ABC White House reporter Jake Tapper described Obama’s first full day as president on the PBS talk show hosted by Charlie Rose on the evening of January 21. The real eyebrow-raising passage came when Rose asked Tapper about the relationship between Team Obama and the press, and Tapper described many of his press colleagues on their knees:

I would say for a lot of my colleagues, it’s perhaps an unrequited love between them and the president. He’s — you know, he’s a cool customer. You know, I think that there are some of us that, you know, maybe try to report on our feet a little bit more than on our knees and he doesn`t necessarily know what to make of us all the time. You know, he eyes us warily.

He added that the press corps would naturally be tougher in the transition from gauzy promises to the problem of fulfilling them:

I think they know that the press is going to get tougher. Because it`s very easy to sell a product and say, you know, “I’m going to — this watch, it`s going to do so many things for you if you buy this watch, it`s great. It`s going to tell time, it`s going to do your dishes, it`s going to make coffee in the morning.” And then you sell them the watch, and it better do what you said it is going to do. So I think they know that the media is going to get tougher, as they have to actually prove themselves and get things done.

These are not the passages that Rose highlighted at the top of the show. He liked this passage from Tapper better, the one honoring Obama’s skills:

He is so savvy, I mean, and I mean that in the sense, like, he does things that both are smart policy and smart politics, and then you think — all the time, while portraying himself — you know, he`s the guy who hates the game, but is so good at it and is so good at it by saying that he hates the game. And he, the fact that he had a dinner for John McCain, to me, is one of these things that you think why didn’t George W. Bush have a dinner for John Kerry? Why didn’t George W. Bush have a dinner for Al Gore after the Florida recount?