Village fanboys on parade
by digby
On the president asking them to the White House for off the record “chats”
The facts are off-the-record, but the sentiment is not,” Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent, said of the meetings. “When you know how the president thinks about something, when you understand his point of view, how do you avoid talking about it?” Todd said. “It’s in your head.”
“He sees columnists as portals,” another journalist who has attended meetings said. “It works — I feel it work with me. It’s almost impossible to spend hours face-to-face with the president, unfiltered, then write a column or go on television without taking his point of view into account.”
Read the whole thing for a good laugh. If you want to know how the Village works in a Democratic administration it’s all spelled out for you.
“I’m not going to deny that we hope this informs people’s reporting — the point is to have a good discussion, but also to deepen their understanding of our perspective,” the source familiar with the president’s thinking said.
Yes, I’m sure it deepens something. Get a load of this pile of fanboy bullshit:
“The confidence he exudes in these sessions is even greater than the confidence he exudes in public,” one attendee said. “And, as in public, it’s the president who does most of the talking.”
Still, no one doubts that the president values hearing the thoughts and opinions of his contemporaries.
“The president cares a lot more about the opinions of Fred Hiatt or Tom Friedman than he does about the average U.S. Senator,” said one journalist. “He’s naturally predisposed to analysis. In his own mind, that’s what he is: he’s like us. He wants to be a writer, and so he likes to talk to writers.”
Oooh baby. He’s so very … mmmm … confident. And he loves them. He really, really loves them.
* Not one woman mentioned in this article by the way. Not that there are very many of them working for the op-ed pages, but still, you’d think he would at least invite Ruth Marcus. She’s as good a centrist know-nothing as Tom Friedman any day …
.