Ever since Labor Day, President Obama has been engaged in the always transparent-but-nonetheless-necessary quadrennial game of presidents pretending events aren’t campaign-oriented or politically motivated when they undoubtedly are.
On Thursday White House spokesman Jay Carney was pummeled with questions about whether the President’s trip next week to a crumbling bridge a stone’s throw from Speaker John Boehner’s Ohio district is politically motivated, especially considering that the bridge connects Cincinnati to northern Kentucky, home to none other than the Senate’s Republican leader, Mitch McConnell.
The balancing act between the political and the official began in earnest last week when the President traveled to Richmond, Va., the home of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, perhaps his biggest foe in Congress. It was one day after the big jobs speech and the campaign desperately wants to keep Virginia in Obama’s camp next year, despite its pre-2008 tendencies to swing Republican in presidential contests.
Reporters are just doing their jobs in asking the questions because the political vs. official issue is obvious and longstanding, and Carney is just doing his job by answering. Right after Carney announced the bridge-as-backdrop scenario, CBS’ Mark Knoller jokingly asked whether Carney et al. hoped it would fall down during Obama’s remarks to drive home the failing infrastructure point. Presidents aren’t covered by the Hatch Act, and no press secretary in their right mind would admit the President is doing anything but governing and looking out for the American people.
The blurring of those lines was on vivid display Thursday night when the President attended two back-to-back fundraisers at private residences. At the first one, he told the intimate group of 30 donors that he’s determined to keep the pressure on Republicans to pass his jobs bill and is going to “run this like a campaign” and at the second, held at the Georgetown manse of former Ambassador to Portugal Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, he didn’t repeat the line and seemed to put the emphasis on governing.
Here are the quotes from the White House transcript from the President’s remarks:
“My hope is, is that we’re going to keep on seeing some governance out of Washington over the next several months, because the American people can’t afford to wait for an election to actually see us start doing something serious about our jobs,” he said at the first dinner party-fundraiser. “But we are going to run this like a campaign, in the sense that we’ve got to take it to the American people, and make the case as to why it is possible for Washington to make a difference right now.”
“Now, the campaign has not begun; my job — I’ve got a day job, and I’m going to have to spend a lot of time continuing to govern over the next several months,” he said at the second.
But there is a real issue behind the Kabuki theater, and one that every president must decide: what is the proper balance between campaigning and governing? And is there any real difference in the incessant, 24-hour, Twitter-driven news cycle in which every public presidential action carries political consequences? Even some of his most loyal fans, as well as Republicans, criticized the President over the summer for a lack of leadership and a failure to sell his own ideas. So now that Obama is offering his own plan, it seems he has an obligation to get his message out, and traveling to critical swing states and consolidating the President’s time seems, well, efficient.
