No change here. Heard it all before:
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So much for that promised Obama transparency. (See 1 below.)
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Is national unity a thing of the past due to technology? (See 2 below.)
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More regarding when White House knew about LIbya. (See 3 below.)
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1)Register editor: Obama off-the-record comments deserve to be shared with voters
Wednesday morning update:
Without comment, campaign officials for President Obama this morning released to the Des Moines Register a transcript of an interview he had Tuesday with Laura Hollingsworth, president and publisher of the Register, and Rick Green, editor/vice-president of news. Initially, the White House had asked that the conversation be considered off-the-record and its details not shared with readers.
Rick Green’s Tuesday night blog:
The Des Moines Register’s publisher and I spoke with President Barack Obama this morning — but we can’t tell you what he said.
Just four days before the Register’s presidential endorsement is released, Laura Hollingsworth and I received a phone call from the president. He was calling from Florida, on the heels of a morning campaign appearance and about 14 hours after his debate with GOP nominee Mitt Romney at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.
The conference call lasted nearly 30 minutes and was an incredibly informative exchange of questions, answers and an insightful glimpse into the president’s vision for a second term. He made a genuine and passionate case for our endorsement and for reelection.
Just two weeks before Election Day, the discussion, I believe, would have been valuable to all voters, but especially those in Iowa and around the country who have yet to decide between the incumbent Democrat and his Republican opponent.
Unfortunately, what we discussed was off-the-record. It was a condition, we were told, set by the White House.
We learned Monday afternoon that the president would be available to us this morning. Like most newspapers around the country, the Register has lobbied for months to get both candidates to appear before our editorial board to analyze the important issues confronting Iowa, the rest of the country and the world.
Typically, these visits are an opportunity for us to ask questions, get details on platforms and positions and to contrast each opponent’s views. These exchanges are weighed when our five-member editorial board – which also relies heavily on independent and extensive research — meets and drafts our endorsement editorial.
Romney appeared before our board Oct. 9. We literally met in a barn on a family farm owned by Jeff Koch, just west of Van Meter.
We had a wide-ranging conversation in a little under an hour of access. He squeezed us in just before a campaign stop that spotlighted his agriculture policies. With the exception of one final question (“Why have you earned the Des Moines Register’s endorsement?”) his camp said the interview could not be videotaped, which has become our typical practice with politicians meeting our editorial board. But the audio was digitally recorded and posted on DesMoinesRegister.com.
We repeatedly –- and politely — have asked Obama 2012 campaign officials in Iowa and Chicago for the same access to the president. I believe it earned serious consideration. But despite at least 28 campaign stops and 11 days in our state, we never could convince his team to carve out a few moments for our editorial board –- in our office, on the trail or even in a barn somewhere in Iowa.
Which takes me back to Monday afternoon’s call from the White House, inviting us to chat with President Obama this morning.
It was a “personal call” to the Register’s publisher and editor, we were told. The specifics of the conversation could not be shared because it was off-the-record.
Of course, we immediately lobbied his campaign staff in Des Moines for a formal, on-the-record call. We were told it was not their decision; it came from the White House. We requested that the White House be asked to reverse course so whatever the president shared with us could be reviewed by voters and our readers.
No reason was given for the unusual condition of keeping it private.
We relented and took the call. How could we not? It’s the leader of the free world on line one.
And as we weigh with our editorial board this critical decision about who to endorse, it was necessary for us to discuss the challenges confronting our state, nation and world with the president -– even when handcuffed by rules related to what could be shared.
However, after our call, I did send a note to the communications chief of the president’s Iowa campaign. I asked that it be shared with others who decided to shortchange readers and voters everywhere from hearing the president’s very thoughtful and specific responses to our questions focused on rebuilding the national economy, imploding the gridlock that has gripped Washington, his priorities for a second term and the importance Iowa plays in winning a second term on Nov. 6.
“Thanks for making today’s call happen,” I wrote to spokesperson Erin Seidler. “It was very beneficial, informative and wide-ranging. I appreciate the hurdles that needed to be cleared.”
However, “one note of feedback for you and the Obama Team: It should have been on the record. You would have wanted this 30-minute conversation to be shared with the rest of Iowa. I understand all the worries, the fears and potential implications. … I know how one slip-up could lead to a (news) cycle-changing ‘gotcha.’ But you and I both know Iowa is coming down to the wire and the polls are incredibly close.
“What the President shared with us this morning — and the manner, depth and quality of his presentation – would have been well-received by not only his base, but also undecideds. From a voter standpoint, keeping it off-the-record was a disservice.”
