Ari Melber on "Washington's Revolving Door" (video)

MSNBC-Dylan Ratigan, video (03:37).

"The Beltway Begins to Wake Up to GOP Extremism"

Jamelle Bouie (The Nation):

There are two extremely frustrating things about today’s media environment as it relates to the Republican Party. The first, as the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen described over the weekend, is the extent to which the media have simply forgotten the previous decade of GOP rule. For at least four years, Republicans governed with few obstacles to their agenda, securing tax cuts, wars, unfunded new entitlements and continued deregulation. The results were trillions of dollars in wasted spending, trillions more in lost revenue, deep dysfunction on nearly every level of government and an economic crisis of nearly world-historical proportions. Despite this, media elites continue to treat the Republican Party—and the architects of its disastrous party—as credible voices on public policy, as if 2001 to 2008 never happened.

The other is the extent to which media outlets treat current Republican behavior as politics-as-usual, despite the extraordinary nature of their actions. MORE...

Beltway Blues: Spending, Guns, Jobs and Popcorn

"Popcorn and 3D glasses have supplanted cocktails at get-togethers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave." | Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

"How House GOP spending cuts would add up to more spending later"(Ezra Klein-WaPo):

As the Associated Press reported, “every dollar the Internal Revenue Service spends for audits, liens and seizing property from tax cheats brings in more than $10, a rate of return so good the Obama administration wants to boost the agency’s budget.” It’s an easy way to reduce the deficit: You don’t have to cut heating oil for the poor or Pell grants for students. You just have to make people pay what they owe.

But deficit reduction is not the GOP’s top priority. It’s a bit lower on the list, somewhere between “get Styrofoam cups back into Congress” — an actual push the Republicans took up to thumb their nose at Nancy Pelosi’s environmental policies — and make “Sesame Street” beg for money. In fact, if you listen to Speaker John Boehner, he’ll tell you himself. “The American people want us to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending,” he has said. And that comment wasn’t a one-off: “Our goal is to cut spending,” he said in another speech. MORE....

"Obama Steers Clear Of Action On Guns" (AP):

Barack Obama once said it was a "scandal" that then-President George W. Bush didn't force renewal of a federal assault weapons ban. Now it's Obama himself who's steering clear of that and other politically sensitive gun-control measures, even while calling for a new discussion on weapons and "how we can keep America safe for all our people."

The president asked for the new conversation on gun safety in an opinion column in Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' hometown paper, the Arizona Daily Star, over the weekend. He proposed strengthening and enforcing existing laws requiring gun sellers to perform background checks.

But to the disappointment of gun-control advocates, the president didn't mention the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 — when Congress failed to renew it — even though it barred sales of high-capacity magazines like the one used by Giffords' shooter, and even though Obama was once an outspoken supporter of the ban. MORE...

"Obama’s Heartland Strategy Takes Friendly Fire" (Carol E. Lee-Wall Street Journal):

A senior Michigan Democrat is taking President Barack Obama to task for not doing enough to promote jobs, just as the president’s political aides are gearing up to make the case for Mr. Obama’s re-election to industrial state voters.

Michigan Rep. John Conyers says Mr. Obama’s economic policies are not doing enough to help his state, despite the administration’s support for the federal bailouts of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC, and federal loans for advanced battery manufacturing and other ventures in the state. MORE...

"Obama's New Schmooze" (Amie Parnes-Politico):

“We live in times when politics are strained, so when you can get people together in a social setting, it’s always a good idea,” said Andrew Wilson, a spokesman for Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), who also attended the basketball party. Socializing outside the office “does carry into the day-to-day politics of legislating and governing,” Wilson said. MORE...

David Kurtz on Obama's "Seminal Moment"

David Kurtz (TPM):

What we saw and what I think we'll see borne out by subsequent events is Obama revealing in a very public way the choice he has made between the two political personas he has simultaneously inhabited throughout his candidacy and his presidency. He has tried to be both pragmatist and progressive savior. And even when he stopped trying to be the savior after he was elected, he was at a certain level content to let supporters continue to project that persona on to him.

Today, he very clearly and loudly said: that savior persona is not me. I am the pragmatist. And you know what, I don't have a whole lot of patience for the idealists. I share their ideals, but I don't share their approach and I'm not going to get bogged down in recriminations over not living up to some abstract ideal.

I don't think this a change in the fundamental truth of who he is or of what his politics are, but with today's press conference the pretense that he might yet be someone else was finally dropped. Not only was he announcing that this is who I am, but he was also effectively declaring, I am not that other guy. (You can watch the key part of the presser here.) MORE...

