To Be Fair, Both Thought Of Themselves As Bigger Than Jesus

This week’s strained legacy media Obama comparison:

The hosts and guests of a special Sunday edition of Morning Joe fawned over Barack Obama’s May 1 performance at the White House Correspondence Dinner. Time managing editor Richard Stengel appeared and knocked host Jay Leno by comparison: “I think that’s one of the things that undermined Jay’s routine is that it’s like coming after the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.”

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas described Obama as being “sort of God” last year, so being compared to a rock group, no matter how legendary, must seem like something of a comedown in comparison.

Curious though, that a magazine could describe the former president, who had previously been elected twice as governor of Texas, as “the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times,” and yet his successor, who took office with an infinitely thinner resume is the second coming of the Beatles.

On the other hand, as Newsweek reported in 1964, when the Beatles first arrived in the US, with a tone that illustrates how the magazine was still in the Mad Men era, and not yet in the 1960s that boomers collectively imagine these days:

Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah!”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.

Maybe that’s the sentiment that Stengel had in mind with his comparison.