Divider-in-Chief (27 page)

Pastor Barbara Reynolds wrote in the
Washington Post
that after Obama's same-sex marriage announcement, she received numerous phone calls from other black Christians. One exchange went like this:

Obama's economic policies have disproportionately hurt black Americans. The black unemployment rate was 13.6 percent in May 2012,
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a full point higher than when Obama took office in January 2009, and more than 60 percent higher than the 8.2 percent unemployment rate for all Americans.
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For black men, the unemployment rate was 15 percent in May 2012; the black teen unemployment rate was 36.5 percent.
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And these numbers would be much higher if they included the hundreds of thousands of black Americans who have dropped out of the job market.

This devastation has not gone unnoticed. Throughout Obama's term, the Congressional Black Caucus has been warning Obama that black voters are frustrated with his economic policies and the impact they are having on the black community.

In September 2011, amid a reported 21 percent unemployment rate for blacks, Democratic representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told the
Wall Street Journal
, “I'm frustrated with the president, I'm frustrated with the Senate, I'm frustrated with the House. The president and his White House team [are] trying to minimize the discussion of race as it relates to job creation.'”
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Obama gave a remarkably patronizing speech to the Congressional Black Caucus in September 2011. In the face of their very real concerns about economic conditions, he told them to “take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes... stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.”
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In other words, if you don't agree with me and my approach, I don't want to hear it.

Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying? Needless to say, those remarks did not go over very well with black leaders in Congress. Democratic representative Maxine Waters of California quipped, “I've never owned a pair of bedroom slippers.”
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Black leaders called the unemployment epidemic among blacks a “state of emergency” and put pressure on Obama to address the problem. “This is not necessarily President Obama's fault—but right now, this is his watch. He has to address this issue,” Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television and the first black American billionaire, told
Politico
.
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Representative Waters said, “The Congressional Black Caucus loves the president, too. We're supportive of the president, but we're getting tired. We're getting tired. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don't know what the strategy is.”
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Waters's comments were reminiscent of a 2010 town hall event in which a black supporter of Obama told him:

Obama's relationship with blacks in the private sector has been frayed. In his book
The Amateur
, Edward Klein quotes Harry C. Alford, the president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which represents the nearly two million black businesses in the United States:

Ironic indeed. Obama knows he can take black voters for granted. He figures he can use identity politics and the race card to compensate for a policy agenda that has left more blacks without work and with less economic hope than they had before.

W
ith the possible exception of academia, no segment of American society was more thoroughly won over by Barack Obama in 2008 than the mainstream media. According to one study, Obama enjoyed an 8 to 1 voting advantage over John McCain among journalists.
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And that advantage helped Obama win. A Pew study found that the media's coverage of the presidential campaign was skewed 3 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama. (The study found that Fox News provided the most balanced coverage.)
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As
New York
magazine political reporter John Heilemann wrote in January 2012, “No person with eyes in his head in 2008 could have failed to see the way that soft coverage helped to propel Obama first to the Democratic nomination and then into the White House.”
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The media malpractice surrounding Obama was summed up best by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who, in a moment of candor, said, “I want to do everything I can to make this . . . new presidency work.”
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After Obama won, many
journalists abandoned their careers as “objective” journalists to join the new administration.

The relationship between Team Obama and the mainstream media was captured perfectly by former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg in the title to his bestselling book,
A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media
.

Obama often acts as though he expects the media to fawn over him. When they don't he gets tetchy and even vindictive. In his first term, President Obama spent an inordinate amount of time threatening and attempting to divide and marginalize the few media outlets that challenged him and his allies.

On the rare occasions during the 2008 campaign when the mainstream media scrutinized Obama, he lashed out. When the
New York Times
ran a front-page article with a poll finding that Obama hadn't closed the racial divide, the administration's press office sent a curt email conveying its displeasure to the
Times
' chief political correspondent, Adam Nagourney. As Gabriel Sherman wrote in the
New Republic
:

Journalist Jodi Kantor wrote that when things were going badly for Obama in 2009, he “took his frustration out on the media, which he largely viewed with condescension bordering on contempt.”
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She writes that “the president was perversely fascinated by cable news—he liked to see ‘what the idiots are paying attention to,' in the words of an aide.” And early in his administration,
Obama set out to destroy the conservative media, particularly conservative talk radio and Fox News.

In the initial days of his presidency, Obama told congressional Republicans to “quit listening” to Rush Limbaugh if they wanted to work with him. The administration had hired pollster Stanley Greenberg to survey the public about Limbaugh and discovered they might benefit if Rush were linked in the public's mind to the Republican leadership. So that's exactly what they did. The administration launched a campaign to divide Republicans by branding Limbaugh as the de facto leader of the Republican Party. The goal was to force Republican leaders to disassociate from the talk radio icon. The campaign provoked a
Time
magazine story titled “Team Obama's Petty Limbaugh Strategy.”
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The story noted that Obama “promised to be a different, more substantive, less gimmicky leader” who would not engage in “phony outrage” but would work on solving problems.
Time
quoted
Politico
's Jonathan Martin saying the entire Limbaugh “controversy” had been “cooked up and force fed to the American people by Obama's advisers.”
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Obama has saved his most vicious treatment for his most effective critic, Fox News
,
which he's tried to delegitimize and isolate from the rest of the media. Obama had always viewed the popular cable network as illegitimate. He was one of a group of Democratic presidential candidates who pulled out of a debate cosponsored by Fox News in 2007.
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As the only political news network not “in the tank” for Obama and the Democratic Party, Fox News attracts a large and loyal audience. Just months into his presidency, Obama began what
Politico
described as working “systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party,” unleashing “top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying world.”
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As
Time
magazine put it:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs used a baseball analogy to describe how the administration would counter critical media. “The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them,” he explained. “They move.”
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Senior Obama adviser David Axelrod told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that the White House didn't consider Fox News to be a real news organization. Axelrod then advised that ABC and others “ought not to treat them” as if they are a news organization.
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White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel echoed Axelrod on CNN, saying, “[Fox News is] not a news organization so much as it has a perspective . . . . And more importantly is to not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led and following Fox.”
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Interim White House Communications director Anita Dunn scolded Fox News in comments she gave to the
New York Times
, saying, “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations
behave.” She added, “We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.” She also called Fox a “wing of the Republican Party.”
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Things sank to an unprecedented low when the White House tried to bar Fox's White House correspondent, Major Garrett, from the press pool. As Jonathan Alter wrote in
The Promise
: “White House communications aides insisted that the only way to change the network's behavior was to elevate the confrontation. They saw it as ‘political malpractice' to treat Fox as a normal media outlet and felt vindicated when Garrett stopped asking them about anti-Obama slurs spread by the network's commentators.”
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The administration also tried to block a Fox interview with “pay czar” Ken Feinberg. Administration officials denied that it had intervened to block the interview, saying, “There was no plot to exclude Fox News and they had the same interview [opportunity] that their competitors did. Much ado about nothing.”
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But reporters knew otherwise. Four networks rallied to Fox's defense and refused to participate in the interview without Fox. CBS reporter Chip Reid said the administration “crossed the line.”
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