How This Presidential Campaign Will Be Unique

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal posted a commentary on the role that President Obama is not playing in the current presidential campaign. The commentary is titled, “How Obama Gets Away With It.” The commentary notes that normally in a presidential campaign, the record of the sitting President is part of the campaign. In 2016 that does not seem to be the case.

The commentary observes:

Yet at the same time we were seeing those nice photos, videos and articles, a lot of other important stuff was going on where Mr. Obama was hardly mentioned, seen or questioned. For example, the U.S. economy grew at a meager 0.5% in the first quarter of 2016; Russian military planes lately have been buzzing U.S. Navy ships; and China is building its military forces and expanding their reach in the South China Sea. Early in May, a Navy SEAL was killed in Iraq (the president has assured the American public that U.S. troops there, increasing in numbers, are not in combat roles). Islamic State terrorist attacks in Baghdad in recent weeks have killed scores of civilians. The Taliban are on the march in Afghanistan. The vicious war in Syria continues. The Middle East refugee crisis shows no sign of diminishing. Military provocations by Iran and North Korea keep coming.

President Obama’s media handlers try to keep the president as far away from these crises as possible, leaving others in his administration such as Press Secretary Josh Earnest, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford to be their public face. That way the problems don’t appear to be Mr. Obama’s problem, and he is free to bask in the good news.

The mainstream media has worked very hard to avoid painting the true picture of the negative impact of President Obama’s foreign policy and his domestic policies. Most Americans may not even realize there is a problem until it directly impacts them.

The article concludes:

One of the news media’s main jobs is to hold public officials accountable, from the president on down. But Mr. Obama is the beneficiary of news-media managers and reporters who mostly like his style and agree with his policies, from his reluctance to make strong military commitments to his advocacy for LGBT rights, fighting climate change and supporting tougher gun-control laws. Case in point: The administration’s easy orchestration of the media story line about the Iranian nuclear deal, recently revealed by Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, only scratches the surface of the White House’s skill at managing a media happy to be managed.

Given such a congruence of opinion, Mr. Obama’s policies don’t receive the scrutiny and analysis they should. Reporters who criticize or dig too deep are cast by the administration as spoilsports or, worse, cut off from sources.

With Donald Trump now the media obsession—and most in the media don’t like him—it is easy to see why Mr. Obama’s performance over the past seven-plus years is still not a major issue in the 2016 campaign. And that’s the way he likes it.

As the presidential campaign progresses, expect to see a focus on any mistakes Donald Trump has made since the age of three. Expect to see the misdeeds and lies of the Clinton’s swept under the rug as if they did not exist. As more information is discovered about the rather twisted finances of the Clinton Foundation, expect to find that information only in alternative media sources. Unfortunately, that is where we are at the present moment.