America finds itself in a fourth war: The war over Jim Messina's legacy.
Ben Smith informs us that the White House appears to be in all out battle mode in response to Ari Berman's recent critical profile of outgoing White House deputy chief of staff and incoming Obama 2012 campaign director Jim Messina.
Seems the Lady Messina's boss doth protest too much.
The skirmish began with Ari Berman's shot across the bow, a piece suggesting Messina is a calculating enforcer who shares Rahm Emanuel's scorn for the liberal base.
The pushback began in a Marc Ambinder piece arguing that Messina is just an operative doing his job, and quickly escalated to a Huffington Post essay by Robert Creamer -- a consultant and liberal stalwart who is also Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky's husband -- arguing that Messina is in fact the secret love child of George McGovern and Eleanor Roosevelt. This was enthusiastically distributed on Twitter by DNC spokespeople Hari Sevugan and Brad Woodhouse (who threw in a mention of Messina's work against privatizing Social Security).
Comes now Jeff Zeleny's profile of Messina as -- as he describes himself -- the "science" to Obama's "art" -- Peter to Obama's Jesus, you might say.
