President Barack Obama has forged a surprising consensus on opposite ends of the political spectrum: They wonder how on earth he gets away with it.
A series of recent moves — from aggressively filling his reelection war chest to green-lighting shoot-to-kill orders against an American terror suspect overseas — would have triggered a massive backlash if George W. Bush had tried them, say former Bush administration officials and a few on the political left. Even Obama’s love for the links draws only gentle ribbing rather than the denunciations that helped drive Bush to give up the game for the balance of his presidency.
The muted public response has fueled frustration – and more than a little envy.
“A little bit of consistency from the media would be appreciated — and from the left-wing groups,” said Mark Corallo, director of public affairs at the Justice Department from 2002-05. “I don’t see anybody standing up. … Where is the outrage?”
A series of recent moves — from aggressively filling his reelection war chest to green-lighting shoot-to-kill orders against an American terror suspect overseas — would have triggered a massive backlash if George W. Bush had tried them, say former Bush administration officials and a few on the political left. Even Obama’s love for the links draws only gentle ribbing rather than the denunciations that helped drive Bush to give up the game for the balance of his presidency.
The muted public response has fueled frustration – and more than a little envy.
“A little bit of consistency from the media would be appreciated — and from the left-wing groups,” said Mark Corallo, director of public affairs at the Justice Department from 2002-05. “I don’t see anybody standing up. … Where is the outrage?”
Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, an icon of what the Obama White House famously dubbed “the professional left,” also sees a strange lack of interest toward some of Obama’s policies. Among them: his administration’s claim that the Constitution allows executive use of armed drones to kill U.S. citizens abroad deemed to be terrorist operatives.
“Virtually all the Democrats who were apoplectic about Bush and were constantly complaining about him ‘trampling on our values’ over eavesdropping and detention have been silent about assassination, even though it’s so much more severe,” Greenwald said. “It isn’t that Obama is necessarily any worse on civil liberties than Bush. The point is he’s able to get away with so much more.”
A White House spokesman declined to comment for this story. But Obama aides have noted that he takes plenty of heat for other policies — such as expanding entitlements or phasing out traditional light bulbs — that were far less controversial when Bush did them. Obama’s recent decision on contraception and religious employers triggered a political firestorm, but a similar policy in place throughout the Bush administration barely registered on the political radar.
Some differences in coverage flow from a simple truth: Stories that feed an established media narrative about a political figure get more attention than those that cut against it. And the press tends to blow up stories when partisans attack one another. Some of Obama’s practices, particularly in the war on terror, are supported by Republicans — even as they cringe at the unanimity.
Here’s a look at five areas in which critics on the left and right say Obama’s gotten a relatively easy ride:
A green light to kill U.S. citizens abroad
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder visited Chicago to lay out his rationale that the U.S. government has the legal right to kill U.S.-citizen terror suspects overseas — and that there’s no role for the courts in reviewing such use of lethal force.
The speech at Northwestern University Law School drew a smattering of news accounts and a handful of reporters, but few protesters, no candlelight vigil and no audience members clad in orange jumpsuits and chains. Some liberal groups issued press releases taking issue with Holder’s analysis, but the reaction to what could be termed warrantless killing was a far cry from the sky-is-falling, apocalyptic rhetoric unleashed at Bush and his appointees a few years back over efforts merely to listen in on the communications of suspected terrorists through the warrantless wiretapping program.
After Obama submitted to a rare news conference the next day, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart noted that not a single question was asked about the provocative Holder speech. “How come no one at the press conference brought that up? Didn’t even say a f—ing word about it?” Stewart asked on his program Wednesday. “You didn’t say anything about a historically massive, executive branch power grab.”
Greenwald sounded equally amazed. “Here you have Obama asserting the power not to detain Americans or eavesdrop on them, but to target them for execution by the CIA without a shred or whit of due process,” he said. “I would think that most people would prefer to be eavesdropped upon, or detained, than killed with a drone.”
“There were Americans in Al Qaeda throughout the Bush administration, but it never asserted the power to target them for death. It was just a bridge too far for them,” Greenwald said. “Those Democrats who claimed to find these issues so important and are now being opportunistic and politically cynical are not just neglecting these abuses, they’re actually enabling them.”
Corallo said he supports the drone policy outlined this week, but if his former boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, gave a similar speech, he would have been excoriated.
“You would have gotten a firestorm of criticism from the left,” Corallo said. “We would have been pilloried as ‘a bunch of jackbooted thugs ignoring the Constitution. We ought to impeach this president.’ The cacophony would have been deafening. The New York Times editorial page would have pilloried Ashcroft and Bush, and reporters would have found every leftist constitutional law scholar to come out and scream and yell that we’re just trampling on constitutional rights.” (The Times did weigh in with an editorial Sunday, six days after Holder’s speech.)
Corallo noted that the Bush administration’s detention of Al Qaeda suspect and American citizen Jose Padilla without charge in a Navy brig in South Carolina became a cause célèbre for many on the left, while reaction to the drone strike that killed New Mexico-born Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last year has been relatively muted.
