I said this incomments over at Balloon Juicebut I wanted to expand on it here: The Obama White House, like the Clinton White House before it, has to spend enormous amounts of time worrying about utterly trivial bullshit because our political press isjust such absolute crap:
Mrs. Obama’s difficulties illuminate some of the president’s central challenges in the White House, including how the Obamas’ freshness to political life, a selling point in 2008, became a liability in office. Her worries about his staff point to a chief executive with little management experience who clung to an inner circle less united than it appeared. (Mr. Emanuel’s relationship with the president grew so strained that the chief of staff secretly offered to resign in early 2010; Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, had a tense relationship with Mrs. Obama and with Valerie Jarrett, another adviser). She shared the president’s ambivalence about political chores and the back-patting and schmoozing that can help get things done in Washington.
OH HEAVENS. She doesn’t like back-patting and schmoozing and chores! Whatever shall we do? Doesn’t she KNOW that you have to give a handy to the right people in order to get anything done around here? How dare she have the outrageous expectation that we are all adults and nobody should be asking anybody for a pet in order to fucking do their jobs?
The first couple declined to be interviewed.
You don’t fucking say.
“We all have watched what happens when people get caricatured,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview, explaining why he policed such personal matters. With a mistake like John Edwards’s $400 haircut in 2007, “there’s no way to correct that.”
Yes. There’s just no coming back from that. Start two wars and blow up lots of people and fail to do anything of any significance besides drive the country into crippling debt over it, though, and you’re a Strong Leader who Loves Freedom. I swear to God, I will personally write a check to cover the president’s next haircut if we can all just for fucking once in our lives worry about something that MATTERS.
Other aides said there was a reason Mr. Gibbs became the main enforcer of the rules of political life: because Mr. Obama, all too aware that his wife never wanted that life, would not.
HE WAS TOO BUSY KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN and ending DADT and the war in Iraq and OH YEAH THE ECONOMY WAS MELTING DOWN. Pardon him for not giving a fuck what Michelle wore to a party.
She had little appetite or expertise for policy detail, and she knew the history of first ladies —like Nancy Reagan and Mrs. Clinton — who had been deemed meddlers, unelected figures who wielded unearned power.
“Who had been deemed …” The passive voice again. Who deemed them meddlers, Jodi? Could it have been their political enemies aided by the compliant and bitchy White House press corps? No, they just magically were “deemed” meddlers and then it was all over. Funny how that just happens.
Early on Sept. 16, Robert Gibbs was scanning the news when a story stopped him short: according to a new French book, Michelle Obama had told Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady, that living in the White House was “hell.” It was a potential disaster — the equivalent of the $400 haircut, Mr. Gibbs feared, coming just weeks before election day and on the heels of a vacation in Spain that had drawn accusations of lavish spending.
Mr. Gibbs asked her aides to find out if she had said anything even close (no, the answer came back), and then fought the story back for hours, having the book translated and convincing the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. By noon the potential crisis had been averted.
WELL THANK GOD FOR THAT. At least no one died.
I do not even know what to DO when things like this are the equivalent of the fucking Alamo.
A.