Steve Sailer writes: From the Washington Post:
Did the White House know what David Samuels thought about the Iran deal?
By Erik Wemple May 9 at 6:02 PMThe White House has had to answer some uncomfortable questions over the past few days, thanks to a profile of Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, in the New York Times Magazine. Under the byline of David Samuels, the story delves into how Rhodes & Co. chose to sell President Obama’s high-priority nuclear deal with Iran. The take-aways weren’t terribly favorable.
Here’s one question that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest faced on Friday:
On Iran, did the administration have “hand-picked” beltway insiders to push the message, to sell the message of the Iran deal to the public? And the characterization that’s out there, it has been reported that the administration misled the public in a manner as well. How does the administration respond to that characterization that the public was misled in the selling of the Iran deal?
And a follow up:
But, Josh, the characterization I’m speaking of came from a profile on your Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes. You read that article. I’m sure you’ve had time to digest it. Do you disagree with some of the characterizations that were in that profile?
Those questions stem from a story titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” It’s something of a hybrid piece of journalism — half-featurey look at Rhodes himself, a 30-something fellow who channeled his love of writing into a super-influential foreign policy job in the Obama White House; and half-patdown of the tactics deployed by the White House to sell its historic Iranian nuclear deal. On the latter front, here’s Samuels’s thesis:
Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false.
The way Samuels tells it — with key supporting quotes from Rhodes — the White House whipped up fancy talking points and fed them to its people, who in turn fed them to gullible reporters with no experience in foreign policy. The public swallowed it all. Samuels even names names: “For those in need of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative,” writes Samuels.
Obama gave Jeffrey Goldberg lots of personal access, and Goldberg obliged him with a pretty obtuse article. Goldberg never seems to notice that his personal ethnocentrism and Obama’s ethnocentrism might cause any conflicts. Samuels, whose wife edits the Jewish magazine The Tablet, in contrast, is acutely aware of the conflicts.
That very sentence is launching entire pieces. Goldberg is responding ferociously, bemoaning the absence of fact-checking and noting that he and Samuels have had a tiff that bears disclosing. Also, Rhodes denied to Goldberg that he’d chosen him to “retail” the Iran message.
Those matters will shake out over the coming days.
What’s not likely to fetch an answer anytime soon is why the White House did such extensive business with Samuels in the first place. …
Did the White House have any idea that Samuels believed these things? It hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
David Samuels is an awesome magazine writer. I’ve been linking to his work at least since 2008, when he published a great article, “Invisible Man,” in The New Republic on Obama, Rev. Wright, and Dreams From My Father:
What’s even more remarkable about Dreams from My Father is the fact that it was written by a man who has since decided to run for president by disowning the most striking parts of his own voice and transforming himself into a blank screen for the fantasy-projection of the electorate. It is hard to overemphasize how utterly remarkable it is that Dreams exists at all–not the usual nest of position papers and tape-recorder talk, but a real book by a real writer who has both the inclination and the literary tools to give an indelible account of himself, and who also happens to be running for president. In which connection, it seems right to mention that the Barack Obama who appears in Dreams, and, one presumes, in his own continuing interior life, is not a comforting multiracial or post-racial figure like Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter who prefers to be looked at through a kaleidoscope. Though there are many structural parallels between Dreams and Invisible Man, Obama believes in the old-fashioned, unabashedly romantic, and, in the end, quite weird idea of racial authenticity that [Ralph] Ellison rejected. He embraces his racial identity despite his mixed parentage through a kind of Kierkegaardian leap into blackness, through which he hopes to become a whole, untroubled person.
