A ‘Dancing With the Stars’ opportunity (Sept. 25)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Mrs. Doud is in a particularly good mood this week because “Dancing With the Stars” has begun its annual, many-week run on television.
In case you have not seen it, the program matches well known people (aka stars) who may or may not know anything about dancing, with professional dancers, and over the weeks the pros try to help the stars figure out which foot is left and which is right. Along the way, as various dances are performed, some of the stars and their partner dancers get weeded out, until finally the contest is down to two dancers and their partners.
“How did President Obama do?” I asked Wednesday, after the first eliminations had taken place?
She gave me a funny look. I remembered, Obama is not on “Dancing With the Stars.” But he has been on just about every other TV program lately, thumping the tubs for the changes he wants to make in how the nation’s health care is funded.
This is nothing new. Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to the present have used media space and time to some degree to promote what they thought was important — going around Congress, as it were, to get the people behind them.
The problem Obama faces is that even though he does a pretty good job on TV — for example, he doesn’t mispronounce words or speak grammatically unforgivable sentences — in the age of the remote control, he stands a good chance of getting clicked out in favor of more interesting medical programming such as “House” or “ER.”
His TV appearances are designed to convince voters they should write their reluctant-to-go-along Congress people and tell them to get off the dime and pass the health care package.
But he runs the chance of getting the dreaded click-off instead if viewers get itchy remote fingers.
Maybe he should give “Dancing With the Stars” a look as a backup.
