To be clear: this is not to imply that Obama did anything wrong. But is anyone asking the basic questions about his advisors and confidants? Whatever happened to "what did he know and when did he know it?" by Matthew Bastian
(conservative)
Saturday, December 20, 2008
The release of the film "Frost/Nixon" this month serves as a vivid reminder of two things. The first is that even in death Richard Nixon can’t get any peace. It seems that every few years Hollywood drags his legacy back into the spotlight, stomps on it, and then shoves it back into storage. A paranoid and duplicitous right-wing bête noire, Nixon is the very embodiment of the conniving, autocratic president - or everything the Left wants to believe about George W. Bush.
The second thing is that, once upon a time, the press viewed the occupant of the Oval Office with a healthy dose of natural skepticism. The mere hint of scandal used to be a journalistic call to arms; exposing a scandal was a badge of honor. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein can attest to that.
With the drama unfolding around Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, it’s clear that the times have changed. Barack Obama may not be president yet, but the kid glove treatment from the general campaign is carrying over into his pre-inaugural transition period.
When the Blagojevich story first broke, most of the mainstream media dismissed it before we knew what happened. From day one, many outlets threw out the word "distraction" - a favorite of the Obama team since the early days of the Reverend Wright fiasco - in his defense. It was the news equivalent of, "Nothing to see here! Please move along!"
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, of course, was very deliberate in saying that none of the wiretaps implicated Obama in any way. But members Obama’s inner circle, including Rahm Emanuel, don’t appear to be so lucky. Peripheral scandal used to be enough to get would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins digging through trash bins and taking midnight calls from anonymous sources.
Not so with Blago. When it comes to any connection to the Obama team, the story was nearly over before it started. With the notable exceptions of Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Sun-Times, nobody seems to be pursuing the Emanuel angle.
To be clear: this is not to imply that Obama did anything wrong. But is anyone asking the basic questions about his advisors and confidants? Whatever happened to "what did he know and when did he know it?"
Keep in mind that this is the same press that had an insatiable appetite for "guilt by association" during the Bush administration. For the better part of three years we were subject to front-page updates of the Valerie Plame affair, which was far more convoluted a tale. Out of necessity for the reader, every article had to spend several paragraphs just recapping what happened: Joe Wilson, Niger, yellow cake uranium, the Novak column, and a strange form of retribution. Just trying to keep up with the background narrative and discern the actual crime behind the allegations was enough to induce migraines.
Was it Dick Cheney, in the White House, with the lead pipe? Who cared? Following along was an effort in futility.
But the news giants patiently and dutifully explained the story over and over until Fitzgerald got his man: Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted in 2007 not for outing Plame - the crux of the case - but rather for having a different recollection of events and conversations that took place years ago. After $2.5 million spent on the investigation, as well as plenty of innuendo about a Bush/Cheney connection, the culmination of the Plame Affair was little more than a perjury trap for a White House staffer.
With the Blagojevich scandal, everything is wrapped up in a tidy, easy-to-understand package: an arrogant governor is caught on tape discussing how he can use his political power to enrich himself, which included entertaining bids for an open US senate seat. That’s the sort of thing a fifth grader can comprehend. It’s Political Scandal for Dummies.
And it’s as red as red meat gets for curious journalists.
Curious journalists, however, are suddenly a rare breed. What they seem to forget is that Obama, inspiring as he is for millions of Americans, is still a politician surrounded by other politicians. You could count on one hand - and while wearing one of those oversized, novelty foam fingers - the number of politicians who have not done, believed in, or said in private something that most of their supporters would find appalling. An essential part of Obama’s narrative is that he somehow rose from the fetid swamp of Chicago politics without acquiring any of its stench along the way. Yet there is a palpable disinterest among the press to scratch below the surface with Obama and his team. They seem terrified that they might find something they won’t like.
I sincerely hope that the president-elect is as noble as the image he portrays, and that his campaign theme of "change" will not be a hollow one. If he or someone close to him stumbles - and again, that’s a big "if" - the guess is here that it will take the most egregious infraction, a story too big to ignore, to pull the mainstream media out of their starry-eyed Obama stupor. Should there ever be an opportunity for an intrepid reporter to play Bob Woodward on Obama, even in something as tangential as the Plame Affair, odds are that nobody outside of Fox News or the conservative blogoshphere will step forward for the role.
Because shunned would be any mainstream reporter who dared, whether deliberately or by accident, to drag a skeleton from the closet of Team Obama.
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