Post-American Presidency (34 page)

As it happened, Color of Change was cofounded by Van Jones, who
served for six months in mid-2009 as Obama’s special advisor for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Jones resigned under fire in September 2009 after Beck and others revealed his inflammatory rhetoric against Obama’s congressional opponents and his deep involvement with radical causes. By the time he resigned, the fact that an organization founded by a White House official was leading a campaign against a primary critic of the administration seemed to be the least of Van Jones’s sins. But for defenders of free speech and republican government, it was one of the most disquieting.

OBAMA’S WAR ON FOX NEWS

Aside from its connection with Jones, the war on Beck had no direct connection to the Obama White House. But the larger assault on Beck’s employer, Fox News, was thoroughly a White House production.

It started out as a joke. But soon it turned out that only Barack Obama wasn’t laughing.

At the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in May 2009, Obama acknowledged the important role that the cheerleader media played in getting him elected president of the United States: “Most of you covered me,” he quipped, “all of you voted for me. Apologies to the Fox table.”
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It was true: coverage of Obama was three times more positive than coverage of John McCain during the 2008 election, and it was clear virtually every night that the mainstream media was happily in the tank for Obama, regularly skewing stories his way while doing all it could to undermine McCain and Sarah Palin.
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According to Mark Halperin of
Time
magazine, liberal media bias marred the presidential campaign of 2008 far more severely than it
had other recent presidential campaigns. Halperin was unequivocal: “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.” Halperin invoked one notorious example: “At the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that
The New York Times
ran of the potential first ladies. The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it cast her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”

The profile of Michelle Obama, on the other hand, was “like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is.”
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And so it went, day after day, night after night, in all the newspapers and on all the television networks—warm praise for Barack Obama, sympathetic explanations of his positions, with caustic criticism and even ridicule reserved for his opponents. A Pew Research Center poll found that the American public was getting the message loud and clear: 70 percent of the American electorate believed that the media wanted Obama to win, with only 9 percent believing that the media was favoring McCain, and only 8 percent still buying the myth of media objectivity.
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A Sacred Heart University poll released the following September reported that 89.3 percent of Americans believed that the mainstream media’s coverage of Obama played a large role in electing him president.
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So Obama was probably very near right at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner when he said that “all of you voted for me.”

But not at Fox News. Alone among the news networks, Fox did not retail wholly hagiographical material about candidate Obama. Rather than applaud the freedom of the press and the robust give-and-take of American politics, however, Obama took a different course once he became president—one with ultimately ominous implications
for the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. Not long after the Correspondents’ Association dinner, it became clear that Barack Obama was intent on making Fox pay for not marching in lockstep with the rest of the mainstream media—and with him.

In June 2009, Obama complained about Fox: “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration.… You’d be hard-pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.”
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By October 2009 this complaint had escalated to a full-out war. In an attack that was bitterly ironic in light of the relentless leftward tilt of the media, White House communications director Anita Dunn declared: “What I think is fair to say about Fox—and certainly it’s the way we view it—is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party. They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”
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The following weekend, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, declared that Fox wasn’t actually a news organization at all: “The way we—the president looks at it and we look at it, is, it is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”
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Obama adviser David Axelrod agreed: “A lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view.”
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He added a threat, telling a CNN reporter: “Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way. We’re not going to treat them that way.”
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The substance of the threat manifested itself quickly. Although Axelrod said that Obama spokesmen would “appear on shows and participate” on Fox despite the administration’s criticism of the network, they didn’t.
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Fox itself reported the same weekend that Emanuel and Axelrod delivered their remarks on the Sunday morning news shows: “Despite calls to the White House this week, the administration did not offer a guest for this weekend’s ‘Fox News Sunday’ to talk
about Dunn’s comments, although administration officials appeared on all four Sunday morning shows to speak on various issues.”
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Dunn and Emanuel had emphasized that they were enunciating the administration’s position, and Obama himself soon made that clear, saying on October 21 that he didn’t consider Fox a news organization either: “If media is operating, basically, as a talk-radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet then that’s another. But it’s not something I’m losing a lot of sleep over.”
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Maybe he wasn’t, but free Americans ought to have been losing sleep over the implications of his war on Fox News for the freedom of speech. In November 2009 Obama’s White House actually warned a Democratic strategist to stop appearing on Fox—or else. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, “shortly after an appearance on Fox,” the strategist—who remained anonymous out of fear of Obama—“got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.” The Obama official told him: “We better not see you on again.” Implicit but unmistakable was the threat that “clients might stop using you if you continue.”

