Your Daily Blago

by digby

The press seems to have decided on one of the subplots to the Blago storyline: Obama didn’t adequately answer the press’s “questions” (and treated them very badly in their estimation) resulting in Obama failing the most important test of any presidency — scandal management. Of course, there’s no way for him to have passed the test, but that’s beside the point.

Random MSNBC Host: The story’s still alive, it may be because it’s the holidays, but it also calls into question how they do crisis management and just what was going on back then in Illinois.

And while most Republicans are following Newtie’s unctuous talking points and slobbering all over Obama as if he’s the second coming of Ronald Reagan, there are some who can’t help but blurt out their fondest hopes and dreams:

Republican strategist Ben Porrit: Well if you look back to 2005 when a scandal plagued the Bush administration you could look at one parallel and that is that president Bush and president elect Obama had an electoral mandate to govern and this negatively affects their ability to do that. This is ammunition for critics and political opponents where they raise speculation and try to crystallize conspiracy theories into facts. When you live in a age where your ability to govern is affected by every political poll that comes out, there’s certainly going to be some negative connotations to this and his ability to effectively implement his agenda.

I assume the scandal he speaks of is Plame, but it could be any number of things, depending on how you define scandal. but the man inadvertantly committed honesty. If they can make that happen, they will be very happy.

On CNN this morning Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorff actually had to explain how this scandal is different than the Ken Starr investigations that led to Clinton’s impeachment. (He wasn’t very convincing.) We are 25 days from Obama’s inauguration.

Blagojevich’s lawyer said today that he wants the impeachment committee (or whatever it’s called) to subpoena Rahm, Jarret and others. Oy. But you can’t blame him. After all, they will supposedly say that there were no discussions of quid pro quos. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald will probably fight it to preserve his case.

And it all adds up to the gasbags continuing to bloviate and speculate. And their daily bloviation and speculation will be seen as further proof that Obama is terrible at crisis management.

.