It’s Over When We Say It’s Over
by digby
I know you’re all as excited as the news media is to hear all about the Obama transition team’s internal review this afternoon, but in case you aren’t able to drop everything and catch it live, let me just tell you what’s going to happen and you can continue with your holiday preparations or last minute work responsibilities.
The report will say that the Obama teams contacts with Blogojevich were all perfectly normal discussions about the possible replacements for Obama’s senate seat and included no quid pro quos or any other kind of inappropriate or illegal compensation. supBut … even though last week they had huge hissy fit over the fact that the Obama team delayed the release of this posedly vital document, the press corps will shrug its shoulders at the results saying that the report is meaningless because it’s an internal document which is now, by definition, unreliable and useless. They will intone very seriously that this story “will not go away” until the prosecutor weighs in.
And when and if the prosecutor weighs in, they will draw the distinction between “illegal” and “wrong” the latter of which they will define for us any number of ways. My favorite in this particular scandal is the AB Stoddard approach: if Rahm didn’t report all his conversations, regardless of their content, to the Depratment of Justice, he is guilty of “bad judgment” the most elastic of all media indictments, and often the most useful (“He may not have done anything illegal, unethical or inappropriate, but it showed bad judgment.”) Another good one is “it has the appearance of impropriety” — which is worse than actual impropriety because it showed (you guessed it) bad judgment.
Here’s Ed Henry from CNN:
Again, this is an internal investigation from team Obama, so it’s not likely to be the final word is likely to come from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. But we need to stress that so far he’s given no indication whatsoever that there was any wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise in the president elect’s world so I think what this is more about is political exposure rather than legal exposure. Team Obama is eager to turn the page so they’re not associated with any of this pay-to-play politics back in Chicago that sort of contradict the message of change we’ve heard so much of from Barack Obama.
This story is over when the press corps says it’s over and not a minute sooner. It’s possible that they will let it go as a sort of honeymoon present, but the minute some other vague “corruption” story comes along (or they can find a way to tie in Rezko, Blago and —God willing — a prostitute or something) they’ll be right back here.
The best thing Obama has going for him is the fact that Fitzgerald does not leak. That’s a real pity for the scandal mongers — if they had a Ken Starr type, we’d be hearing all sorts of delicious little, out of context tid-bits being dribbled out at opportune moments to make Obama look bad. So they will fall back on their other method to keep these stories simmering —- endless, groundless speculation about what “could” have happened, which will, over time, color everyone’s perception until they assume that at least some of it must be true or it wouldn’t have garnered all this interest. (There’s a lot of important gossip reporters can’t talk about publicly, dontcha know.)
Now would be a really good time to read Gene Lyons and Joe Conason’s The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton
It’s not to say that things will unfold exactly the same way. Nothing ever does. But, as much as I am skeptical of the press corps, I have to admit that I’ve ben gobsmacked to see how closely they’ve been following the playbook with this Blago scandal. (Somerby is too.) Even I, in all my cynicism, didn’t expect them to fall back into their old patterns quite so cleanly. It’s as if they are on autopilot.
Obama is not Clinton and has many attributes that make him a different sort of subject. The political balance of power is far different as well. However, the same problems exist over the long term. As Lyons and Conason so brilliantly showed, the biggest problem (aside from the vast right wing conspiracy, which certainly did exist) was the media’s fascination with an exotic political culture they didn’t really understand and which took them for a ride.
There are quite a few of these exotic political cultures in America and Chicago is one of them. (I would say that Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among them. There are others I’m sure.) Some places just generate strange political stories that leave the media open to all kinds of manipulation from those in the know — they are both naive and intrigued and that’s a very dangerous thing for any national politician.
Obama partisans want desperately to just ignore this thing, pointing to polls that say that none of it is having any effect on his popularity (even though nearly half think his team did something either unethical or illegal.) .Well, polls don’t tell the tale. Clinton remained very popular throughout his ordeal and it didn’t stop them. This is about Village power and if the public isn’t in tune with them, they will fight all the harder to convince them. It’s the worst kind of Catch 22 for a president.
And if you think it can’t limit his ability to get things done, you’re wrong. It’s a distraction and potentially a serious erosion of political capital. It needs to be aggressively challenged by all those who agree that the unelected members of the press shouldn’t be dictating the political agenda in this country. If the right gets its act together and cranks up the old noise machine to just the right pitch and the press continue to party like it’s 1997, we will have a problem on our hands that we just can’t afford.
I always thought that the Clinton scandals were a terrible indulgence that could only be afforded by a country that was living in a time of peace and prosperity. After the last couple of weeks, I’m not convinced that’s true anymore and if I’m right, the consequences could really be awful.
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