Steve Clemons weighs in about the White House whisper campaign that eventually did in White House counsel Greg Craig. Steve notes, as I have before, that it's odd that a White House which prided itself on running a political campaign with no leaks and no drama, now has so many leaks and such drama. Unless, of course, the leaks were sanctioned.
What just happened to Gregory Craig should not have happened in Obama Land. It’s something from what Dick Cheney would have called “The Dark Side”--where insinuation and character assassination were leaked to undermine a foe. Think of the manner in which Scooter Libby and Karl Rove promulgated the revelation that Bush administration thorn Joe Wilson was married to a CIA covert operative.
I spoke to Gregory Craig in the summer when the first leaks began to break. While he suspected they were driven by someone in the White House who was frustrated with the slow progress on shuttering GITMO, Craig did not know who was out to get him. He had no idea.
But the sustained nature of the leaks and—and the fact that they ultimately proved to be true—indicates something quite disappointing for anyone who had hoped that the Obama White House would operate more transparently and honestly than the Bush team had.
In fact, leaks are becoming standard fare by key players in the Obama administration. Someone, most likely on the military/intel side of the president’s national security bureaucracy, leaked Afghanistan Commanding General Stanley McChrystal’s report to Bob Woodward. Recently, other political players infuriated U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry by leaking his eleventh-hour contrarian view on a U.S. force surge to the press.I'm just as troubled by the notion that Craig was done in by his insistence that Obama close Gitmo. Why should holding the President to an important campaign promise "do in" a senior White House official?
But it’s quite hard to maintain the kind of Obama-esque upbeat tone of transparency and forthrightness and punish staff for leaking when the president himself is standing by and doing nothing as his closest advisors undermine one of their own.
Let's remember a few other times the White House leak machine went into action when people were simply trying to hold the president to his own campaign promises. There was the time the senior White House official called the Netroots "the left of the left" because we wanted the President to keep his promise on the public option in health care reform. And the time that gay marchers, and other liberal allies, were labeled "the Internet left fringe," for wanting the President to keep his gay rights promises, among others. Or the time that Harry Reid's efforts to get a robust public option (Obama's promise) in the Senate was repeatedly sabotaged by anonymous White House leaks. Or lots of other times that Glenn Greenwald documents.
These leaks don't happen in a vacuum. They far too often seem to occur when the White House doesn't want to keep one of President Obama's promises.
