Much attention is being paid to Game Change, a new book by Mark Halperin of Time and John Heilemann of New York magazine. The book dishes up a great deal of dirt about the 2008 campaign… information which, as Allahpundit noted tartly in a Tweet, the mainstream media did an awesome job of suppressing during the campaign. Among other things, the book reveals Colin Powell held secret meetings with Obama before the 2008 campaign began. This throws an even more unflattering light on Powell’s surprise eleventh-hour endorsement of Obama over John McCain, the candidate from the Republican Party – whose leadership, like most of America, labored under the mistaken impression that Powell was also a member.
The big fireworks for the launch of Game Change concern the remarkable level of tension between vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, who apparently holds the same opinion of Biden that most Republicans do. It would have been nice if Halperin, Heilemann, and their journalistic colleagues had informed voters about this a little earlier, since the electorate might have been interested to know that Obama was willing to put someone he didn’t even trust on his nightly campaign conference call a heartbeat away from the presidency. The voters would also have benefited from seeing how the campaign revealed Obama’s remarkably poor managerial skills. Instead, we got to pay several trillion dollars to learn that lesson, and we haven’t even made it to afternoon recess yet.
The dirt from Game Change is being shoveled after a week of outrage over the secrecy and obfuscation surrounding ObamaCare negotiations. Even some liberals have taken to howling at that closed door. We also discovered that one of the top academic defenders of ObamaCare is the cable-news equivalent of an Internet sock puppet, animated by a rather stunning conflict of interest that the media was willing to ignore, until liberal bloggers began complaining about it during of the Left’s growing civil war over the “Cadillac tax” that would cut into union health benefits.
It’s remarkable how perfectly consistent the Obama presidency has been with the criticism leveled by conservatives during the campaign. If you relied on the mainstream media for information during the fall of 2008, every day of this presidency brings a fresh dose of shock and disappointment. If you relied on talk radio and conservative web sites instead, everything that happened in 2009 was dreary and predictable. Barack Obama has vindicated the Right more quickly and thoroughly than anyone in recent history.
Were you expecting “transparency” out of the Obama Administration? Not if you paid attention to the Reverend Wright scandal, chiseled open through a stone wall of media ignorance by conservative bloggers and talk show hosts… or if you followed the Tony Rezko saga more closely than Big Media thought you should. Absolutely nothing about the candidate’s past history, or his behavior during the campaign, suggested much interest in transparency. Liberals like Jack Cafferty have been the loudest critics of the broken “health care deliberations on C-SPAN” campaign promise, because they were the only ones who fell for it in the first place. I always knew my odds of seeing those deliberations on C-SPAN were roughly equal to my chances of being invited to participate in them.
Are you disappointed by how disengaged Obama has been during the Underwear Bomber crisis, or how inept his response to every major news event has been? Not if you cared about his brief Senate career of voting “present.” Are you unpleasantly surprised by the high-unemployment economic quagmire of the past year? Not if you saw the $100,000 gazebo that stands as the only tangible result of a million-dollar botanical garden project in Chicago, guided by Obama’s dazzling community organizing skills. Were you shocked by the appointment of a repulsive character like Van Jones to a czarship? Why would that be unusual, in light of Obama’s long friendship with the even more repulsive Bill Ayers?
Thus far, Obama has performed exactly as the conservative critique of his candidacy predicted, bringing Chicago sleaze, corruption, and inefficiency to Washington – which was producing all of those things just fine on its own, and had no need to import more. He’s reacted to unexpected developments – the most expected, and difficult, features of a presidency – with the helpless confusion of an unqualified politician promoted far beyond his ability. He’s approached domestic policy with the bitter frustration of an academic who refuses to accept that his theories don’t work in the real world, coupled with a reckless determination to force the world to fit his theories.
The inside details of the transparent fiction that got Obama elected are not a shocking revelation… at least, not to those of us who understood from the outset that the legacy media served as its willing ghostwriters. Writing about the weak response to the Underpants Bomber, Mark Steyn recently described the election of Barack Obama as a “fundamentally unserious act by the American electorate.” The electorate urgently needs to get serious before it heads back to the polls. It would do well to remember that the conservative media was right about Obama during the last campaign, while the “objective journalists” of the legacy media were happy to save the really juicy information for future book deals, and leave their dwindling audience in the dark.