Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Nile Gardiner brings his British readers an update on our thuggish president.
Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Today’s White House definitely isn’t poor, lavishly feeding off the wealth of the American taxpayer, and the current presidency certainly isn’t short, with nearly four more years to run. But it is undeniably nasty and brutish, as veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has found after questioning President Obama’s narrative on the sequester issue.
Woodward, one of two reporters who broke the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall (immortalised in the 1976 Oscar winner All The President’s Men), has revealed to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the White House warned him that he would “regret” his recent remarks on the sequester, made in a Washington Post column. (Read the exchange of emails between White House economic adviser Gene Sperling and Woodward posted by Politico here.) Woodward is hardly a conservative, and has been at the heart of the liberal media establishment for decades. He is, however, not afraid of challenging the status quo, as he did with his 2010 book Obama’s Wars. Woodward is not alone. Lanny Davis, another liberal columnist and former special counsel to Bill Clinton, who has penned several pieces critical of Obama’s policies, has also spoken out against similar White House tactics. …
Gardiner quoted Michael Barone at length from an October 2008 article. Here’s Barone now suggesting the president is only interested in politics, not governing.
Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It’s not an entirely unfair question.
Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders.
In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.
His offense: He’s continuing to make it clear, as he did in his book “The Price of Politics,” that it was Obama’s then-chief of staff and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who first proposed the dreaded sequester.
This inconvenient fact threatens to interfere with the ready-for-teleprompter narrative that the Republicans want to cut aid to preschoolers in order to save tax breaks for corporate jets.
It appears that Obama prefers delivering such messages to crowds of adoring supporters over actually governing.
His theory seemed to be that if he kicked his job approval rating up a few points, Republicans would agree to the revenue increases he is promoting, just as they agreed to a tax rate increase in the “fiscal cliff” showdown.
But his job rating continues to hover just above 50 percent. That’s not nearly high enough to compel cooperation.
In addition, his campaign rhetoric undercuts his credibility with politicians of the opposite party and perhaps of his own. …
Debra Saunders wonders if the Woodward kerfuffle will be a watershed event.
There is a rule in Politics 2013 that’s evident in the flap about a White House aide who may or may not have threatened Washington Post veteran reporter Bob Woodward. The rule: The more superficial the brouhaha, the bigger its impact.
What public figures say is more important than what they do, because cable TV and political blogs can cover a mud-fight more cheaply and more easily than a real story.
Quick synopsis: Woodward has reported doggedly on the White House’s role in putting “sequestration” cuts – $85 billion this year – in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Last week, as Woodward was writing that President Obama was moving the goal post in negotiations on those cuts, a White House aide yelled at him on the phone for half an hour, Woodward says. Economic adviser Gene Sperling later sent him an e-mail to apologize for raising his voice. Sperling also wrote, “I think you will regret staking out that claim.”
The White House says no threat was intended. I believe that. I also see why Woodward might perceive the exchanges as a threat – not to harm him physically, but to deny him access. Without access, Woodward cannot write best-selling books.
Why am I writing about what Ron Fournier, National Journal editor-in-chief, described as “a silly distraction to a major problem” – Washington’s failure to lead under a budget deadline? Because this could be a turning point: the moment the White House press corps starts pushing back. …
Jonathan Tobin with similar thoughts.
A week ago, the White House was absolutely sure that its position on the sequester would prevail and that the Republicans would soon be surrendering on the president’s demands for even more new taxes in order to avoid the implementation of the draconian across-the-board budget cuts. Most of the press, backed by polls that showed the unpopularity of Republicans, agreed. But the discussion has shifted a bit in the last few days and the administration’s confidence in its ability to prevail in this political struggle has to be slightly shaken, even if they are not publicly admitting it. Part of the president’s problem is that the attempts of the secretaries of transportation and homeland security to scare the public about airport delays and the border if the sequester went ahead sounded fake and appeared to be politically motivated. But just as important was the intervention into the debate of an icon of liberal journalism: the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.
