Sounding more like a Democratic strategist on Sunday's Meet the Press than NBC's political director, Chuck Todd urged President Obama to force congressional Republicans into a corner on the fiscal cliff: "...go do it with 65-70 members of the Senate, cut the deal, bring it over to the House....box Boehner in....did the President learn anything from his first term about how to deal with congressional Republicans? Which is don't do it through the leadership."
Moments later, liberal pundit and historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin described how Obama could "build his mandate": "...he has to mobilize that base. That base was energized on election nigh....It's there to bring pressure on obstructionists if they don't get a deal done from the outside in....The Tea Party pressured everybody that summer, why can't his coalition, which is bigger, pressure people from the outside in?"
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Sunday’s Meet the Press featured a panel of five, none of them conservative (Congressman-elect Joaquín Castro, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, author Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and NBC’s Chuck Todd), to assess why Mitt Romney lost and “the future of the GOP.” And they agreed conservatives are the problem.
Todd, NBC’s political director, decided the GOP has become “a coalition of special interest forces” and fretted “the leaders in Washington can’t control the special interest groups” as Republicans, like Democrats in the past, “succumbed to their base.”
On Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin pleaded with President Obama to tell voters: "'I am doubling down on what I did.' He didn't do enough on the stimulus. He didn't do enough investing in the future. The things he believes in, he has to say we need more of it. And that's our future." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Goodwin implored Obama to "diagnose that what went wrong has gone wrong for 20 years, not just the last four years. The middle class has been squeezed for a long time because of an unfair structure because of lack of investment."
Following a revealing interview with former JFK mistress Mimi Alford on Wednesday's NBC Rock Center, left-wing MSNBC host Chris Matthews, along with liberal historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard Reeves, were invited on the broadcast to give a sycophantic defense of the womanizing president. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Touting his new book, "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero," Matthews proclaimed: "The greatest heroes are often the most flawed." The Hardball host went on to gush over how Kennedy "colorized American politics....made it a technicolor movie, he made it exciting." In his characteristic fashion, Matthews concluded: "And so with it all, the total picture still arouses the country."
In my previous two columns, I outlined the 10 questions we need to ask to find our next president. I believe them wholeheartedly, but I have one last question that is almost as important as all of them combined. And it is for all the GOP candidates.
During former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's November trip to Charleston, S.C., he said the following: "I do approach this whole campaign, I think, differently from everybody else. We have a number of friends who are also running. We have no opponents except Barack Obama. I think that's very important. I think (Abraham) Lincoln was very wise, as was captured in a book called 'Team of Rivals.' ... Literally everybody who was his opponent ended up in the Cabinet because he needed all of them in order to be able to put together the political power during the crisis that we faced. I would say the same thing. I don't know of a single person currently running who wouldn't be a very effective member of an administrative team and who doesn't have real talent and, in some way ... a unique strength. So I don't have any opponents on the Republican side."
Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Random House executive editor Jon Meacham described the political comeback of Republicans: "...we were all sitting around in 2009, and this was a new era. It was an entirely different time. And I think it was a implacable opposition, which is not to say it's wrong, but it was an implacable opposition."
Host David Gregory quoted Meacham's introduction to a new Politico ebook, "The Right Fights Back": "The dawn of 2009 was supposed to inaugurate a new political age. After a decade of war and a year of epic economic collapse, a young Democratic president unscarred by the cultural conflicts of the Clinton years promised a 'post-partisan' ethos...Conservatism was said to be dead. Except it wasn't....How did American politics get from the 'there' of a new Age of Obama to the 'here' of a resurgent right?"
On NBC's Sunday Meet the Press, host David Gregory took on an alarmist tone as he worried that any significant attempts to address the nation's enormous debt could lead to violence: "Look at the images that came out of Greece this week as you've got...big cuts in public spending. And this is the result, rioting in the streets....Could we have that kind of reaction here?"
Gregory posed that question to Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham early in the program, further fretting: "Are we headed in this direction with the kind of actions we're talking about in terms of cutting public spending?...Is there a risk...that these draconian cuts in spending that so many Americans think are necessary may actually halt what we're still...seeing as a very fragile, very weak economic recovery?"
Before the Democratic primary vote on Tuesday in Massachusetts to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy, a chance to catch up with how just before Thanksgiving, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin -- a Bay State resident and a favorite of NBC News where she regularly pops up to deliver conventional liberal wisdom in the guise of historic insights -- crossed into partisan politics to campaign for one of the four liberal candidates.
In a piece that could've been crafted by Hillary Clinton's PR shop, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, on Monday's "Today" show, gushed on and on about the Secretary of State's new "role of a lifetime," as a "a foreign policy superstar," and cheered Clinton has the "highest approval ratings of any time in her career."
Mitchell's theme throughout her story was that the "anger of the primaries," between Clinton and Barack Obama was long gone and that in her role of Secretary of State she has proven to be a "key asset to Team Obama," as "Today" co-anchor Matt Lauer observed in the intro. There wasn't a hint of skepticism or negative note in the story as Mitchell threw in soundbites from John Podesta, Joe Klein and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin who chimed: "She seems to be really enjoying herself, as does he."
The following is a complete transcript of the segment as it was aired on the May 4, "Today" show:
Wednesday’s post-inaugural edition of The Oprah Winfrey Show, taped at a Washington restaurant, overflowed with strange and messianic notions about Obama and how the thrill over him is unanimous. Actor Forest Whitaker summed it up for Oprah: "The light of the New Age is here." Oprah pal Gayle King passed along her agreement with a message that "Not only does he hear us. He feels us. That when I hear Barack Obama, they said, he talks to my soul." Whitaker also strangely claimed "we’re not used to seeing" a president and a First Lady who love each other, but the Obamas have signaled "it’s okay to love."
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin strangely claimed it was "extraordinary" to have a president care about history, and told the audience Obama said to her in 2007 he’s not getting the presidency to be Millard Fillmore, but to be great like Lincoln. Ali Wentworth, the wife of George Stephanopoulos, painted an incredible picture of a massive gospel choir on the subway system en route to the festivities: "I took the Metro, and everyone was singing ‘Amazing Grace’ on the Metro."
Short of going full Ninja hero and snatching the shoes in mid-air, it's hard to see how Pres. Bush could have been any cooler in his handling of the Hush Puppy Hurler. I figure W's feeling pretty good about things this morning. But that didn't stop ABC and NBC from declaring the incident "embarrassing" for President Bush.
For good measure, on Today, Doris Kearns Goodwin discounted Bush's blithe reaction, saying he wouldn't have been that cool a couple years ago, strangely intepreting his nonchalance as evidence of how anxious he is to leave office. And not to leave CBS out of the mix, on the Early Show Richard Roth described the president as being "nonplussed" in reaction to the incident, when he was in fact just the opposite.
Is there anything a Republican can do that would please the folks at the New York Times short of losing an election, resigning from office, or getting caught in a career-ending scandal?
You would think the gracious, post-election comments expressed towards president-elect Obama by folks such as John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.) would have been greeted with joy by liberal media members basking in the glow of their glorious victory.
Quite the contrary, as the losers in this election showed extraordinary class while demonstrating perfectly how those that come in second should behave in a civilized society, the Times' Jim Rutenberg found ways to spoil the moment in a piece slated for Sunday's front page (emphasis added):