My own belief is that Barack Obama has the makings of an unusual and unusually effective president, because he might combine a writer’s sense of the dramatic moment, and of how language helps to shape reality, with the brain–and perhaps the soul–of a Harvard-educated technocrat. At the same time, I find it hard not to wonder about how President Obama will see the world, and what the major fault lines in his personality might be. The fact that the talking heads and the voters alike are unable to see him plain is an optic effect that Obama anticipates in his first book. …
Obama’s decision to identify with the lineage of his black Kenyan father to the exclusion of his white U.S.-born mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and her parents allows him a measure of release from the cruel racial logic that binds Ellison’s narrator–he comes from outside American society, and therefore he is not entirely bound by the overdetermined racial logic that unites the children of slaves and masters. Yet, while Obama’s rejection of his “white blood” may seem familiar from the writings of African American authors like Malcolm X, it is actually much stranger; Obama’s partial “whiteness” is not the product of an ancient rape by an anonymous slave-master but is instead the color of the mother who raised him. Obama’s embrace of authenticity separates him from Ellison’s profoundly modernist consciousness, and prevents him from seeing the serial absurdities of his own story. Where Invisible Man bubbles with fiery, absurdist humor, the narrator of Dreams rarely cracks a smile. One can only imagine what Ellison would have done with Obama’s straight-faced account of his futile career as a community organizer in Chicago, or with the incredibly juicy character of Dr. Jeremiah Wright–a religious con man who spread racist and anti-Semitic poison while having an alleged sexual affair with a white church secretary and milking his congregation for millions of dollars and a house in a gated community whose residents are overwhelmingly rich and white.
Now, you know and I know what Samuels is talking about here, but for most of the media this is just a big Does Not Compute.
An interesting question is whether Obama and Rhodes, who are both good writers, gave Samuels access because they get it that he gets it about Obama. Or were they just clueless too?
What’s not likely to fetch an answer anytime soon is why the White House did such extensive business with Samuels in the first place.
Over the weekend, the Erik Wemple Blog watched Samuels in a videotaped panel at the Hudson Institute in April 2015, back when the Iran deal was still in the “proposed” phase. The title of the session was “What’s Wrong with the Proposed Nuclear Deal with Iran?” It lasted an hour and a half, much of it filled with blowbagging by Samuels himself. He revealed himself as a name-dropper: “I had lunch last fall with a person named Jeb Bush. …” And: “The Hudson Institute was founded by Herman Kahn, a master of of what my friend Edward Luttwak calls the paradoxical logic of strategic thinking. Kahn’s work, as I’m sure many of you know, was extraordinarily important in guiding the United States through the very real dangers of the Cold War, which culturally we seem to be forgetting. And that work in turn was founded of course on the work of John von Neumann and others in game theory and related fields.”
Bolding inserted to ease transition to Samuels’s vicious hammering of the administration’s Iran deal. Speaking of the “principles” related to anti-proliferation policy dating back to the Cold War, Samuels riffed, “To find them being undone in this very rapid way, given the potential consequences of unchecked nuclear proliferation…, is and should be a terrifying thing for Americans to contemplate, whatever their feelings about this president or Republicans or Democrats. As someone who has reported in and around questions relating to nuclear programs and free-market economies, I am startled by the lack of attention and clarity that is obvious in the way these stories are being reported,” he said in the panel discussion.
Might that sound familiar to readers of the New York Times Magazine?
More stuff on the Obama administration’s approach to proliferation: Run-of-the-mill questions about Middle East policy “pale next to the prospect of unchecked nuclear proliferation in a world where the U.S. has decided that it will no longer enforce the very, very basic structures that we set in place after World War II in order to prevent the horror of a world in which many, many states, some of them led by people whose perceptions of reality depart from our own in very significant ways, are armed with weapons whose capacity to kill hundreds of thousands of people and to destroy if used in great numbers the most basic functioning of not just individual societies but of large chunks of the global system that feeds and provides basic security to billions of human beings on the planet. This is a terrifying, terrifying prospect. And that’s what’s at stake in this deal. And the inability of people to recognize that that’s what we are talking about is in part tied to the institutional collapse of the structures in which I spent a good deal of my life working,” he said, addressing the media.
