Fwd: The Times Discovers Black Republicans

Documenting and Exposing the Liberal Political Agenda of the New York Times
Wednesday May 05, 2010 @ 04:05 PM EDT

Gail Collins Finds 'Bright Spot' in Massive Gulf Oil Spill
At least one Times columnist has her priorities straight. Gail Collins: "Polls show that the country as a whole has lost a lot of its passion for environmental issues. Maybe the oil spill will bring it back. That'd be one bright spot in all this mess."

Obama's White House 20-Somethings 'Reign Over' D.C. Social Scene
Blech: "President Obama's young staff and their senior counterparts mix seamlessly and often sweetly....The young staff members in the Obama White House have not only helped create a new social scene but also nonchalantly reign over it." Because it's important for the White House staff to be hip.

The Times Discovers Black Republicans
Jennifer Steinhauer gives the candidates their due, but can't resist a cheap shot: "Videos taken at some Tea Party rallies show some participants holding up signs with racially inflammatory language." The paper has yet to address violence at left-wing May Day rallies or at a protest against Arizona's new illegal immigration law.

---

Gail Collins Finds 'Bright Spot' in Massive Gulf Oil Spill

Columnist Gail Collins' usual Wednesday "Conversation" with columnist David Brooks, the Times idea of a conservative, often amounts to two liberals nodding agreement over various liberal platitudes. This time the two agree that Obama shows grace under pressure: "The Calm, Cool and Collected President."

But Collins trumped Brooks on this outing by seeing the bridge side of the oil spill in the Gulf:

Polls show that the country as a whole has lost a lot of its passion for environmental issues. Maybe the oil spill will bring it back. That'd be one bright spot in all this mess. And if it turns out that we're going to be able to pin at least part of the blame on Halliburton, there'd be a second.

Obama's White House 20-Somethings 'Reign Over' D.C. Social Scene

A Sunday Magazine profile of Obama's young, hip staffers by Ashley Parker takes after MTV in its headine: "The Real World: 44." (Obama is the 44th president.) The alternate headline was more specific: "All the Obama 20-Somethings." Clearly the Times finds this new batch of idealists a welcome change from the stuffy, preppy Bushies, and Parker fawns over them, obviously comfortable in their presence and generous in her descriptions:

President Obama's young staff and their senior counterparts mix seamlessly and often sweetly. During the primaries, Axelrod once dropped by a party at the Pad -- a group house in Chicago where seven campaign staff members lived, worked and played the video game Rock Band. The rumpled, over-50 "Axe," as nearly everyone calls him, impressed the crowd by playing a game of beer pong. Now in Washington, he still makes the rare appearance at parties for junior staff members. When friends of the 31-year-old deputy communications director, Jen Psaki, gave her an afternoon engagement party at the Cork wine bar near Logan Circle, Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Axelrod came by, arriving with Lesser.

Parker prefers this hip batch of aides to the stodgy ones of the Bush White House (that is, when they're not "tabloid fodder" like the Bush twins).

Even so, Obama's young aides offer a contrast to the ones who worked in George W. Bush's administration only a few years ago. Bush promised to "restore dignity to the White House," and the mood inside the administration was subdued from the start, with a reinstated dress code that encouraged women to wear pantyhose. As Matt Latimer observed in his account of his years as a Bush speechwriter, "Speech-Less," there was no hint of Aaron Sorkin's "West Wing" sexiness. "We were more like Rob Lowe's cousins," he wrote, "the ones who didn't go out much." When they did go out, Johndroe says, they stuck to creaky haunts close to the White House like Old Ebbitt Grill or bars in the historically preppy enclave of Georgetown. "The Daily Grill was the place to go on Thursday nights, in Georgetown, and then people would go to Smith Point," Johndroe said, referring to the basement bar known for sightings of the Bush twins and its unofficial uniform of popped collars, boat shoes (no socks) and salmon-colored khakis for the men, pearls and Lilly Pulitzer for the women. The president's daughters were perhaps the city's most visible revelers, and their late-night escapades around town became tabloid fodder. (Johndroe, for the record, says he now spends more time on the U Street corridor.)

