David Broder is known as the “Dean of the Washington press corps,” but it can more accurately be said that he’s the “David Gergen of the Washington press corps:” the apostle of conventional wisdom/custodian of institutional memory/protector of Democrat Party interests/and non-rocker of the boat.
Broder is the kind of journalist who facilitates the smooth operation of the rackets, the scribe who keeps the rubes out there in Flyoverland thinking that the game isn’t rigged, that somebody inside the Beltway takes those noble words inscribed on the D.C. buildings and monuments at face value, and that here in America the people — not the powerful — rule.
Which is why he could hardly let slide his Post colleague Dana Milbank’s astonishing act of lèse majesté against the Emperor Hussein in the form of this extraordinary paean to the genius of Obama hatchet man Rahm Emanuel, which included these gems:
Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.
Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.
Obama’s problem is that his other confidants — particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod — are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn’t dirty his hands in politics.
Anyone who’s spent five minutes playing in the journalistic big leagues knows a purpose pitch when he sees it, which forced the Dean to leap to the defense of his beloved President and administer a very uncollegial brushback to Milbank:
It sounded, for all the world, like the kind of orchestrated leaks that often precede a forced resignation in Washington.
Except that the chief of staff doesn’t usually force the president out. When George H.W. Bush had had enough of John H. Sununu, of course it was Sununu who walked. Maybe the sources on these stories think Obama is the one who should leave.
Now Milbank may be something of a buffoon — as when he showed up for a television interview about Dick Cheney’s hunting accident dressed like this:
— but in this case he just may have been right. What if it was a message — from the Chicago Machine to Barack Obama, instead of the other way around? A message that read: you’re not getting the job done.
You civilians aren’t supposed to know this, but the Washington press corps is probably the most insulated group of reporters in American journalism. As political journalism has come to be entirely centered on Washington, the Washington bureau is the ne plus ultra of postings: once you’re there, you stay there forever. Like barkers at a perpetual carnival, they keep touting the same acts, but with different Fat Ladies, Little Egypts, and Dog-Faced Boys, and hope that an infinite queue of suckers keeps crossing their palms with coin before they realize they’ve been had.
Had these crack reporters spent any time covering either the intelligence business or gangland, however, they might actually have some insight into what’s really going on with the current administration, which combines both disciplines in nearly equal measure, with a hearty dollop of Saul Alinsky poison thrown in just for Frankfurt School laughs.
For example, does any of them ever stop and ask why — aside from horse-race considerations — President Obama is in such a desperate rush to ram through “health-care reform,” oblivious to the electoral consequences both for himself and his party, as if he were a kind of legislative suicide bomber? Could there possibly be some other reason to explain the Punahou Kid’s arrogant disdain for the public, the willingness to treat the members of his own party as cannon fodder, and the logical implication from his own words that “health-care reform” now is worth a one-term presidency later? And if so, what is it?
Not only won’t they ask these questions, they won’t even think them. So, as a public service, Big Journalism offers them this handy primer:
[youtube hkJIcFMN_pc nolink]
Here endeth the lesson.
For now.
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