Obama White House Throwing Loyalists Under The Bus...Clean Gov't, "Restructuring" Or Ruthlessness?

PRES. OBAMA ON ACORN: NOT SOMETHING I'M FOLLOWING CLOSELY

On ABC, George Stephanopoulos pressed President Obama on the recent controversy surrounding the community group ACORN. Here's the full exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?

PRES. OBAMA: You know, if -- frankly, it's not really something I've followed closely. I didn't even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.

PRES. OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you're not committing to -- to cut off the federal funding?

PRES. OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to.




The Boys Under the Bus


White House Counsel Greg Craig was just the latest Obama loyalist to be sacrificed for political expediency. Lloyd Grove tallies up the body count so far.


Presidents of the United States—all presidents—tend to adopt a clinically utilitarian view of the people who serve them. They burn through their staffs like rocket fuel, a White House observer once noted. In his readiness to discard underlings who are no longer useful to him, or otherwise have passed their sell-by dates, Barack Obama is no different from his predecessors. But he’s arguably more unsentimental than most about the unpleasant necessity of throwing friends and allies under the bus.

As Jacob Weisberg wrote recently in Slate, “Obama has a healthy disdain for the overrated virtue of political loyalty… If you're useful, you can hang around with him. If you start to look like a liability, enjoy your time with the wolves…The president is catlike also in his lack of evident affection for the people who take care of him.” Certainly he’s no Bill Clinton—whose eyes were apt to well up while his lower lip trembled, occasionally punctuated by a consoling hug, as he did what had to be done.

Defenestrated White House Counsel Gregory Craig—a crucial early supporter of Obama’s long-shot candidacy, who became a lightning rod for critics of White House efforts to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—is only the latest loyalist to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. He surely won’t be the last.

Herewith, The Daily Beast’s official scorecard of the body count so far:


GREGORY CRAIG

The 64-year-old Craig was a Washington wise man, having enjoyed a stellar career in politics, policy, and the law before President Obama tapped him to be his top legal adviser in the White House. A partner at the powerhouse firm of Williams & Connolly, Craig had been a trusted aide and confidante of Sen. Ted Kennedy, a top policymaker in Bill Clinton’s State Department and ultimately Clinton’s impeachment lawyer before he became enthralled by the freshman senator from Illinois. Craig’s early support lent Obama’s presidential ambition a degree of Washington street cred that it might otherwise have lacked. Indeed, Craig’s support was one of the factors that led to Kennedy’s game-changing endorsement. On Friday—after months of toxic leaks to the press from anonymous White House aides questioning Craig’s handling of politically sensitive Guantanamo Bay matters, among others—he was forced to resign in humiliating fashion. The president, on his way to Asia, issued an anodyne statement of thanks and appreciation, but the damage to Craig’s reputation was done.


CASSANDRA BUTTS

A close friend of the president’s from Harvard Law School, Butts was at least afforded a soft landing when she was removed Nov. 6 as deputy White House counsel—a week before Greg Craig’s forced resignation. Butts was named to the wordy post of “senior adviser in the office of the chief executive officer at the Millennium Challenge Corporation”—compared to the West Wing, a governmental backwater—with the vague mission of “combating global poverty.”


JAMES A. JOHNSON

When he was at the height of his power in the mid-1990s, former Democratic political operative and Walter Mondale aide Jim Johnson was nicknamed “Chairman of the Universe.” He simultaneously ran the Brookings Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the home mortgage behemoth Fannie Mae. He was a pillar of the Washington establishment who had gotten rich in business while becoming a generous philanthropist. Johnson was frequently touted as a potential Treasury secretary in a future Democratic administration—probably the Obama administration. It looked like all-systems-go in June 2008 when the freshly victorious candidate promptly tapped his loyal supporter to lead his vice-presidential vetting team—the sensitive, all-important task of assessing prospective running mates. And then, just as quickly—after press reports of low-interest personal loans Johnson had obtained as a friend of embattled Countrywide mortgage chief Angelo Mozilo—Obama kicked him to the curb.


