I think that self-reference is the key problem. If the press judges itself, then who will pass a critical judgment on the press? If the press is in the tank for Obama the information he will get from reading the press will be unreliable. It’s possible to get caught in a loop in which your reviewers are reading each other’s reviews. Then after opening night the theater is empty and the playwright is surprised. “My reviews were so good, how come the show is bombing?”

The other source of information for Obama are polls. The Candidate is reading numbers which led him to remark to the Times Online that the voters were nervous about him. So BHO is aware that not everything is sunshine and roses. But if the Times Online story is accurate, there is something Obama’s handlers are missing:

Mr Obama’s aides say that it is relatively early in the general election cycle, but there is a growing anxiousness about why he is not doing better against Mr McCain, who has so far run an unimpressive, disjointed and at times shambolic campaign.

The possible answers to this are self-generated noise, strategic overstretch, losing control of the message and letting the press run away with your campaign. The media is out to sell newspapers. And teen confidential stories which emphasize the manly Obama not sweating in a gym can both sell papers and sell Obama down the river. The press covered Britney Spears but they also nearly destroyed her. The virtual Obama which the press is creating, the legend they are constructing for him is what he is going carry on his back going to election day.

Depending on how it all hangs together, BHO may either win or lose. But the press introduces an element of uncertainty in your packaging even when they are in the tank for you. This whole game is not above the laws of signal to noise. And the press can noise as well as signal.

While I have no intention of comparing BHO to the Iraqi insurgents, I have pointed out in the past that al-Qaeda may have been drawn into the Iraqi disaster because they read their own press. If you read Robert Fisk about yourself, you are probably headed for a fall. If the al-Qaeda believed their publicity, they were invincible, unbeatable, like ghosts. Their foes, the US military, were stupid. If you didn’t believe that, just watch a movie. It was true. Look, people were already talking about the American defeat in Iraq. So they went and them bam. Those glowing newspaper articles were the last words that many a Jihadi, now moldering in a lonely grave, must have read. The problem with false predictions is that we find ourselves believe them. One of better lines in a Hollywood movie was supposed to have been taken from antiquity. But it’s message was ever-new.

For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.