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" The kidz at Tiger Beat On The Potomac are tired of being frightened, or frightened of being tired, or something and, speaking as they do (always) on behalf of the American people, they would like the president to stop harshing their mellows for a while. This time, President Barack Obama warns, the sky really is falling. Really. His problem: the pitch isn&amp;#039;t a new one - not to a public weary of fiscal disaster countdown clocks and breathless deadlines, one that heard Obama&amp;#039;s predictions the fiscal cliff would be calamitous, his analysis that the sequester would hamstring the economy or his warning that a government shutdown could mean a recovery slowdown. Those predictions could still come to pass. But when the various strokes of midnight didn&amp;#039;t deliver the worst on those fronts, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief, and moved on. Now, with a historic default looming, Obama&amp;#039;s doomsdaying is drawing a been-there, heard-that response from much of the country. More than a few Republican members are publicly skeptical of the risk of failure to raise the debt limit. Polls show a majority of Americans aren&amp;#039;t sold either. And the stock market continues to mostly shrug at the prospect of a default. Once again, TBOTP manages to define its entire philosophy of journalism in a single passage. Find an easy trope (Chicken Little), cite &amp;quot;many Americans&amp;quot; without quoting any, cite &amp;quot;more than a few Republican members&amp;quot; as being &amp;quot;skeptical&amp;quot; even though those people would be &amp;quot;skeptical&amp;quot; of this president if their desks were sold out from under them at auction, and then cite a couple of polls. Scoreboard! And you didn&amp;#039;t even have to leave your desk to do it. It isn&amp;#039;t entirely Obama&amp;#039;s fault. But his dramatic messaging, combined with the frequency of fiscal crises, has induced an advanced case of apocalypse fatigue. The whole country - including, to hear him tell it, Obama himself - is bone-weary of semi-annual brushes with financial calamity. The result: Obama&amp;#039;s still talking. But he&amp;#039;s not breaking through. It might just be me, but part of the reason that &amp;quot;the country&amp;quot; may not be paying attention may be that the people Out There are too busy scrambling to hold their lives together after being knuckled repeatedly by the frequent fiscal crises. Perhaps someone should go out and report something and find out if this is the case. To boost his case for a clean debt limit increase, Obama has invited the entire Congress to the White House and made public statements about the debt limit on six of the last seven days. But so far most Republicans aren&amp;#039;t eager to cooperate. And despite sagging poll numbers for the GOP, there seems to be little public pressure for them to bend. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain furloughed over the shutdown and countless more impacted because of the sequester cuts. Their plight has not yet moved Republicans to accede to Obama&amp;#039;s demand for a budget extension and debt limit increase without significant giveback of some kind. Conclusion: Republicans continue to program of suicidal vandalism. I&amp;#039;m sorry, that&amp;#039;s not what you were saying. Do continue. And so the bottom line for Obama, two years after his first close encounter with default, remains the challenge of explaining to a skeptical public what breaching the debt limit means. He&amp;#039;s dubbed it an unprecedented &amp;quot;economic shutdown&amp;quot; and warned of all manner of calamity - telling a Florida TV station Wednesday, for instance, that &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s never happened before. It&amp;#039;s completely unacceptable that&amp;#039;s even a prospect&amp;quot; - but hasn&amp;#039;t managed to convince Congress to acquiesce to a clean debt ceiling increase. He can&amp;#039;t convince this Congress -- and its principal owners -- that he was legitimately elected. Twice. Once he does that, Easy Street! According to Mark Hertsgaard&amp;#039;s invaluable book, On Bended Knee, a study of how the courtier press of the day took a dive on the deplorable policies of the Reagan administration, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl once did a tough piece on the sources of the devastating 1982 recession, which was triggered by the lunatic supply-side first budget of that administration, But in that piece, she also included B-roll of Reagan, smiling his ass off, in front of the carefully designed backdrops that attended his every performance. White House officials called Stahl in and she expected to be read the riot act for what her piece actually said. She was gobsmacked to discover that the Reagan administration officials weren&amp;#039;t angry at all. They liked the pictures of the president with the flags, and they thought those would outweigh the facts derived from Stahl&amp;#039;s reporting. Because there was little if any follow-up, they turned out to be correct. They remain correct today. I think I can assure the kidz here that both the sequester and the government shutdown are having serious material effects on the lives of millions of people all around the country, regardless of what the polls say about their exhaustion with the rhetoric coming out of Washington. That they do not connect that rhetoric with the hardship in their own lives is a profound failure of journalism of which TBOTP is a perfect manifestation. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19630/the-country-out-there/>