Lynn Sweet is the Washington D.C. Bureau Chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. And an adoring, fawning an Obamanite.
My evidence?
Read the following transcript of a segment of hard-left Alex Witt\’s show on (where else?) MSNBC) in which Sweet fawns over the funnyordie.com video of President Obama with the allegedly funny Zack Galafianakis and see for yourself. Oh, and don\’t forget to marvel at the spontaneous honesty which comes from the Washington Post\’s David Nakamura as well. (The bold print is mine):
SWEET: I think part of the critics — it reflects a partisan divide.Obama sacrificed maybe a smidgen, ephemeral bit of dignity forsomething far more important in his legacy, which is getting youngpeople to sign up for the Affordable Care Act, to sign up for thishealth insurance. The March 31 deadline is just coming up, Alex. Youknow, I don\’t think when history is written that this video will seenas a turning point one way. Far more serious for the president isgetting these sign-ups up. So I think the critics — if that\’s thebest they have, you know, bring it on.
WITT: So, David, did itwork? Do you think that the youth will sign up?
NAKAMURA: What we know from the White House, Alex, is that they werepleased that referrals after the video was posted to healthcare.gov,you know, spiked. They saw double the number of people visiting thesite, I think, and about a 40 percent increase. And what we don\’tknow, though, is how many people took advantage and signed up andwhether there\’s a residual bump day after day as the video continuesto sort of rebound on the internet. But you know, what we know so farfrom the White House also is that about a million young people havesigned up. That\’s only about 25 percent of the total sign-ups. Andthey\’ve said they need about 40 percent of the sign-ups to be youngpeople to make this a viable, affordable program. So they have a lotof work to do. As Lynn said, they have about two weeks left. You sawthe president go on this week, call in to Ryan Seacrest\’s radio show.He\’s trying to reach out in other ways, and I would suspect you\’regoing to see more of this in the next two weeks.
WITT: Lynn,is there even really a contest as to which party better reaches youngvoters?
SWEET: No. The Democrats are fortunate that thepresident is younger, he\’s hipper, he\’s into cultural references.He can do shtick like — he can do shtick that can bring millions ofhits on videos. You know, he\’s into Justin Bieber numbers here onthis one particular video. So I think if this was the only contest,you know, certainly he, you know, the president is somebody who isjust more youthful. He plays basketball. He\’s into sports. Mrs.Obama, you know, athletic. So all that helps, I think, in a youthappeal.
My thanks to David Nakamura for providing the honest-dialogue portion of the transcript. I hope it doesn\’t cause him to be shunned by the MSNBC people in the future.
Note to the people who think a lot of youtube.com hits necessarily translates into a bump in ObamaCare sign-ups.
Take me as an example: I think ObamaCare is a disaster, but I watched the video — how could I not have at least nominal interest when media could not stop talking about it for days – mostly in glowing terms? That wasn\’t interest in signing up for ObamaCare, that was natural curiosity.
Regarding Lynn Sweet: what I want to know is whether her poster of Barack Obama is bigger or smaller than her poster of Justin Bieber. But I doubt I will ever be invited to her bedroom to find out for sure. (Maybe her “Frozen” poster is bigger than either of them).
If I were one of the Chicago Sun-Times decision-makers, I would think long and hard about who is running the paper\’s D.C. Bureau. If the idea is to have a one-person cheering section for Mr. Obama, they\’re certainly getting their money\’s worth. On the other hand, if the idea is to provide hard news, Ms. Sweet just might be a bit of a mistake.
