Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” slapped White House secrecy and said that smart people don’t run for Congress anymore.
“I think the collective IQ of Congress goes down every two years because smart people look at it and say, ‘Why do I want to do this?’” he said on Ora.tv’s “PoliticKING with Larry King.”
Asked about reports that the Obama White House is the most secretive ever, he told King, “It’s more — yes. I would say it’s more secretive. You want to use secretive — I’d say more insular, but you know what? When it comes to the media management, this is a — I would say this is a bipartisan trend. Each presidency basically takes whatever the maximum the previous one got away with when it comes to press management, or access, and then tries to grab a little bit more turf in each one, and each one has a new tool to give them easier access to grab that turf. In the president’s case, it’s social media.”
The duo covered several issues, but Todd was especially talkative and harsh on Congress and the money involved in winning a seat and the need for candidates to find rich friends.
“If you’re a candidate, Larry, and you want to run for office, you’ve got to suddenly not just see if you’ve got enough friends to write you checks that’ll add up to a couple of million dollars. You have to find out if you have a sugar daddy or sugar mommy that can write you a check for a billion dollars or knows people that can accumulate a billion dollars. Oh by the way, what you want to run on, you might not be able to run on because some outside group may decide they’re going to make your campaign about issue X even if you want to talk about issue Y.
“I think this whole process — it’s the money. It’s media, social media, opposition research, the destructive nature of American discourse—is you have an accumulating effect that drives good people from running for office …”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
