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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / Black Jimmy Carter / The Only Carney That Ever Mattered Was Art

The Only Carney That Ever Mattered Was Art

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Jay Carney was named the new WH Press Secretary, and D-Day has some thoughts. The only thing I could remember off the top of my head was that he was a beltway CW type, but I do remember that during the campaign, John McCain just exploded on Carney for really no reason whatsoever (other than the fact that McCain is a cranky hothead asshole whose memory is shot and who gets pissed off when people notice him doing one thing and saying another):

I guess the strategy is to give the beltway insiders in the WH press room a beltway insider to deal with. D-Day has some interesting points, but I honestly don’t remember the last time any news was broken by a Press Secretary. Pretty much the only thing that happens when the press secretary speaks is one side or the other gets livid about something they were already mad about.

Reader Interactions

66Comments

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    They should have got Dave Chappelle. It’s not like he’s busy.

    Sample response to reporters:

    “It’s Mars, bitches!”

  3. 3.

    Elisabeth

    I just want to know if he’ll wear pastel ties like Gibbs did.

    (Actually, I thought the fact that the president went outside of his inner circle, passing up folks like Bill Burton, was a bit significant. How, I don’t know yet.)

  7. 7.

    BGinCHI

    Anybody else watch Lawrence O’Donnell’s show tonight?

    There was a crawl with a bunch of names with no explanation (the first was Henry Cabot Lodge). Any idea what this was? What am I missing?

  8. 8.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    John McCain just exploded on Carney for really no reason whatsoever

    The McCain is infallible, therefore The McCain never changes. To suggest that The McCain is different is to suggest The McCain is flawed. Offenders will be banned from the Tire Swing.
    Seems a propos today, given that Salter has stumbled into the news, to point out the unintended humor of McCain not being able to refer to “his own” books.

    On topic: I’m sure Carney has said a lot of stupid things. Who hasn’t? Who cares?

  9. 9.

    Elisabeth

    @joe from Lowell:

    I’m guessing this actually might be a move on the adminstration’s part in softening the relationship they have with the media. Gibbs, with whom I have a bit of a love/hate relationship, could be a bit acerbic, often rightfully so. But Carney should bring a different dynamic to the briefing room.

  12. 12.

    stuckinred

    @BGinCHI: Maybe this?

    Q: Say Russ Feingold were to run for the next open Senate seat in Wisconsin, if Herb Kohl decided not to run in 2012, and say Russ were to win. How many times has a senator done something similar? How many times has someone been elected to more than one of the three classes of senators? I have no idea if it’s ever happened, even once, but obviously you’re my best hope for an answer.

    • Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (R-Mass.) served from 1937 until he resigned in 1944 to join the Army, the first person since the Civil War to leave the Senate to go to battle. Once out of the service, he unseated a Democratic senator in 1946 but lost the seat six years later to John F. Kennedy.

  13. 13.

    Ailuridae

    @joe from Lowell:

    Frankly, a President doesn’t need a fair arbiter of the truth as press secretary. It’s a propaganda position.

    I guess I would have preferred Burton to get the job but this is really far down my list of “Shit I care about”

  17. 17.

    Raenelle

    He’s married to Claire Shipman?! Well, despite anything else you can say about him, you have to give him credit for his choice of marriage partners.

  18. 18.

    Tom Q

    @BGinCHI: It was a list of losing vice-presidential candidates over the past half-century. O’Donnell was illustrating a point he’s made many times previous: that Sarah Palin is not a threat to be president because no losing VP candidate has been in his lifetime.

    Of course: 1) a number have been losing presidential nominees, which is all we’re asking Palin to be; and 2) if you got back a bit further, you will find this fellow named Roosevelt.

  19. 19.

    geg6

    @Elisabeth:

    No guessing about it. You have hit the nail right smack on the head. This is about getting the WH Press Corpse to feel all warm and snuggly with one of their very own Villagers as their conduit to the White House. They’ll eat it right up. I think it’s a smart move. And if DDay and Glenn Greenwald don’t understand that, they have no business even discussing politics. They are too stupid and ignorant to pay attention to at all in such matters.

  20. 20.

    TR

    @Tom Q:

    if you got back a bit further, you will find this fellow named Roosevelt.

    Well, if Palin wants to get stricken with polio, have a radical rethinking of her politics, and get back to us in 12 years like FDR, fine.

