The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Regrets, I’ve Had a Few
The world came to an end this morning as the federal budget sequester took effect. In other news, Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post reporter who was half the team that broke the Watergate story, is on the outs with the White House.
The tiff began last Friday, when an op-ed piece Woodward wrote for last Sunday’s paper appeared on the Post’s website. Drawing on reporting from his most recent book, “The Price of Politics,” Woodward argued that President Obama’s efforts to blame the sequester on congressional Republicans constituted, as Woodward delicately put it, “partisan message management.”
In fact, according to Woodward, “the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of [now Treasury Secretary Jack] Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors.” Having agreed to the spending cuts in 2011, the president “is moving the goal posts” in now demanding that Congress raise taxes again. “Months of White House dissembling” have “eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans,” Woodward writes, adding immediately that “the Republicans are by no means blameless and have had their own episodes of denial and bald-faced message management.”
That did not go over well at a White House that is used to deferential, even admiring coverage from mainstream-media reporters, many of whom these days, in contrast with old-timers like Woodward, are brazen advocates of left-wing causes. (See our Monday column for a detailed treatment of this problem at the Post.)
Press secretary Jay Carney tweeted that Woodward’s op-ed was “willfully wrong,”Politico reports. Obama aide David Plouffe, as Twitchy.com notes, got nastier, likening Woodward, who turns 70 later this month, to an athlete who is too old to perform well: “Watching Woodward last 2 days is like imagining my idol Mike Schmidt facing live pitching again. Perfection gained once is rarely repeated.”
The most hotly contested White House response came to Woodward in private. Its public revelation came in stages and occasioned a good deal of confusion and hostility. Here’s how CNN.com reported it:
Veteran journalist Bob Woodward said Wednesday he was threatened by a senior Obama administration official following his reporting on the White House’s handling of the forced federal spending cuts set to take effect on Friday.
“They’re not happy at all,” he said on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” adding that an e-mail from a senior administration official–who [sic] he would not name–communicated a message which caused him great concern. “It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this,” he said.
By yesterday morning, Politico had “obtained, exclusively, the exchange” and identified the other participant as Gene Sperling, director of the president’s National Economic Council. Contrary to CNN’s description, Sperling’s email seemed anything but threatening:
I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today. My bad. I do understand your problems with a couple of our statements in the fall–but feel on the other hand that you focus on a few specific trees that gives a very wrong perception of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here.
But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus [the president of the U.S.] asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim. . . .
My apologies again for raising my voice on the call with you. Feel bad about that and truly apologize.
Here’s Woodward’s reply:
You do not ever have to apologize to me. You get wound up because you are making your points and you believe them. This is all part of a serious discussion. I for one welcome a little heat; there should more given the importance. I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening. I know you lived all this. My partial advantage is that I talked extensively with all involved. I am traveling and will try to reach you after 3 pm today.
Woodward’s detractors now accuse him of having “lied” or “fabricated” the White House threat. That’s ridiculous. As Woodward tells the New York Times, “I never said it was a threat.” What he did say, as the video shows, is: “It’s Mickey Mouse.” He quoted the Sperling email accurately. The lack of any factual dispute is sufficient to disprove the charge of lying or fabrication.
The email does seem at odds with Woodward’s description of it, but that disparity is one of tone. Woodward’s description of the email exchange made it sound hostile and combative, whereas the tone of the actual emails is reasonable and conciliatory. But Sperling’s email makes clear right off the bat that there is a context to which outside observers are not privy: The emails were preceded by a “conversation” in which Sperling “raised my voice” to such an extent that he felt it necessary to apologize in writing.
Our surmise is that the email exchange was an exercise in rationalization rather than candor–that both Sperling and Woodward were concealing their anger in an attempt to come across as reasonable to each other and to themselves. In the CNN interview, by contrast, Woodward failed (if he attempted at all) to hide his feelings and thus gave an emotionally more accurate portrayal of his exchange with Sperling, even if the inference that there was a threat involved turned out to be mistaken.
