By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
We don’t really know our political leaders. What we know is an image designed for them by public relations teams. When they speak during television interviews, we get sound bites packaged for them on the basis of poll results. Watch Nancy Pelosi during an interview. She gives it away. When she answers a question, she pauses and her eyes roll upwards, as she seeks to recall the answer that her policy advisers have prepared for her on the topic. She looks like a fifth-grader during a spelling bee trying to remember the spelling of “antediluvian.”
Occasionally though we get an unscripted moment caught on camera that lays bare the real person. We all have our favorite examples. Some might point to the moment when Bill Clinton with shifty eyes struggled to tell us that “it depends on what the meaning of is is,” as he tried to defend himself in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Others might favor Hillary describing Muammar Qadhafi’s killing to an interviewer with the quip, “We came, we saw, he died,” and then giggling like a sorority sister recalling a prank. She came across as immature and shallow, while at the same unsettlingly ruthless. Those who have not seen the incident owe it to themselves to Google it before this fall’s presidential election.
There are some conservatives that can be added to the list. I never felt the same about former Secretary of Education William Bennett after he accused Patrick J. Buchanan of “flirting with fascism” during Buchanan’s run for the Republican nomination for the presidency against George H.W. Bush. I had admired Bennett up until then. Bennett was trying to play political hardball, but it was sleazy. Buchanan didn’t deserve the charge. It is true that the mid 20th-century fascists were economic nationalists, but so were Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. Bennett knew better.
Recently, there were two unscripted moments that confirmed my suspicions about the Obama administration’s willingness to lie for political advantage. It always seemed to me that when Obama appeared on camera to assure us, for example, that the economy is improving, that “if you like your doctor, you can keep him” under Obamacare, that Iran could be trusted not to develop nuclear weapons, that his administration is successfully controlling illegal immigration across our southern border, that ISIS “is the JV team” — that he knew he was not telling the truth.
But it was hard to prove that. Obama sounds earnest when he makes his case. We can’t read minds, or “impute motives,” as they say. As a result, his administration has not suffered the unguarded “gotcha moment” that reveals the truth about them. Until the last few weeks.
The Ben Rhodes admission in his May 5 New York Times interview was the first example. In that interview Rhodes spoke candidly — some would say smugly — of how he was able to take advantage of the political naiveté of the Washington press corps to spread false information about the administration’s arms deal with Iran.
Rhodes called the reporters “27-year-olds who know nothing about foreign policy.” His goal was to manipulate them to build support for the deal the Obama team was negotiating by spreading the false narrative that it was necessary to strike an agreement with Iran, because new elections in 2013 had brought moderates to power whom we could trust to negotiate honestly for the purpose of ending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
It wasn’t true. The Obama team had been negotiating the arms deal as far back as 2012, and the newly elected Iranian leaders were far from moderate and trustworthy. The Iranian leader Rhodes was referring to, Hassan Rouhani, was chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
None of that mattered to Rhodes. His goal was to secure a nonproliferation treaty. Whether it was a sound treaty did not matter as much as enhancing the legacy of the Obama administration. Rhodes — and we must assume the president as well, since Rhodes does his bidding — was confident that he could spin the “27-year-olds” in the press to spread the deception with the American public.
And then, just a few weeks after the Times’ story about Rhodes hit the newsstands, in one of those curious coincidences that happen every now and then, three other Obama advisers, young men who appeared to be in their 30s, appeared on the Charlie Rose show on PBS to discuss their roles as speechwriters for the president.
One of Obama’s advisers, speechwriter Jon Lovett, was telling Rose that he was most proud of the serious speeches he worked on — “health care, economic speeches.” That led fellow speechwriter Jon Favreau to interject that Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.” Lovett then shot back, “How dare you!” — causing the roundtable, including Rose, to erupt in a fit of laughter.
They knew that large numbers of Americans lost their health insurance as Obamacare went into effect. It was hard not to get the impression that, like Ben Rhodes, they didn’t care about the effect of Obama’s policies, as much as packaging them as a success for public perception. Truth did not matter; a con job was being sold to the public. They were proud of their role in the deception. And Rose seemed to admire them for it.
It reminded me of when Obama smirked and chuckled about how the “shovel-ready jobs” he promised to fund with his economic stimulus package “turned out to be not so shovel-ready.”
Is it a coincidence that Obama has surrounded himself with these smug 30-somethings, or a calculated strategy? And, if it is a strategy, what is the strategy? To assemble a cohort of apple-polishing young people without principles who will do the president’s bidding? And is the strategy something that Obama concocts on his own? That seems unlikely. Someone had to convince him that the Iranian leaders could be trusted, that there were shovel-ready jobs awaiting his initiative, that his health-care plan would work as promised. Who is that someone?
Or does Obama simply plow ahead on his own, on the basis of his left-wing beliefs that socialized medicine and a planned economy will work, and that Third World leaders can be trusted in refashioning the world arena with a diminished American presence?
It could be the latter. One need not be bright and well-informed to be full of oneself.
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