In strong-arming Democratic consultants to ban Fox, the
Los Angeles Times
explained: “Obama’s White House sought to isolate it and make it look more partisan.” Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter’s former pollster, said that Democratic spokesmen had told him that Obama’s White House had warned them to stay away from Fox. “I find it appalling,” said Caddell. “When the White House gets in the business of suppressing dissent and comment, particularly from its own party, it hurts itself.”
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Indeed. When the president of the United States enjoyed the support of 80 to 90 percent of those who reported the news, and then he directed his energy and made full use of his bully pulpit to discredit and marginalize the remaining 10 to 20 percent, it was hard to avoid
the conclusion that he simply was not a strong supporter of the right to dissent.

Without Fox News, what outlet would those who dissented from Obama’s policies have? The answer to that was the Internet—but the Obama administration had plans to take care of that also.

CASS SUNSTEIN: FREE SPEECH CZAR?

In April 2009, Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) introduced into his Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation a “cybersecurity” bill that contained this language: “The President may… order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network.”

Compromised in what way? By whose determination? This appeared to give the president power to shut down any portion of the Internet that displeased him. But after a public outcry, the bill was revised to read in this way: the president, in view of “strategic national interests involving compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network,” may “direct the national response to the cyber threat” along with “relevant industry sectors.” It still gives the president the authority to direct the “timely restoration of the affected critical infrastructure information system or network.”
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This still appears to give the president the sole authority to decide when and whether certain information systems or networks would
ever
come back online. A conflict with the First Amendment and a dangerous abridgement of the freedom of speech? Sure. But with a compliant Supreme Court behind Obama and an indifferent public before him, what would stop such a measure from becoming law?

Nor was this an isolated initiative. In August 2009
Computerworld
reported that “the Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has approved the controversial searches, copying and retention of laptops, PDAs, and other digital devices without cause at U.S. borders.”
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The problem with such sweeping measures was that while they were intended to address security issues, they could all too easily be used to stifle political dissent.

But surely Obama wasn’t interested in doing that, was he? If he wasn’t, he gave supporters of free speech no comfort when he appointed Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at Harvard University, to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

With conservative blogs serving as key sources of information for Obama’s opponents, it wasn’t hard to imagine which blogs Sunstein might think needed to be corralled. In his book
On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done
, which was published in September 2009, Sunstein complained that “people’s beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire.” This problem was squarely the fault of the unfettered Internet: “We hardly need to imagine a world, however, in which people and institutions are being harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet. We live in that world. What might be done to reduce the harm?” Sunstein recommended changing libel laws to make it easier to convict someone of libel. “A ‘chilling effect’ on those who would spread destructive falsehoods can be an excellent idea.” Why would such a chill be so urgently needed? Because “falsehoods can undermine democracy itself.”
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New York Post
reporter Kyle Smith observed: “What Sunstein means by that sentence is pretty clear: He doesn’t like so-called false rumors about his longtime University of Chicago friend and colleague, Barack Obama.”
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And he means to stop them not just by the compelling force of sweet reason, but by the force of law. But who would decide, in such an eventuality, what was a false rumor and what was
legitimate political dissent? Why, the very ones from whom the dissenters were dissenting. And that would be the end of the freedom of speech in America.

In initiatives to block free speech on the Internet, Sunstein might find an ally in another Obama appointee, Attorney General Eric Holder, who said on NPR’s
Morning Edition
as far back as 1999 that the Internet would have to be restricted: “It is gonna be a difficult thing,” said Holder, “but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at.”
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Now’s his chance.

With Sunstein’s friend the president saying that he didn’t want “the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” in the first year of the Obama administration there was nothing farfetched about concerns over the very survival of the right of free speech.

OBAMA MOVES TO SHUT DOWN FREE SPEECH

The Obama administration’s apparent disdain for free speech and dissent from his policies wasn’t limited to rhetoric alone, or to campaigns against dissenters in the mainstream media, or even to the occasional resort to strong-arm tactics. He also moved on the legislative front. In the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the new administration indicated in numerous ways, large and small, that it was hardly a champion of the robust debate and hearty rough-and-tumble involved in defending one’s views in the public square. On the contrary, it gave numerous indications that dispensing with the freedom of speech altogether would suit it just fine.

An especially Orwellian touch came on August 4, 2009, just days before Obama, Pelosi, and Hoyer spoke out against dissent. The
White House blog “The Briefing Room” posted an item asking Americans to report on “casual conversation” that included “disinformation” or anything “fishy” said about the health-care debate: “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected].”
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