Guess Who Doesn’t Like the Press

As Obama cut into his butter-soaked waffle–fork in his left hand, knife in his right–one newshound wanted the candidate’s reaction to the news of the day. Former President Jimmy Carter had traveled to the Middle East to meet with leaders from Hamas. In an exchange during one of the primary debates, Obama had promised that his administration would seek to engage America’s enemies–a position that Hillary Clinton had called “naïve” and “irresponsible.”

“Senator, did you hear about Jimmy Carter’s trip?”

“Why is it that I can’t just eat my waffle?” Obama snapped with his mouth full. One reporter at the diner wrote that the candidate glared “sternly” at the questioner–the wrong kind of audacity, apparently.

“Just asking,” said the reporter.

Obama, perhaps realizing how his reaction might look, offered a little smile. But he still refused to answer.

“Just let me eat my waffle.”

Obama finished his breakfast, lost the Pennsylvania primary, won the Democratic nomination, and after riding a wave of media adulation unseen in recent times, is now less than a month from becoming our 44th president. And he still doesn’t like the press.

At a press conference in Chicago on Wednesday to introduce Obama’s longtime friend Arne Duncan as the nominee to be secretary of education, John McCormick, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, asked Obama a two-part question about the fallout from the arrest of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. “First of all, .  .  . do you favor or oppose a special election to fill your vacancy?” McCormick asked. “And secondly, you told us at your first press conference after the election that you were going to take a very hands-off approach to filling that spot. Over the weekend, the Tribune reported that Rahm Emanuel, your incoming chief of staff, had presented a list of potential names .  .  .”

Obama had heard enough. “John, let me just cut you off, because I don’t want you to waste your question. As I indicated yesterday, we’ve done a full review of this. The–the facts are going to be released next week. It would be inappropriate for me to comment, because the–the–for example, the–the story that you just talked about in your own paper, I haven’t confirmed that it was accurate, and I don’t want to get into the details at this point. So do you have another question?”

McCormick tried once again to ask Obama about his “hands-off” approach to filling the seat, and Obama once again refused to discuss it. So McCormick tried to get an answer on the special election. It didn’t work. “You know,” said Obama, “I’ve said that I don’t think the governor can serve effectively in his office. I’m going to let the state legislature make a determination in terms of how they want to proceed.”

Having tried gamely to get the president-elect to answer one of his questions, McCormick gave up. “Do you or Duncan have a better jump shot?” he wondered.

“Duncan, much better. That one’s an easy one.”

It was easily the most direct response Obama gave in any of his five press conferences last week, and it was probably the most direct response he has given since winning the presidential election on November 4.

Barack Obama has promised to run the most transparent White House in history. As he said throughout the campaign, this election was about us, not him. So it makes some sense that he would let us see what we will be doing. The president-elect has held a record number of press conferences, and quite naturally he has earned lavish public praise for the frequency of his appearances.

But take the time to look at what he has actually said in these engagements and you will be less impressed.

At his first press conference, three days after the election, he backed some kind of stimulus package and artfully dodged several tough questions. CNN’s Candy Crowley, for instance, noted that Obama had begun receiving intelligence briefings and asked whether he thought the intelligence agencies were doing a good job sharing information. “I have received intelligence briefings. And I will make just a general statement. Our intelligence process can always improve. I think it has gotten better. And, you know, beyond that, I don’t think I should comment on the nature of the intelligence briefings.” Crowley also asked whether he’d learned anything in his briefings that gave him second thoughts about any of the policies he advocated during the campaign. “I’m going to skip that.” (Obama did talk at some length about buying a dog for his daughters.)

Obama’s second press conference focused on the economy. The president-elect had come out in favor of some kind of stimulus package–something he hoped would pass “either before or after inauguration.” Reporters, not unreasonably, wanted a little better idea of what he actually wanted. So the first question was: “What are the details on your proposed stimulus package: how much it’s going to cost, where the money’s going to come from, and when do you want to see it enacted?”

Obama said he wanted it quickly but was short on specifics. “I want to see it enacted right away. It is going to be of a size and scope that is necessary to get this economy back on track. I don’t want to get into numbers right now.”

Another reporter wanted to know whether he intended to repeal the Bush tax cuts or simply let them expire at the end of 2010. Obama offered some of the platitudes leftover from his campaign and then deferred his answer. “Whether that’s done through repeal or whether that’s done because the Bush tax cuts are not renewed is something that my economic team will be providing me a recommendation on.”

A third reporter noted that Senator Schumer had suggested a $700 billion stimulus package and pointed out that a noted investor thought $1 trillion would be better. She asked Obama for a range. “I’m not going to–I’m not going to discuss numbers right now, Kim, because I think it’s important for my economic team to come back with a recommendation.”

And on it went. At press conference after press conference, Obama introduced his new appointees and took a few questions. But only rarely did he give a direct and substantive answer.

To a certain extent, Obama’s reluctance to answer is understandable. After all, as he put it in the opening statement of his initial press conference as president-elect: “The United States has only one government and one president at a time.” He is right, of course, and it’s smart–or at least defensible–for him to pass on questions that might make the current president’s job more difficult.

But Obama seems to get annoyed at perfectly reasonable questions that have nothing at all to do with his one-president-at-a-time position. When the president-elect introduced Hillary Clinton as his choice to become secretary of state, Peter Baker from the New York Times asked him an obvious question. Noting that Obama had mocked Clinton’s foreign policy experience during primary season, Baker wondered why he had settled on her to lead his administration’s foreign policy team.

The president-elect suggested that those things he said during the campaign might not be all that reliable. “I think if you look at the statements that Hillary Clinton and I have made outside of the–the heat of a campaign, we share a view that America has to be safe and secure and in order to do that we have to combine military power with strengthened diplomacy.”

He finished with a testy statement of the obvious. “I think she is going to be an outstanding secretary of state. And if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t have offered her the job. And if she didn’t believe that I was equipped to lead this nation at such a difficult time, she would not have accepted. Okay?”

In a New York Times Magazine profile of Robert Gibbs, the incoming White House press secretary, Mark Leibovich reveals that the Obama campaign emulated the “Bush model” of tight information control. Campaign manager David Plouffe acknowledged that they “talked a lot about the Bush model” inside the campaign and, like the Bush White House, sought to limit the spread of information internally so as to avoid the leaking that badly damaged the campaigns of Obama’s rivals.

There are other similarities. During the 2004 election, Dick Cheney famously kicked the New York Times off his campaign plane. Obama apparently did the same to three newspapers this fall–the Washington Times, the New York Post, and the Dallas Morning News–all of which had endorsed John McCain. At the time, the Obama campaign cited space concerns. But when Leibovich asked Gibbs whether reporters were kicked off the plane for considerations other than space, Obama’s spokesman first said “no” but later amended his response. “On occasion, yes,” Gibbs said, adding that such instances were infrequent. “I mean, were there occasions? Sure.”

How does that square with Obama’s promise to move beyond politics and to run the most transparent and open White House in history?

Just let him eat his waffle.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.