FAUX Makes Into the Front Row @WH Press Briefing Room

March 2009 Seating Chart for White House Press Corp

Steve Benen:

To be sure, this isn't exactly important news, and squabbling over seating assignments seems pretty silly for adults. But if there's a disappointment here, it's that Fox News is being treated as a legitimate, professional journalistic enterprise, and it shouldn't be. It will join a front-row with credible media powerhouses -- ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Reuters, and AP -- producing a rather powerful "one of these things is not like the other" moment.

Fox News is a propaganda outlet, a detail everyone seems to know, but which is apparently impolite to say out loud. The network's proponents will likely argue a front-row seat is warranted because Fox News has a lot of viewers. Perhaps. But Milli Vanilli sold a lot of records, and success didn't make them legitimate recording artists.
MORE...

Howie P.S.: "Important news," or not? In other Beltway news, Taegan Goddard asks whether the U.S. Senate really is "The World's Greatest Deliberative Body?" as he quotes from a New Yorker piece by George Packer that "sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think." Meanwhile, I continue my obsession with Paris while John Aravosis continues his annual house-sitting summer vacation there.

"You Can Dislike The Beltway Bubble And Still Try To Work Within It"

Greg Sargent:

Everybody is talking about Marc Leibovich’s magazine piece on Politico’s Mike Allen, and I’m definitely a daily reader and a fan of Playbook.

But I wanted to flag this particular nugget in the piece, because it encapsulates something that always creeps into discussions of the Beltway media: The bogus notion that there’s a contradiction afoot when Obama officials show disdain for the Beltway bubble even as they do their best to function within it:

Politico today remains a White House shorthand for everything the administration claims to dislike about Washington — Beltway myopia, politics as daily sport. Yet most of the president’s top aides are as steeped in this culture as anyone else — and work hard to manipulate it. “What’s notable about this administration is how ostentatiously its people proclaim to be uninterested in things they are plainly interested in,” Harris, Politico’s editor in chief, told me in an e-mail message.

That Politico has been so vilified inside the White House is itself a sign of its entry into “the bloodstream” (another Politico phrase). It is, White House officials say, an indictment of the “Washington mentality” that the city is sustaining Politico and letting it “drive the conversation” to the extent it does. In early March, Axelrod was sitting in his West Wing office, complaining to me about the “palace-intrigue pathology” of Washington and why he missed Chicago. “I prefer living in a place where people don’t discuss the Politico over dinner,” he said.

This sort of talk tends to ilicit snorts of derision from Beltway media insiders. They say the Obama media team is cynically using the Beltway bubble as a foil to position Obama as an outsider. But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Obama administration officials really don’t like the Beltway media’s excesses.

After all, the Obama team, in addition to managing their own careers, are also running the country. And the Beltway bubble’s priorities — the manic 24-hour news cycle, its prioritizing of speed over accuracy, and its obsession with today’s polls and with who’s up and who’s down — really do complicate the act of governing. It’s understandable that the Obama team would come to genuinely dislike the media culture here, while simultaneously trying to do their best to work within it and, yes, manipulate it.

Politico has plenty of virtues — the big picture pieces, the relentless reporting on the internals of Congress, the bloggers who frequently break useful news, etc. — but parts of it really do encapsulate, to a disproportionate degree, the Beltway bubble’s excesses. I doubt its editors would even contest that. Once members of the Obama team leave the administration and start up their own consulting firms, perhaps they’ll be begging for their own Politico profiles. But for now, it seems obvious that they genuinely dislike the influence the excessive aspects of Politico are having on the discourse. It makes their jobs more difficult. And their jobs are pretty important right now.

*************************************

Update: A colleague points out that the press’ job isn’t to make governing officials’ lives easier. True enough. Just saying that there’s a difference between making officials’ lives harder with aggressive reporting designed to hold them accountable and making them harder by prioritizing speed over accuracy or obsessing over “palace intrigue.”

Howie P.S.: I wish "everybody" was talking about how Wall Street and the banksters ripped the rest of us off, but they aren't, and won't (with conviction) anytime soon. Jason Linkins (HuffPo) reviews the Liebovich piece ("Mike Allen Profile: We Read The NYT Magazine's Politico Piece So You Don't Have To") and offers this descriptive prose about Politico and by extension, Mike Allen:

Basically, Politico takes some crap, shines it up, gets a legion of followers to inflate the empty bubble, bets against it, watches it pop, and then cashes in on whatever micro-transactions they can grub up in terms of pageviews and "influence" (less a verb than the root form of a noun!). Basically, the Magnetar model of journalism!

