Jay Carney is leaving Time magazine after 20 years to be Vice President-elect Joe Biden's communications director in the White House, astonished magazine and gleeful transition sources said.
Carney's title will be assistant to the vice president and director of communications. TIME.com's "The Page" first reported his new job.
Carney, the magazine's Washington bureau chief, is one of Washington's best-known talking heads, with regular appearances on ABC's "This Week," "The McLaughlin Group" and MSNBC's "Hardball."
Biden has assembled a team of heavyweights: Ron Klain, who was chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore, as chief of staff; Mike Donilon, one of Washington's best-connected Democratic consultants, as counselor; and Tony Blinken, a longtime Biden adviser, who is expected to fill a senior role on the National Security Council or on Biden's staff.
Jay Carney mocked Josh Marshall for pursuing the Bush Attorney scandals, arguing that "in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist." He later retracted his words and apologized to Marshall, which is more than most reporters tend to do.
There's not really a point in criticizing this choice. Joe Biden is who he is, he's obviously comfortable with Carney and Carney can clearly move a message through his former colleagues in the press. It is useful to think about what this means.
When an administration chooses personnel, it's a validation of the set of institutions and social ties that nurtured that personnel. In this case, the administration is validating the traditional press - Time Magazine in this case - as an important and credible organization. Part of the new progressive movement's ideological core is about seeing the press as an explicit battle space without residual moral credibility. The Lakeoff thesis of 'framing' makes the implicit argument that mediating institutions are no longer credible, but need to be molded along progressive lines. A sustained critique of the media is core, just as it was core to the right in the 1970s and onward.
This is a different belief system that held by people like Jay Carney, who think that the press is a relatively honest authoritative group that does make errors but broadly operates in 'the best interests' of a democratic nation. That such an important figure in journalism is going into this administration suggests that the Obama administration pretty well believes that the political conversation might need to be altered, but that the actors controlling our dialogue - mainstream journalists - are credible guides for the public. We'll see how that works out.
I find the whole 'John McCain is a maverick' incredibly puzzling, but the narrative stays alive because journalists explicitly keep it alive despite all the evidence to the contrary. Here's Time Magazine's Michael Scherer on McCain and torture just a few weeks ago.
No Republican has been as outspoken an opponent of prisoner mistreatment and abuse as McCain, and his own painful experience as a prisoner during the Vietnam War has granted him a unique moral authority on the issue.
Let's ignore the fact that McCain voted against banning waterboarding and focus on the sycophantic tone. Has Scherer done a search on which Republican actually spoke out against torture? Did he compare John McCain to Chuck Hagel? Or is Scherer simply asserting something that is conventional wisdom on the campaign bus. It appears to me that Chuck Hagel has been far more aggressive than any Republican on the issue, and that McCain has done very little to actually force an end to the use of these techniques.
Scherer goes on.
So there is nothing the Democrats would like to do more than portray McCain as a rank hypocrite, someone who has sidled up to George W. Bush and flip-flopped on torture, all for political gain - which is exactly what Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean claimed in March. "It is shameful that George Bush and John McCain lack the courage to ban torture," Dean said in a statement. "And it is reprehensible that McCain changed his position on torture just to win an election."
Dean's statement, distributed in a press release, was a political attack meant to raise questions among independent voters. And as with most political attacks, it turned a grain of truth into a misleading landslide of overheated accusation. A review of the record shows that McCain has neither changed his position on torture nor taken sides with President Bush on the substance of the issue. But at a time when new details are emerging of the Administration's intimate involvement with formulating specific detainee interrogation practices, the Arizona Senator does now find himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with President Bush on a key election-year vote about those very same controversial policies.
This is just horrible writing. In one sentence, Scherer dismisses Dean as issuing a political attack, and noting that as with 'most political attacks', it is a 'misleading landslide of overheated accusations.' So is Scherer saying that all criticisms from opponents are inherently wrong? Apparently. And then he goes on and directly contradicts himself. 'A review of the record', he writes, shows that McCain 'has neither changed his position on torture nor taken sides with President Bush on the substance of the issue'. In the very next sentence, Scherer writes that McCain 'does now find himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with President Bush on a key election-year vote about those very same controversial policies'.
So McCain has not changed his position, does not agree with Bush, and yet is uncomfortable about agreeing with Bush on a key vote. What the hell?
And now, Scherer comes out with an article just two weeks later further muddying the issue titled 'McCain Does Not Know Contents of Current CIA Interrogation Program'. So which is it, Scherer? Has no Republican 'been as outspoken an opponent of prisoner mistreatment and abuse as McCain', or does McCain not actually know anything prisoner abuse in CIA programs and simply votes with Bush? And why exactly was Howard Dean's criticism wrong, if it is the case that McCain is unwilling to vote against Bush on a program of CIA interrogation techniques which various Intelligence Committee members say are illegal?
Scherer of course notes that the series of events is 'complex' and paints a picture of a tortured relationship between Bush and McCain, where McCain fights on some issues and capitulates on others. But maybe it's not so complex. Maybe McCain is just a politician and votes for torture when it's politically useful and speaks out against it when it's politically useful.
I bet that's not as fun to talk about on the bus, though.
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