Citing the possibility of new nuclear powers across the globe, Samuels said, “A president who came into office talking about a nuclear-free planet is going to be responsible for the greatest surge of nuclear proliferation that we’ve seen in a half a century or more.”
Did the White House have any idea that Samuels believed these things? It hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
I also told Silverstein of my unhappy history with Samuels. I won’t bore you with this sad story, but five years ago, his wife, Alana Newhouse, offered me a position at Tablet Magazine, which she edits. I accepted the job, but then I quickly came to feel that she and David—he was a senior editor at Tablet—weren’t dealing with me in a straightforward way on a number of fronts, and, ultimately, I chose to stay at The Atlantic. Since that time, I have been the intermittent target of criticism in Tablet, and a more-than-intermittent target of Samuels’s personal animus. (He is not particularly careful about sharing his negative opinions of me—or others, by the way—with people who are friends of mine). Samuels should have disclosed this history to the reader.
COMMENTS AT WASHINGTON POST:
* There have been so many people who have commented on the press being lapdogs for Obama….don’t you think there is a grain of Truth in that observation?
* Steve Sailer: My guess is that Obama found Samuels’ 2008 article the most acute analysis of his memoir.
LUKE FORD: I love how Jeffrey Goldberg complains the New York Times did not approach him for comment. When I tried to ask Jeffrey Goldberg a question in 2006 at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations, he referred to me his publicist.
* His [Ben Rhodes] wife, Ann Norris, is Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the State Department. While information on the web that her salary is in the $125k range is uncorroborated, it is reasonable to assume that Rhodes and wife have a combined government salaries in the $300k+ range. Washington DC has become an expensive place, but $300k a year is not exactly a modest income, even today, in that locale.
Ben Rhodes’ brother is David Rhodes, who is the President of CBS.
Ben Rhodes got his foot in the door in DC by being recommended to Lee Hamilton as a staffer by none other than his mother’s successor at Foreign Policy magazine, James Gibney.
He’s very much part of an inside crowd.
* The dual personalities of Samuels and Rhodes mixed there on the paper offer an excellent window into the phoniness, conniving, ironic self-righteousness and other psychoses of the center-left-wing yuppie subculture from which Obama, his goons and his enablers sprang.
MORE COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* Samuels gets it and yet he doesn’t. An Obama could NOT have come from the American Black community (even the light skinned talented 10th like the Rev. Wright) for several reasons:
1. An almost white (Benjamin Jealous) type octoroon would not have been “black enough” for the Dems – he wouldn’t have made white liberals feel good enough about themselves.
2. A blacker figure would not have had the intellectual HP. The # of slave descended American blacks who are as dark as Obama with Obama’s brains are vanishingly small. As the product of a white woman and a top 1% Kenyan, Obama came out OK in the smarts dept. and his coal black father made him darker than you might expect from a mulatto.
3. Obama had the advantage of being raised in a white family. Even though it was pretty dysfunctional for a white family, it was more functional than 99% of American black families. He also learned how to talk to white people.
So it is not just some coincidence that the 1st black President has no American black slave blood and was raised by a white mother. If you look at the blacks who are doing well at places like Harvard, most of them fit one of those two categories or both (again unless they are Benjamin Jealous or Rachel Dolezal type “blacks” who would not be black at all but for AA).
* Reading the Samuels article, I can only conclude that Obama and Rhodes truly believe that anybody in the mainstream press will write about the two of them and their endeavors in nothing but flattering terms. And this can only be because they have observed, through the nearly eight years of the Obama administration, that that is exactly what has gone on.
It’s good to be King — especially, in these fine days, a black one.
* Yes, but is it OK to question the authorship of Dreams, or is that engaging in lunatic-fringe authorism?
* Steve said, “An interesting question is whether Obama and Rhodes, who are both good writers, gave Samuels access because they get it that he gets it about Obama. Or were they just clueless too? Did Samuels use his iSteve-level awareness of Obama to play the President?”
