The White House likes to describe them as ?process? stories and is famously uncooperative with reporters trying to do them, so the tantalizing glimpse into President Barack Obama?s decision making that appears in The New Yorker this week ? based on hundreds of pages of internal White House documents ? is something of a milestone.
The story, ?The Obama Memos,? by staff writer Ryan Lizza, includes ?probably the most process we?ve seen in White House reporting? on the Obama administration, said Jared Bernstein, former chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden told POLITICO.
Continue ReadingBut that isn?t a bad thing, Bernstein said. ?How presidents make decisions and how they change over time is of great interest to people.?
The article is notable not so much because it includes startling revelations ? it doesn?t, really ? but because it literally documents the conventional wisdom on Obama?s first three years in office, which is that the idealistic campaign promise of a post-partisan presidency has been thwarted.
?My contention, not to be too cynical, is that it really was impossible to change Washington and that Obama should have always known that,? Lizza told POLITICO. ?Given the polarization story, there was never a real chance for him to have a post-partisan presidency.?
Past attempts to document Obama?s transition from idealism to realism ? such as Ron Suskind?s 2011 ?Confidence Men? or Jodi Kantor?s ?The Obamas? ? were primarily culled from the reminiscences of administration sources.
The Washington Post?s Bob Woodward ? famous for the documents he always obtains from cooperative sources ? collected some for ?Obama?s Wars,? a 2010 book about Iraq and Afghanistan, but Lizza?s piece is the first to examine Obama?s economic decision-making process with official documents that include the president?s own handwritten notes.
?I spoke with dozens of White House officials over the last few years, and what I learned is people don?t have very reliable memories,? Lizza said. ?They contradict themselves. You look at the paper trail, and you realize what they told you isn?t true. So I decided to rely almost exclusively on primary source material.?
Perhaps because of Lizza?s reliance on official memos and perhaps because there are no great damaging revelations, the White House has not staged the heavy pushback campaign that it waged against Suskind and Kantor.
One administration official pointed out that if the story was particularly harmful to the White House, there would be a point person responding to what Lizza uncovered. There isn?t.
?Silence,? Lizza said. ?I haven?t heard anything so far.?
?It?s a very long article, and I haven?t gotten through it,? White House press secretary Jay Carney said during Monday?s briefing. ?The portrait that I see portrayed in it, based on the half of the article that I?ve read so far, is one of the enormous economic calamity that the president and his team faced as they were coming into office in the end of 2008 and early 2009 and the monumental decisions that the president had to make at the time.?
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