"Quick story about govt. shutdowns and the theatrics behind them. One year when I was reporting at CBS News during a govt. shutdown..."

"... we were sincerely searching for real life impact. When we couldn't find any, *that* should have been part of the story. Instead, we kept trying to create the appearance of an impact. It wasn't really trying to be dishonest. It was, in my retrospective view, because the general editorial idea for the story was to show how bad the 'Republican' shutdown was for ordinary Americans, and the answer simply couldn't be that it wasn't.... [W]e were calling Ds and the Obama administration for ideas to report what was the real impact. Taking our cue, these officials fabricated impact that we could report. For example, they cordoned off outdoor public monuments in Washington DC. We knew and even discussed in the newsroom that this made no sense. These monuments weren't 'manned' to begin with. The only reason to cordon them off from the public was so that visiting tourists would see the 'impact' of the shutdowns and the news media would have something to take pictures of and interview people about...."

Tweets Sharyl Attkisson.

"[T]he Biden White House frequently demands that interviews with administration officials be conducted on grounds known colloquially as 'background with quote approval'..."

"[T]he information from an interview can be used in the story, but in order for the person’s name to be attached to a quote, the reporter must transcribe the quotes they want and then send them to the communications team to approve, veto or edit them.... At its best, quote approval allows sources to speak more candidly about their work. At its worst, it gives public officials a way to obfuscate or screen their own admissions and words. The Biden White House isn’t the first to employ the practice. Many reporters say it’s reminiscent of the tightly controlled Obama White House. The Trump White House used it, too. But reporters say Trump’s team did so less frequently than Biden’s team — which also used the tactic during the campaign — and a number of current White House reporters have become increasingly frustrated by what they see as its abuse.... 

From "Reporters fume at White House 'quote approval' rules" (Politico).  

The article quotes NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker, explaining that the practice originated with reporters: “What started out as an effort by reporters to get more transparency, to get people on the record more, to use fewer blind quotes, then got taken by the White House, each successive White House, as a way of taking control of your story. So instead of transparency, suddenly, the White House realized: ‘Hey, this quote approval thing is a cool thing. We can now control what is in their stories by refusing to allow them use anything without our approval. And it's a pernicious, insidious, awful practice that reporters should resist.”

"People close to the president say his proclivity to retreat to the residence during work hours has built up over the course of his presidency...."

"Early in this presidency, Trump’s staff tried to nudge him out into the city more often for dinners or to attend events, but the plans always fell apart, said one of the former senior administration officials who called Trump a 'homebody.'...  Now he tends to go to the Oval Office and adjacent private dining room for five to six hours a day for formal meetings, lunches and ceremonial events, current and former administration officials say. But the bulk of his work in the mornings, late afternoons, evenings and weekends happens in his private quarters where Trump can call staff and advisers as early as 6 a.m. and up to midnight.... He also uses it during working hours as a place to watch TV freely, tweet and serve as own his one-man communications director and political strategist. The residence serves like a bunker for his impeachment response and his real-time reaction to testimony, witnesses and public hearings.... Trump also loves to open up parts of the private residence to special guests, personally taking them on tours of the Lincoln Bedroom where he’ll show off a copy of the Gettysburg Address. It’s a party trick he deployed in an attempt to wow German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a move he uses with a wide array of other White House visitors...."

From "Forget the Oval. The real Trump action is in the residence/Fixated on impeachment proceedings against him, Trump is increasingly taking his official business to the White House’s executive residence to escape perceived risks of his formal office space" (Politico).

What a lonely weirdo he is!



ADDED: The article suggests it would be better if he'd go out at night in Washington, go to restaurants, as if he could just go out to a place and it wouldn't shut everything down. He can't really get "out." He's in the bubble wherever he goes and cannot just go be a regular person somewhere. At most, he can try to put on a show of doing something a normal person would do, like go to 5 Guys for a cheeseburger....

"No one quite knows why Pyongyang slowed its public and overt testing, nor why Donald Trump’s bluntness and boasting that his nuclear button was bigger seems to have worked."

"But consider this: Trump largely inherited practices initiated in the Obama years, military moves that were meant to threaten and coerce North Korea in light of its diplomatic failures.... Into this near autonomous skid towards conflict blundered Mr. Trump. It did look grim for a few months, the two threatening strikes on each other, missiles flying, and speculation even emerging that the United States might move nuclear weapons back onto South Korean soil.... Say what you will about Trump, but after some very bad years of active nuclear testing and missile shooting, disarmament on the Korean peninsula has already occurred. Things are quieter and two leaders who previously weren’t talking – ever – now are. Sure the United States should remain vigilant, but much of the penis-wagging and button-pushing is over. To say no success has occurred is factually incorrect. Just getting rid of the war cry is enough to cheer over."

