Give Obama a script he has made his own, and he is the motivational speaker to end all speakers. Tony Robbins cloned with Honest Abe.
To win respect, the networks seem to feel they have to keep absurdly overstating their anchors' reporting cred.
'The Daily Beast' competes in the highly Darwinian media world filled with hyper-smart, highly adaptive, tool-using people with opposable thumbs.
Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.
In all the debate about Afghanistan, we don't hear much about our obligation to the wretched lives of Afghan women. They are being treated as collateral damage as the big boys discuss geopolitical goals.
Perhaps it's time to stop analyzing Sarah Palin as a politician. Maybe, in her own muddled way, she is at last owning up to the fact that she has been miscast. You don't need politics anymore once you've discovered that the alchemy of celebrity has turned you into a 24-carat phenomenon.
Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone's definition of an all-American girl - attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul?
Practices such as arranged marriages and restrictions on girls attending school have deep roots, and changing them is a gradual process. Sometimes these problems seem very far away from us here in the United States. But let's remember that even into the 20th century, an American woman could not own property or vote in national elections.
TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling.
No one is asking for an Oprah in Chief. Anyhow, Obama is too chilly by nature ever to be convincing as a human care package.
It is ironic that American women now need to be fortified by the inspiration of the women of the Arab Spring, who risked so much to win basic human rights.
Obama has figured out the best method to prepare the way for his verbal Houdini acts: Use political noise as the tune-up din before the aria. Perhaps his body temperature is so low, it sometimes takes him too long to break out the song.
Obama's great asset has always been an ability to maintain his air of authority without being baritone about it. He can be boring, but he is never ridiculous or pompous.
What America is thirsting for now is a battalion of strong, down-to-earth 'doers' - managers, frontline activists, business and social entrepreneurs engaged in tackling America's manifold problems of unemployment, education, and competitive slouch.
Glenn Beck is Rush redux - Limbaugh with liposuction, partying like it's still 1993.
I'm trying to be entertaining without being mean.
Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It's unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they'd like before they return to the bickering and the games.
What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity.
The British Isles are awash with the choice of beautiful historic churches, abbeys, and cathedrals where one king or another has tied the knot and bestowed a royal precedent.
To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What's new is the way it's hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.