They are bragging that they used the MSM knowing that nothing will come of it.
The sorriest thing to me about the decline of my beloved country is how the press, which fancies itself brave enough to “speak truth to power”, has become nothing more than stenographers to the politicians they agree with. I thought the MSM was in the tank for Clinton, but they are completely underwater for Obama.
* Why is there growing racial solidarity among Whites when I was told by the HBD crowd this could never happen without “intellectuals” backing it?
And has anyone noticed it is the “lower” classes who are in the lead position?
* Dreams From My Father puzzles the hell out of me too. The book is largely B.S. — but it contains a lot of anti-white racial hostility, “daddy issues,” admission of felony drug use, left-wing pap, etc.
It was out there for years before Obama ran for national office… and yet nobody — NOBODY — gave a damn about it and used it against him. (Certainly not the Republicans).
For the last eight years, I’ve been asking my students, little Millennial Obamabots, if they’ve ever read it. NONE of them have. None of them are familiar with Rev. Wright, Obama’s “after the election” promise to Dimitri Medvedev, Frank Marshall Davis, his drug use… none of it. They accept the fabricated, Wizard-of-Oz image of the man 100%, hook, line, and sinker.
It’s almost as if Obama could admit to being a serial axe-murderer and the public and the media would simply shrug and say “Eh.. so what?”
Actually, the guy DID say “I’m good at killing people” and everybody shrugged it off… can you imagine if Romney or Trump had said such a thing? It’d be on the front page of the NYT every day for a year straight…
* Trump would have used it and with a vengeance. That is why this election will be a pleasure. Trump will not shy away from making Hillary uncomfortable. Nothing was ever done to make Obama uncomfortable. I remember when he debated McCain. McCain called him Senator and he condescendingly called McCain “John” and no matter how many times he did it, McCain did not respond with the same. Had he called Trump “Donald”, Trump would have called him Barry. Not Barak but Barry.
* I know it sounds scandalous but that is pretty normal for today’s successful black pastor. The congregation doesn’t care. They want their pastor to have nice things and some will happily give their last nickel. Most think money is a sign of God’s favor and if their pastor has money, money will magically show up for them too.
The worshippers just want to be entertained and show off their illegitimate children. If the pastor does cheat on his wife or get caught with drugs, everyone will shrug and say he is just a man. They love knowing they too can sin with abandon and always be forgiven. Bishop Eddie Long had sex with boys. He not only still has his church, but he has satellite churches in other cities.
* I’d guess Obama is in the 120-130ish range, probably with a strong gap between quantitative and verbal. You can do some reverse engineering from his initial choice of college. Occidental is a good school, but he doesn’t strike me as the sort who would pass on a AA-assisted admit to HYPS if he had the test scores. Maybe you can make some allowances for late maturation or a dope-addled youth. He seems to have done basically OK at Columbia and has a talent for accurately repeating back/summarizing what people have said. His Harvard Law time is a puzzle, because that’s the only time in his life he’s consistently performed at a high intellectual level. At Chicago he was happy enough to teach but didn’t engage in any of the intellectual give-and-take the school is famous for.
Steve Hsu has some thoughts on Feynman’s supposedly low IQ. I suspect Feynman liked to play it up as part of this regular-guy schtick.
“Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman’s cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things. ”
One of the physicists at Los Alamos described Feynman as “a second Dirac, only this time human.”
* He [Obama] can speak extemporaneously on a variety of topics, using a variety of sentence structures with a sophisticated vocabulary. You didn’t get that with Ali, who could rhyme, for God’s sakes. Kids can rhyme. In interviews, he demonstrates an ability to use rhetorical devices such as parallel structure. Ali’s sentences were predictable: subject, verb, direct object or phrase. You likely never heard him begin a sentence with a participial phrase.
