Charles Krauthammer credited President Obama’s charm offensive toward Republicans to his losing the news media which couldn’t any longer abide his ridiculous sequester “cut” exaggerations.
“Obama’s strongest constituency, which is not the left, it’s the mainstream media, could no longer cover for him without being entirely embarrassed,” Krauthammer observed Friday night on FNC, “It had to expose the one exaggeration after another on the sequester.”
Audio: MP3 clip [1]
On the March 8 Special Report with Bret Baier, Krauthammer offered his explanation for Obama's “charm offensive”:
The only thing that truly changed is that his numbers have gone down from the mid to high 50s into the 40s. And the only thing that’s happened in the real world he tried to exploit the sequester, a) with predictions of the apocalypse. Then with sort of the petty actions like shutting the tours of the White House. And what happened is Obama’s strongest constituency, which is not the left, it’s the mainstream media, could no longer cover for him without being entirely embarrassed. It had to expose the one exaggeration after another on the sequester, the stuff about the janitors being laid off and all that which wasn’t so and, secondly, the obvious cynicism of the White House tours trying to inflict the maximum pain in order to make a case and to blame Republicans.
That kind of partisanship has worked for the President since election night and through the fiscal cliff, but it crashed on the sequester. And that’s why I think he’s had to recalculate and now he’s become extremely charming.
-- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here [2] to follow Brent Baker on Twitter.