During the 2004 campaign, I distinctly remember a colleague of mine tossing aside a New York Times Magazine with John Kerry on the cover and sighing, "It always amazes me that people don't want to think for themselves." He was referring to an article by Matt Bai, which contained this anecdote, among others:

A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.''Can we get any of my water?'' he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didn't like about Evian.
''I hate that stuff,'' Kerry explained to me. ''They pack it full of minerals.''
''What kind of water do you drink?'' I asked, trying to make conversation.
''Plain old American water,'' he said.
''You mean tap water?''
''No,'' Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say I'm out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesn't demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French -- important to stay away from anything even remotely French.

This was the media/GOP narrative at the time: Kerry was a waffler, with no firm principles, shifting with what he thought voters wanted to hear, constantly battling his own ingrained elitism. What my colleague meant about people not thinking for themselves was that, if Bai had not absorbed this media narrative and decided to see Kerry through that frame, he would not have interpreted this water bottle moment - or any other number of moments - that way.

(Quick digression: I think Bai's article on Obama, 4 years and 5 days after the above, was actually quite good.)

I find unthinking adherence to a rather bland pre-set narrative much more cloying and damaging than factless partisan screeds. Not only is it maddeningly difficult to get out of a media narrative rut, but it makes it all but impossible for anyone on either side of the notebook/microphone/camera to talk about anything else.

Case in point. Throughout the campaign, the grownup thing to say about Barack Obama was: All this rhetoric is great for campaigning, but if he becomes President, he'll actually have to govern. And [wistful smile and headshake from Clinton/McCain/David Gergen] he's going to find out that's a little more difficult than he makes it sound.

So, now that Obama is in office, there is only one choice for the media as far as a narrative: Now that he's President, he's finding out that governing is a lot more difficult than his rhetoric made it sound. Here's Sheryl Gay Stolberg's take from this Saturday's New York Times (again, an author I sometimes quite like):

Great Limits Come With Great Power, Ex-Candidate Finds

WASHINGTON -- President Obama showed up for his first full day at work on Wednesday determined, as he later told the nation, to make "a clean break from business as usual." But it did not take long for the new president to discover that there were limits to his power to turn his campaign rhetoric into reality.

Perhaps I was the only one...but I did a double- or triple-take when I read this. This analysis is so at odds with the week I think most Americans experienced. In fact, I think we nearly had whiplash from the amount of change suddenly taking place in the White house, and from how many campaign promises Obama managed to follow through on in the space of 3.5 days: Guantanamo, torture, secrecy and transparency, global gag rule, emissaries to the Middle East and Afghanistan/Pakistan. And since then, he's moved to re-regulate the financial system and implement stricter emissions standards, and given his first sit down interview to Al-Arabiya (an amazing interview, I'm watching it now).

But the media narrative does not move at that speed. Everyone expected Obama to run smack into the cold hard face of reality...and so, in media analyses, that's what he did.

When Mr. Obama wandered into the White House briefing room Thursday afternoon hoping to make small talk with reporters, he was instantly confronted by an unwelcome question: Why was he waiving his tough restrictions on lobbying for a Pentagon nominee? The president brushed it off, saying he would not return "if I'm going to get grilled every time I come."

The photo of this moment is captioned (not Stolberg's doing, presumably), "President Obama got a grilling, not the hoped-for small talk, on a surprise visit to the press room." I've seen the video, and it was not a grilling. One unpleasant question that he "brushed off" does not a grilling make. But even if it did, I'm not sure what this is supposed to demonstrate. Now that he's President, he'll get tough questions?

His plan to build bipartisan consensus around an economic package ran smack into discontented House Republicans. When he ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be shut down, Mr. Obama put off the tough decision of what to do with the terrorism suspects there, a delay that his senior adviser, David Axelrod, attributed to the complexity of the issue -- the same argument Mr. Bush used to keep the prison open.

If, while listening to Barack Obama during the campaign, you thought he was promising that everyone from both parties would instantly flock to him once he became President, you weren't paying attention. And comparing Obama's thoughtful approach to examining what to do with Gitmo detainees to Bush's stalling tactics because he didn't really want to close it at all feels like a stretch, doesn't it? You can palpably feel these examples straining under the pressure of being fit into a pre-set narrative, can't you?

Finally we get this wrap-up:

But in the coming weeks, Mr. Obama will have to do more than create an image; he will in fact have to make something happen...

Hey! Sound familiar? How many times over the past year or more have you heard a pundit of some stripe say, "If Obama wants to ____, he's going to have to do more than just ____"?

It's going to take a long time for the media to catch up with how mature the relationship between Obama and the American people actually is. Obama has spoken to us like adults, and recent polls have shown that most of us support his attempts to revive the country after eight years of Bush, and that we're willing to be patient. But much mainstream continues to show that, at some level, they think Obama tricked us. He got us all hopeful with his pie-in-the-sky optimism, made us believe he was magic, and now we're all going to see that he's fallible and governing is really hard. Unlike ordinary Americans, of course, Washington reporters know how hard governing is, because they see it every day.

I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of Obama supporters who do fit that description, nor am I accusing all Washington reporters of being condescending. But I think many if not most of us voted for a serious person to take on the country's problems, were willing to give him a good amount of slack to tackle those problems, and have frankly been amazed at the speed with which he has worked so far to implement changes. We remain vigilant (if Obama decides after consideration to hold some Guantanamo detainees without trial, just elsewhere, we'll be horrified), but to see the story of Obama's first week as the story of an idealist brought to ground by reality...well, you'd have to really be looking for that story to see it there.