When it comes to the Grand Canyon-sized distance between candidate Obama’s C-Span promises and his administration’s decidedly more aphasic approach, as Byron York writes, the White House chooses to hide the decline:
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs declined to answer questions about the president’s campaign commitment to hold health-care negotiations on C-Span. Gibbs said he had not seen a letter from C-Span’s Brian Lamb to congressional leaders requesting the coverage and thus could not comment on it.
On Wednesday, Gibbs was asked again about the C-Span commitment. The story had gotten pretty big in the intervening time, and presumably Gibbs had had a chance to familiarize himself with it. So reporters tried for a second day to get him to comment on the president’s commitment to holding televised health-care talks. Gibbs’ answer? “We covered this yesterday.” Gibbs referred reporters to the transcript of Tuesday’s briefing and said, “The answer I would give today is similar.”
AdvertisementBut of course, he hadn’t answered the question at all. Here is the transcript from the Tuesday briefing:
QUESTION: C-Span television is requesting leaders in Congress to open up the debate to their cameras, and I know this is something that the President talked about on the campaign trail. Is this something that he supports, will be pushing for?
GIBBS: I have not seen that letter. I know the President is going to begin some discussions later today on health care in order to try to iron out the differences that remain between the House and the Senate bill and try to get something hopefully to his desk quite quickly….
Later in that same briefing, a reporter raised the C-Span issue again:
[Long transcript of Gibbs' endless Ron Ziegler meets Joe Lockhart-style dissembling in response to multiple journalists' questions on this topic, snipped -- Ed]
And that was the end of that. If the public wants to know why President Obama didn’t keep his pledge to hold televised health-care negotiations, they’ll have to look for answers elsewhere. The White House isn’t talking.
And why should they? They’re obviously betting that the press corps won’t pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize this topic as they did President Bush on:
- Hurricane Katrina
- Abu Ghraib
- Cindy Sheehan
- The Dubai Ports Deal
- And numerous other stories and non-stories
Is that a safe bet for the Obama administration to make? Given the worshipful treatment they’ve gotten from their fellow Democrats in the MSM, probably. Or it could be Obama’s “Read My Lips” moment, even if the legacy media chooses not to awaken from its slumber.
That’s how it works now. Even when the press decides to do its job … it doesn’t do its job to completion. The reporters, stymied by Gibbs’ non-answer, will simply move on.
Frankly, I’m surprised the reporters asked the question in the first place.
Read my lips? The Russians could occupy the West Coast, the Japanese Hawaii, and the the Brits do an 1812 War encore and burn Washington and the press is not going to turn on the first black, transformative, unprecedented president.
Abu Ghraib, Cindy Sheehan, Katrina! Piffle! Mere bagatelles! Remember embryonic stem cells? Christopher Reeve would be winning the Boston Marathon, Michael J. Fox the gold medal for synchronized swimming, and amputees the world over would have new limbs were it not for one man: George W. Bush!
The Dubai ports deal is a very bad example, Ed.
I dont see why they wont let the cameras in,everybody covered the beer summit!
Andrew Breitbart has opened a new site called Big Journalism.
It is abundantly clear that this administration has full faith and confidence that their ambush legislation will be met with the expected BJ response they otherwise receive daily, why…it makes one’s leg tingle just thinking about it.
Here’s a hint to the White House, and both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi — If they try to get into a demonization media public relations battle with Brian Lamb, they are going to lose. As liberal as the media is, the D.C. correspondents’ wonkishness outstrips whatever fidelity they have to Barack, Harry or Nancy, and Lamb has three decades of non-partisanship on his side as head of C-SPAN. Given a choice of who to believe, all but the most liberal media outlets (hello, MSNBC) are going to be on C-SPAN’s side in this dispute, as the past two days’ news conferences with Robert Gibbs has shown.