Promoting his new book about the 2012 election, Double Down, with co-author Mark Halperin on Monday's NBC Today, New York Magazine national affairs editor John Heilemann offered Obama campaign spin to excuse the President's disastrous performance in the first debate against Mitt Romney: "...[Obama's] disdain for Romney, his contempt for Romney, he couldn't figure out how to deal with that. He would say, 'What am I supposed to do when he starts spewing his BS?'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Heilemann laughably added that Obama also had "contempt for the theatricality of politics," which, "all got mixed up together and he gave this horrible practice session performance that left them totally stymied about how they were going to fix it" before the second debate with Romney.
John Heilemann
Too smart to be President. Is that really Barack Obama's problem? Mika Brzezinski thinks so.
On today's Morning Joe, as Mike Barnicle and John Heilemann kicked around the notion, as others have before, that President Obama doesn't much like politics and the people in it, Brzezinski piped up with a different explanation for his aloofness: he's "too smart for the job," she suggested. View the video after the jump.
I think we have the winner in the "If a Republican or conservative had said it" media bias category this year, if not this decade.
In the book "Double Down" by liberal journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (reviewed by Peter Hamby at the Washington Post on Friday), President Barack Obama, while discussing drone strikes in 2012, reportedly told aides that he's "really good at killing people." This would have been headline news three seconds after Hamby's review, and Hamby would have headlined it himself instead of casually mentioning it in Paragraph 11. A Google News search on an obvious search string ("really good at Killing people" obama; sorted by date) at 6:45 p.m. returns only 11 items, none of which are establishment press outlets. Michael Kelley at Business Insider, which did not show up among the search items returned, had some interesting thoughts on Obama's alleged remark Saturday evening (bolds are mine throughout this post; Update: important links relating to CIA practices which can only be considered barbaric are in the original):
Not surprisingly, the liberal media on Friday focused on leaked details from Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book "Double Down" that involved Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, and Chris Christie.
Yet buried deep in Peter Hamby's review at the Washington Post was a paragraph claiming the campaign of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman was behind the 2011 smears of Herman Cain and Indiana governor Mitch Daniels' wife:
Imagine that George W. Bush had decided to proceed with a harsh, partisan speech attacking Democrats for "hurting people," despite a scene of mass murder unfolding just 3.5 miles away. On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough imagined just such a scenario, and came to the inescapable conclusion: his own MSNBC network and the MSM at large would be "killing" W for his insensitivity and poor judgment.
Panelist John Heilemann of New York magazine grudgingly agreed that Scarborough's assessement was "kinda fair." But Mika Brzezinski empathized with our poor president: he was in a "horrible position." View the video after the jump.
On Tuesday night, the Obama administration announced it was delaying the implementation of a key provision of the president’s signature health care law – a so-called “employer mandate,” which requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance.
The move to delay implementation until 2015 was criticized by Republican lawmakers, who claim the measure is proof positive that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will be costly and disastrous. Of course, to a liberal journalist like Carl Bernstein the consequences of the delay are irrelevant, because “it’s a very smart move” that “takes this issue off the table in an election year.” [Video after the jump, via MSNBC.com.]
Bob Woodward is a legend in modern journalism, especially for fellow liberal reporters. But that all is for naught now that Woodward has committed the cardinal sin of criticizing the White House for an operative's use of what apparently is a fairly common tactic: a harsh bullying of the press in order to demand even more favorable coverage than the Obama-friendly press already lavishes on Team Obama. It centers on Woodward reporting that sequestration was the White House's idea. This morning Matt Lauer, on the Today Show, questioned Woodward's judgement, saying "I'm a little surprised you've gone public with this." Even, the New York Times offered no refuge for Woodward.
He isn’t the only one. Clinton operative and op-ed columnist Lanny Davis has received similar treatment, and veteran White House reporter Ron Fournier at National Journal also reported threatening emails and calls. But in today’s broadcast of Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski decided to give deference to Obama acolyte David Axelrod’s days as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune in order to portray Woodward as going over the line in his reporting on Gene Sperling's harassment:
New York magazine's political writer and frequent MSNBC guest John Heilemann confidently predicted in the December 3 issue that United Nations ambassador Susan Rice would be the next Secretary of State. That issue's table of contents put it starkly: "John Heilemann on why, John McCain be damned, Susan Rice will be the next secretary of State."
Or perhaps not. On Thursday afternoon, NBC reported that Rice had withdrawn her name from consideration for the position, citing "a confirmation process that was very prolonged, very politicized, very distracting and very disruptive."
Heilemann fumed at the GOP before he ventured forth with his spirited prediction.
From Joe Scarborough to John Heilemann, Katty Kay to Mark Halperin to Willie Geist, it was unanimous on today's Morning Joe. Whatever the substance, whatever the policy, Republicans would be making a massive political mistake by opposing the possible nomination of Susan Rice as Secretary of State.
Summed up Scarborough the MJ zeitgeist: "do a bunch of old white guys want to make their first big battle, post-election, a battle going up against a younger woman of color?" View the video after the jump. H/t reader cobokat.
Pseudo-conservative and liberal media darling Joe Scarborough is known for his whacky theories but on Thursday’s Morning Joe he posited a new one that puts the icing on the cake.
Speaking with co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, the MSNBC host said that if the GOP had selected former Utah Governor Jon Hunstman, the Republican Party would have done much better against President Obama. [See video below break. MP3 audio here.]
In his day job at New York magazine, political writer John Heilemann is throwing cold water on Romney victory hopes. “What's true, however, is that two or three weeks ago, Mitt Romney and his people were fully convinced, and not entirely without reason, that victory was within their grasp. The reality now, though, is that this is no longer true.”
As victory eludes Romney’s grasp, beware the “ferocity” of the Romney voters who “despise Obama,” for it will be “breathtaking, and perhaps not a little scary”:
On PBS's Charlie Rose show on Monday, as the group discussed the night's presidential debate, New York magazine's John Heilemann described Mitt Romney's past statements on foreign policy as "relatively harsh and relatively bellicose," as he argued that Romney had faced political "dangers" in his foreign policy positions "because he's been surrounded by some number of neo-conservative foreign policy advisors."