Inauguration Day

A few months before 9/11, I caught Jerry Seinfeld in performance. I cannot say enough about how funny he was that evening. He had the audience in the palm of his hand.

However, in the course of a brief Q&A session with the audience after the show, he came off as, well, a jerk.

I was never able to watch another episode of Seinfeld without realizing that if he were not reading a script, I would be watching something else.

A decade and a half earlier, a friend – at the time, a sports reporter for a college radio station – had me listen to a tape he made inside the locker room of a professional sports team. A star players went into an obscenity-laced tirade. The tape was never aired although it probably would have been big news for a day or two. Had it aired, it's a safe bet that my buddy probably would not be allowed inside a locker room ever again. The player is now in the Hall of Fame and my friend is a big time news executive.

I bring these two points up because we really do not know the folks in the limelight. Their public, scripted appearances can be odds at what they are really like. Moreover, the press is under no obligation to show us at their worse, especially if it could mean a loss of access.

The same can be said about our new President – Barack H. Obama. Nobody really knows him – and if they do, they are not talking. (Recall how his college classmates were asked not to speak to the press.) He is a cipher. He had a liberal voting record and railed against the war in Iraq, yet he chooses to keep his predecessor’s Secretary of Defense. He is for abortion yet is against gay marriage.

David Brooks, the erstwhile conservative, noted during his friendly weekly chat (they stopped being debates a long time ago) with Jim Lehrer and Mark Shields that Obama is not bound by ideology – he is more of an empiricist – he will go with what works. Perhaps.

This has not stopped people who should know better (e.g., pretending to know Obama) from comparing Obama to JFK, or even C. B. Sullenberger. Then again, paper does not refuse ink.

Therefore, you will excuse me if I take a pass on the festivities today – the thought of listening to the clueless anchors, scripted analysts, and know-nothing reporters babbling about Obama and “what he means” all day long will be too much to bear. (About 20 minutes of GMA this morning was enough to confirm my worse fears.)

Give him some time; we will see the real Obama and the press will not be in a position to filter out the bad stuff.