“We got pilloried [over Padilla], and they’re dropping missiles on some guy’s eyeball from 30,000 feet and it’s just business as usual,” said Corallo. “In fact, they’re actually crowing about it.”
Fundraising and swing state travel
Obama, who came into office bemoaning a broken electoral system, has proved surprisingly energetic at fundraising from wealthy donors and using his office to his political benefit in states that could decide his reelection.
He’s attended 103 reelection fundraisers — about double the 52 such events Bush had attended at this point in 2004, according to tallies kept by CBS’s Mark Knoller.
Obama also changed course and recently blessed the efforts of super PAC Priorities USA Action, allowing top campaign aides and even Cabinet members to appear at its fundraising events.
The travel has produced Republican National Committee email blasts, news reports and questions at the White House press briefings, but nothing approaching the drumbeat of criticism that Bush received. Personalities may also come into play. Liberal suspicion and fear of Karl Rove as a sinister force overseeing Bush’s political operation likely fueled both a congressional probe and a five-year federal investigation of the Bush White House that concluded that taxpayers funds were misused but resulted in no formal charges or action.
Closed-door CEO courting
When Vice President Dick Cheney met privately with oil company executives to talk about energy policy, he was excoriated for being an industry stooge and wound up on the receiving end of lawsuits that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Yet, Obama has repeatedly met with CEOs behind closed doors with little outcry about whether he’s in the tank for business interests.
Last February, he had a sit-down in Silicon Valley with the CEOs of Twitter, NetFlix, Apple, Facebook and Google. In August, the heads of American Express, Xerox, Wells Fargo and Johnson & Johnson were among those who won a cozy Roosevelt Room meeting with Obama. And in 2010, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon had a one-on-one with Obama in the Oval Office. All had the chance to plead their case, and their companies’ case, privately with the president.
The private confabs generate less suspicion because the media consensus — and, to some extent, that of watchdog groups — is that Obama and the business leaders have a strained relationship. Since he’s not seen as being in the pocket of business, the secrecy produces few complaints — even though the potential for the kind of lobbying Obama has criticized is obvious.
The press and public haven’t always been locked out of such meetings. When Obama met with CEOs who are part of the Business Roundtable in 2009, both his speech and the ensuing question-and-answer session were open to the press and cameras. However, when Obama spoke to the group last week, his remarks were open, but journalists were kicked out when the CEOs engaged with the president.
A Business Roundtable spokesman couldn’t explain why the 2009 session was open but said the closure last week was a joint decision with the White House. “In inviting the President to our meeting, when we began to discuss the arrangements with the White House, we mutually agreed that a closed door session would result in the most productive dialogue,” spokesman Carter Wood wrote in an email.
Obama’s CEO-laden Jobs Council does meet publicly with him from time to time, but the panel’s work is done largely behind closed doors, in conference calls, emails and subcommittee meetings that are closed to the public.
A leak crackdown that could send reporters to jail
The Obama administration has launched an unprecedented drive to put alleged leakers of government secrets behind bars — a campaign that could end up putting reporters in the same place.
Since Obama took office, prosecutors have filed six criminal, Espionage Act cases over leaks — more prosecutions than under all prior presidents combined. In one, the Justice Department is trying to force New York Times reporter James Risen to identify his confidential sources and has argued to a federal appeals court that journalists enjoy no privilege against being called as witnesses in a criminal case. If the government prevails, Risen is likely to end up in jail for contempt.
The anti-leak drive and the potential for journalists to be caught in the crossfire is an occasional subject of news stories and editorials, but Bush officials are convinced they could never have gotten away with what has happened under Obama.
“If we were doing what this administration has been doing to reporters, we would be characterized as Nixonian, flat-out. People would say, ‘They have an enemies list in the media and are taking it out on them. …’ We would have gotten crushed. It would have been editorial after editorial and 24/7 on cable news,” Corallo said.
“This is a huge chilling effect on national-security reporting,” Greenwald said. If it had occurred under Bush, “this would be a major, major scandal.”
A golfing habit regularly indulged
Even a president’s R&R time gets scrutinized — but Obama’s frequent golf games have sparked less derision than those of his predecessor.
Obama has hit the links more than 90 times since assuming the presidency in 2009. The outings, often weekly during the spring and summer months, draw scant attention from the press, save for a few complaints from pool reporters about being stuck for the day at an Andrews Air Force Base food court.
Bush’s golfing was a frequent subject of mockery by his critics. Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” immortalized the 43rd president on the links in 2002 decrying the scourge of terrorism before declaring, “Now watch this drive!”
Eventually, Bush simply gave up golf, adviser Ed Gillespie said in a 2009 interview. He pointed to the bombing of the U.N. compound in Iraq in 2003 as the point at which Bush decided the optics were simply too awkward.
“Bush gave it up because we were at war — which we still are by the way,” Gillespie said. “When he was commander in chief, he just didn’t like the thought of being seen out on the golf course.”
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