WSJ: Jones Resignation Deals Blow to Obama and the Left

While media predictably blame Obama adviser Van Jones's resignation on a right-wing smear campaign, the inconvenient truth is that this episode says a lot about the current White House resident and how he was just as poorly vetted by news outlets during the campaign last year as his administration members are now that he's the Commander-in-Chief.

More to the point: if so-called journalists had done their job in 2008, voters might have known just how radical Obama was BEFORE they went to the polls instead of finding out after it was too late.

According to an editorial in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, this is just one of the lessons from Jones's resignation (h/t Jack Coleman):

As a candidate, Barack Obama was at pains to offer himself as a man of moderate policies, and especially of moderate temperament. He said he would listen to both the right and left, choosing the best of each depending on "what works." He sold himself as a center-left pragmatist. When his radical associations—Reverend Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers—came to light, Candidate Obama promptly disavowed them. Now comes Mr. Jones, with a long trail of extreme comments and left-wing organizing, who nonetheless became the White House adviser for "green jobs." This weekend he too was thrown under the bus. [...]

Mr. Jones's incendiary comments about Republicans and his now famous association with a statement blaming the U.S. for 9/11 had to have been known in some White House precincts. He was praised and sponsored by Valerie Jarrett, who is one of the two or three most powerful White House aides and is a long-time personal friend of the President.

Our guess is that Mr. Jones landed in the White House precisely because his job didn't require Senate confirmation, which would have subjected him to more scrutiny. This is also no doubt a reason that Mr. Obama has consolidated so much of his Administration's governing authority inside the White House under various "czars." Mr. Jones was poised to play a prominent role in disbursing tens of billions of dollars of stimulus money. It was the ideal perch from which he could keep funding the left-wing networks from which he sprang, this time with taxpayer money. [...]

Mr. Obama is falling in the polls because last year he didn't tell the American people that the "change" they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and appointees with the views of Van Jones.

Most importantly, if the press had done their job last year, Americans would have better known exactly who AND what the junior senator from Illinois was, and might have concluded that his brand of change WASN'T something to believe in.