Andrea Mitchell calls Obama on fake interviews

Barack Obama’s campaign ethic: If you don’t have it, fake it. Maggie Gallagher reports:

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was the one journalist [tagging along on Barack Obama's global rainbow tour] with the courage to name what she was actually seeing happen: Obama faking even being interviewed by the press.

“Let me say something about the message management. He didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference,” either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured “what some would call ‘fake interviews,’ because they are not interviews from a journalist,” Mitchell went on. . .

He’s shameless when it comes to managing his own image. “Politically it’s as smart as can be. . . We’ve not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before.”

The whole Obama campaign is something we’ve never seen before — at least not executed to this level of perfection with a media willing to go along because, well, so many of them want it to succeed. . .

President Obama, if that’s our future, and his team of symbolic analysts will find out soon enough there are realities out there which none of his contrivances are going to be able to help him handle. . .

Here’s one reality that seems to get right by Mr. Obama: Anyone with an ounce of negotiating smarts knows that in a poker game or a war, the last thing you want to do is set a specific timetable for getting out. Obama’s foolish sixteen-month plan for getting out of Iraq is foolish mostly because it tells the enemy how long they need to hole up. Withdrawal in sixteen months might be a good idea, but only if only your friends know in advance that it’s going to happen. But don’t expect Barack Obama to figure that out.