Sasha and Malia Obama - Getty Images
“It wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently,” Obama said of his daughters as he explained his switch to supporting same-sex marriage. “It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.”
According to the director of Democratic leaning Public Polling Tom Jensen said,“They’re the most popular unit of the family, who doesn’t like the girls?”
His firm surveyed the girls’ popularity in 2009 and found them with numbers politicos would covet: a 54 percent favorability rating and an unfavorable standing of just 5 percent, numbers that he thinks are unlikely to have moved much.
Jensen notes that family is a big factor for President Obama, whom polls show people like even if they’re not crazy about his stewardship of the economy.
“Children have a kind of humanizing impact, and that’s really what Obama needs,” Jensen said. “Voters feel like things haven’t changed as much as they wanted. The economy still is not where they wanted it to be. He needs people to vote more on whether they like him or not, regardless of his record of accomplishment.”
A Gallup poll this week found Obama with a wide lead over Romney when it comes to personal likability.
“With that small swath of swing voters that everyone wants, if something gets people to think about Obama the man, as opposed to Obama the guardian of the economy, he’s in better shape,” Jensen said.
Despite the reasoning several media outlets have pulled or edited already-published articles about the activities of President Barack Obama’s daughters, even though the stories appeared to pose no active security risk to the first family.
An example, on Thursday, 14-year-old Malia Obama attended a concert by the British boy band One Direction at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, Va., flanked by Secret Service agents who attempted unsuccessfully to blend in with the crowd of mostly pre-teen girls.
At one point during the concert, the boy bands’ teen heartthrobs sang, “You’re insecure, Dunno what for, You’re turning heads when you walk through the door” — words that managed to take on some meaning for Malia, who looked less than enthused by the presence of multiple middle-aged federal agents at her side.
On Friday, the story was picked up by The Huffington Post, which ran the headline, “Malia Obama, One Direction Fan: First Daughter Attends Boy Band Concert with Secret Service in Tow.”
Within hours, the entire post was scrubbed from the site without explanation, and the post’s URL was hastily changed to direct users to the site’s celebrity section.
The next day, news aggregation website Buzzfeed ran a story on the event, accompanied by a picture of Malia in attendance at the concert. The headline was “Malia Obama Goes to the One Direction Concert with the Secret Service,” and the story’s picture showed Malia standing awkwardly in front of a scowling male Secret Service agent, with what appear to be two additional female Secret Service agents standing to her right.
By Sunday, the headline had changed to “Secret Service Agent Does Not Appear To Enjoy One Direction Concert,” and Buzzfeed had cropped the photo to remove Malia entirely, leaving only a narrow shot of the unhappy Secret Service agent. Again, the author of the post, Hillary Reinsberg, left no explanation for scrubbing Malia from the story and the picture, nor did she provide any indication to readers that it had occurred.
Interesting…EOTM! Online has yet to get such a request…guess ‘new media‘ is no threat.
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