[guest post by Dana]

It’s always been a bit reminiscent of high school, this tumultuous relationship the president has with the press. Mad crushes, intense bonding, the on-again-off-again upheavals. They don’t ever really break up because everyone knows they really can’t quit each other. From day one, journalists and reporters have adored him, worshiped at his podium, covered for him, and even deified him. For his part, the president kept them in his circle with flattery, made a select few feel big and important, depended upon their loyalty, kept them close, pushed them away. With that, it’s interesting to read former ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton’s inside look at the president and his relationship with the press. It’s especially interesting to see his response when the press steps over the line and functions independently, perhaps with an eye to do their jobs with an objective non-biased professionalism:

Compton explained that the president went on a “profanity-laced tirade, where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he didn’t think were scandals.” And there was another time, she recalls, when he scolded the media “for not understanding the limits he has with foreign policy.”

Further:

“I don’t find him apologetic,” she continued. “But I find him willing to stand up to the press and look them in the eye — even though it was off-the-record — and just give us hell.”

Compton had little sympathy for the president’s concerns. “We cover what we are allowed to cover,” she said. “And when policy decisions and presidents are inaccessible, and don’t take questions from the press on a regular basis, I think they reap what they sow.”

Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson responded to Ann Compton, and her experience sounded familiar:

Maybe this is just me or a personal opinion that a profanity-laced conversation with professionals in the press by the president of the U.S. is probably inappropriate,” said Attkisson.

“That’s not surprising to me,” the former CBS investigative reporter told Malzberg. “There have been profanity-laced discussions on their part with members of the Obama administration that they’ve talked to me about similar things, thinking that a cover story…was not warranted or fair.”

“They haven’t just done this with me, but with reporters at The Associated Press and other colleagues,” said Attkisson. “This is a tactic and a strategy.”

“I don’t know if it’s heartfelt or sometimes it’s just to create the kind of pushback that leads to a self-censorship, because you’re so beaten down…by what they say, by the social media campaigns and the blog campaigns that they launch,” Attkisson added.

–Dana

[Guest post by DRJ]

Following Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts, Kevin Drum convinces himself that smart liberals never thought of Barack Obama as The One or a Miracle Worker, let alone a Messiah. According to Drum, it was conservatives, not liberals, who talked this way:

“Did a lot of people really think Obama would be a miracle worker? I don’t personally know of a single person who felt that way, and the fact that he got huge crowds for his speeches means only that he was a charismatic guy, lots of people liked what he had to say, and liberals were stoked at the prospect of dumping Bush and Cheney. Sure, maybe a few thought he was the salvation of American politics, but there’s really not much evidence that this was a very widespread belief — and no evidence at all that Obama himself ever believed it.

In fact, this is mostly the triumph of a conservative narrative. It was conservatives who spent months during the 2008 campaign taunting Obama for his alleged messiah status and it was conservatives who were constantly misquoting him about being “The One” or griping about how he thought his silver tongue could save the world and induce vicious dictators to swoon.”

It wasn’t The Weekly Standard or the National Review idolizing Obama, was it? It was left-leaning publications like Time, the New York Magazine, and this cover at The New Republic:

There are more Obama-as-Messiah illustrations recorded at the ObamaMessiah blog that originate from the left, not the right, as well as these Obama descriptions:

“A Lightworker — An Attuned Being with Powerful Luminosity and High-Vibration Integrity who will actually help usher in a New Way of Being”

— Mark Morford

“What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation’s political history … The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance”

— Jesse Jackson, Jr.

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

— Barack Obama

“Does it not feel as if some special hand is guiding Obama on his journey, I mean, as he has said, the utter improbability of it all?”

— Daily Kos

“This is bigger than Kennedy. … This is the New Testament.” … “I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often. No, seriously. It’s a dramatic event.”

— Chris Matthews

“In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of GOD. He’s going to bring all different sides together.”

– Newsweek editor Evan Thomas

Too many liberals thought Obama was The One. It must be twice as hard for them to accept he’s not only not The One, he’s not a very good leader either.

— DRJ

Close enough, anyway.

S.F. Gate columnist Mark Morford gives us one of the most nauseating paeans to Obama yet:

Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

. . . .

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Amusing theories about where this nonsense came from at Mrs. Peel and doubleplusundead, who says it all derives from video games. [UPDATE: Well, not exactly, but sort of. doubleplusundead explains below in a comment.]