  22. 22.

    handy

    @Tom Q:

    They do that a lot in sports, too: throw a bunch of past performances with no real causal links as predicative of present and future results. “Phil Jackson has never lost a 7-game series after winning the first game at home against a team whose road colors contain Cerulean blue.” Oh, well Vegas can take that to the bank then, can’t they?

  27. 27.

    Lolis

    I think Carney is a good choice. He is attractive, youthful, and no doubt is chummy with the reporters. The White House should be greasing the palms of the press if that is what it takes. This is a P.R. gig, not someone who is the brains behind the White House. If anyone is truly disappointed about this pick, I honestly question their intelligence and ability to put things in perspective.

  28. 28.

    FlipYrWhig

    @geg6: I don’t know if it’s a smart move or not. I just get tired of having every. damn. thing. be read symbolically about what constituency group is being meta-slapped in the meta-face or meta-thrown under the meta-bus.

    ETA: Constituency group here being something like “bloggers.”

  29. 29.

    Ija

    Typical White House insidery stuff about the new Obama team from New York Magazine. There’s some fluffing of Plouffe, some bashing of Rahm, some account of how Pete Rouse feels about being replaced for the top job by Daley (he’s okay with it, totally okay! okay). Wingnut baits include:

    “What you had was really three or four people running the entire government,” says the former White House strategist. “I thought they put a pretty good Cabinet together, but most of those guys might as well be in the witness-protection program.” A funny line, no doubt, but an overstatement, surely? Well, maybe not. “I happen to know most of the Cabinet pretty well, and I get together with them individually for lunch,” says one of the most respected Democratic bigwigs in Washington. “I’ve had half a dozen Cabinet members say that in the first two years, they never had one call—not one call—from the president.”

    The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.” Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.

  30. 30.

    Ailuridae

    @BGinCHI:

    Sadly I am buried under a pile of mucus at the moment. But beer is soon.

    I was thinking of hitting up Sheffield’s before baseball starts up and that place is crawling with meatheads again.

  32. 32.

    FlipYrWhig

    Also, this (excerpt from Dayen; see the OP for the full context)…

    I could not believe how thick Carney was laying on the “praise” for bloggers in that session, and yet Greenwald, perhaps mindful of Carney’s past, would have none of it

    …doesn’t reflect well on anyone.

  34. 34.

    Tom Q

    I just got through reading the dday story, plus the comments after and…wow…a perfect reminder of why I don’t go near Firedoglake (I know: except for TBogg).

    I don’t remember dday being that dogmatic back in the earlier Kos days. What happened to these people?

  36. 36.

    kdaug

    @geg6:

    This is about getting the WH Press Corpse to feel all warm and snuggly with one of their very own Villagers as their conduit to the White House. They’ll eat it right up. I think it’s a smart move.

    Yeah, that’s how I read it too. Put one of their own in the room, with the job of delivering the company line.

  38. 38.

    Mnemosyne

    It’s weird that D-Day and Rick Pearlstein posted a mistake — in fact, Pearlstein did it twice since he reposted his own post:

    Moments later, a writer identfiying himself as “Tom T” pointed out an error in Carney’s “nut graf” that would have earned a failing grade for a first-year journalism major: “Clinton’s approval rating in January of 2005 was 47 percent. It was not mired in the 30s.”

    Anyone remember who was president in 2005? Anyone? Bueller?

    It was hard for me to take the rest of the debunking seriously when there was a serious, uncorrected mistake right there in the middle of it that was missed by two different people.

  39. 39.

    Cat Lady

    Jay Carney was one of the Villagers at Swampland who gave the Bush DOJ the benefit of the doubt about the US attorney firings after TPM broke the story. To his credit, he fessed up that he’d been rolled. I think he was with Michael Scherer when they tried to get McCain to talk to them on McCain’s campaign jet, and Grumpy blew them both off. It was a come to Jeebus moment for both of them, when their Villager tickets didn’t get punched. I’m guessing that the job interview had some McCain questions.

  40. 40.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Tom Q: A lot of people have a lot invested in indignation. If you’re outraged and indignant, it proves you’re not complacent or a chump. Being dissatisfied demonstrates that you have principles.

  41. 41.

    Ija

    @Maude:

    Pardon? I don’t understand that comment.