It’s important that I emphasize the White House’s decision won’t play a factor in our board’s final endorsement decision. That would be petty and ridiculous. We take far too seriously what’s at stake this election and what our endorsement should say.
And I write this not to poke the president’s team. I get that he’s busy. I understand the demands of running a country and a competitive campaign.
Instead, this blog, I hope, reveals in a transparent way the rigors of covering a heated presidential race in a critical swing state and the circumstances that unfold far from the view of our readers.
Yet, it also speaks to the transparency all voters should demand from the candidates. They want more than just repetitive sound bites on the campaign trail or rehearsed one-liners from debate stages.
Our expectation is that the answer to one of the most important questions the Register ever can ask a politician –- “Why should you be our president?” –- deserves to be shared with voters.
It’s unfortunate that did not happen today.
Look for the Register’s endorsement to appear here on DesMoinesRegister.com at 7 p.m. Saturday and in our Sunday print edition.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)Are We Becoming Medieval?
In an age of technocratic elites, national unity is losing its charm.
A tourist mecca like Venice now boasts that it dreams of breaking away from an insolvent Italy. Similarly Barcelona, and perhaps the Basques and the Catalonians in general, claim they want no part of a bankrupt Spain. Scotland fantasizes about becoming separate from Great Britain. The Greek Right dreams of a 19th-century Greece without Asian and African immigrants who do not look Greek. Belgium increasingly seems an artificial construct, half Flemish, half French, with the two sides never more estranged. These days Texas and California do not even seem like two parts of a united nation, just as Massachusetts is growing ever more distant from Wyoming.
Here at home, it is not just that taxation and government are different in red and blue states, or that for the last two decades national elections have hinged on what the shrinking number of purple-state voters prefer. Social and cultural questions are also dividing us, almost as much as slavery did in the 1850s. Fault lines over abortion, the role of religion, gay marriage, affirmative action, welfare, illegal immigration, and gun ownership are starting to manifest themselves regionally. We have long had the Blue–Gray game; soon will there be a Red–Blue Bowl? If Mexico plays against the U.S. soccer team in Merced, Fresno, or L.A., will the spectators root for the country in which they live or the country that they left?
Why is there today a nostalgia for localism? Shrinking Western populations with growing numbers of elderly and unemployed can no longer sustain their present level of redistributive taxation and entitlements. Europe, which can endure neither the disease of insolvency nor the supposed medicine of austerity, is only a decade ahead of what we should expect here in the United States, or what we see now in California — a construct more than a state, where the Central Valley is to the coast as Mississippi is to Massachusetts.
Voters are also disgusted with government, and feel that their overseers are not even subject to the consequences of what they impose on others: We expect the Obamas to trash the 1 percent as they jet to Martha’s Vineyard, or a zillionaire John Kerry to demand higher taxes as he seeks to avoid them on his yacht, or an upscale French Socialist president to have a home on the Mediterranean — or, on the other side of the ledger, social-conservative elites to speak and act like metrosexuals.
The frustration with the distant redistributive state extends beyond the technocracy to the very nature and legitimacy of the bureaucracies themselves. We know that no one trusts the National Bank of Greece or believes much in Eurobonds, but who trusts any more the GSA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or even the Secret Service to fulfill their missions competently, and with honesty and decorum?
Nor can the redistributionist technocracy any longer make the case that its certifications, its very claims to legitimacy and entitlement — a PhD from Harvard, a JD from Yale, an MBA from Stanford — and its experience — tenure at Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, two years in OMB, a billet at the CBO, three years at the Federal Reserve — have warranted our trust. We certainly do not believe any more that such a résumé makes one a better legislator or administrator than another who has run a company, built a business, farmed, piloted a plane, or served in the military. Certainly an Al Gore or Barack Obama does not seem wise, no matter where he was educated or how many government posts he has held.
High-tech communications of the 21st century are a force multiplier, in real time conveying the failures of redistributionist schemes, through cable news, Internet blogs and tabloids, and downloaded videos. A nurse in Des Moines has the power in the palm of her hand to read the Wall Street Journal, watch a YouTube video, or browse a news site at Google, accessing more information than what the aristocratic class was privileged to obtain just a few decades ago. The result is that we see and hear instantaneously what “They” do and say, even though we rarely meet them any more in our daily lives. They have become Orwellian visages on our collective screens, whose empty platitudes seem instantaneously familiar and yet irrelevant to the people we live, work, and enjoy our leisure with.
