THOSE THAT LIVE IN "GLASS HOUSES", SHOULDN´T THROW ROCKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Gary Ater
October 31, 2009
…Accusing the Obama White House of abusing power is seriously the "pot calling the kettle black".
Just when you think they can´t get any more ridiculous, they go and step it all up a notch. This week the Republicans suggested that the recent moves by the Obama White House to take on people and organizations that disagree with it and oppose its policies "is an unprecedented abuse of government resources".
After the previous eight years of Bush, Cheney, Rove and Gonzales, this is not only ridiculous, it´s laughable. And let´s not forget the those wonderful years of the GOP;'s Gingrich, DeLay, Hastert and Frist. These individuals did not invent "strong-arm politics", but they sure flexed their muscles when they had the power in the White House or the Congress, or both. In reality, the way these GOP operatives worked back then, they made today´s White House so called "Chicago Politics" look wimpy.
This claim by the Republicans is, of course, total nonsense. The opposition really does hate it when the other side actually hits back.
The reality is that the Obama team is currently engaged in a series of tough legislative and press battles and is just stepping up its game, it is not stepping out-of-line. And the latest actions by the White House are mild and tame compared with those of both the Gingrich and the Bush years.
President George W. Bush had a long list of groups that he disliked and that he never meet with or that he actually spurned. As is very well known, Bush declined for years the opportunity to speak to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This was an organization that had hosted every president since Herbert Hoover. It was not until 2006 that due to strong public pressure, he finally reversed that course.
And let´s not forget how Bush totally ignored the activist Cindy Sheehan who became famous for following Bush to his ranch, asking for a meeting and a hearing, which he refused to grant. Bush also declined to meet with a bipartisan committee that requested his presence for rewriting the education bill.
And despite repeated requests, Bush refused all but once in his last year to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus. Bush even declined to meet with Nelson Mandela in 2003 because the former South African political prisoner had opposed the Iraq war.
There was also the House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, who would not meet with the National Endowment for the Arts, calling it a group based on patronage and elitism.
So when it comes to declining meetings with groups you disagree with, Bush and Gingrich set the standard, not this White House.
But the Republicans are continuing to now make noises that the Obama White House is pushing away from meeting with the Washington K-Street lobbyists.
The Obama White House has made it clear that it is not going to play the past games as the Bush administration did with the powerful and highly financed business lobbyists. Everyone will get treated in the same fashion, no favorites.
It must also be remembered that the K Street Project was a project by the Republican Party that was set up for pressuring Washington lobbying firms to hire only Republicans in their top positions. The Republicans had committed that they would then reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials. The project was launched in 1995, by Republican strategist Grover Norquist and the then House majority leader, Tom DeLay.
K Street in Washington DC is where the big lobbying firms have their headquarters and it has sometimes been referred to as the "4th branch of US government", especially during the Bush administration. DC Lobbying firms have had great influence on US politics due to their monetary resources and the "Project´s" revolving door policy of hiring former government officials.
Historically, K Street firms have hired top ex-politicians from both major parties, since the party in power can vary between elections and among the legislative and executive branches in government.
However, during the last Bush administration, the Republican party had majority control of both houses of Congress and control of the White House. At the time, DeLay in the House, Rick Santorum in the Senate, and the GOP´s Norquist took the opportunity to expand the K Street Project. They proceeded to pressure the major DC lobbying firms to hire only Republicans in any new or open positions. Those same right-leaning individuals are still in power at the main lobbying firms in Washington.
As to the Obama administration´s recent back and forth, with and about, the Fox Opinion Channel, this is also nothing new. I have personally enjoyed that the White House called out Fox for their blatant misinformation. And it´s probably going to improve Fox´s ratings, but it certainly isn´t very original. The Republicans have been blasting at the "liberal" media for decades.
Even going back to 1964 and the then President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. President Eisenhower called out "sensation-seeking columnists and commentators". And that sentiment was immortalized by Richard Nixon´s Vice President Spiro Agnew, who memorably charged that many in the press corps were mere "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "an effete corps of impudent snobs".
The following was written for POLITICO by Mark Penn:
"It was Newt Gingrich, in one of his radio addresses as speaker, that said it was time to zero out the funding for public broadcasting, which he saw as carrying a liberal agenda. Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Bush all at one point blamed the "liberal, elite media" as at the root of their problems, with famous battles against Connie Chung, Dan Rather and others. At the time, the Republicans called CNN the Clinton News Network.
If a Democratic administration ostracized Fox News, it was mild compared with the Republican attempt headed by New York Rep. Peter King to institute a criminal investigation by the attorney general into The New York Times for its coverage of the Iraq war — a charge he made on "The O´Reilly Factor," of course.
And Ed Gillespie, working for the Bush White House, essentially made the same charge against MSNBC that David Axelrod and Anita Dunn made about Fox News. Gillespie said in essence that the reporters and hosts of MSNBC have a point of view that comes through in what they do.
Even the John McCain presidential campaign tried to get NBC off of presidential debate panels and would not allow columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Joe Klein on its planes. McCain strategist Steve Schmidt also called MSNBC "a partisan advocacy organization that exists for the purpose of attacking John McCain." Newsweek found its access threatened after one of its cover stories."
(Mark Penn, is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates. He has been a pollster and an adviser to President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.)
So it´s all a bunch of "Bull" if they think they can throw rocks at the Obama White House for "unprecedented abuse of government resources".
And as Mr. Penn also added: "Giving everyone a seat at the table doesn´t mean giving everyone a seat to sit there and attack the White House. And if anyone should and can appreciate that point, it is those very Republicans on television now complaining about it."
Copyright G.Ater 2009
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