In his remarks dedicating the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on Monday, President Obama imagined how a child would see the replica of the U.S. Senate there and imagine the dialogue as “elevated” and “purposeful.....before she’s old enough to be cynical.” He lamented that party lines or philosophies become “barriers to cooperation or respect.”
On Wednesday, the Washington Free Beacon noted Fox correspondent James Rosen asked White House spokesman Josh Earnest how that matched Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s cynical and partisan 2012 strategy of claiming without evidence that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes:
JAMES ROSEN: Those remarks struck me because this week, we saw my CNN colleague Dana Bash do an interview with the Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid, in which she asked him about his decision in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign to take to the Senate floor and accuse Mitt Romney of not paying his taxes, and demanding that Mitt Romney in fact prove that he had paid his taxes.
And when Dana Bash asked him about this, she mentioned that some people considered it McCarthyite, and of course, no evidence has ever been produced to show that Mitt Romney failed to pay his taxes. I wonder if President Obama, who has lamented this incivility in our politics, this disrespect in our politics, has any view of Harry Reid telling Dana Bash in response to this question, “Well, Romney didn’t get elected, did he?"
JOSH EARNEST: I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to the president about Senator Reid’s interview. Obviously, Senator Reid is somebody who’s going to decide for himself what he says on the Senate floor. He is obviously a vocal supporter of the president, and they have a partnership that will go down in history as a remarkably productive one. But ultimately it’s up to Senator Reid to decide what he’s going to say on the House [sic] floor, and there are a number of things that Senator Reid, over the course of his career I think that he has said pretty proudly were independent of the views of anybody else. They represent only his own.
ROSEN: But it’s the president’s choice and his spokesman choice to call out conduct unbecoming of our highest elected officials, when it is in fact unbecoming. Are you going to take that opportunity now?
EARNEST: Not for something that’s three years old.
Of course, Reid's bold refusal to apologize on CNN is three days old, not three years old.
