The Message Is the Message

It's gotten to the point where one expects to see and hear from President Barack Obama every day. He's in the information business almost as much as the policy business. "This is president as content provider," says Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman and adviser to George W. Bush. "It's like when Rosie O'Donnell had a show and a magazine and a blog." The president has taken a fair amount of heat for this full-saturation approach. Friends and critics alike have complained it cheapens his words, erodes his mystique, and, worst of all, smacks of desperation. Yet it's also clear that the public has a near-insatiable appetite for Obama-related content, from the trivial to the serious.