Woodward’s op-ed reminded the public that the sequester was the White House’s idea and that any attempt to include a request for more taxes into the discussion of putting it off was “moving the goalposts.” While seemingly just one voice among many talking heads, the Woodward assertions touched a nerve in the White House and set off a furious back-and-forth argument that betrayed the administration’s sensitivity to criticism as well as a thuggish intolerance for anyone who would try to alter their hand-crafted narrative about the issue. …
Jennifer Rubin with more.
Now that we have reached sequester reality one wonders if it, like the Mayan calendar hoax, will disappear with a shrug or whether voters will become irate over the scare tactics and egregious waste of tax payer dollars that continues. Fiscal conservatives are greatly helped by a number of revelations.
First and foremost, the voters have seen President Obama at his very worst. The Post editorial board observes, “Washington has reached a strange place indeed when the opposition party offers the president more control over spending — and he refuses it.” If the GOP is on the ball they will remind voters of this day in and day out. If nothing else, it may dissuade the White House from finding “horror” stories. For each one the Republicans’ reply is simply, “President Obama chose to inflict this pain.”
It is also the case that the obnoxious sense of entitlement of public employees has been exposed. The Post’s Marc Fisher describes the outrage government workers feel at the prospect of furloughs, cut backs or unemployment. In a neighborhood of $700,000 homes (a far cry from the average American’s neighborhood) he finds this sort of reaction to the sequester:
“It’s an extremely threatening and highly insulting condition to find myself in,” said a NationalDefenseUniversity professor who lives in Mantua and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his high-level security clearance. “It’s one thing to hear the constant negative drumbeat directed at federal workers from people outside Washington. It’s another thing to have the threat of denial of livelihood.”
Have these people not a clue what the rest of the country has been going through? …
Peter Wehner, who worked in the White House, says all this starts at the top.
… Having worked in the White House for seven years, I recognize things can get heated between the press and the president and his staff. But this goes far beyond anything I ever witnessed and certainly anything I ever personally experienced. (I tended to have civil and cordial relations with members of the press during my tenure in the White House.)
Mr. Fournier’s experience is, I think, a good barometer of the cast of mind of the Obamacons. They are a rather thuggish, thin-skinned group who tend to view criticisms as a declaration of war. Many of them seem to view their opponents as enemies. As Fournier’s account shows, they routinely upbraid and insult reporters. Which is why I found his conclusion to be a bit puzzling. “This can’t be what Obama wants,” Fournier writes. “He must not know how thin-skinned and close-minded his staff can be to criticism.”
I actually believe this conduct can be what Mr. Obama wants. He is himself quite thin-skinned and closed-minded, so it makes perfect sense for his staff to be as well. And while the press coverage they get often ranges from favorable to fawning, it is never good enough for them. The job of intimidation is a full-time one, after all, and it clearly works with some journalists.
One of the extraordinary talents the president has is projecting an image of decency and civility while giving home to staffers who are known for being abusive and threatening.
It’s perfectly appropriate to judge a president by his White House staff. And Ron Fournier has done us the favor of lifting the curtain, just a bit, on this one.
It isn’t a pretty sight.
Seth Mandel points out who’s losing this skirmish.
… They’ve seen this play before, and they believe life goes on. As Jonathan mentioned, the press’s reaction to this debate has been to push back a bit on the White House, first with regard to Bob Woodward and now with the Post accusing the president, and those who echo his pronouncements, of “melodrama.” And it also marks a shift on the Republican side. The GOP has often fallen into the president’s PR traps and allowed him to effectively divide their ranks, then step back and watch them point fingers at each other. There was even (overblown) talk of a mutiny against Speaker John Boehner when the new Congress took office.
But this time, the Republicans are putting up a much more unified front, and calling the president’s bluff. It’s a shift Obama ignores at his own peril. Clinton, after all, was still relevant–he was running for re-election. Obama has already put that victory behind him–and, it seems, may have squandered the momentum and political capital that came with it.