The political director of the ABC-affiliate station in New Hampshire used his downtime waiting for a scheduled interview with President Obama Monday to write a first-person essay on what it’s like for the White House to try to use him and other local reporters to target vulnerable GOP senators in their home states.
The White House invited WMUR’s Josh McElveen as one of six local anchors from around the country to come to Washington Monday to interview Obama on the Senate Republicans’ decision to block consideration of Merrick Garland, his choice to fill the Supreme Court vacancy.
It was his second invitation to “one of these scrums,” he wrote, and quickly realized that it wasn’t because of his “sparkling personality and quick wit.”
As he gazed around the White House Map Room, where the other local reporters were assembled for an off-the-record morning discussion with presidential press secretary Josh Earnest, he noticed that every reporter was from a state in which an incumbent Senate Republican is up for re-election.
“In New Hampshire, of course, that is Kelly Ayotte,” he wrote.
He then provided a sarcastic day-in-the-life riff of a local reporter called to the White House for an interview opportunity with the president that many members of the White House press corps never have.
The morning off-the-record discussion with Earnest, who he says “seems like a pretty sharp cat” starts off with a question about process, which he said was “dull enough to tune out” so he could get a Twitter fix and send out a pic of the meeting.
He also readily denigrates his local media colleagues’ “wide-eyed” reaction to White House staff face time, noting that it’s Earnest “gig” to take question from the media every day and “there’s no heavy lifting in this room.”
“Earnest concedes that the motivation for the invite is to highlight the stonewalling by Senate Republicans to consider Garland,” McElveen writes.
He then calls the talk “with a couple of White House insiders” “enjoyable” and said Earnest and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough seemed “pretty down-to-earth.”
The next session featured another off-the-record discussion with senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and Brian Deese, as well as White House counsel Neil Eggleston, who were there to talk about Garland specifically.
After that “quick briefing,” McElveen asked how much consideration went into picking a nominee who appealed to the GOP after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other Republicans had already said they would refuse to consider anyone.
“These aren’t newbies to the game, though, and despite a quick smile that seemed to indicate that she knew the gist of the question, Jarrett responded by saying their mandate was to find the best candidate possible,” he wrote. “I asked how quickly Garland’s name came up and she said ‘Immediately.'”
After more “wonky questions” from his fellow local reporters, McElveen had had enough and he ducked out with his “camera guy, Danny Ryan, to go grab coffee.”
He said Earnest then suggested he come to the regular White House briefing with the rest of the White House press corps so he could ask his question again in front of the other reporters and for the C-SPAN cameras.
McElveen happily complied. Within an hour of posting the story, Republicans on Capitol Hill were circulating it to the White House press corps, seemingly as evidence of the obvious reasons the local anchors were selected.
The email of the story, sent from GOP aides, highlighted this line: “The fact is, every reporter in this White House holding room (they call it the Map Room) is from a state in which an incumbent Senate Republican is up for re-election.”
Obama’s interviews with the six local reporters is part of a new push to try to embarrass Republicans for blocking Garland. The latest effort, which Democrats are calling the 9-9-9 campaign, will blitz the states of nine Republican senators for nine days to fill the ninth seat on the high court.
The groups plan to have a mobile billboard campaign circling outside senators’ town halls and campaign events over the next week when the Senate is in recess.
In addition, the mobile billboards will be driving around the neighborhoods where the senators live and their district offices, and the groups will hold press events, some with nurses and janitors saying they’d be fired if they didn’t show up to work and do their jobs, according to a Politico report.
Republicans are dismissing the effort as an act of desperation. A spokeswoman for Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, one of the Republicans targeted, called the 9-9-9 push just another stunt that will likely fall flat.
“Despite [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid spouting lies and misinformation on the Senate floor and airplanes flying banners, it’s clear that the push by the White House and its liberal activist groups is fizzling and hasn’t made a dent in the desire to give the American people a voice in the direction of the Supreme Court,” Grassley’s spokeswoman Beth Levine told the Washington Examiner Friday.
Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, said the 9-9-9 plan is “really a desperate 9-1-1 call by liberals who will say and do anything to create the most liberal Supreme Court majority in decades.”
“A Supreme Court with Garland would roll back our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, harm small businesses by empowering unaccountable bureaucrats at agencies like the EPA, and legalize partial birth abortion,” she said.
