"You tell her. No, YOU tell her!" . . . Richard Wolffe says that in 2012 an all-male group of senior Obama campaign people got together at a White Sox game and decided to fire deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter—but didn't have the "balls" to tell her.
Maybe so. Then again, Wolffe—appearing on Morning Joe today to tout his new book on the Obama re-election campaign—also claimed that Cutter was "one of the single most effective" people in the Obama campaign? Cutter? The nasty gaffe machine? View the video after the jump.
Wolffe added that ultimately no one wound up firing Cutter. She just plowed ahead, knowing no one in the Axelrod crowd had the guts to confront her—or Michelle Obama—whom Wolffe described as Cutter's biggest backer.
RICHARD WOLFFE: You had a communications team that was not on speaking terms with itself. They took the decision at a senior level to push Stephanie Cutter out, again one of the single most effective people in the campaign and they could not have the guts in the end to tell her about their own decision. You know, there's a leadership question that comes out of that. The secret plot, they get together at the White Sox game to fire her--by the way all of them men--and here she is one of the most profiled, the highest profiled woman in the campaign and they don't have the balls to go tell her they decided to fire her.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: So who ended up telling her that she was fired?
WOLFFE: Nobody did. They tried layering around her. They sent Dan Pfeiffer in from the white house. And she carried on regardless. Because she knew they didn't that have balls to take her on, and by the way, to take on the First Lady of the United States, who was her biggest backer.