Writes William M Arkin in The Guardian.

I'm enjoying this genre of awkward acknowledgement of Trump success. Notice how carefully it steers around any potential criticism of Obama. On quick first read, I thought "much of the penis-wagging and button-pushing is over" referred to Obama, but that wouldn't happen. For Obama, the penis metaphor will be actively avoided. For Trump, they'll use it whenever they can.

"One can validly argue the media generally liked Obama & muted criticism, but journalists vehemently denounced Obama DOJ for obtaining the phone records of AP & Fox journalists..."

Tweets Glenn Greenwald, agreeing 100% with Jake Tapper, quoted in "Jake Tapper Corrects Ex-CIA Analyst For Claiming Media Ignored Obama Press Crackdown: ‘So Sick of the Lying.'"

"Diners at Upland, the California-inflected brasserie in Flatiron, would have a story they could tell their great-grandkids: about the day they saw President Obama — gracious, handsome, tieless — while taking forkfuls of little-gem salad."

The love affair — the press with Obama — continues.

And new love arrives: "Did Senator Cory Booker and Mindy Kaling Just Set Up a Real-Life Date Over Twitter?"

Now that we're talking about magazines, and it's the last full day of Obama the President...

... let's look back to Inauguration Week 2009. Here are the shrines to Obama I observed in the (now defunct) Borders Bookstore:







That title "What Obama Means" provoked me at the time: "Spare me. Whatever is in that book can — I will bet you — be skimmed and understood in less than one minute."

That reconfirmed my practice of reading on line to get my political news and analysis. In our era of fake news, these are fake books* and fake magazines. You don't want to get sucked into the passive experience that awaits you inside these rectangular objects. You've got to keep it digital so you can cut and paste and blog as you read. Save yourself.

I won't go to a bookstore this week, but if I did, I wonder how the front tables and racks would look. I'm sure there are no comparable shrines to Donald Trump. Maybe there are, once again, shrines to Obama: What Did Obama Mean?
______________________________

* My use (coinage?) of this term is interfered with by the common reference to Facebook as Fakebook and by those wonderful music books that help musicians play 100s of songs.

"I’m looking forward to being an active consumer of your work rather than always the subject of it."

Said Barack Obama to the White House press corps* on his second-to-last full day as President of the United States. But he's not promising to withdraw and leave the presidential stage to his successor, which is what George W. Bush did for him.

But there's this meme that the new President is not normal, adverted to by Obama:

There’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake.

Bush, like his father, adhered to an absolute principle. Obama respects the principle by cushioning it with a malleable escape clause: where core** values may be at stake. And what a wide door that is! Not only is the concept "core values" subject to infinite debate, but — whatever these values are — they don't have to be severely threatened, only "at stake." And they don't even need to be at stake. It's enough that they "may" be at stake. Well, then there's really no one-President-at-a-time principle of withdrawal at all.

Obama gives 4 examples of what would override the principle of withdrawal:

1. "Systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion."

2. "Explicit or functional obstacles to people being able to vote, to exercise their franchise."

3. "Institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press."

4. "Efforts to round up kids who have grown up here and for all practical purposes are American kids, and send them someplace else, when they love this country."

Is #4 restricted to "kids"? Younger than 18? Is he serious about the condition "when they love this country?" When has Obama shown an interest in limiting immigration to those who actually love America? That sounds like a condition Trump would set.

The 4 examples of what Obama will consider not to be the "normal functioning of politics" suggests that he's ready to exert his influence whenever he wants. We'll see what he wants. The threat that he can drop back in might work as a check on President Trump: Don't stir the sleeping Obama. But we all know Trump has figured out how to leverage opposition. A reactivated Obama would offer a springboard for Trump's antic attacks on Obama. Any deviation from the principle of presidential withdrawal would put at stake the core value of the Dignity of the American Ex-President. And, frankly, it would threaten the the core value of the dignity of the current President.

________________________

* Pronounced corpse?



Some of those press corpsmen must feel they are dying, with the withdrawal of life-giving presence of the President We Loved and the arrival of President who tells them to their face they are garbage.

** Pronounced corps.

Can the President tweet? Yes, but not very well at all.

He hasn't put anything up since January 10th, and it's just:

Tonight, President Obama reflects on eight years of progress. Watch the #FarewellAddress at 9 pm ET: https://t.co/ZnwTsg155B #ObamaFarewell

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 10, 2017

That's pointing you to another place, the place where he's most comfortable speaking to the American people: on TV, in a calm, upholstered setting, a few feet away from a news or talk-show celebrity whose face glows with love.

