Klein Bashes 'Inanity' of Asking Obama About Process and Old Hillary-Bashing Quotes

On the Swampland blog, Time’s Joe Klein is beating the press for asking "inane" questions that suggest that Barack Obama’s words on the campaign trail might still matter, not to mention tick-tock process questions about how Obama and Clinton hammered out this potentially troublesome team-of-rivals arrangement. While Klein suggested these questions don’t elicit news, you can also sense that Klein doesn’t want anyone trying to trip up Obama or make him look petty:

I was struck by the inanity of most of the questions from my colleagues. Granted, these are political reporters, not national security or foreign policy specialists, but what sort of journalist expects the President-elect to tell the "inside story" of how he selected Hillary Clinton? (Those sorts of stories, if told at all, are wrenched from aides on background--and reported only after consulting multiple sources.)

Klein could be more precise: these sorts of tick-tock stories aren’t always "wrenched" out of aides. They’re often handed out to friendly print outlets (like, Time, for instance) by press aides, with the intention of making the behind-the-scenes actors look good. Klein is complaining about process: why ask Obama a process question when it doesn’t make him look good? Klein also disliked the primary quotes:

And what's the point of raising the nasty things Obama and Clinton said about each other during the primaries? Did the reporter expect Obama to say, "Well, I still believe her resume is overblown, that's why I appointed her...oh, and by the way, she still thinks it's dumb to talk to the Iranians without preconditions."

There may be an element of "gotcha" in the question, but Klein seems to suggest that everyone should realize that Obama was insincere back then, and that insincerity is required in primary debates and on the campaign trail.

Obama punched back at New York Times reporter Peter Baker for noting that during the primaries, Obama mocked Hillary Clinton’s foreign-policy travels as a set of tea parties and recalled that Greg Craig said her resume was "grossly exaggerated." He suggested this was all a game-playing distraction:

This is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign, and you're having fun. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not faulting it. [Yes, he most obviously is.] But, look, I think if you look at the statements that Hillary Clinton and I have made outside of the heat of a campaign, we share a view that America has to be safe and secure, and in order to do that we have to combine military power with strengthened diplomacy.

There is a real issue here in that Obama clearly mocked the idea that Hillary had an experience advantage, and Obama painted Hillary as Bush's patsy on the Iraq war. If that was on the "heat" of the campaign trail, the heat lasted for about a year. Scott Helmand at The Boston Globe’s Political Intelligence blog offered the counterpoint to Joe Klein’s point:

To listen to Obama today, however, all of that was just campaign rhetoric, and it doesn't really matter anymore...That statement raises several important questions: What else that Obama said during the campaign will he now belittle as mere byproducts of campaign heat? Does Obama not think it's important for the press to elucidate serious differences between leading political figures? Does Obama, who prides himself on consistency, believe he will be able to swat away challenges to that notion so easily, and what will that mean for his relationship with the media?

Joe Klein thinks it means that Obama is not the problem, inane press questioners are.