Throwdown: POLITICO vs. The White House

WASHINGTON, D.C. (YBH.ME) – Politico digi-printed an article today entitled “7 Stories Obama Doesn’t Want Told.” The article begins:

Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds.
No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and thoughtful way. This easily outpowered the anti-Obama narrative, featuring an opportunistic Chicago pol with dubious relationships who was more liberal than he was letting on.
A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, there are several anti-Obama storylines gaining momentum.

An analysis of each developing perception of Obama is available at Politico, they are in order:

He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money
Too much Leonard Nimoy
That’s the Chicago Way
He’s a pushover
He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe
President Pelosi
He’s in love with the man in the mirror

gibbs

The unofficial White House response, which was circulating between staffers via email today, is a list of seven things Politico would probably not want their brand primarily known for. The list is named “7 narratives Politico is fighting in their efforts to get an interview with the President”:

1.       They are more interested in readers than accuracy
2.       It’s okay to be wrong every once in a while, if you are the first to break the news
3.       More interested in gossip than news
4.       A spouter of the worst sort of insider conventional wisdom
5.       Their analysis about Obama has been wrong more than anyone’s
6.       Click … period
7.       More obsessed with personality than policy

The White House received a lot of heat this past fall when they singled out FOX News, by name, as someone unfriendly to the White House. They went so far as to state that other news organizations shouldn’t treat FOX as a hard news source. As we know, the attempt to ostracize FOX failed terribly. The Politico battle, on the other hand, seems more of a good-natured back and forth between friendly rivals. But when you print it for all to see, we all get a look inside the Beltway.

Thanks, Politico. Fun stuff.