The New York Times eventually came around to publishing a review of a book it published in June grandly titled Obama: The Call of History, a photo book with text by Times reporter Peter Baker. Their Sunday reviewer was Rutgers professor James Goodman, who gushed like a good liberal Democrat about how much his late mother would have loved this coffee-table valentine:
I cannot look at Peter Baker's extra-large and lavishly illustrated history of the Obama years without thinking of my mother. She supported Hillary Clinton in 2008, but after the convention she put two Barack Obama stickers on the bumper of her red Prius and they were still there the day she died, in December 2012, six weeks after she voted for him again. She was passionate about politics, and intensely partisan, and if cancer had not killed her, Trump's candidacy might well have -- long before election night.
But if she were here, she would buy a dozen copies of Obama: The Call of History, lay them out on her coffee table and all over her house, and then not have the heart to crack the cover.
This is why it's funny when anyone still pretends the Times isn't a daily diary for Democrats. Even they know their fans have Obama stickers on their Prius bumpers, and they make books for those people. Goodman, who calls himself "a non-observant Jewish pantheist as appalled as anyone on earth by right-wing politics masquerading as religion," still offers a bit of worship on Obama's integrity:
It isn't easy. A mere 11 months since Inauguration Day, these photographs evoke not just the previous administration but, seemingly, another age. It does not matter what Obama is doing. He might be editing a speech on health care, sitting stone-faced in the Situation Room as Navy Seals approached Osama bin Laden's compound, working out with a disabled veteran, consoling the mother of a child killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting after Congress blocked gun control legislation, bending over in the Oval Office so that a curious 5-year-old could touch his hair or hugging a victim of Hurricane Sandy. Integrity like his cannot be photoshopped or feigned. In Obama's company on the Jersey Shore, even Chris Christie looks like a mensch.
Goodman pays tribute to Peter Baker's "determination to be fair" (and balanced), but Baker also insisted Obama was loaded with personal integrity. An August 20 book review in The Washington Post by leftist Michael Eric Dyson elaborated:
Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, spends the bulk of his book writing about Obama's accomplishments -- getting the economy on good footing after the greatest financial collapse since the Depression, bailing out the automobile industry, passing a health-care overhaul, killing Osama bin Laden -- and his virtues, above all "a self-discipline that, for all the controversies, allowed him to emerge from eight years in office without a hint of personal scandal."
So lying for days about the Benghazi terrorist attack being caused by a YouTube video isn't worth mentioning. Claiming "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" with Obamacare was awarded "Lie of the Year" by the PolitiFact liberals in 2013, but that's not a "hint" of an integrity problem for Mr. Call of History.
Goodman concluded by looping back around to die-hard Dems like his mother (and the liberal media myth-makers):
The first thing that happened to Obama's political legacy was the election of Donald J. Trump, who promised to undo his signature achievements. Time will tell. Obama's reputation is another matter. Trump has already been good for that. Obama's favorability rating has risen steadily since January. And very likely not since tributes to the assassinated John F. Kennedy will a book of photographs of a president so recently departed make millions of Americans want to cry.