If Woodward isn’t claiming the White House threatened him, two other Beltway media figures are. The first is Lanny Davis, the Clinton aide turned Washington Times columnist, who told his story to the Washington radio station WMAL:
Davis told WMAL that his editor, John Solomon, “received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn’t like some of my columns, even though I’m a supporter of Obama. I couldn’t imagine why this call was made.” Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, “that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials.” . . .
Davis says his editor, Solomon, was not worried by the threat.
“He didn’t take it seriously, because he didn’t think that could ever happen. He thought it was bluster,” Davis told WMAL. “I called three senior people at the White House, and I said, ‘I want this person to be told this can never happen again, and it’s inappropriate.’ I got a call back from someone who was in the White House saying it will never happen again.”
The second, more interesting one is Ron Fournier of National Journal, who explained in a column yesterday why he decided to “ice a source.”
Fournier writes of having received “several e-mails and telephone calls from this White House official filled with vulgarity, abusive language, and virtually the same phrase” that Sperling used in his email to Woodward. The last straw came after Fournier responded sarcastically on Twitter to Jay Carney’s Woodward tweet: “Obama White House: Woodward is ‘willfully wrong.’ Huh-what did Nixon White House have to say about Woodward?”
Whereupon the unnamed source “sent me an indignant e-mail. ‘What’s next, a Nazi analogy?’ the official wrote, chastising me for spreading ‘bull**** like that.’ ” Although Fournier says he was “not offended,” he “didn’t want to condone behavior that might intimidate less-experienced reporters, a reaction I personally witnessed in journalists covering the Obama administration.” So Fournier wrote to the official not to email him again.
“Get off your high horse and assess the facts, Ron,” the official wrote back. Fournier answered by warning that “all future e-mails from you will be on the record–publishable at my discretion and directly attributed to you.” That seems to have gotten the message across.
What’s oddest about this piece is that Fournier goes out of his way to deny that Obama is responsible for his aides’ bad behavior. Fournier follows his description of his own tweet with this disclaimer:
Reporting by Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered Watergate misdeeds and led to the resignation of President Nixon. My tweet was not intended to compare Nixon to Obama (there is no reason to doubt Obama’s integrity–period) but rather to compare the attack to the press strategies of all the presidents’ men.
The distinction is fair enough, but that parenthetical is deeply weird. Above all, what kind of reporter would grant–or indeed even think it in his power to grant–a politician he covers blanket absolution from all doubt about his integrity? (The kind who invented “accountability journalism,” ironically enough.)
The tone of the parenthetical is oddly defensive. Maybe Fournier is just trying to protect himself from the sort of attacks leftist ideologues have waged against Woodward. (If so, good luck with that.) But if there’s no reason to doubt Obama’s integrity, why does Fournier need to say it so categorically and emphatically? Jimmy Carter never had to declare, “I am not a crook” (though CNN reports Obama said today, “I am not a dictator”). It’s as if it requires an exertion for Fournier to convincehimself not to doubt Obama’s integrity.
The closing paragraph of Fournier’s column bolsters this hypothesis:
This can’t be what Obama wants. He must not know how thin-skinned and close-minded his staff can be to criticism. “I have the greatest respect and admiration for what you do,” Obama told reporters a year ago. “I know sometimes you like to give me a hard time, and I certainly like to return the favor, but I never forget that our country depends on you.”
That sounds like the kind of rationalization one invents to sustain a bad romance–specifically, a romance in which one is head over heels with an ambivalent or indifferent partner: I’m sure he doesn’t mean to hurt me. He once told me he has great respect and admiration for me.
And it’s not just Fournier. Here’s what Woodward had to say In his CNN interview:
I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication’s strategy–let’s hope it’s not a strategy, that it’s a tactic that somebody’s employed–and said, look, we don’t go around trying to say to reporters, “If you, in an honest way, present something we don’t like, that, you know, you’re going to regret this.”
If only Barack knew . . . Try to imagine Woodward saying the same thing about Nixon–or about any other president from Gerald Ford to George W. Bush. What Woodward, Fournier and more than a few other Washington journalists ought to regret is the degree to which they have allowed themselves to become personally attached to the presidency of Barack Obama.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