TOM DASCHLE

The former Senate Majority Leader—who lost his 2004 reelection bid in South Dakota—was national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, a key policy adviser, especially on health-care reform, and a savvy surrogate on the Sunday talk shows. When Obama’s nomination of Daschle to be secretary of Health and Human Services encountered stormy weather over his nonpayment of income taxes—and acceptance of free chauffeured limousine services, embarrassingly enough—nobody blamed the president for pulling the plug. (Daschle paid back many of the taxes, but reports suggested others remain unpaid, and a spokesperson suggested the acceptance of the free limo service was “naïve.) Some old Washington hands were rattled by Obama’s cold-eyed bluntness. “I screwed up,” the president said about the abortive nomination, over and over, in a series of television interviews on the day that Daschle was forced to withdraw.


NANCY KILLEFER

Along with Daschle’s dashed nomination, the president forced the withdrawal of business consultant Nancy Killefer, a McKinsey & Co. executive whom he had picked, with great fanfare, to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget while also filling the brand new role of chief performance officer in the White House. “Today was an embarrassment for us,” Obama told NBC after Killefer acknowledged a $946.69 tax lien from the District of Columbia government. It didn’t matter that she had resolved the problem years earlier; she was toast.


VAN JONES

A Yale-educated lawyer and environmental activist, as well as an ardent Obama campaign supporter, Jones was given the nominally low-profile job of White House special adviser on "green" jobs. But some intemperate statements from his past (such as “Republicans are assholes”) and ill-advised associations from his flirtation with radical politics (such as his apparent sympathy with 9/11 conspiracy theorists) provoked withering attacks on Jones and Obama from Fox News star Glenn Beck and a host of Republican office-holders. The White House let Jones fend for himself; in September he was finally forced out of his job, complaining in his resignation letter of “a vicious smear campaign against me.”


STEVE RATTNER & RICK WAGONER

After Obama tapped Steve Rattner to restructure the foundering automobile industry in February, the New York financier and Democratic fundraiser quickly shook up General Motors and Chrysler, and helped orchestrate the resignation of GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner as that company coped with bankruptcy proceedings. With Rattner’s goals as car czar largely achieved, he reportedly had hoped to secure other Washington assignments. But the president let him leave under a cloud in July when New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was reported to be pursuing a civil investigation into the public pension fund management business of Rattner’s Quadrangle Group.


CREIGH DEEDS

Although he had no prior relationship with the president—and, indeed, had thought it prudent to assert his independence from the Obama White House—state Senator Creigh Deeds was the 2009 Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia. The current governor, Tim Kaine, was a close friend of the president and his hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And yet, as Deeds’ campaign started to falter, Obama’s top aides in the White House were not reluctant to trash him—to the contrary, they unloaded to The Washington Post, two weeks before the Nov. 4 election, about all the mistakes Deeds had made in the race, and how Obama couldn’t and shouldn’t be blamed for Deeds’ inevitable defeat.


DAVID PATERSON

Even the many detractors of New York’s embattled governor were surprised when the president’s operatives—led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and political director Patrick Gaspard—actively attempted to push David Paterson to drop out of next year’s election campaign. They were aghast that anonymous “administration officials” boasted about their efforts in a front-page story in The New York Times. “Butt out,” Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel advised the Obama White House. So far Paterson has steadfastly refused to assume the presidentially approved position, under the bus.


ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI & ROBERT MALLEY

Zbigniew Brzezinski—Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser and a gray eminence in the foreign-policy establishment—gave a big and early lift to Obama’s candidacy with his August 2007 endorsement. But after pro-Israel activists howled that Zbig’s presence raised troubling questions about Obama’s commitment to the Jewish state, the candidate dropped him like a hot falafel and trotted out his senior Middle East adviser, former ambassador Dennis Ross, to claim: “Brzezinski is not an adviser to the campaign.” Zbig later got his revenge, telling The Daily Beast that Obama and his “lousy staff work” badly botched his announcement of scrapping the Bush administration’s missile-defense program.

In May 2008, candidate Obama sacked foreign-policy adviser Robert Malley, a Middle East expert, after he disclosed that he’d met with the militant Palestinian group Hamas in his non-campaign-related work for the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution think thank. A campaign spokesman promptly declared him a non-person: “He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future.”


GENERAL DAVID MCKIERNAN

In May, the president had Secretary of Defense Robert Gates abruptly fire David McKiernan, the Army’s top general in Afghanistan. The ostensible reason was that McKiernan was too cautious and conventional a thinker about how to bring stability to the war-torn, corruption-plagued country that Obama had previously announced was crucial to America’s security. Now that McKiernan’s replacement—Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal—has shown himself to be anything but cautious and conventional (even preempting announced White House policy by publicly demanding tens of thousands of additional troops), there are rumblings that McChrystal is likely to be next.


