So Long, Jay Carney
❧ A farewell to Obama's outgoing press secretary

May 30, 2014
By Reid Cherlin

Jay Carney took the podium for the announcement of his departure today in much the same mien as when he began the job in February 2011. Other than a change to hipper, square glasses, and that flirtation with a beard, Carney seems to have escaped his job with little of the physical and existential drain that you see in the face of President Obama. And that may say more than anything about Carney’s tenure as White House press secretary. Carney was selected for the role in part to alleviate the press corps’ frustration with his predecessor, Robert Gibbs. Where Gibbs was bombastic and longwinded, Carney was supposed to be placid and direct. And where Gibbs had often failed to handle the reporters’ demands and inquiries—he spent much of his time in meetings with the president—Carney would be present, behind the desk when he wasn’t behind the podium. The idea was steadiness, calm, reliability.

It didn’t take long, of course, for the knock on Carney to emerge: The press corps decided he was too out of the loop. At least with Gibbs, the refrain went, you knew you were getting a look at the president’s thinking. Carney, they noted in a very This Town kind of way, wasn’t “in the room” where decisions get made. (I worked in the White House press office for a little more than two years; all but the final month of that was under Gibbs.) The irony here isn’t the amnesia of the White House reporters: the irony is that the job is actually impossible...

Read on at The New Republic ➝