Obama's daughter's inconvenient birthday

In a 1,000-word feature Wednesday, Peter Nicholas of the Los Angeles Times portrayed Barack Obama as a helpless victim of the campaign trail, "caught" in Butte, Mont., on Fourth of July weekend, when he "wriggled free of the campaign's fetters" for his daughter's 10th birthday.

In fact, as a "pool" report by the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman made clear, the reason Obama was in Montana on his daughter's birthday was so that "Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim's crew could shoot scenes for a film bio of the candidate to be shown at the Democratic National Convention.

So, rather than being "caught" in Butte, Obama seems to have chosen the city's Fourth of July parade as the perfect setting for a film by an Oscar-winning director. After I blogged about the L.A. Times story, an alert reader spotted the discrepancy in the description of why Obama was in Montana and sent this e-mail to Nicholas:

You state that Obama improvised a party for his daughter's [birthday] because he was "caught" in Montana. I believe he was there to film a movie to use at his convention. That's quite different than what your article implied, wouldn't you agree? He chose to be there so he could use clips from the July 4th parade in his film. So, he "purposely" chose to be there on his daughter's [birthday]. Leaves quite a different impression, doesn't it? One wonders why you chose to mislead your readers.

To accuse the reporter of intentionally striving to "mislead" readers is a bit strong, but certainly it is inaccurate to characterize any political candidate as a passive pawn of his own campaign. Ultimately, the candidate is always in charge.

If Obama had wanted to spend Fourth of July alone with his family in Chicago, he could have done so. Spending the holiday in Butte, Mont., was his own choice. Nobody forced him to schedule the film shoot, just as no one forced him to run for president. So the "campaign's fetters" are self-imposed.