For a guy who’s been cast to play the “dean” of NBC commentators (a list which now includes such notables as law-breaking David Gregory, anti-Semitic rabble-rouser Al Sharpton, the calm, milquetoast Alec Baldwin and scat-prØn aficionado Martin Bashir), Tom Brokaw sure knows how to play clueless when his job requires it:
GREGORY: “Tom Brokaw, is this a low point of the presidency?”
BROKAW: “Well, there have been several low points, but this is certainly a low point at a critical time, coming into the 2014 elections, and a lot of Democrats beginning to bail on the idea of Obamacare. What was striking to me about that statement, ‘We should have been aware.’ I would think, given the importance of Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act, eight months ago the president would have started every meeting with, “How are we doing? Is that going to be ready? That’s going to be our big play for the second term,” and demanding from Kathy Sebelius and other people who are involved in it that they were ready. And sending people over there to take a look at the rollout. That it suddenly landed the way that it did, in utter chaos, and it’s not going to be an easy fix, is just inexplicable.“
Inexplicable, you guys.
As Bryan Preston asks at the PJ Tatler, was this debacle really “inexplicable?”
Millions of Americans saw this train-wreck coming years ago. We saw it in Obama’s lack of experience. He wasn’t ready for the job, and nothing in his past suggested that he was. We saw it on what the Democrats were doing and how they were doing it.
Obama and his media allies smeared us.
Even Barack Obama telegraphed that his signature program probably wouldn’t hit without being a significant mess. Roll tape on this clip from the 2008 presidential debates.
Click over to Bryan’s post to watch Obama as presidential candidate warn potential voters in the beginning of 2008 that “I ask my staff never to hand me paper until two seconds before I need it because I will loose it. My desk in my office doesn’t look good. I’ve got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff. And that’s not trivial, I need to have good people in place who can make sure systems run.”
But you admit to journalists that you think you’re smarter than all your staffers — and Valerie is quick to remind them as well — which is why they’d rather keep their mouths shut, collect a fat paycheck, and then watch the president crash and burn, rather than suggest that the clothes have no emperor — which conservatives also warned voters in 2008.
Ten months after Mr. Obama admitted how disorganized he is, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose pretended that their own news departments had utterly failed both them and millions of American voters, and that they had no idea — not a clue! — what was going on inside the head of the man whose path to victory they had greased:
CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.
TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.
ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.
BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?
BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.
ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.
BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.
ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.
And even more that they were weren’t willing to ask, lest the American public find out what a bill of goods the networks had sold them.
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Perhaps what’s most mystifying about this process, is that given how clueless NBC journalists can act, why aren’t their ratings even lower?
Related: Time-Warner-CNN-HBO’s Gloria Borger also pretends to be clueless about how the Obamacare Website cluster-SCOAMF occurred.
At PJM, Tom Blumer proffers “Three of Many Lessons from Obamacare’s Failed Rollout,” adding that “In this administration, they’re destined to go unlearned,” along with this administration’s palace guard media, as well.
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