* One study I read about years ago–so take it with a pound of salt—had young jerk doctors practice writing short stories/fiction daily—I think one full story a week was due by the study.
Punchline: The doctor’s empathy and “bedside” manner improved.
The conclusion was that fiction writing forced the arrogant and/or autistic knaves to get inside the heads of others and sympathize with their characters in order to write successfully. This caused the MD’s to get out of their own head with patients and start to think about how they felt, which made the doctors realize they were probably scared and wanted to be treated nicely.
Reminds me how so many great fiction writers today (such as Tom Wolfe) are usually non-lefties who get how non-lefties feel but are able to explore how lefties think and feel. In sharp contrast to many hack lefty writers, who caricatures of any non-lefty are so screamingly bad they are almost as two-dimensional than the page they are written on. Vox Day has pointed out that lefty sci-fi writers have ruined the genre because their political mindset so dominates them that they are unable to sympathize with non-lefty characters, and so they ignore them or cast them as the villain with no soul. This makes most modern left sci-fi novels nothing more than after school specials with lasers and really bad sex scenes (usually with a Strong-Independent-Red-Headed-Tough Grrrl or, these days, a “person of indeterminate sexuality”.)
Normally, such bad writing would be shunted away, corrected, or discouraged, as the doctor’s creative writing teachers probably did to their early attempts. But creative writing/English programs in college—and the big publishing houses—have all been taken over by strident lefties, for whom Politics Trump Talent. These bad novels were published despite losing money (with guys like Andrew Klavan and Wolfe paying the bills with non-lefty novels). Like Soviet-Style, state “approved” literature, they have no value as writing (as they are crap), but serve a political purpose of indoctrination and ugliness. The internet is really leveling the houses’ advantage, however.
* Obama graduated magna from Harvard law. Grading is blind in law school. He finished in the top 15% among a field of competition like Harvard law. It’s quite possible he has an IQ of over 140. Certainly 130+.
* Reminds me of how Maury Povich is married to Connie Chung.
Does anyone remember the bizarre career of Connie Chung? Long time reporter, suddenly got very public promotion to co-anchoring the CBS Evening News with Rather, then totally flamed out? She tried a news magazine show that flopped, then went to MSNBC and flopped, and now has disappeared.
Once upon a time, that such a “respected” reporter would be literally in bed with a sleazy talk show host would have seemed weird to me. But since the mask of the “serious news” and the media has been ripped off for me, I see it as quite fitting that an obvious double-affirmative action case (female and Asian!) would end up with such trash. She failed upwards, only when faced with declining ratings and her poor reporting, no one could deny she was promoted well beyond her abilities for P.C.’s sake. If white gentile male, she would have been doing local political news, wearing a bad toupee, and cheating on his wife with the newest weather girl. She and Maury were really meant for each other.
* I think the whole AIPAC opposition to the Iran deal was more of a show of force and team-building exercise than actual opposition to the deal.
When is that last time something Israel really, really, really did not like passed Congress? No examples I can think of in my lifetime. The Israel Lobby lacks the ability to get Congress to do what it affirmatively wants, but is one of a dozen or so Powerful Lobbies in Good Standing With the Congressional GOP that can veto anything it does not like from passing.
* Obama’s American extended family tended to be smart and helpful. His maternal grandfather was a black sheep, but his grandfather’s brother, Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, was a worthy exemplar of his name. Janny Scott’s biography of Obama’s mother has a lot of long interviews with Obama’s elderly American relatives just before they died, and I found them impressive individuals.
Also, Obama stepfather’s relatives were big shots in Indonesia, and Obama’s mother stayed on very good terms with them even after she dumped Lolo. When she left Lolo, she moved her and her daughter into Lolo’s mother’s compound.
Obama downplays this aspect of his upbringing for political reasons, but he was always treated as a socially elite individual. He was never very rich, but he was molded to be a diplomat, or something similar in the international relations realm, from early on.
