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Harry Reid: It’s Obama’s Fault!
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 5, 2014 @ 10:44 am In The Point | 20 Comments
Victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat has to be blamed on someone else. Obama is blaming the Dems for not letting him campaign. Harry Reid is now blaming Obama.
This Washington Post story features a clear setting for the Reid narrative.
At a March 4 Oval Office meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other Senate leaders pleaded with Obama to transfer millions in party funds and to also help raise money for an outside group.
“We were never going to get on the same page,” said David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff. “We were beating our heads against the wall.”
Obama isn’t a big fan of surrendering control even to his own people. He fundraises for his own agendas. It took the Dems a while to convince him to scale down his own permanent campaign so they could raise money.
“The president’s approval rating is barely 40 percent,” Krone said. “What else more is there to say? . . . He wasn’t going to play well in North Carolina or Iowa or New Hampshire. I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean that the message was bad, but sometimes the messenger isn’t good.”
And the messenger is Obama.
But what the White House saw as deference and support, Senate Democrats viewed as “lip service,” in the words of Krone.
This past Sunday, two days before Election Day, Krone sat at a mahogany conference table in the majority leader’s stately suite just off the Senate floor and shared with Washington Post reporters his notes of White House meetings. Reid’s top aide wanted to show just how difficult he thought it had been to work with the White House.
With Democrats under assault from Republican super-PAC ads, Reid and his lieutenants, Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), went to the Oval Office on March 4 to ask Obama for help. They wanted him to transfer millions of dollars from the Democratic National Committee to the DSCC, a relatively routine transaction.
Beyond that, they had a more provocative request — they wanted Obama to help raise money for the Senate Majority PAC, an outside group run by former Reid advisers.
Despite his deep aversion to super PACs, Obama in early 2012 reluctantly sanctioned Priorities USA, a super PAC set up to back his reelection, and allowed White House and campaign officials to appear at the group’s fundraisers. But Reid and Senate Democrats thought the president was not giving the same level of support for Senate Majority PAC.
Lawyers negotiated for months over legal minutia, with Obama’s counselors insisting that the president appear only as a guest and do no donor solicitation, which would have violated federal law. After Obama appeared at two Senate Majority PAC events — June 17 in New York and July 22 in Seattle — the president’s lawyers demanded that no staffer follow up with the donors for at least seven days.
These contingencies were so strict, Krone argued, that it would be fruitless to involve the president at all. “They were setting the rules as they saw fit,” he said. “For some reason, they hid behind a lot of legal issues.”
For some reason… because Krone knows quite well that Obama routinely violates laws when he chooses to. That implicit admission is already interesting.
The senior White House official voiced displeasure with Senate Majority PAC’s methods: “They were calling Obama donors who we had long relationships with and making asks that annoyed the donors.”
The disagreements underscored a long-held contention on Capitol Hill that Obama’s political operation functioned purely for the president’s benefit and not for his party’s…
It’s always all about Obama.
The official said a “fundamental game changer” that “broke trust” came in August, when a story in the New York Times included unflattering details about the president from an Oval Office meeting. White House officials, famous for their loathing of leaks, believed Krone was behind the story.
And they ought to know.
Exacerbating matters was Obama’s Oct. 2 speech in Chicago, in which he handed every Republican admaker fresh material that fit perfectly with their message: “I am not on the ballot this fall. . . . But make no mistake — these policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.”
“It took about 12 seconds for every reporter, every race, half of the Obama world to say that was probably not the right thing to say,” said a senior Democratic official.
It was so problematic that many Democrats wondered whether Obama meant to say it. He did. “It is amazing that it was in the speech,” the official said. “It wasn’t ad-libbed.”
Of course he meant to say it.
Krone said that the White House “likes to cast aspersions and point fingers at us.”
“No member of the Democratic caucus screwed up the rollout of that health-care Web site,” Krone added, “yet they paid the price — every one of them.”
No, they just voted for the bill that gave incompetent corrupt idiots the power to screw everything up.
Reid’s people go on to blame Braley and Grimes for their own defeat for not listening to them. It’s always someone else’s fault.
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