Yeah, They Planned It Just This Way
- 06.10.2008 - 10:16 AMMickey Kaus asks of Barack Obama’s VP vetter James Johnson:
Why would Obama, in his first big personnel decision, choose a paleoliberal greedhead with a track record of failure? You tell me. He’s described Johnson as ‘a friend.’ It looks as if he was at best highly susceptible to amicable overtures from someone he should have had some critical perspective on.
Really, the choice is so bad the conspiratorial minded might suspect this unhelpful suggestion to put Johnson on the VP selection committee came from someone in the Hillary Clinton camp. In fact this description sounds like the profile of someone with whom the Clintons would feel right at home:
He’s part of the permanent government of this country, a long-time Democratic fixer (Mondale and Kerry campaigns), former CEO of Fannie Mae, and as such a big buyer of Countrywide loans. He’s a guy who sits on a bunch of corporate boards, etc.
But there are no limits to the spin of the liberal punditocracy, desperate to come up with an explanation for this appalling failure of judgment. Try this out:
I don’t really think this amounts to a scandal, but it’s certainly a distraction… it’s hard to see how the Obama campaign wouldn’t have expected questions about Johnson’s past activities in the home mortgage industry, so I take it they are not terribly worried about the WSJ’s reports.
Well, unless they didn’t expect the questions about Johnson’s past activities and have a tin ear cultivated in a media cocoon, that sounds right. So which is it: the Obama team expected an off message mini-scandal to disrupt their New Politics message or they were clueless? (Given that this very same pundit observed in 2007 that “perhaps no Democrat in Washington better exemplified the city’s political-corporate-cultural elite than James A. Johnson, the former head of Fannie Mae,” I’ll vote for the latter.)
But let’s think this through. Option #1 would be for Johnson to announce he has become a distraction and remove himself from the VP selection process. That sounds smart and painless and ends the story for most media outlets quickly. Option #2 would be to tough it out because the Obama camp can’t let “Obama forces out lobbyist advisor” be the first major misstep in the first week of the general campaign.
If you are a John McCain supporter you are hoping it’s Option #2 because the longer a story about a “paleoliberal greedhead with a track record of failure” goes on the better and because the attacks on McCain lobbyist connections will likely need to simmer down for a while.
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