STILL FOOLS FOR SCANDAL….Peter Baker writes today that Barack Obama and his team have learned a lesson from the scandal-driven “moral jihad” of the Clinton presidency:
Even though Mr. Obama had no known personal involvement, the Clinton veterans understood that was only part of the issue. They had Mr. Obama publicly declare he had never spoken with Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich about the Senate appointment. They imposed a cone of silence on colleagues so they would not make a remark that could come back to haunt them. And they ordered an internal inquiry to document any contacts with the governor’s advisers.
Republicans were ready to pounce, rushing out statements linking Mr. Obama to Mr. Blagojevich within an hour or so after the governor’s arrest was reported. They too knew the script and that any opening must be exploited. Politics in this hyperpartisan age, after all, is the ultimate contact sport.
All well and good, but it’s a little odd that Baker leaves out the role of the press in all this. I’ll let Bob Somerby do the heavy lifting here, but I’ve lost count of the number of op-eds and TV talking head segments over the past week that have started out with something like this: “There’s no evidence that Barack Obama was involved in Rod Blagojevich’s pay-to-play scheme — in fact just the opposite — but….” After the “but,” we get a couple thousand words with some take or another on why this is casting a “lengthening shadow” over Obama even though there’s precisely zero evidence that he had even a tangential involvement in the whole thing.
Look, I get it: it was kind of a slow news week, reporters are tired of Obama the Savior stories, the Blagojevich scandal is theatrically sexy, and everyone is desperately trying to find a way to turn it from a local story to a national one. But there’s no there there. Maybe Republicans still haven’t learned their lesson from the 90s, but that’s no reason the press has to follow them over a cliff once again. Cool it, folks.
