Like the discovery of gambling in “Casablanca,” the mainstream media is shocked, shocked! to learn there is chaos and back-stabbing in the Obama White House. The media missed the story for the same reason Capt. Renault missed gambling at Rick’s Cafe: They chose to.
A cash kickback did the trick in the film. In real life, the Washington pack turns away from the truth for something less forgivable.
Three years after President Obama took office, much of the national press corps remains remarkably uncurious about what has gone wrong inside the land of Hope & Change. Whether still mesmerized by hypnotic chants of “Yes we can” or afraid to risk access by asking unpleasant questions, the press largely has failed to pierce the secrecy surrounding all the president’s men, their conflicts and policies.
It is a shameful dereliction, given that the Great Recession has left 25 million Americans out of work or looking for a full-time job, and the national debt has reached 100 percent of GDP. To state the obvious, no Republican president ever enjoyed a similar lack of scrutiny during a national emergency.
Consider that nearly all of Obama’s economic team left in stunningly short order, yet no newspaper, magazine or broadcast news show connected the dots. Only author Ron Suskind late last year exposed the incompetence and bitter tensions behind the failed policies the team produced.
Suskind’s “Confidence Men” showed that Obama’s lack of experience and overconfidence created a mash-up of male egos that caused top female staffers to complain their views were not taken seriously. Suskind also showed how Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored harebrained Obama decisions that would have rocked the financial world, such as effectively nationalizing Citibank.
The book made news for a few days, then members of the press pack who didn’t go back to sleep careened off into reporting weighty matters of state, such as whether Sarah Palin had a one-night stand with a basketball player in 1987.
Recent days have demonstrated the press missed two other big stories, too, proving it is still content with the “scoops” the administration feeds it.
One story involved the “surprising” resignation by White House chief-of-staff Bill Daley a year after taking the job. The decision was surprising only because the press corps ignored signs he was flaming out.
Last November, Daley told insiders he was sharing his duties with another official. Less than three months later, he quits, prompting a flood of inky speculation about a “rare shakeup,” as a headline in The New York Times said.
Nonsense. As Suskind showed with the economic team, and as Daley’s short, turbulent tenure confirms, the “No Drama Obama” facade is just that. It is a public-relations gimmick the media has swallowed.
Daley was brought in to fix Obama’s relations with the business community. But the president decided to wage class warfare, so there was no point in Daley trying to court business leaders, since Obama is running against them.
Another story the sleeping-dog media missed involves the tensions between Michelle Obama and the president’s inner circle. Again, a book breaks the news.
In “The Obamas,” author Jodi Kantor reveals a diva first lady using a senior adviser to the president, Valerie Jarrett, to rail against decisions and people.
Kantor says the president was passive about his wife’s odd behavior, while Rahm Emanuel, the first chief-of-staff, and Robert Gibbs, the first press secretary, pushed back. Gibbs, who cursed out both Jarrett and Michelle Obama, and Emanuel left the administration.
There was no mention in the mainstream media of those conflicts when they resigned, or of Kantor’s disclosure that Emanuel offered to resign earlier, during disputes over health care.
Kantor is a reporter for the Times, yet her groundbreaking work showing Michelle Obama as something other than a fitness-obsessed fashion icon appeared in book form first. Excerpts were published in the Times.
Maybe that’s the New Journalism. If you want real news, wait for the book.
Give us a mulligan on Trump golf deal
You don’t have to Occupy Wall Street to realize that capitalism is too important to be left to capitalists. Consider the deal Donald Trump is ready to sign with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.
The city has spent about $100 million of taxpayer dough to build a first-class golf course on a long-abandoned dump in The Bronx. The brainchild of Rudy Giuliani, the project had an initial tab of $22 million, but it soared, as government projects always do.
After a contract with another developer collapsed, Trump emerged with a bid to manage the course after it is finished next year. The terms the city has tentatively accepted have him paying $10 million to build a clubhouse and, after four years, paying rent that would max out at 10 percent of gross revenues in the 20th year.
The bottom line is that taxpayers are putting up more than 90 percent of costs, and getting back only a fraction of the revenue. That’s the gist of crony capitalism: public risks and private gains.
To add insult, greens fees for city duffers could be as much as triple those on other municipal courses.
Bloomberg, an avid golfer in Bermuda, has defended the deal, saying many golf projects are in trouble. He may be right, but he’ll have to do more to persuade a public that keeps hearing how the city is too broke to hire cops or fix rutted roads.
As they stand, the Trump terms make no sense, either as a commercial venture or as a city service. If the mayor really knows the buck, he’ll get taxpayers a better deal.
Liu’s loose laws
John Liu is a one-man scandal machine. The Post reports the city comptroller is a Con Ed deadbeat and a state tax delinquent, but the really scary part is that he shows no signs of getting it.
The target of a federal probe into his campaign finances, Democrat Liu keeps raising money and playing footsie with the unions. He had limited himself to $800 contributions — a lucky number in Chinese — but raised the limit in the midst of the investigation.
Apologists for Liu claim his immigrant supporters aren’t familiar with campaign laws. That sorry excuse won’t wash. Liu knows those laws, and he’s ultimately responsible for making sure his campaign follows them. If he doesn’t, he has no business holding public office.
Nuclear fallout
Now that Hugo Chavez is joking with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about detonating a nuclear bomb, surely wingnut supporters like Joseph Kennedy II and Sean Penn finally will disavow the Venezuelan dictator. Won’t they?
More holes than Swiss cheese
Here’s a keeper quote: When the head of the Swiss central bank quit, he denied knowing about a $500,000 currency trade his wife made, but conceded he couldn’t prove his ignorance.
“I stand by my word that I never lied,” said Philipp Hildebrand.
Try wrapping your brain around that one.