BILL RICHARDSON

New Mexico’s governor provoked the enduring anger of Hillary and Bill Clinton—from whom he had received two coveted jobs, U.N. ambassador and Energy secretary—when he endorsed Obama in March 2008. Obama rewarded Richardson, a former presidential campaign rival, by nominating him to be Commerce secretary, and then threw him under the bus a month later amid reports of a federal grand jury investigation into New Mexico state contractors and their donations to Richardson’s political action committee. More than a year has passed since then, and no indictment has been forthcoming. Richardson, who fiercely maintained that he had done nothing wrong, “has seen his political fortunes crater,” according to Politico.


JEREMIAH WRIGHT & WILLIAM AYERS

“I could no more disown Reverend Wright than I could my own white grandmother,” candidate Obama famously declared in his speech on race in Philadelphia. Yes, he could! After his Chicago pastor of 20 years persisted in making incendiary statements of the “God Damn America” variety, Obama surgically cut him loose and cast him into the outer darkness. “Whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this,” Obama said by way of explaining the final breach. “I don’t think that he showed much concern for me. More importantly, I don’t think he showed much concern for what we’re trying to do in this campaign and what we’re trying to do for the American people.”

Obama’s divorce from former Weatherman Bill Ayers, a friend, neighbor, and occasional political supporter from Chicago’s Hyde Park ‘hood, was far less painful but just as decisive.


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Sources: The Daily Beast, Politico, ABC News, Youtube, Google Maps

Creigh Deeds Beats Former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe....Here's How, Why

Politico----

State Sen. Creigh Deeds’ surprising blowout win in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial primary can be summarized in 30 seconds.

That was the length of the ad he aired on Washington-area broadcast stations in the pivotal final days of his 2-to-1 victory over former state Del. Brian Moran and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

In that brief half-minute, the Deeds campaign made some critical points to the well-informed Northern Virginia primary electorate that helped turn undecided voters his way in droves and made a son of the Alleghenies the unlikely victor over two suburbanites in the most populous part of the state.

At the start and finish, the ad’s narrator noted that Deeds had won the endorsement of The Washington Post, a meaningful credential in a race with relatively little-known candidates, and that he was in the mold of Virginia’s two moderate and well-liked Democratic governors, now-Sen. Mark Warner and Gov. Timothy Kaine.

In between, viewers were informed that Deeds supported abortion rights, had high ratings from teachers (translation: safe for the region’s left-leaning Democratic base) and that he was focused on transportation and education (translation: He may be from a place that is culturally light-years away from traffic-choked Tysons Corner, but he understands the region’s perennial priorities).

Though he appears in the ad, not once did Deeds speak and reveal his country-inflected twang to voters in the least-Southern part of the state.

The size of the ad buy was as important as the message. For all the talk of McAuliffe’s massive spending, Deeds’ late momentum sparked a critical influx of dollars that Democratic sources say allowed him to match his deep-pocketed rival on the airwaves at the end. For the last week of the campaign, Deeds spent $950,000 on TV ads to McAuliffe’s $1 million.

Electability, continuity and acceptability on the issues — it was the right message on TV but also in his mail pieces and on the stump. It allowed Deeds to carry all three of Northern Virginia’s congressional districts and turn what would have been a win into a rout.

He was also helped, as runaway winners almost always are, by the flaws and mistakes of his rivals.

Moran, many Virginia Democrats believe, never recovered from McAuliffe’s entry into the race. He became an attack dog — his first ad was a negative spot on the Clinton pal — and sought to position himself as the purist liberal in the race.

But neither tactic worked, as he was overshadowed by McAuliffe’s big bucks and larger-than-life persona.

Still, many Democrats remained unsold on the man known as the Macker, and polls revealed the softness of the support he did have.

“He could just never quite surmount the concern that he was somebody who just hasn’t been involved in Virginia until he decided to run for governor of the commonwealth,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “He had trouble shaking the image of a ‘hustler.’”

But Deeds wasn’t simply the third — or last — man standing.

“Once people made the decision not to go with McAuliffe, the electability issue became important,” Robert Holsworth, a longtime Virginia political analyst, said of the late-breaking voters. “And Deeds had that perception that he could win.”

