Tina Brown: That Was Then, This Is Now

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Here’s Tina Brown on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, today. As Glenn Reynolds paraphrases at Instapundit, Tina told viewers that “Women Feel ‘Unsafe’ With Obama,” a statement that would be spun as dog whistle racism straight up just two years ago at that same channel:

“Economically, they’re feeling unsafe. With regard to ISIS, they’re feeling unsafe. They feel unsafe about Ebola. What they’re feeling unsafe about is the government response to different crises. And I think they’re beginning to feel a bit that Obama’s like that guy in the corner office, you know, who’s too cool for school, calls a meeting, says this has to change, doesn’t put anything in place to make sure it does change, then it goes wrong and he’s blaming everybody.”

Back on November 5th, 2008 though at the Daily Beast, Tina was singing a far different tune. Obama was “Magic,” her headline that day screamed; unfortunately, that headline was an abbreviation for “Magical Thinking:”

This has been an election full of magic. White Magic that only the black man from everywhere and nowhere could perform. Even his adored grandmother dying on the eve of the victory had a mythic feeling of completion to it in a candidacy full of signs and symbols. Remember the three-point basketball shot when he played with the soldiers in Kuwait? It’s as if Obama is the prince who lifts the curse in a fairy story, a curse that began eight years ago with an election wrenched away from the rightful winner and begetting as a consequence the wrathful visitation of tragedy and wars and hurricanes and economic collapse.

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His subtle guiding intelligence married to that uncanny connection to the fine-tuning of the zeitgeist made his campaign an unstoppable force before which everything fell away. The entertainment world saw it coming. This morning in the BBC Green Room, Richard Schiff, who played Toby Zeigler, the White House Communications Director on The West Wing, told me that in the 2004 series, Democratic candidate Matt Santos was based on Barack Obama. And, of course, Dennis Haysbert, who played the first President Palmer on FOX’s 24 further imagined for American audiences a black leader of the free world. Then the rest of the country caught up. You could almost feel the world spinning faster and faster in the last year, before it came to a stop in Chicago on November 4, 2008. As a new American, I pulled the lever for the first time and felt how lucky it was that it was this election I got to vote in. As I left the booth in the Catholic high school on East 56th street I felt as joyful and emotional as any Iraqi with a purple forefinger.

In retrospect, that last sentence was quite a nice touch, and an unintentional homage to what the man who preceded Obama in the White House had accomplished in spite of monolithic opposition from Tina and everyone else in the MSM, and how much his successor would be willing to discard in order to advance the leftwing narrative.