NYT Shows Obama Fretting Over Political Division, Ignores Democrat Responsbility

New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse and White House scribe Julie Hirschfeld Davis teamed up to paint the president as wringing his hands over the current divided state of U.S. politics. One potential culprit almost wholly exonerated? The president himself.

Thursday’s report, “Obama’s Plea to ‘Fix Our Politics’ Has Both Sides Looking Inward,” portrayed Obama as regretful over the current state of affairs, while skipping his bouts of arrogance and the clear animosity he feels toward his GOP opposition. They also pinned the beginning of the division to Robert Bork's failed Supreme Court nomination, without mentioning Sen. Ted Kennedy's scurrilous anti-Bork speech. Instead, Hulse and Davis found a pox on both houses (which is actually somewhat more fair than the standard Times trope, which generally finds resurgent right-wing Republicans to blame for any lack of civility).

President Obama’s urgent call in his final State of the Union address to “fix our politics” posed a fundamental question: Who broke them in the first place?

The answer is that both sides did. A steady erosion underway for years has accelerated during Mr. Obama’s time in the White House and now shows itself in congressional dysfunction and campaign vitriol. The restoration project could take some time.

But don’t worry, Obama’s here to fix it (albeit after 8 years in office).

Mr. Obama, who rose to the presidency promising to transform Washington, seemed so alarmed by the political state of the nation that in his address, he said one of the few regrets of his presidency was that the political rancor had grown worse rather than better.

Among the matters the paper ignored:

Obama's IRS targeting of the Tea Party during Obama’s re-election campaign.
Obama playing politics with government shutdowns to cast Republicans as the bad guys.
Obama’s habit of impugning Republican motives.
His re-election campaign calling out GOP donors by name, vituperation sometimes followed by IRS audits, as documented by Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal.

The Times quoted a Republican blaming her own party, but lacked a similar mea culpa from Democrats.

Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, who offered the Republican counterpoint to Mr. Obama’s speech, said that her party needed to accept some of the fault and that voters must resist following “the angriest voices.”

“We need to be honest with each other, and with ourselves,” Ms. Haley said. “While Democrats in Washington bear much responsibility for the problems facing America today, they do not bear it alone. There is more than enough blame to go around.”

The political reporters also skipped the dirty details of just how the Democrats beat back Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Both parties trace much of the current hostility to the bitter fight over President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, when Democrats succeeded in defeating him and Republicans vowed revenge. Eight years later, Newt Gingrich became House speaker and ushered in an era of confrontation and government shutdowns that culminated in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

For the record: Senator Ted Kennedy, a liberal lionized in the press, unleashed this tirade on the Senate floor during the Democrats’ successful war against Reagan nominee Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens."

Those lines were also left out of Davis’s gooey tribute to Kennedy from March 2015.

Hulse and Davis portrayed Obama as a passive victim of “the forces of division,” before a brief intrusion of reality:

The president’s arm’s-length relationship with Capitol Hill throughout his tenure only deepened the sense of suspicion and animosity. Lawmakers in both parties still complain on a regular basis that the White House treats them as an afterthought in important decisions and fails to respond to their concerns.

The reporters downplayed Obama’s unilateral bypassing of Congress.

Mr. Obama, after forcing through an aggressive economic and social agenda in his first two years in office, quickly grew frustrated with Republican resistance and engaged in a concerted campaign to go around lawmakers. His series of executive actions on health care, immigration and the environment drove Republicans into a frenzy of opposition. As divisions grew, Mr. Obama was increasingly defiant about his prerogative to act where Congress would not.

NYT Shows Obama Fretting Over Political Division, Ignores Democrat Responsbility

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