Ed Schultz Delighted That Campaign Book Says Obama Had to Put Up With His 'Tirade'

September 18th, 2013 7:51 AM

Richard Wolffe, executive editor of MSNBC.com, has a new book out on Obama’s 2012 campaign called "The Message," and it’s delighting Ed Schultz.

One of the findings was this, as Schultz read out loud on his radio show on Monday: “When Obama conducted an outreach effort to the Left, he had to put up with a tirade from Ed Schultz and had to hunt for a phone number to New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal.” Schultz did not remember the “tirade,” but enjoyed that Obama was paying attention to him:

SCHULTZ: You mean, the president was paying attention to my commentary and it was something during the campaign that he didn't like so he picked up the phone and called the New York Times and tried to get after it, get after it with Andrew Rosenthal, so, I don't know anything about this. I don't know, maybe they had thin skins over there at the White House.

In the Washington Post version, it’s not clear these two incidents went together other than both being “outreach to the Left.” Chris Cillizza went into more details about the Times, but not Schultz:

At one point Obama was going to call the Times switchboard, but senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer blocked his assistant Anita Decker from doing that because “If you call the main line, they are going to announce on the PA system that the president is on the phone for Andy Rosenthal. We can’t do that.”