YOU SIR ARE NO MIKE MCCURRY!

There are few avenues open to Presidents for dealings with their public critics and opponents. You can attempt to destroy them with the IRS, and covert investigation, (Nixon and Johnson). You can act like a pedagogue in a bunker (Carter). You can ignore them (Ford and both Bushes); or laughingly dismiss them (Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton).

The last seems to work best, but it is clear what doesn’t work. “They talk about me like a dog” creates the perception of a thin-skinned president. Having as the Press Secretary of your administration Robert Gibbs, a screeching, humorless, scold, even more thin-skinned than your are perceived to be, is casting against type.

Mike McCurry, leader in the clubhouse for Press Secretary role models, used to prepare for his daily press conferences by chain smoking cigarettes and going over his notes. One can only guess that Gibbs’ pre-game ritual consists of eating lemons and red pepper. "It's a stunning thing, to see a publication (Forbes) you would see in a dentist's office, so lacking in truth and fact," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says in an interview. "I think it represents a new low."

My dentist office carries a few sports and home magazines, but nothing entitled “The Guaranteed Factual Guide to Everything”. The piece that aroused Gibbs ire was a psycho-babble exploration of President Obama’s motivation in life as the ghost of his dead father. It was a wildly speculative piece by Dinesh D’Souza, former child prodigy of the radical right. His star has since been eclipsed and the piece, was D’Souza’s attempt to make a comeback by out-radicaling the radicals.

One can imagine that if McCurry was still Press Secretary he would have ignored the article entirely unless asked. If questioned, he would have made some humorous remark as if it were an inside joke between he and the reporters. He would have not raised the matter into a public debate or called for a meeting at the White House with a Forbes editor, as Gibbs has done.

President Obama is professorial and not gifted at banter or self deprecating humor. He needs assistance to handle daily life with the press. Unless Gibbs role as this administration’s sneering “Professor Snape” of Harry Potter fame is recast; the Obama Presidency may end at the same time as that film franchise in 2012.