Aha!

I think Weekly Standard writer Fred Barnes is getting at something here, when he suggests that one of the problems President Obama has is that he has not faced much of an adversarial press until fairly recently.

Barnes says that earlier presidents, who found their failures and troubles highlighted by the media, often responded by upping their game, either in terms of policy or working the electorate. Holding elected leaders accountable by talking about their records and probing them on their failures is one of the things that the Founders envisioned when they made a guarantee of a free press part of the very first constitutional amendment.

Unfortunately for his own growth in the job, President Obama has faced little such heat, Barnes says. Certainly his own magazine as well as other conservative stalwarts like National Review or The American Spectator have dogged what they believe to be the president's errors. The conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and conservative-minded papers like The Washington Times have done so as well. Opinion broadcasters on Fox News, such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, have beaten a serious drum on areas where they think the president has it wrong, and many people say that the news operations of the channel have done likewise.

That's the thing, though -- all of these outlets that have been cited as being tough on or even attacking the president are identifiably conservative. The media operations that carry the reputation of objectivity have been noticeably absent from the rolls of those calling the administration to account for its goofs or places where it hasn't measured up to the promises made at the outset. A New York Times reporter asks the president if the job "enchants" him. A writer for the San Francisco Chronicle calls him a "lightworker," some new kind of being. Hardball host Chris Matthews had a "thrill go up [his] leg" when the president accepted the Democratic nomination.

Like most modern presidencies, the Obama administration has done its best to try to manage the media and keep it out of the way. President Reagan used to pretend he couldn't hear reporters' shouted questions. Subsequent presidents have trimmed the number of press conferences they hold. The Obama administration has shut some media out of photo ops. But with the exception of a few like ABC's Jake Tapper or the reporters from the identifiably conservative outlets, who persist in asking the president or his officials to explain what they're doing, too many media folks have been content to let the administration define itself.

I won't pretend I'm a fan of the president's policies, and as such I consider any ineffectiveness he shows to be a feature, not a bug. I want him to succeed, but my definition of his success would include him changing his mind from what I think he's doing that's wrong, so he might not share that definition with me. But I don't believe one has to be a critic of President Obama to see that much of our media have not dogged him the way they have dogged other presidents, and it's not unreasonable to assume the lack of a whetstone has not allowed him to sharpen in office as much as he might otherwise have done.