Kristian Denny Todd, a Democratic consultant who was neutral in this race, recalled her own experience in a similarly situated Virginia Democratic Senate primary three years ago, where the more conservative and down-home candidate in the race fared the best in the state’s most liberal and upscale region.

“These are the same Democratic activists in Northern Virginia who nominated somebody who had been a Republican four months prior because they thought he was the guy that could win,” Todd said of her then-client, Sen. Jim Webb. “Northern Virginia voters consider themselves political pundits.”

Moreover, most Virginia Democrats are quite pleased with their political lot right now. They’ve won consecutive gubernatorial races and picked up both U.S. Senate seats and control of the state Senate. They also enjoy a majority of the state’s House delegation and ended a 44-year losing streak by delivering the Old Dominion to President Barack Obama last fall.

Merely by entering the race for the state’s top job — a position former Gov. Mills Godwin once described as having “no higher honor” — with little connection to the political establishment, McAuliffe had shown a considerable amount of audacity.

And by campaigning as a Richmond outsider who vowed to “shake things up,” McAuliffe left many Democrats unmoved.

“The only thing they want to ‘shake up’ are the Republicans,” said Holsworth, speaking of what is now effectively the state’s majority party.

And that’s what made Deeds pledge to continue the “Warner-Kaine tradition” so resonant — it was a promise to “continue along the same trajectory and promote from within,” as Holsworth put it.

McAuliffe’s message would have been a better fit in 2001, when Warner ran as a Richmond outsider at a time when Republicans enjoyed near-complete control of the state. This time, Democrats didn’t think they needed to take a chance on a well-funded newcomer with few connections to the state Capitol.

As the cautious and moderate choice in a state known best for cautious moderation, Deeds fit well into Virginia’s Democratic mainstream and offered little fodder for the two suburban candidates to use to scare off liberal base voters.

The one area where they tried — tardily, in the final days of a race in which Deeds was surging — was on guns. Both Moran and McAuliffe sought to paint Deeds as insufficiently supportive of firearms restrictions, but the attacks had little effect in a state where grass-roots Democrats have demonstrated little concern for their leaders’ apostasy on the gun rights issue.

“We had the same position as Mark Warner and Jim Webb on guns,” said David Dixon, Deeds’ admaker.

Democrats view May 22 as the turning point, the day The Washington Post endorsed the only non-D.C.-area resident in the race.

While McAuliffe was drawing all the attention during the spring, Deeds made a big gamble to remain alive in the polls: He laid off some field staff so he could afford biographical-heavy TV ads in the inexpensive downstate markets.

By doing so, advisers say, he reinforced his strong rural standing and remained a credible contender — in other words, a viable candidate the Post could get behind.

And when they did, it could not have been more pitch-perfect for Deeds.

The paper indicated that he opposed his own interests downstate and was a strong supporter of transportation spending, a signal that he was ideologically acceptable. The editors made the case, too, on electability, writing that Deeds’ “moderate platform would have the broadest appeal” in the fall. The endorsement nodded at the idea of continuity, making reference to the legislative veteran’s studied observation of the state’s most successful Democratic governors, singling out former Gov. Gerald Baliles and Warner.

“It provided a gateway for him,” Dixon said of the editorial.

Soon after, the campaign was broadcasting the endorsement as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on every mail piece, ad and yard sign seen in the 703 area code.

Fred Hiatt, the Post’s editorial page editor and a former Virginia political reporter, said that without exit polling, it was difficult to definitively determine what impact the paper’s endorsement had.

But he did allow that its move “helped make sense of a race that was hard to make sense of.”

Others are less modest in their assessment.

“It was a very important validation, because it coincided with the late-deciders,” said Connolly, who noted that the paper repeated its support for Deeds and even defended him in subsequent editorials after the endorsement. “The timing couldn’t have been better.”

“[Deeds] got that late surge, precipitated by The Washington Post, which gave Northern Virginians a reason to take a look at his candidacy, which they hadn’t been doing until that moment,” said Mo Elleithee, a top strategist to McAuliffe’s campaign.

The Post endorsement, Elleithee said, “created the story line that he was surging.”

And in politics, especially primaries, the perception of momentum can quickly turn into the real thing.


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Sources: Politico, Wikipedia, Google Maps