Not since Bob Irsay packed up the Baltimore Colts in the dead of night has a high-profile retreat in darkness gotten so much attention. Van Jones was shoved under the Obama bus, as everyone knew would occur, with an announcement coming at midnight. The Wall Street Journal enumerates his baggage, enough to fill a small commuter plane:
Mr. Jones has been in the center of a maelstrom on conservative radio and television talk shows since a video surfaced last week showing him calling Republicans a vulgar epithet. Since then, other controversies have emerged, such as Mr. Jones saying black students would have never committed a massacre such as the one at Colorado’s Columbine High School. His name also appeared on a 2004 petition calling for the government to investigate its own culpability in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. None of those issues happened after Mr. Jones joined the administration.
There are a number of story lines percolating here: the mainstream media’s refusal to report on the incident until he left; the mystery as to how such a figure wound up in the White House; the ham-fisted performance of late by an administration that allowed a story to build and its critics to claim victory; and the substantive issue concerning the proliferation of czars who evade congressional confirmation and oversight — and apparently get a lesser level of vetting. And then there is the familiar White House reaction — no apology, no explanation, and no remorse.
Some of the punditocracy — Juan Williams, for example — are peeved we are spending any time on this. And true enough, if the White House had a near perfect vetting record, or if the president did not have a reputation for hanging out with the likes of Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, whose worldview bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Jones, this might be a nonstory.
Unfortunately for the White House, this turn of events seems to confirm many of the criticisms, even those from sympathetic Democrats who want Obama to succeed with his liberal agenda. There are at least a couple of problems that we have seen before.
First, there is apparently no one outside the ultra-liberal bubble who can spot a mistake and understand how those not part of the netroot fan base might take offense. No one to say, “Let’s not give the nation’s highest civilian honor to Mary Robinson. She presided over Durban, for goodness sakes!” No one to caution against smearing ordinary citizens as lackeys of the insurance industry or kooks. No voice to suggest, “Maybe we shouldn’t attack the voters — they, um, vote.” And no one to question the selection or quickly raise the red flag once Jones’s “truther” background and other offenses came to light. Maybe there is a brave soul trying to save the White House from itself, but if there is, no one is listening. And that gets it into trouble again and again.
Second, because the mainstream media doesn’t report or underreports “bad” news ( i.e., news that isn’t helpful to Obama), the administration operates under the misconception that bad news is just Glenn Beck ranting or a “fake” news story. The White House then goes to spin mode, attacks the messengers (e.g., conservative news outlets), imagines “real” Americans couldn’t possibly care, and allows the issue to fester. The result is to elevate the conservative outlets that did the reporting and to further erode the credibility of the “friendly” nonnews media. As Politico’s headline aptly put it: “Glenn Beck up, left down, Jones defiant.”
Jones isn’t the biggest story going on — clearly the war on the CIA, the loss of support for the Afghanistan war, the health-care debate, the “deadline” (who believes that?) for Iran to make a substantive response to the U.S. on its nuclear ambitions, and the rising unemployment rate have longer term implications. But unless the White House deals with the judgment, personnel, and execution problems that the Jones fiasco highlights, the president will have a hard time regaining his footing and dealing with all these, and other, pressing issues.
