama on "The View." It's only a matter of time before he has his own sitcom: " Barack The House - The president grabs the wrong phone and orders a sausage pizza from the bewildered president of Iran. Explosive hilarity ensues."
His budget was off the mark by $2.3 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It triples our debt to $9 trillion - enough to someday make our children envy the good old days of the Carter recession. Yet in his latest prime-time show, Obama claimed he's moving us from "borrow and spend to save and invest." That's as offensive as being lectured on charity by a guy who gave less than half of 1 percent of his income in 2001.
But perceptions are not always tethered to policy. They are shaped by the same flocking impulse that makes birds fly off a telephone wire together.
And the image of a slacker with a crush on the camera could stick like Mighty Putty, making us wonder if being president is getting in the way of his TV career.
After two years of saturation campaigning, he's supposed to leave us alone. Instead, it's all Obama all the time.
Hope and change? I just hope to change the channel. Yes we can.