    ETA: Sorry, I’m an idiot. I thought you were replying to something else. Sorry :)

    Yeah, the knives are out in full force, especially against Rahm.

  44. 44.

    Mnemosyne

    @joe from Lowell:

    It’s a typo that no one caught in the course of doing three (3) different posts that used the quote.

    It’s not the original typo, it’s the fact that neither dday nor Perlstein cared enough to correct it. And I’m still not sure which president it refers to: did the original guy mean Bush in 2005 or Clinton in 1995?

  48. 48.

    Mnemosyne

    @A Writer At Balloon-Juice:

    Okay, now I’m even more confused: what did Bill Clinton’s approval ratings in 2005 have to do with Bush’s ratings that same year? Especially since the previous paragraph talks about Clinton’s ratings in 1995 and compares them to Bush’s ratings in 2005. How are Clinton’s approval ratings in 2005 at all relevant?

    It’s not the Swampland commenter’s original mistake that bugs me. It’s that two subsequent people used it to try and prove their point that Jay Carney is a sloppy journalist when they apparently didn’t notice the error since they didn’t correct it themselves with a [sic].

    ETA: Geez, at least indicate that you changed your post after I responded.

  49. 49.

    A Writer At Balloon-Juice

    @Mnemosyne:

    The commenter meant that Clinton’s approval ratings were at 47 percent in 1995. Carney claimed they were mired in the 30s.

    The comparison was with Bush in January 2007. Carney’s original post (now gone, I think) was comparing Bush in January 2007 with Clinton in January 1995. He made several inaccurate claims about Clinton’s standing in 1995, including that Clinton’s approval rating was, at that time, “mired in the 30s”. The commenter gave a detailed explanation of why this was wrong, but made a 2005/1995 typo.

  52. 52.

    AxelFoley

    @BGinCHI:

    They should have got Dave Chappelle. It’s not like he’s busy.
    Sample response to reporters:
    “It’s Mars, bitches!”

    Close this thread, because this statement cannot be topped.

  56. 56.

    JMY

    @Elisabeth:

    I thought Burton would have been good. I hope he’s gonna be apart of the campaign though. He was amazing at fighting back at Fox News.

  59. 59.

    amk

    What? No KO ? That would break some ‘progressives’ heart.

    And does GG always involve in petty fights ? Netroots made fun of Garner, yukkity, yukkity, yuk. Big deal.

    Man, I miss dana perino.

  60. 60.

    Uriel

    I guess the strategy is to give the beltway insiders in the WH press room a beltway insider to deal with.

    Isn’t that pretty much the entire job description? Or did I miss the part where the Press Sec was also supposed to draft legislation, argue cases in federal court, and single-handedly defeat the enemies of freedom with his kick-ass dual-wield light saber skills, while simultaneously serving as the primary Jiminy cricket to the administrations Pinocchio?

    I mean really, apart from 1) exhibiting the ability to remember the names of a bunch of reporters, 2) being able to repeat the positions the president has already voiced in a way that the village will echo as authoritative, and 3) having an affinity for the occasional one liner- what exactly are the prerequisites for the job supposed to be?

  61. 61.

    Evie

    That McCain article says JAMES Carney. Not the same person.

    I like Jay Carney, from what I used to read from him and see on MSNBC and ABC. I’m guessing there will be significantly fewer glib quips during briefings, which got very old by the second month Gibbs was behind the podium.

  62. 62.

    mark f

    How many times has someone been elected to more than one of the three classes of senators?

    Kent Conrad did it without even leaving the Senate. He was in one of ND’s seats but had pledged to retire at the end of his term. Then ND’s other senator died and Conrad took that seat (I beleive he was appointed to the second seat at first, but won election later).

  63. 63.

    miningcityguy

    Another Carney that might matter a little bit is Brian Carney, Art’s son. He plays the gekko’s boss in the Geico commercials.I will now have to go to Firedoglake Lake to see what David Dayen has to say about all this. This is something that I do anyway since I regard him as an exceptional reporter.His coverage of the mortgage crisis,in which I am interested and which is not discussed too much in depth here on Balloon Juice,has in particular been outstanding.

  66. 66.

    Jebediah

    @Uriel:

    I mean really, apart from… [snippity snip] …what exactly are the prerequisites for the job supposed to be?

    Punching bag.

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