And it's odd, isn't it?, that @BarackObama speaks of Barack Obama in the third person — President Obama reflects on eight years of progress.

That's not really the right way to do Twitter. You should feel like a real person, talking straight to us. Directly at us and in clear words that convey specific, almost startling meaning.

And you have to put a few things up every day. Before that January 10th tweet, @BarackObama hadn't tweeted anything since before the election. On November 5th, he tweeted: "In the weekly address, President Obama discusses what #Obamacare has done to improve health care" — (another promo for a speech, a little note to say what I have to say will be somewhere other than on Twitter). And he had 2 posts that day. The other one was: "Let's keep working to keep our economy on a better, stronger course."

Now, I'm reading the fine print: "This account is run by Organizing for Action staff. Tweets from the President are signed -bo." I don't think there's been a "-bo" tweet in over a year.

Imagine the praise that would be lavished on Barack Obama if he'd really tweeted in the way that counts as real tweeting. Imagine if he'd said pithy things that cut to the core of important issues and events and if he had taken good-humored shots at critics. Oh! He'd have been celebrated as the new-media-savvy genius of the world!

But Barack Obama will only be President for 3 more days. The incoming President actually has already established himself a brilliant Twitter user. He has leaped over innumerable political and media critics, danced over their heads in a mind-boggling journey to the White House. He's talked to us the People in clear, sharp words and no one could stop him. We liked the straight talk. Not all of us, but some of us, and those that liked it got their/our way.

But the mainstream media will never celebrate his new-media genius. That's why he had to be a new-media genius to get where he did in the most impressive free-speech achievement in the history of the world. Oh! Suddenly, I am celebrating him. But I'm not mainstream media. I'm new media too. I'm savvy in my own way in my little domain of blogging, and I think I can say from one new-media voice to another: I celebrate you! 

And to those old media people who publicly agonize about the prospect of the new President tweeting: I have seen your phony-baloney worried faces on the news shows...



...  as you confront the serioso question whether Trump's advisers can stop him from tweeting. You are worried about yourselves, and rightly so. And you know damned well you'd have been utterly delighted and overflowing with praise if Barack Obama had tweeted like Donald Trump.

ADDED: Organizing for Action. That sounds familiar. Ah! Here it is. My post from January 18, 2013:

"Obama unveils 'Organizing for Action.'"

I read the Politico headline out loud.

Meade immediately improvises a song, and I have the wit and the skill to transcribe as he sings:

Organize for action
Organize for some action, baby
Organize! Organize!
Organize my organ
Activate my organ for organizing
A little girly action
Organize for action

ADDED: "You in?"

Ha ha. And now, clicking on the Politico link, I see why @BarackObama is such a dead, dull Twitter feed:

President Barack Obama on Friday announced the relaunch of his remaining campaign apparatus as a new tax-exempt group called Organizing for Action that will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during his second term.

The tax code lures people into restricting their own speech. Obama let his name appear on a Twitter feed that was doomed to be un-Twitter-y by the need to fit the demands of the IRS. Big Government trips over itself. Sad!

ALSO: I am directed to the Twitter feed @POTUS. This too presents itself as Barack Obama tweeting. I see 3 MLK Day tweets. e.g., "Dr. King and those who marched with him proved that people who love their country can change it. As Americans, we all owe them a great deal." Before that there is a January 12th post expressing pride in the arrival of Obama's autograph on Mars.

There is a January 12th post:

Thank you for everything. My last ask is the same as my first. I'm asking you to believe—not in my ability to create change, but in yours.

Ask not what your President can change for you, ask what you can do for change.

On January 1st, similarly, Barack Obama spoke in vague terms about himself:

It’s been the privilege of my life to serve as your President. I look forward to standing with you as a citizen. Happy New Year everybody.

And, also on New Year's, he approved of himself in a series of tweets like:

From realizing marriage equality to removing barriers to opportunity, we've made history in our work to reaffirm that all are created equal.

I've reviewed this Twitter feed too, and I stand by my position that Barack Obama is not doing anything that I would count as real tweeting. There's no sense that the human being Barack Obama is using Twitter to speak to us directly and to speak clearly in his personal voice. Like @BarackObama, @POTUS feels like banal PR written by some unknown person with an assignment to cause a Twitter presence to exist. 

AND: I've actually followed @POTUS since its inception, so I have seen it come up continually as I read Twitter. It's obviously not made an impression on me as something beyond a generic White House PR feed.

"If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist..."

"... he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama," writes James Risen in the NYT.

