Obama's White House appears as thin skinned as a condom. but at least we can take comfort in the fact that Biden is minding the store.
What is really ironic is that I am reading the biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley.
Cronkite was a flawed human, as we all are, but he was also the most trusted TV reporter in the nation. He graced the TV during a time when America was blessed with a number of other media and radio giants - Murrow, Mudd, Sevareid, Chung, Sawyer, Schieffer, Swayze et al.
Now we are blessed with wimps like the reporter with the tingling leg, Barbara 'Wa Wa' who once was a respected and tough TV reporter and who has now sunk like the Titanic and then there is MSNBC and CNN.
When Cronkite was attacked by various White Houses, the media rallied to his defense because if Cronkite could be intimidated they all could.
Well here we are again. Obama is now trying to worm his way out of the fact that he was the one who proposed the sequester concept and is now in a pickle. Obama first tried to spread fear among the land and when he had his hand called he sicked a White House lieutenant on Woodward to try and intimidate him..
Woodward is too big, too respected and too tough so he will come out on top and once again Obama will look like a petulant Chicago thug .(See 1 and 1a below.)
I keep repeating - POGO was right!
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Off for DC so will not be in a position to do any memos and when I return am here for only one day and then off to celebrate our granddaughter, Dagny's, first birthday!
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Dick
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1)Woodward at war
By MIKE ALLEN and JIM VANDEHEI
Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came about — and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me for about a half-hour,” Woodward told us in an hour long interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets.
Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade was followed by a page-long email from the aide, one of the four or five administration officials most closely involved in the fiscal negotiations with the Hill. “I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today,” the official typed. “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”
Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat. “ ‘You’ll regret.’ Come on,” he said. “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ‘Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ‘you’re going to regret challenging us
“They have to be willing to live in the world where they’re challenged,” Woodward continued in his calm, instantly recognizable voice. “I’ve tangled with lots of these people. But suppose there’s a young reporter who’s only had a couple of years — or 10 years’ — experience and the White House is sending him an email saying, ‘You’re going to regret this.’ You know, tremble, tremble. I don’t think it’s the way to operate.”
UPDATE: The official Woodward is referencing is Gene Sperling, a top economic aide, as BuzzFeed reported last night and we confirmed. Sources tell us the White House might release the full exchange to show it was much more innocuous than Woodward suggests.
ANOTHER UPDATE. We have obtained the actual email exchange.
A White House official said: “Of course no threat was intended. As Mr. Woodward noted, the email from the aide was sent to apologize for voices being raised in their previous conversation. The note suggested that Mr. Woodward would regret the observation.”
Woodward — first in “The Price of Politics,” his best-seller on the failed quest for a grand budget bargain, and later with his opinion piece in the Post — makes plain that sequestration was an idea crafted by the White House. Obama personally approved the plan and later signed it into law. Woodward was right, several congressional officials involved in the talks told us.
And that contention has made Woodward, once Public Enemy No. 1 to a generation of Republicans, the unlikely darling of the right wing. Conservatives suddenly swoon over him, with his stepped-up appearances on Fox News and starring role in GOP press releases. And while White House officials are certainly within their rights to yell at any journalist, including Bob Woodward, this very public battle with a Washington legend has become a major distraction at a pivotal moment for the president.
The feud also feeds a larger narrative because, like many others, Woodward thinks this is a very thin-skinned White House that does not like being challenged on the facts. He said that explains the senior aide’s in-your-face email. “I think when they get their rear end in a crack here, they become defensive,” he said. “This could be a huge issue if the economy takes a hit. And people are going to go back and say exactly what happened and who did it and so forth.”
The Woodward reporting has caused the White House spin machine to sputter at a crucial time. The president was running around the country, campaign-style, warning that Republicans were at fault for the massive cuts set to hit Friday. What Obama never says: It was his own staff that proposed sequestration, and the tax hikes he now proposes — aimed at replacing half of the cuts — were never part of that very specific plan
The White House instead has, with great success, fudged the facts. The administration has convinced a majority of the country that Republicans are more to blame by emphasizing that Republicans voted for the plan. Which they did — after Obama conceived it.
The truth is that Obama and Republicans supported it because everyone believed it was a such a stupid idea that the grown-ups in Washington would never actually let it happen. They thought Obama and Congress would come up with a grand bargain on spending, entitlement cuts and tax increases, instead of allowing the sequestration ax to fall. They were wrong.
