Ben Rhodes, one of President Obama’s top foreign policy strategists and chief media spinner, said Tuesday that he has no intention of leaving his post, as many Republicans want, despite the blow up he created when he boasted of creating an “echo-chamber” in Washington to sell the Iran nuclear agreement.
Rhodes on Tuesday declined to say whether he regrets the interview with the New York Times magazine in which he made the comments, but instead gave a long-winded response and indicated he would remain in his post until the very end of Obama’s presidency.
“I will not, um, Monday morning quarterback every article I’ve been a party to,” Rhodes told a forum at the Center for a New American Security, where he had just delivered a speech on the president’s Asia and Burma policy.
Rhodes made the remarks at the very end of a question-and-answer session filled with queries from the Asian press about the president’s upcoming trip to Japan and Vietnam.
The moderator for that discussion, Kurt Campbell, a co-founder and current chairman of CNAS’ board of directors, several times before the Q&A began admonished the crowd to only ask “respectful” questions of Rhodes and then allow his staff to quickly leave out the back door without trying to detain him.
But instead of trying to escape the forum without answering a question about the New York Times interview and the surrounding controversy, Rhodes appeared to want to respond. He urged Campbell to take more questions until a reporter from the British tabloid, the Guardian, asked whether he regrets agreeing to the New York Times interview.
In alluding to the Q&A that would take place afterwards, he joked, “Who knows – there are other things that people might be interested in about me.”
Republicans have called on Rhodes to resign, and were pushing for him to testify at a House hearing Tuesday morning, but Rhodes skipped it after the White House said he wouldn’t be made available in order to preserve the “independence and autonomy” of the president.
The White House over the past week has made clear that Obama still has faith in Rhodes and has no intention of forcing him out.
At CNAS, Rhodes mostly avoided delving into whether or not he had misled the media to create a false narrative on the Iran deal. Instead, he thanked his close colleagues who have supported him throughout the blow-up.
“I will say that, y’know, when things like this happen, that’s part of what happens in Washington,” he said. “The people who know me know what I care about and how I approach issues and know what motivates me in this job.”
Rhodes expressed a deep appreciation for his White House tenure and his ability to make an impact on what he characterized as policy that affects the lives of individual people, whether that be through the administration’s Burma policy or through the Iran deal.
“What motivates me in this job is what I talked about today … I’m very excited about the things I can do when I leave public service, but you don’t have the ability to participate – not lead, the president leads – but participate in things that will have a positive difference in peoples’ lives,” he said.
Rhodes went on to describe a dinner he had in Burma and his experience meeting a woman whose husband had been arrested because of a Facebook post he wrote that was critical of the government.
“She had a very quiet but fierce dignity,” he said, noting that she hadn’t been in touch with her husband but still wanted to know what U.S. officials could do to help to make their elections fairer.
“That’s who Americans should be focused on, and that’s why I will keep coming to work until the very last day of this administration… and then I will go on vacation,” he said.