Over the past eight years, the [Obama] administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

I experienced this pressure firsthand....

Now that the power must be handed over to Trump, it's time to put a spotlight on all of Obama's overreaching.

The administration’s heavy-handed approach represents a sharp break with tradition. For decades, official Washington did next to nothing to stop leaks....

Things began to change in the Bush era, particularly after the Valerie Plame case. The 2003 outing of Ms. Plame as a covert C.I.A. operative led to a criminal leak investigation, which in turn led to a series of high-profile Washington journalists’ being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury and name the officials who had told them about her identity. Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, went to jail for nearly three months before finally testifying in the case.

The Plame case began to break down the informal understanding between the government and the news media that leaks would not be taken seriously....

But isn't that what the liberal media demanded at the time?

Fortunately, power shifts from one party to the other. That's some kind of safeguard. If you exaggerate your power, your successor will have exaggerated power.

Unfortunately, people are short-sighted.

Is President Trump going to adhere to the presidential tradition of press conferences?

Here's a transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Sean Spicer, who will be the new White House Press Secretary. They're talking about whether President Trump will have the same kind of press conferences we've seen from past presidents, which Hewitt characterized as "regular" and "energetic."

I had to stop and check to see what the tradition of press conferences really is. Has it been distinct and consistent? Here's a piece from the White House Historical Association. Woodrow Wilson started the practice of press conferences, and all of his successors (so far) have used it.

Calvin Coolidge considered it "rather necessary to the carrying on of our republican institution that the people should have a fairly accurate report of what the president is trying to do." Fairly accurate. Trying to do.

JFK — who's right in the middle of the line of men that begins with Wilson and ends with Obama — gave the first live, televised press conferences. Up until Eisenhower, the sessions were not even on the record, and the President retained the power to rewrite his quotes. When Truman said "I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy," the reporters helped him see that the quote was too exciting and they even assisted him in mushing it up into: "The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States."

JFK made the televised press conference into something that served his agenda and suited his particular gifts and desired image. Later Presidents accepted Kennedy's approach but also adapted it. George H. W. Bush introduced the joint press conference with world leaders. Obama has often substituted interviews with one chosen reporter. In his first 2 years, Obama did 21 Kennedy-style press conferences to a roomful of reporters and 269 of those one-on-one encounters.

With that background on presidential press conferences, let's get back to Hewitt and Spicer:

"In ’08, they saw me coming, but I was a guy named Barack Hussein Obama coming up against the Clinton machine, so no way!"

"So they weren’t focussed on me, and I established a connection. Then came the stuff: Ayers and Reverend Wright and all the rest. What I’m suggesting is that the lens through which people understand politics and politicians is extraordinarily powerful. And Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter. You attract attention, rouse emotions, and then move on. You can surf those emotions. I’ve said it before, but if I watched Fox I wouldn’t vote for me!"

That's Barack Obama, talking to David Remnick in "OBAMA RECKONS WITH A TRUMP PRESIDENCY/Inside a stunned White House, the President considers his legacy and America’s future."

And I just want to say: It takes one to know one.

The NYT said "Donald Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law," but that's a reason to vote for him.

Because — as Glenn Reynolds puts it, linking to my "All Presidents threaten the rule of law!" post — Hillary Clinton is "less constrained than Trump would be by the media and the Deep State." The very fact that the NYT notices and calls out Donald Trump is a safeguard of some kind. Hillary, like Obama, will be facilitated.

Glenn also links to a USA Today column of his from last week:

[I]t’s nice to see the prospect of a Trump administration reminding folks on the left of [the imperial presidency], particularly as the journalist and pundit classes are dominated by lefties. It’s terrible, we’re told, that Trump is issuing veiled threats to journalists — though Obama joked about auditing his enemies, seized journalist phone records and threatened a journalist who refused to reveal sources with imprisonment. Trump would be a warmonger, we’re told, although in fact Barack Obama has been at war longer than any other U.S. president, if without any particular success. Trump would arrogantly ride roughshod over any opposition, though Barack Obama famously used “I won” as an excuse to ignore opponents and bragged that he had a “pen (and) a phone” to bypass congressional disagreement. (And he’s used them a lot.)

"The last person in the world who should be lecturing journalists on how to do journalism is President Barack Obama, Yet there Obama was Monday night at a journalism award ceremony, yodeling banalities about the role of a press in a free society..."

"... moaning over the dangers posed by 'he said/she said' reporting, and—to the delight of the assembled audience—attacking Donald Trump in every way but name. The press-heavy crowd, convened by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to give the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting to Alec MacGillis, clapped at Obama’s 30-minute address, encouraging his best Trump-baiting lines about 'free media' and the dangers of 'false equivalence.'"