So the blame game is in full swing — and Woodward is smack in the middle of it. The Obama White House is out to discredit him. Behind the scenes, Obama allies are spreading word that the Woodward book broadly — and his reporting on sequestration specifically — are misleading because Republicans, especially House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, were so clearly among the chief sources.
It is no secret on Capitol Hill that Cantor and his staff cooperated extensively with Woodward. It is fairly obvious as you breeze through the opening chapters of the book. But we have talked with many Democrats and Republicans who cooperated with the book. And all of them say that while they might dispute some of the broader analytical points Woodward makes, the play-by-play is basically spot on.
David Plouffe, the longtime political adviser to Obama, taunted Woodward on Twitter shortly after this column was published. “Watching Woodward last 2 days is like imagining my idol Mike Schmidt facing live pitching again,” he tweeted. “Perfection gained once is rarely repeated.”
Watching and now having interviewed Woodward, it is easy to see why White House officials get worked up about him. He clearly is skeptical of Obama’s approach to the job. “I’m not sure he fully understands the power he has,” Woodward said. “He sees that the power is the public megaphone going around to these campaign-like events, which is real, but the audience he needs to deal with is on this issue of the sequester and these budget issues is John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.”
Woodward also said that based on his reporting for the book, Obama deserves more of the blame for scuttling the grand bargain of 2011 that would have put sequestration to rest long ago. “He changed the deal and it blew up,” Woodward said. “I mean, you look at the facts, and even by the White House accounts by his aides, he was making a last-minute change.”
Woodward thinks there is still a grand bargain to be had between Obama and Boehner, with tax reform as a huge component. “Sit down and work through this,” he said. “I can see exactly how you come up with a deal that would dispose of lots of things.” Woodward, who helped bring down one presidency and has written instant history on every one since, added: “Color me a little baffled. I don’t understand this White House. Do you?”
1a)Kerry and the 'peace process'
By Elliot Abrams
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This piece is reprinted with permission and can be found on Abrams' blog Pressure Points here.
There must be something in the water at the State Department that leads successive secretaries of state to decide, seemingly on their first day there, that now is the time for a big new push at a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
Here we go again. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry intends to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the center of his diplomatic activities and to strive to achieve a breakthrough agreement between the two sides during President Obama’s second term in office, according to the assessment of well-placed sources in Washington and New York.”
Why? The article continues: “Nonetheless, the overall impression left by the discussions conducted in recent weeks by Kerry and his advisers with European, Israeli and Arab officials, as well as American Jewish leaders, is that the former Massachusetts senator is 'determined to the point of obsession,' as one skeptical interlocutor put it, to change the tone and direction of relations between Israel and the Palestinians during his term as secretary of state. 'He sees it as the holy mission of his life,' the source said. Kerry is convinced that his years of experience with the region and his deep personal relationships with many of its main protagonists, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, place him in a unique position to succeed where his predecessors have failed and to bring about not only a resumption of talks but a long-term agreement as well.”
Lest it be thought that this is the take solely of one Israeli newspaper, here is the Los Angeles Times' experienced correspondent Paul Richter: “As Kerry heads off Sunday on his debut trip as secretary of state to nine nations in Europe and the Middle East, his blunt exchange with Assad offers insight on his determination to use whatever it takes — even insults — to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, his personal passion. Kerry has made it clear he wants to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a long and sporadic process whose latest collapse occurred during Obama’s first term. He is well aware that failed attempts tarnished the reputations of elder statesmen and presidents for decades, including Obama. He is not deterred.”
Oh, boy.
Two things strike me about these reports. First, our new secretary of state does not appear to be operating from any new assessment of the situation received from State Department or other U.S. experts, nor from Israelis or Palestinians. He is entering the office certain of what can be achieved and certain he is the man to achieve it. This is not the best way to make policy.
Second, he seems unaware of, or anyway undeterred by, the risks and downsides. Raising hopes that are later dashed, opening negotiations that sadly go nowhere, holding ceremonial openings that never lead to tangible achievements — all of these undermine faith on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides that peace is achievable. American failures of any sort have the same effect, on those parties and others in the region. Moreover, the insistent (obsessive?) focus on breakthroughs and huge achievements leads too often to ignoring more practical, shorter-range, and achievable agreements that are sometimes derided as “small ball.” Better small ball than the swing for the fences that, time after time, ends the inning in a strikeout.
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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