HE'S GOT A LOT OF ED WHITSON IN HIM:

Guess Who Doesn't Like the Press: And the feeling may be mutual. (Stephen F. Hayes, 12/29/2008, Weekly Standard)

In a New York Times Magazine profile of Robert Gibbs, the incoming White House press secretary, Mark Leibovich reveals that the Obama campaign emulated the "Bush model" of tight information control. Campaign manager David Plouffe acknowledged that they "talked a lot about the Bush model" inside the campaign and, like the Bush White House, sought to limit the spread of information internally so as to avoid the leaking that badly damaged the campaigns of Obama's rivals.

There are other similarities. During the 2004 election, Dick Cheney famously kicked the New York Times off his campaign plane. Obama apparently did the same to three newspapers this fall--the Washington Times, the New York Post, and the Dallas Morning News--all of which had endorsed John McCain. At the time, the Obama campaign cited space concerns. But when Leibovich asked Gibbs whether reporters were kicked off the plane for considerations other than space, Obama's spokesman first said "no" but later amended his response. "On occasion, yes," Gibbs said, adding that such instances were infrequent. "I mean, were there occasions? Sure."

How does that square with Obama's promise to move beyond politics and to run the most transparent and open White House in history?

Just let him eat his waffle.

George Steinbrenner's office is littered with the bones of guys who were fine players in podunk towns but wilted under the pressure of playing in front of a full on media glare. Mr. Obama is so used to an adulatory press that we can have no way of knowing how he'll deal with the coming adversarial one.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 22, 2008 4:41 PM