Yodels and moans Jack Shafer (at Politico).

Go to the link if you want to see the argument that  that Obama is an anti-free-press guy. It seems to be mostly resentment that Obama isn't generous enough opening himself and his administration to the press. He's been successful at controlling information from his end: "Obama holds infrequent news conferences, and he wastes reporters’ time by refraining from answering questions with any candor." I can see whining about how that makes journalism harder to do, but not how it makes him anti-free-press. The press is still free. Freedom doesn't mean everyone else is making it easy to do all the things you're free to do. You've got to step up, not demand cushier spoon-feeding.

The WTF Podcast with Barack Obama.

Just posted, streamable here.

Marc [Maron] welcomes the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, to the garage for conversation about college, fitting in, race relations, gun violence, changing the status quo, disappointing your fans, comedians, fatherhood and overcoming fear. And yes, this really happened.

ADDED: The casual interaction between the 2 men is a listening pleasure.

"Chuck Todd's out there... saying 'Obama nourishes me.' What are you doing? Breast-feeding?"

"What in the world, Obama nourishes him?  Yes, F. Chuck Todd says Obama nourishes him.  Whatever this relationship is, it's deeper than ideological."

Said Rush Limbaugh today, predicting that the media will work to build Obama's legacy: "It's gonna be fabricated, made up, and the media is going to do everything they can to write it, defend it, protect it, and prolong it.  If that means destroying the next Republican president, they'll do it without batting an eye... Even if it's a new Democrat president, even if the new president's a Democrat and tries to unravel some of Obama, I guarantee you, the loyalty here is to Obama, not so much the Democrat Party, although that loyalty is indisputable as well."

How bad was Joel McHale, the (official) comedian at last night's White House Correspondents Dinner?

At last night's White House Correspondents Dinner, the official comedian — insert typical joke about how they're all comedians — was Joel McHale, whose comic gimmick seemed to be reading bad jokes off cards and then ad-libbing about how that was a poor joke. For example:

I am a big fan of President Obama. I think he’s one of the all-time great presidents, definitely in the top 50. Please explain that to Jessica Simpson. You’re right, that was low.

That came early on and was followed by what might have been his only rough treatment of Obama:

All right, how about the president’s performance tonight, everyone? Sir, it’s amazing that you can still bring it with fresh, hilarious material. My favorite bit of yours was when you said you would close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. That was a classic. That was hilarious, hilarious. Still going.

Detainee Obamedy. Obama laughed and laughed. I think he mouthed something like "I'm still workin' on it."

Kathleen Sebelius is a walking joke, literally.

At the White House Correspondents Dinner, Obama exploits the woman for laughs acting as if his slide show is broken and then calling someone out to fix it. Sebelius is the sight-joke punchline.



Hey! War on Women… don’t you think? I've also posted this at Instapundit, where I'm guestblogging this week.

Obama's stint at the lectern was terrible overall, by the way. For example, he made a joke about the missing Malaysian airplane. It's an occasion to laugh at CNN, and joking about the media is the thing to do at the Correspondents Dinner, but the President of the United States should not be laughing about the death of hundreds of human beings.

A puffy, glum Obama at an NCAA basketball game.

Pictured here (and at the top of Drudge). What a drag to go to a recreational event, to look like someone on vacation, and to know that photographers will be photographing every instant of your expression and that editors will be able to select from the 1000s of images the one that expresses whatever message they decide they want to send about you... you and your wife and your daughter. There is no recreation, only the appearance of recreation. So why go to the game at all? Because you want to get your phony-baloney message out, that you're on vacation, Christmas vacation, and that everyone else ought to chill out and get all holiday-ish and off your case.

Stop talking about Obamacare. Please talk about "Duck Dynasty." Not my puffy face. Please look away. It's not that puffy. It will be puffier if I must cry myself to sleep another night. No. Don't look at me. Not in that shot anyway. Look at the "Duck Dynasty" guy. Isn't he hateful? Me, I'm that very nice, very likable man who works so hard for you and then vacations in Hawaii and goes to basketball games with his wife — don't look at her grim underbite — and his charming, lovely daughters.

"If I was editor, I would get people after Obama. I voted for the guy, but he’s a disaster as a president."

"And a disaster most through his Justice Department and muzzling the press. Succeeding. And nobody’s — there’s no [Harrison] Salisbury, [David] Halberstam to bust ass in Washington anymore. That Washington bureau is a wimpy place right now and has been since Obama’s election, or since 9/11 actually."

Says Gay Talese, who was a NYT reporter in the 1960s and who wrote "The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World."