By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
President Obama stepped on his health-care message last night when he said more about the Henry Louis Gates arrest than he should have — especially since, as he himself admitted, he didn’t know the facts.
But critics who tut-tut whenever Obama reminds us that he is indeed an African-American who has experienced his share of racism might want to consider the debilitating effects of crap like this and this.
The Obama administration is continuing George W. Bush’s policy of arguing that logs of visitors to the White House — health-care executives, of all people — are not public, Bill Dedman reports for MSNBC.com.
David Kurtz has a withering take on the news at Talking Points Memo: “Cheney Obama refuses to release visitor logs showing which energy health care company executives visited the White House.”
OK, we get it that we’re not suffering through Barack Obama’s economy or his war in Iraq — at least not yet. But governmental openness is not only something the president promised, but it’s also under his direct control. Enough already.
In my latest for the Guardian, I ponder the possibility that President Obama, with his health-care forum on ABC News as the latest example, may have just about reached the media-oversaturation point.
Now that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s national ambitions are a thing of the past — left behind on the extreme southern stretch of the Appalachian Trail — it’s interesting to think about the number of up-and-coming Republican stars who’ve been taken off the board in the past year. Five (including Sanford) come quickly to mind.
Two — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — were damaged by their own party, pushed in front of the public long before they were ready. Hype-versus-reality questions aside, Palin and Jindal were routinely described as rising stars until, suddenly, they weren’t.
Jindal can certainly recover from his poor performance in delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s national address last February. All he has to do is not act like a dork the next time. But the arc of Palin’s post-running-mate political career has already been determined: hero to the right wing of her party; pariah to everyone else.
Sanford’s finished. So is Nevada Sen. John Ensign, although at least his sexual indiscretions do not include a secretive flight to Argentina. I must confess I’d barely heard of Ensign before learning that (1) he’d been unfaithful in his marriage and (2) he was a possible presidential candidate.
Finally, there is former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, chosen by Obama as his ambassador to China. Huntsman hasn’t been tainted (except possibly in the eyes of a few partisan Republicans), but he’s not going to challenge Obama in 2012.
As Rich Lowry observes at National Review (via Talking Points Memo), Mitt Romney may be the last candidate standing by the time the ’12 campaign rolls around in earnest.
Friend of Media Nation Jon Keller has written a post at Beatthepress.org in which he endorses Dana Milbank’s account in the Washington Post of President Obama’s “prepackaged entertainment” at Tuesday’s White House news conference.
As you may already know, Obama called on Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, saying, “I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?”
I don’t want to provide too much set-up before turning this over to you, but here is what Pitney wrote for HuffPo about what happened. Pitney says that though he was invited to prepare a question based what Iranians had been talking about online, no one at the White House knew what he was going to ask; and that though he was, indeed, escorted into the briefing room, he had been told ahead of time that there was no guarantee he’d be called on.
Now, I have two questions for you, which I want you to answer only after reading Keller, Milbank and Pitney.
1. If you relied solely on Milbank’s account, would it be your understanding that Obama knew what Pitney’s question would be?
2. Since, according to Pitney, Obama neither knew the question nor had promised to call on him, did either the president or his press operation do anything wrong, unethical or even disrespectful to the other reporters in the room?
Bill Dedman of MSNBC.com reports that the Obama administration is following George W. Bush’s policy of refusing to release the logs identifying visitors to the White House — despite two rulings that such records are public.
Good story, though Dedman doesn’t say whether Bush’s policy was a reversal or a continuation of what previous presidents had done. I hope he’ll clarify.
Update: Dedman writes that “the story makes clear that only in limited cases have these records been released. And that apparently only the Bush and Obama administrations have stood up in federal court to argue that White House visitor logs are not public record.”
They don’t come any dumber than U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. In a piece on local reaction to President Obama’s speech in Egypt, Inhofe tells his hometown newspaper, “There has never been a documented case of torture at Guantanamo” and “I just don’t know whose side he’s on.” (Via TPMDC.)
On the other hand, New York Times columnist David Brooks gets right to the heart of the contradictions in Obama’s speech, writing:
This speech builds an idealistic facade on a realist structure. And this gets to the core Obama foreign-policy perplexity. The president wants to be an inspiring leader who rallies the masses. He also wants be a top-down realist who cuts deals in the palaces. There is a tension between these two impulses that even a sharp Chicago pol is having trouble managing.
My own reaction: underwhelmed, despite the characteristically first-rate craftsmanship and delivery. I couldn’t really articulate why, but I definitely think Brooks is on to it.
A Pennsylvania newspaper published an advertisement on Thursday calling for the assassination of President Obama. The ad, buried in the classifieds, says:
May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, & Kennedy!
According to this item at the Daily Kos, the ad — published in the Times Observer of Warren, Pa. — appears to have made it into the paper by accident. Publisher John Elchert is quoted as saying, “It is unfortunate that it made it to press. The person who took the ad didn’t recognize the significance of the names. We canceled the ad and turned the information over to the authorities.”
In an apology published in today’s edition, the Times Observer reports that the identity of the person who placed the ad was provided to local police, who in turn alerted federal authorities. (Via Greg Mitchell. The story is currently leading Romenesko as well.)
Image from Capitol Beat, which has also been covering the story.
At TPMDC, Eric Kleefeld posts a statement from U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., saying that he’s concerned Judge Sonia Sotomayor might allow her “personal race, gender, or political preferences” to exert an “undue influence” over her decisions as a Supreme Court justice.
You’re going to hear a lot of this in the days and weeks ahead. Conservative critics seem to be oblivious to the fact that white men have both a race and a gender. I highly recommend Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker profile of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has emerged as a conservative activist judge whose world view is very much informed by his race and gender.
To listen to conservative critics of “activist” judges, you’d think that appellate judges would always reach the same conclusion as long as they are competent and free of bias. But we all know that’s not the case, and that judges are heavily influenced by their personal beliefs.
Sotomayor, for instance, is already under fire for her role in a New Haven affirmative-action case that has been appealed to the Supreme Court. But as Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree pointed out on CNN last night, “the Supreme Court will probably decide the case 5-4. Now, she’s going to be wrong. Maybe she is. But four justices on this court right now will agree with her.”
In other words, she’s a liberal, and she’s well within the mainstream of liberal jurisprudence.
It was interesting that President Obama announced the Sotomayor pick on the same day the California Supreme Court upheld a voter-approved constitutional amendment that outlaws same-sex marriage. The vote was 6-1. Earlier, the court had created a right of gay marriage by a margin of 4-3.
The California rulings show just how important the courts are in American life — and how judges, reading the same laws, come to entirely different conclusions. If that’s activism, then all appellate judges are activists.
Obama won the election, which means that we’re going to get liberal activist judges rather than conservative activist judges. That’s the way things are supposed to work.
President Obama will reportedly nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Although none of the candidates on his short list has a reputation for being a liberal fire-breather, Sotomayor is probably the most provocative given her ruling in a high-profile affirmative action case in New Haven.
A ruling Sotomayor made in 1995 ended the eight-month-long major-league baseball strike. So she sounds like a fine choice to me.