Dunno about the revolution—but Obama is certainly being televised. The 24-hour cable-network chatter about the First Family during the first few days of his administration could easily fill out an undergraduate course packet on media analysis. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan says, and the intense scrutiny of the Obamas seems to exist to justify and further the television time dedicated to this analysis.

But the fine analysis isn’t relegated merely to the television end of the bandwidth spectrum. In fact, some of the finer scalpel work has been done by the blogosphere. In a casual but charged cry of lèse majesté on behalf of the Obamas themselves, blogger Phoebe Maltz Phoebe Maltz criticizes Barack and Michelle for dressing Sasha and Malia in J. Crew for the inauguration. Not because the girls looked inappropriate; Maltz freely admits they were dressed nicely enough for the occasion. Rather, the squarely middle-brow prep label was judged unbecoming for such a unique and excelsior occasion as the inauguration. Writes Maltz:

Yes, they looked adorable, as always, but this was the Most Important Day Ever, for America, the world, and, in all likelihood, the two of them. J.Crew is hardly Kmart, but it’s a cheap enough store for, say, those on grad student budgets to shop in from time to time. I’m not saying they had to go all Sarah Palin-$150,000 on us, but the move struck me as over-the-top tasteful.

Was the land’s finest tailor too busy to dress the new royalty? Or was this, on the other hand, a cynical, over-motivated decision designed to appeal to a populist shopping sensibility—as Maltz puts it, “over-the-top tasteful”? (Let’s note that J. Crew is well out of the price range of a great many Americans whom the Obamas represent.)

What this is not is good fashion criticism. That the girls looked good while dressed perhaps down ought to prompt a “huh” at best. Because, as a fashion move, it’s perfectly appropriate to dress off the rack, so long as you can make it work.

That’s probably the finest, strangest criticism I’ve seen levied at the Obamas yet, but surely the Joe Scarboroughs and Nancy Graces of cable television have given that competition. But are people still tuning in?

Photo by Kriston Capps