Because it's important for presidential staffers to be hip.

The young staff members in the Obama White House have not only helped create a new social scene but also nonchalantly reign over it. Washington, always known as "Hollywood for Ugly People," is now Hollywood, period. Jon Favreau landed on People magazine's most-beautiful-people list and Time magazine's Top 100 most-influential-people list in the same week. Other staff members found themselves ranked in GQ and Maxim, and in fashion spreads in Vanity Fair and Elle. Sam Kass, a 30-year-old White House assistant chef with movie-star looks, was also named one of People magazine's 100 most-beautiful people in 2009. He sometimes is teased by his co-workers with the nickname "100." The actress Rashida Jones came to Washington for the White House Correspondents Dinner and left romantically linked to Favreau. Kal Penn, who is 33, traded his Hollywood career in the "Harold and Kumar" movies and in Fox's "House" for a comparatively low-paying job as associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

And would the Times have treated this incident as a "silly blog sensation" if it had been a Republican staffer groping a cutout of Hillary Clinton?

People gripe about staff assistants who, they feel, have received un-deserved press coverage, the ones who didn't start out in Iowa but still landed a plum job, like the person in the next cubicle who has the same portfolio but makes more money. They are careful, however, not to complain too loudly. They have already learned lessons the hard way. When a Washington Post reporter first e-mailed Favreau about a Facebook picture of him groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton, he couldn't believe it; he never even put the picture up online (a friend from home had naïvely posted it). But the story became a silly blog sensation during the 2008 campaign, and Favreau had to apologize to Clinton. The incident was a psychological turning point for Obama's staff. Several of them started defriending reporters from their Facebook accounts and internalized the lesson that everyone in Washington eventually learns: nothing is private; everything is on the record.

Judging by fawning profiles like this, Obama staffers should have little reason to fear embarrassing coverage of their personal foibles.


You can follow Times Watch on Twitter.

The Times Discovers Black Republicans

Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer's piece on Wednesday, "Black Candidates Pick This Year for G.O.P. Primary Races," is getting some attention. It's already served the salutary purpose of making NBC reporter Luke Russert look both liberal and naive (Russert claimed, with surprise: "...it's quite interesting, these candidates are actually soliciting support from the tea party, a group that a lot of folks have claimed to be racist against African-Americans").

While managing to credit Barack Obama for the rise of viable black Republican candidates and throwing in a cheap shot at Tea Party protesters "holding up signs with racially inflammatory language," Steinhauer provided a mostly fair look at the opportunities and challenges of black Republican candidates:

Among the many reverberations of President Obama's election, here is one he probably never anticipated: at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.

The House has not had a black Republican since 2003, when J. C. Watts of Oklahoma left after eight years.

But now black Republicans are running across the country -- from a largely white swath of beach communities in Florida to the suburbs of Phoenix, where an African-American candidate has raised more money than all but two of his nine (white) Republican competitors in the primary.

Party officials and the candidates themselves acknowledge that they still have uphill fights in both the primaries and the general elections, but they say that black Republicans are running with a confidence they have never had before. They credit the marriage of two factors: dissatisfaction with the Obama administration, and the proof, as provided by Mr. Obama, that blacks can get elected.

....

Many of the candidates are trying to align themselves with the Tea Partiers, insisting that the racial dynamics of that movement have been overblown. Videos taken at some Tea Party rallies show some participants holding up signs with racially inflammatory language.

Meanwhile, the Times failed to cover the violence at the pro-amnesty May Day rallies, or the violence at the protests against Arizona's new illegal immigration law.

Steinhauer let Florida congressional candidate Allen West rebut that accusation:

The black candidates interviewed overwhelmingly called the racist narrative a news media fiction. "I have been to these rallies, and there are hot dogs and banjos," said Mr. West, the candidate in Florida, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army. "There is no violence or racism there."

There is also some evidence that black voters rally around specific conservative causes. A case in point was a 2008 ballot initiative in California outlawing same-sex marriage that passed in large part because of support from black voters in Southern California.

You can follow Times Watch on Twitter.

Click here to support TimesWatch.org!



TW Latest Headlines RSS feed