The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

How long will the media continue its gushing adoration of Barack Obama? This is the question raised by the adulatory prose of The Washington Post's Eli Saslow:

Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.

Such "reporting" ought to make Saslow a laughingstock among the hard-bitten cynics of the Washington press corps, because Obama's gym enthusiasm is not really "a new kind of presidential fitness." President Bush is ferociously fit, his mountain-bike sessions notoriously grueling. Bush doesn't make a habit of going around shirtless with the sun glinting off his pecs, but a couch potato, he ain't.

At some point, hagiographic treatment of Obama will end, if only because of market saturation. In 2008, Obama was featured on the cover of Time 14 times, and 11 times on the cover of Newsweek. and if the coverage wasn't always as schoolgirl-giddy as Saslow's, it was overwhelmingly positive. The news-consuming public will eventually tire of worshipful profile features and stenographic accounts of Team Obama's talking points.

The press corps' credibility and self-respect is at stake, when Obama feels no compunction about chiding the Chicago Tribune's John McCormick that he will "waste his question" by asking about the Blagojevich scandal. And when the transition team's self-exculpatory report about l'affaire Blagojevich elicits chortles from the Los Angeles Times -- "Obama team probe of Obama team finds no Obama team impropriety" -- it becomes clear that some journalists are tired of seeing Obama getting a free ride from their peers.