Some poor stuff on Obama today in the Guardian, whose coverage of US politics is usually pretty good.
Hannah Pool offers us a long piece about how, as black person, she ought to have been really optimistic about Obama coming to power, but actually she was just really nervous in case he messed up and she got the blame. Now he's in power, she is, you know, really pleased but kind of nervous. There's a half-hearted attempt to find a wider resonance for her personal reflections but the thing comes off as an exercise in narcissism. Lazy too. A couple of quick phone interviews with black Labour MPs turns up nothing that's nearly as interesting as this.
Then Gary Younge, after misspelling the name of one of America's largest cities in his first paragraph (print version), blithely asserts the following:
President Barack Obama is popular for now. But his programme for reinvigorating the economy is not. Indeed, it is a sign of the dislocation between politics and everyday life that while the $787bn stimulus package that Obama is expected to sign today is being hailed as a great victory, nobody truly believes it will work.
All the polls show that the stimulus package is seen as a good idea by most Americans. And presumably, they support it because they think it will work. So what we seem to have here is a sign of dislocation between one man's opinion and the facts.
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