As those who run the nation state become ever more estranged, we yearn for the safety and security of our own neighbors, who seem to think, speak, and live more as we do. In other words, we are unhappy residents of Hellenistic Greece who dream of the romance of the lost face-to-face city state, or the bread-and-circuses turba of fourth-century Rome, who feel that their fellow citizens in Gaul, Numidia, and Pontus seem hardly Roman. These days the problem is not just that an Italian wants to leave the EU, but that a Florentine or Venetian would prefer to leave Italy itself. A Texan not only wants us out of the U.N., but may feel he is already out of the U.S. Britain may want no part of the EU, but Scotland wants no part of Britain.
In terms of race and ethnicity, the classical-liberal tradition of emphasizing our character rather than our appearance has been eroded by the self-serving multiculturalism of our elites. Formal support for assimilation, intermarriage, and integration became passé, as hyphenation began to strain credulity, the “salad bowl” replaced the melting pot, and grand proclamations about the “other” became the new normal. Even as we intermarry and our popular culture blends us together, our elites tear us apart, distributing rewards and punishments in terms of jobs, entitlements, and education based on notions of difference.
Where does this all lead? Are Westerners to become Flemish against Walloons, Scots vs. Brits, and Catalonians tired of the Spanish? In our lifetime, we will certainly see the dissolution of the eurozone, and perhaps of the EU itself. At best, “Europe” may return to a common market; at worst, to the nationalism and rivalries of the first half of the 20th century. Not that the nation state itself is safe; language, locale, religion, and tradition are powerful bonds that reassert themselves once unionists fail to make the case that people are better off uniting across natural divides than fragmenting into logical enclaves.
And the United States? Are we doomed to being drawn and quartered into blue and red provinces: a postmodern Pacific Coast and New England, an Hispanic zone extending 200 miles north of the Mexican border, and a rusting Great Lakes industrial belt with its inner cities, all in loose alliance — as our red/blue Electoral College maps suggest — against the Plains states, the Rocky Mountains, and the South?
Barack Obama and his administration apparently believed that by asserting a fictitious Republican war on women, by fostering a new racial divide of “punish our enemies” and “nation of cowards,” by claiming a new economic Mason-Dixon line between the 99 percent and the suspect few who make over $250,000, and by running up $5 trillion in debt in less than four years, they could cobble together majority support for their neo-socialist agenda.
That divisiveness proved as foolish as borrowing $5 trillion to increase the number of dependent constituents. Well before Obama emerged from his Chicago organizing, there were already forces of political disunion in the West brought about by demography, globalization, and an out-of-touch technocracy — ill winds that he should have calmed rather than fanned. Indeed, Obama himself from 2002 to 2008 lectured about red/blue divides, and warned us about people like himself who would seek to exploit them for partisan advantage.
Somehow in just four years Obama has almost done to the United States what it took Brussels apparatchiks three decades to do to the European Union: alienated the people both from their technocracy and from themselves. The results could be medieval.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institutionand the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)Emails detail unfolding Benghazi attack on Sept. 11
CBS News) It was six weeks ago on Tuesday that terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Now, CBS News has obtained email alerts that were put out by the State Department as the attack unfolded. Four Americans were killed in the attack, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
These emails contain the earliest description so far of what happened at Benghazi the night of the attack.
At 4:05 p.m. Eastern time, on September 11, an alert from the State Department Operations Center was issued to a number government and intelligence agencies. Included were the White House Situation Room, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the FBI.
"US Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack" -- "approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well. Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four COM (Chief of Mission/embassy) personnel are in the compound safe haven."
At 4:54 p.m., less than an hour later, another alert: "the firing... in Benghazi...has stopped...A response team is on site attempting to locate COM (embassy) personnel."
Then, at 6:07 p.m., State sent out another alert saying the embassy in Tripoli reported the Islamic military group "Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibilty for Benghazi Attack"... "on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli."
The emails are just a few in what are likely a large number traded throughout the night. They are likely to become part of the ongoing political debate over whether the administration attempted to mislead in saying the assault was an outgrowth of a protest, rather than a planned attack by terrorists.
Fourteen hours after the attack, President Obama sat down with Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes" for a previously scheduled interview and said he did not believe it was simply due to mob violence.
"You're right that this is not a situation that was -- exactly the same as what happened in Egypt and my suspicion is that there are folks involved in this who were looking to target Americans from the start," Mr. Obama said.
The White House and State Department declined comment on the email alerts. The House Oversight Committee told CBS News the information in the emails will be part of their ongoing investigation into the Benghazi attack.
Sharyl AttkissonSharyl Attkisson is a CBS News investigative correspondent based in Washington. All of her stories, videos and blogs are available here.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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