Another Unfortunate Appointment

Sometimes I’m tempted to blame Obama’s advisors for some of the bad choices he has made, but I have to admit that he chose the bad advisers.  Early on he took too much advice from the Clinton camp, but that is no longer an excuse.  Who could be worse than Bernanke at the Fed and Geithner at Treasury.  He has made one superior appointment, Elizabeth Warren at the CFPB.  He has just chosen a 2012 campaign manager with a history of anti-progressive views and conflicts with progressives, as this article by Ari Berman explains.

In March 2009 the Campaign for America’s Future, a top progressive group in Washington, launched a campaign called “Dog The (Blue) Dogs” to pressure conservative Blue Dog Democrats to support President Obama’s budget. When he heard about the effort, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who was regarded as the Obama administration’s designated “fixer,” called CAF’s leaders into the White House for a dressing down, according to a CAF official. If the group wanted to join the Common Purpose Project, an exclusive weekly strategy meeting between progressive groups and administration officials, CAF had to drop the campaign. We know how to handle the Blue Dogs better than you do, Messina said. Not wanting to sour its relationship with the White House at this early date, CAF complied, and the campaign quickly disappeared from its website. Despite Messina’s assurance, however, the Blue Dogs would remain a major obstacle to the realization of the president’s legislative agenda.

The hardball tactics used by Messina against CAF exemplified how the Obama administration would operate going forward—insistent on demanding total control, hostile to any public pressure from progressives on dissident Democrats or administration allies, committed to working the system inside Washington rather than changing it. As deputy chief of staff, Messina held the same position once occupied by Karl Rove (and Josh Lyman on The West Wing). He worked as a top lieutenant for Rahm Emanuel and became the administration’s lead enforcer after Emanuel left for Chicago. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer calls Messina “the most powerful person in Washington that you haven’t heard of.” Messina’s dream job was to become chief of staff. Instead, he recently got an arguably more important assignment—manager of Obama’s re-election campaign.

Messina, a longtime aide to Montana Senator Max Baucus, entered Obamaworld in June 2008 as the campaign’s chief of staff… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Nation>

Lawrence O’Donnell obtained comments and background from the author.

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I have to disagree with Lawrence.  If Max Baucus, a DINO even more bought than Mitch McConnell, is a moderate, then Joe LIEberman is a Democrat.

It would serve Obama well to remember that it is the grass roots efforts of thousands of progressives that put him in the White House.  If this unfortunate appointment telegraphs the way he intends to treat his base going forward, and I hope it does not, it will cost him at the polls and hamper his efforts to restore Democratic control in the House.