Greenwald on the Beltway Media Mindset

Glenn Greenwald:

When President Obama's approval ratings were still very high, we were regularly bombarded with sycophantic profiles of Rahm Emanuel that touted his vast power in the West Wing ("arguably the second most powerful man in the country," the New York Times declared last January; "perhaps the most influential White House chief of staff in a generation" with "prominence in almost everything important going on in Washington," gushed the same paper last August).

But now that Obama faces serious political difficulties, and the health care debacle and his confused Terrorism approach continue to weigh him down, we are treated to the exact opposite storyline: Obama's woes are caused by his following the advice of others rather than that of his poor, ignored, powerless Chief of Staff. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dutifully read from this Rahm-protecting (and Rahm-authored) script in his column yesterday, and in doing so, voices (as he always does) conventional Beltway wisdom masquerading as quirky contrarianism:

• Continue Reading

Let us now praise Rahm Emanuel. . . . Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. . . .

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel's counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn't politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn't met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

The same person hailed in the NYT last August as "the principal author of Mr. Obama’s do-everything-at-once strategy" has now been transformed in Milbank's column to someone who has been unsuccessfully urging Obama to pursue a less ambitious course and a less sweeping (and "liberal") health care policy. Emanuel has also been making it known that he vehemently opposed Obama's release of the OLC torture memos, arguing that the administration should have kept them suppressed. In other words, according to Milbank's Beltway mind, Obama's failure is that he should follow Rahm's instructions to embrace Bush's defining policies (Guantanamo, military commissions, lawbreaking-shielding secrecy) even more so than Obama has already been doing.

Beltway journalists are nothing if not wet-finger-in-the-air sycophants. What they most revere and most eagerly serve is political power, those who are successful manipulators of the political game (which is why NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen describes them as "the Church of the Savvy"). That's why they revered Karl Rove and why they do Emanuel's bidding: those are the ultimate political manipulators, the High Priests of Savviness (the prayerful language which begins Milbank's column -- "Let us now praise Rahm Emanuel" -- is illustrative).

When George Bush and Dick Cheney left office as two of the most despised American political figures of the last century -- and Barack Obama was hailed as the new, shiny, popular wielder of power -- the Beltway media parroted the sentiment. Until recently, when Obama became weakened and conservatives appeared rejuvenated, Beltway media treatment of the new President was largely deferential, while the Bush/Cheney era was treated as an embarrassing, "American-values"-violating disgrace to be stuffed away in the attic and forgotten entirely (Look to the Future, Not the Past!). The Democrats were now in power and their opponents were rejected, and thus the dominant Beltway mindset was (as always) to praise and serve the new King and his court while feigning opposition to the deposed. The ethos had shifted, and therefore, so did the words issuing from Beltway mouths. The same media that spent years hailing Bush officials as the Serious, Strong Adult Leaders and mocking Democrats as hapless losers simply reversed the script, to dutifully fulfill their central role as spokespeople-servants to those who wield political power.

But the reality was the opposite: the same Beltway media that cheered on those Bush/Cheney "values-violating" policies while they were being implemented still believe in those policies and yearn for them. That's why it's possible to open the The Washington Post and see that Rahm Emanuel is openly boasting to his stenographers that he has been counseling adherence to those policies and to read Beltway mavens like Milbank now insist that Obama must stop deviating from the Bush/Cheney template. The Washington media script was (at least temporarily) re-written as of January 20, 2009, but their belief system -- which cheered on and enabled the horror show of the prior eight years -- most certainly did not. To placate an angry public and to serve their new Washington rulers, they pretended to find Bush and Cheney ever so distasteful, all while continuing to love and insist upon the very policies that defined them.

* * * * *

To be honest, I've been having a bit of a difficult time getting myself to write about the DOJ whitewash, which predictably rejected the finding by the Office of Professional Responsibility that John Yoo and Jay Bybee violated their ethical duties when they authored their torture memos. After all, what is less surprising than having politically powerful criminals shielded from accountability and seeing, yet again, that the central tenet of American justice is that the rule of law does not apply the politically powerful (Look Forward, not Backward!!)?

Reading through the voluminous documents that were released, I will certainly have several specific points to make about them.

But in the meantime, it's not possible that anything better will be written about this episode than this perfect and scathing analysis from Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin. It says everything that needs to be said and I can't recommend it highly enough (and on the pervasive myth that political officials are immune from prosecution as long as they can find DOJ minions to write memos authorizing their criminal conduct, see this analysis from DCLaw1).