In case you were worried, former Time magazine staffer Jay Carney has "had very little trouble adapting" to his job as Vice President Biden's director of communications. From a recent interview with Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers published in the March 12 paper:

[Akers]: You left journalism after 20 years with Time. How is life on the other side?

Carney: It's great. I have had very little trouble adapting to this new role, which is completely different from what I was doing before.

Carney also insisted that while he was just sort of swept into the Obama administration during the post-election transition period, he never was a leg-thrilling puddle of drool like others in the media:

Story Continues Below Ad ↓

[Akers]: During the campaign, were you ever swept up in Obamamania?

Carney: I wasn't personally, I was impressed by and believed in what then-Senator Obama was saying during the campaign and what his program was, and also have long admired Joe Biden. It was something I never expected to happen, but it kind of happened very quickly after the election. And here I am.

Without getting into specifics -- such as his boss recently forgetting the Web site "number" for Recovery.gov -- Akers mentioned Biden's "having a little bit of foot-in-mouth syndrome" before asking how it was for going for Carney working to "keep his [Biden's] foot out of his mouth[?]"

Carney dutifully answered that his boss's problem was that "most of what people attribute to him as being gaffes are really examples of his candor. Vice President Biden is not capable of not telling you how he feels."

Oh, it gets better.

Akers asked Carney if he felt fully accepted among the "veteran Democratic loyalists" in the corridors of power in the Obama administration, yet posed no similar corresponding question about journalists who might disapprove of him moving through the revolving door from covering the White House as a journalist to joining a White House as a partisan.

—Ken Shepherd is Managing Editor of NewsBusters