U.S. News & World Report editor-in-chief Mortimer Zuckerman penned 'The Fall of Barack Obama,' an editorial critical of President Obama.
The above-referenced editorial, entitled 'The Fall of Barack Obama,' is (due to some bad formatting) being circulated as an opinion piece written by Mortimer Zuckerman, the editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report - an authorship that some might be consider to be a telling political sign, as the editorial is highly critical of President Barack Obama, yet Zuckerman (one of America'swealthiest individuals) has in the past made political donations that have gone primarily to Democratic candidates.Actually, however, this editorial was penned by Paul Hollrah, a political columnist, and was published on the Red County web site on 2 February 2010. The confusion of authorship came about because the opening paragraph of Mr. Hollrah's editorial consists mainly of a quote attributed to a 20 January 2010 editorial by Mortimer Zuckerman, while all of the remaining text is Hollrah's own words. A missing attribution, some confusing formatting, and introductory comments added by others have created the mistaken impression that the entire piece was written by Zuckerman, but the U.S. News & World Report editor-in-chief is merely quoted in the first paragraph.Proper formatting of the opening paragraphs makes the distinction between who wrote what clearer:In a January 20, 2010 editorial, the Editor in Chief of U.S. News & World Report, Mortimer Zuckerman, had this to say: 'Obama's ability to connect with voters is what launched him. But what has surprised me is how he has failed to connect with the voters since he's been in office. He's had so much overexposure. You have to be selective. He was doing five Sunday shows. How many press conferences? And now people stop listening to him ... He's lost his audience. He has not rallied public opinion. He has plunged in the polls more than any other public figure since we've been using polls. He's done everything wrong. Well, not everything, but the major things ... I don't consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster.' And that's what his friends are saying about him. As the boy president occupied the White House on January 20, 2009 it was predictable that his presidency would last a year, at most, because the things he promised and the things he stood for were so uniquely un-American. Looking back over his year in office, any reasonably precocious fourth grader could make a cogent argument in opposition to nearly everything he's done. In fact, his policies have been so extreme and so far outside the mainstream that he was destined to achieve the most spectacular fall from grace of any American president in history. It was easy to see him serving out the final three years of his term as a virtual exile in the White House ... afraid to venture out among any but the most rabid partisans.The words attributed to Mortimer Zuckerman appear in a 19 January 2010 editorial of his entitled 'He's Done Everything Wrong' and are echoed in his 21 January 2010 U.S. News & World Report editorial entitled 'The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama.'
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