TPM Reader PP writes in and asks my view on Obama’s interview on Fox since it’s generated a lot of heat from progressive blogosphere. My take is that it was stupid for an unnamed Obama advisor to tell TPM Election Central’s Greg Sargent that Obama was going to “take Fox on” in the Sunday interview, since obviously he didn’t. But I think it would have been even stupider for Obama to have actually done so.
I’m totally down with the idea that Fox News is an immense pile of crap and essentially a fraudulent operation. And for that reason I think it’s in general a good idea for Democrats to shun the network. Certainly, Fox shouldn’t be hosting any Democratic debates since it essentially operates as an arm of the Republican National Committee. But once Obama agreed to sit down for an interview with Chris Wallace I think it would have been crazy to try to make it into some sort of ‘take on fox-fest’. Totally, nuts.
Presumably Obama wanted to introduce himself to people who actually watch Fox. And getting in a tussle with the moderator of their show would not have been the way to do it, especially since he’s campaigning on an ability to reach across the partisan divide, and so forth. In addition, it’s virtually impossible to have that work when the people you’re ‘taking on’ control the editing.
As for whether he should have gone on in the first place, I have mixed feelings. It was pretty sickening watching the Fox tease the interview in advance by playing up the idea that he’d finally caved and was shamed into doing so with their Obama clock or whatever it was. But at the end of the day, all I really find fault with was saying Obama was going to do something he wasn’t.
