Washington was hot today, and Democrats were tearing at each other's hair like a clatch of tween frenemies fighting for the front row at a Justin Bieber mall appearance.
First, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs seemed to strike out of the blue, telling The Hill:
"I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
It's definitely going to take Obama's superior conflict management skills to smooth this over. Democrats are not-so-privately fuming over Robert Gibbs' admission on "Meet the Press" this week that Dems could lose the House.
"How could [Gibbs] know what is going on in our districts?" Pelosi told her members in the caucus meeting in the basement of the Capitol Tuesday night. "Some may weigh his words more than others. We have made our disagreement known to the White House."...
Robert Gibbs declined to answer repeated questions today about Obama's use of the offensive term, "teabagger" to refer to Tea Party activists, as reported in Jonathan Alter's new book, "The Promise: President Obama, Year One."
"I barely have enough time to read my briefing books," Gibbs told reporters at today's press briefing. "I have not read the book."
As he tried to move on, CBS' Chip Reid offered to laughter: "You only have to read one word."
Asked again later in the briefing, Gibbs parried, but finally promied to report back:
The Dow fell nearly 1,000 points today and MSNBC's Savannah Guthrie informed White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs of it at the daily press briefing. Her question was the first he had heard of it, and he answered the question with generalities about the "Treasury monitoring Europe and the Greek crisis," according to reporter David Corn, who was at the briefing.
From Politico's report on reporters' frustration with White House secrecy:
A few days later, Gibbs said at one of his briefings, “This is the most transparent administration in the history of our country.”
Peals of laughter broke out in the briefing room.
That happened on April 19.
I imagine that some reporters laughed because of the White House's stingy and selective doling out of scoops--shockingly, the New York Times has a special relationship with Obama--and the fact that Obama "has severely cut back the informal exchanges with the press pool." Politico reports that "Bill Clinton did 252 such Q&A sessions—an average of one every weekday. Bush did 147. Obama did 46, according to Towson University Professor Martha Kumar."
But the administration's stonewalling on national security matters is much worse.
In his press conference today, the first held in the Rose Garden, Robert Gibbs announced that Obama will push off his trip to Indonesia and Australia to June so that he can be around for the health-care reform vote, expected to happen Sunday.
"The president greatly regrets the delay," Gibbs said. "But passage of health care reform is of paramount importance, and the president is determined to see this battle through."
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the healthcare bill will pass by next weekend.
"We'll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week," Gibbs said on "Fox News Sunday."
Gibbs added that those on next week's Sunday talk shows "will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land."
Gibbs is making clear that the vote House Democrats face next weekend is whether or not to make the Senate bill--with its tax on union health care plans and special deals for Nebraska, Florida, and Louisiana--"law of the land."
During an interview on MSNBC Thursday morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the Obama administration’s handling of Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Gibbs argued that the administration was right to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, instead of as an enemy combatant. “Just because you make somebody an enemy combatant [it] doesn’t make them talk,” Gibbs argued.
As Bill Kristol notes at the Washington Post, Vice President Biden couldn’t be bothered to express any support for the Iranian opposition the night before the Green Movement’s largest protests in months. It appears from various reports that the tens of thousands of protesters that turned out today faced a well-prepared security apparatus and regime supporters bused in from outlying areas. Visit
MSNBC White House correspondents Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs some hard-hitting questions today.
Hinting that intelligence is perishable, Guthrie asks Gibbs, "Did you lose an opportunity to interrogate by Mirandizing too soon? This was not a product of reflection that went all the way to the top."
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