Why is our White House just so entirely political?
On the eve of the first election of the Obama era, the Washington Post ran a long profile Monday of the White House’s “low-profile” political director, Patrick Gaspard. It was an unremarkable story filled with unremarkable tidbits about how the unassuming Gaspard has thrived in a West Wing filled with political heavies–save for one quote from Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina that caught my eye. Explaining what sets Gaspard apart from his White House peers, Messina said, “We are all campaign hacks. Patrick is a movement guy. He really came up through the movement and the grassroots.”
This was meant to be an innocuous bit of inside baseball touting Gaspard’s labor roots and progressive bona fides. But it wound up revealing the Obama White House’s biggest weakness: The president’s top advisers are not just overly political, they are almost totally political. Indeed, this West Wing is stacked with “hacks”–campaign professionals who are acculturated to think, act and win in the hothouse environments of elections, not to govern a bitterly divided country in extremely difficult times.
And so they continue to blame Bush and declare war on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News – its not that they think its the best thing to do, but that its the only thing they know how to do. Past masters at the art of spinning a news cycle, they fail at everything else because campaigning and governing are two very different skill sets – and thus Presidents usually have clearly delineated political and government staffs.
You see, all that campaign rhetoric about bringing us all together was just that – campaign rhetoric. And when the time comes for Obama to become the uniter, these people won’t skip a beat and Obama will suddenly start talking about bridging our differences and working together. Right now, that’s not on the political agenda because it doesn’t fit in with the current need to placate the leftwing base prior to shutting them up in the run-up to 2010.
A horrible government run by people who create and hammer home talking points – that is all we’ve got.
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