Reporters have had it with officials going "off the record"

By GottaLaff

We can relate:

Reporters have had it with officials abruptly going "off the record" at public events and conferences. Now some are calling for an end to it. "If you're giving a speech to the public, and especially if the organizers have made it open to the press, don't declare your comments to be off the record. That's silly," says Rick Blum, coordinator of the Sunshine in Government Initiative, which is asking media outfits to sign a letter urging an end to the widening practice. [...]

In the draft letter being circulated for news agencies to sign, there's a specific demand that officials at widely attended meetings keep their comments on the record. "Keeping public remarks by officials at all levels in the government on the record will greatly improve transparency and accountability for taxpayers," it reads.

Blum especially wants officials to stay on the record when talking policy, a request he made to Barack Obama's transition team. "We'd like fewer backgrounders, and when comments are made off the record or on background only, it's only to provide context or background information, not to discuss policy," he says.

A man pointed to Obama: "Look, he doesn't want it to end."

By GottaLaff

Ryan Lizza has an excellent, but long, piece in the November 17th issue of the New Yorker. Here are some excellent, but long, excerpts:

The Paris Hilton effect:

“We’ve had a ‘presumptuous watch’ on since then,” Dunn said. Alyssa Mastromonaco, who was in charge of putting on all of Obama’s events, said, “After that, people started thinking that he’s like this celebutante. You have to make it pretty clear through your pictures every day that you aren’t, that this is not easy for you.”

The Barbra Streisand concert:

The campaign kept Obama away from celebrities as much as possible. A Hollywood fund-raiser with Barbra Streisand became a source of deep anxiety and torturous discussions. The campaign was on the phone for days trying to make sure it was going to work, and almost cancelled it.

The infamous Invesco columns:

Two days before Obama’s acceptance speech, in Denver, Jim Margolis, a top media consultant to the campaign, went to inspect the stage at Invesco Field. McCain’s aides had successfully turned the Greek columns ringing the stage at the stadium into a story about how a godlike Obama would be speaking from a “temple.” But when Margolis arrived he realized that it was even worse than that. “I walked in and turned to look at the stage, and they had put in purple runway lights all the way around the whole stage, up across all the columns and it looked like a set from ‘Deal or No Deal,’ ” he said. “And in back of them, where he would walk out, there was a colored horseshoe that was lit that would have gone around him. And in back of that was a sixty-five-inch plasma monitor that would change colors. And for a guy who is being torpedoed every day about celebrity and Hollywood this was straight out of a Hollywood set. My mouth just dropped open.” Margolis ordered the producer and the set designer, who had worked for months on the design, to remove the screen and the purple lights and generally make the stage look less like a Hollywood production.

The day Madelyn died:

Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, had died that morning. He seemed subdued, and when he finished his speech he did something unusual. He stood on the stage for what seemed like a long time, a solitary figure in a simple black jacket with his arms at his sides, as if simply absorbing the intensity of a crowd illuminated by high-powered spotlights. A man standing next to me pointed up at Obama. “Look,” he said. “He doesn’t want it to end.”

Being president:

To Obama’s aides, the most important moment of the campaign occurred when Obama had to actually be President. [...] No matter how much confidence one has in Obama, support for him is often based on such intangibles as his temperament and his intelligence, not on a real record of successful decision-making. [...] The September financial crisis, which confronted Congress with the task of trying to rescue the economy from collapse, gave Obama’s aides the clearest indication that he might indeed be as good at governing as he has been at campaigning. It forced Obama to do something unusual and difficult for a candidate: he needed to separate politics and governance in the midst of a political campaign in which there was often no distinction. Obama’s aides say that that was the moment they won the election—the moment that any lingering doubts were erased.

Being presidential:

The Obama campaign was organized around a series of conference calls, the most important of which was a nightly call involving Obama and some dozen senior advisers. [...] During one, Obama laid out the steps in negotiating the bailout package: he would call the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, and consult with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Pfeiffer said, “We all got off the phone and I was, like, ‘You know what? That was the first call that felt like that’s what it’s going to be like if he’s President.’ That was the moment where he began looking like a President and not a Presidential candidate.”

Obama on Obama:

Obama told aides, “I’m in this to win, I want to win, and I think we will win. But I’m also going to emerge intact. I’m going to be Barack Obama and not some parody.”

On being a great president:

“[Hillary Clinton] was very good, and I need to meet that standard, meet that test,” he told Axelrod. “I am not a great candidate now, but I am going to figure out how to be a great candidate.” One of Obama’s achievements as a politician is that he somehow managed to emerge intact, after navigating two years of a modern and occasionally absurd Presidential race, while also becoming a great candidate. On Election Night, as he once again invoked the words of Lincoln, he seemed to be saying that he was going to figure out how to be a great President.