CJR points to this nice, informative example of what we might see from the new White House Press Secretary in his more combative moments.  But what’s even more interesting is how Carney himself wrote about the experience on Time’s Swampland blog in his previous life:

“Wallace’s bash-the-media exercise has its merits as a campaign tactic. It certainly rallies the base. But the base won’t lift McCain to 50% in November. More importantly, in her smug dismissal of the media’s role in asking questions of the candidates, Wallace was really showing contempt not for reporters, but for voters. I bet there are a lot of undecided voters out there who were intrigued by Sarah Palin last night, but who don’t yet know enough about her — what she believes, what she knows — to be comfortable with the idea of her as vice president of the United States. It’s important to them to know if Palin can handle herself in an environment that isn’t controlled and sanitized by campaign image makers and message mavens. Maybe she can, maybe she can’t. As far as Wallace is concerned, it’s none of their — or your — business.”

How will his views shift now that he’s a message maven himself?  Like the appointment of Daley was cast as a fig leaf to the business community, does the appointment of Carney represent a shift in how the White House deals with press?  I suspect not.  Once you’re in the job of press secretary, you can’t really afford to let the principle of openness to press questioning compete with your responsibility to make sure the message gets through as you want it to.  Don’t expect Carney to make a 180 degree turn, but it is a rare opportunity to play the money where your mouth is game.

And it is true, he did reclaim his long-lost place as the leader not just of red or blue America.  But he did not accomplish this simply through soaring rhetoric (though the speech was top-rate), or generic appeals to civility and working together.  Instead the President reprized his unique ability to be what he has called, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.“

Some on the right took comfort that the President, “knocked heads on his own side,” by refuting claims that rhetoric caused the violence, while those on the left celebrated his insistence, in light of alarmist conservative rhetoric, “that we improve the discourse for the sake of our children and our country.”  Bipartisan fetishists, of course, were just happy that he seemed to seek a middle ground.  Setting aside the merits of any of these arguments, Obama’s success lies not just in his ability to give a speech that appeals to the diverse interests and beliefs of Americans of all political stripes, but that his words and voice actually allow listeners to take different lessons from the same sentence.

Surely this skill represents the President’s innate understanding and connection to the values and motivations of the American public.  But it’s also what leaves him so vulnerable to disappointment from all sides when the rubber hits the road on policy decisions.  It’s his great strength, and also probably the underlying cause (other than unemployment) of most of the turmoil his administration has battled in the last 2 years .

Apparently Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Armando Iannucci are set to film a pilot called “VEEP” about US politics.  I’d watch that.

“The show is about a former senator ‘who finds being vice president of the United States is nothing like she expected and everything everyone ever warned her about.’”

Here’s hoping that there’s a few Malcom Tucker cameos.

(h/t Taegan Goddard)

Ben Smith

UPDATE on the previous post.  Ben Smith has officially given the Bart Simpson reply to rampant speculation that he is in fact the author of the novel “O: A Presidential Novel”: “I didn’t do it,” wrote Smith in POLITICO.

Readers will recall that Joe Klein, author of “Primary Colors”, flatly denied writing that piece of presidential fiction before being unveiled as the true author.

Speculation persists…

Let’s assess the evidence:

Ben Smith has (presumably) been “in the room” with President Obama (unconfirmed)

Ben Smith has publicized the upcoming release on multiple occasions

Ben Smith, when faced with the opportunity to address the possibility of his own authorship, declined to offer an explicit denial

Further inflaming speculation, Smith failed to directly address rumors in subsequent emails.

Developing…

UPDATE: Smith denies.

(Via NOTCOT of course.)

Since 2008 the media has positioned itself in opposition to pretty much everyone and everything that was driving the narrative at one point or another: the President, Democrats, the Tea Party, GOP leadership, banks, big government, Muslims, extremists, liberals, conservatives, you name it, they opposed it.  The brunt of their opposition, I would argue, has fallen on the shoulders of those who currently hold the most power and authority: Democrats and President Obama with a side dish of rich bankers.  This strikes me as a healthy predilection towards skepticism, although usually not a particularly productive one.  It has also been one of the President’s primary obstacles to selling the Democratic agenda and achievements.  Many have chalked this up to a “communications problem”; but who could even hear a sales pitch, no matter how effective, amid all the din and clamor of the current media environment?  Particularly when your platform (the media) is predisposed to distort and criticize your message in transmitting it to their audience.

But with power more officially divided between parties, who will the media look to as targets for their oh-so-genuine outrage?  And how will that impact the voters’ perceptions of the 2 parties leading into the 2012 slugfest?  Personally I think (and hope) we’re reaching the apex of the pendulum, and it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable course correction levels the playing field between right and left.  Whether that will be enough to right the ship electorally by 2012 remains to be seen.

“When you’re in a fight — and we’re in a real fight — you want as much help as you can get from any quarter,” said former Clinton aide Harold Ickes, who recruited megadonors led by George Soros to give some $200 million to Democratic efforts in 2004. “It doesn’t seem to me that there’s been much encouragement from the White House for outside help.”

“We need to set up something on our side again for 2012 that will basically do what we did in ’04 and what Rove and his crowd did in 2010,” [Rosenthal] said. “We can’t go into 2012 and be caught with our pants down, the way we were in this election.”

The irony of course is that the real lesson of 2004 is that big Democratic outside groups failed.   Why would we want to set up something that will basically do what we did in ’04?  So we can lose again?  Why replicate a failing model?  Beyond protecting the brand and controlling the message, the reason it was so important for Obama to consolidate control in 2008 was because farming-out key pieces of your political operation to outside groups is a terrible strategy.  It does not work.

Park Slope Food Co-op

I’m proud to be a BKLYN liberal, but having been away from the borough for a few years it may be a bit easier to step back and see the ideology of the area for what it is.  But when I opened the Washington Post this Sunday to read Nancy Goldstein’s advice for President Obama to help him regain touch with “reality” I couldn’t stop myself from gasping, then laughing.  A lot.  Goldstein, one of the Posts’ pundit finalists, says President Obama should drop the line that his administration has, “stepped in and stopped the bleeding” because this is a painful reminder that he is “closed off to reality”.  Goldstein’s prescription to regain touch with the truth of the economic hardship Americans are facing: a few hours at her Brooklyn food co-op.

Now I can only assume that Goldstein is referring to the Park Slope food co-op, a mere 3 blocks from where I grew up.  I can say with utter confidence that this is among the last places I would recommend the President visit for a re-acquaintance with reality.  The co-op may be great, but it’s about as far from a representative portrait of the American experience as you can get.

Her point is that the technology of EBT cards has made it harder to tell who is using unemployment or food benefits and that visiting the co-op would give the President a modern view of the depression era breadline that he’s closed off to in his  bubble.  Certainly there is a great deal about the American experience to be learned from seeing the day to day lives of Brooklynites.  But I think if the President spent much time at the co-op, he’s probably more likely to come away thinking that the country is overrun with baby carriages and yoga mats than he is to pick up a message about the struggle of working families.

Certainly I take issue with Goldstein’s basic assumption that the President is out-of-touch with the hardship of American life.  I would challenge her to find a speech he’s given any time over the last 3 years where he hasn’t focused heavily on the economic struggles many are facing. Including the Des Moines speech she criticizes.  But that’s besides the point.  Mostly I’m just struck by the irony of somebody chastising the president for being out-of-touch from the checkout aisle of the park slope food co-op.  Can you think of a worse way to make that point?