BEN RHODES – MANIPULATING THE LEFTIST MEDIA

 

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Trump and the Obama Effect

The administration’s cynical manipulations have lowered the bar for what voters expect.

President Obama at the White House, May 6. ENLARGE
President Obama at the White House, May 6. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Top presidential advisers often go public as administrations end, but there has rarely been a disclosure as illuminating as how President Obama’s top spin doctor helped turn American foreign policy upside down.

In a New York Times Magazine article this weekend headlined “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru: How Ben Rhodes Rewrote the Rules of Diplomacy for the Digital Age,” writer David Samuels details how Mr. Rhodes, a former speechwriter, sold the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran by creating a false claim of “moderate” Iranian officials.

Mr. Rhodes brags about keeping Mr. Obama’s long-standing plan to elevate Iran over allies such as Israel and the Gulf States hidden from the public by manipulating liberal journalists and think-tank analysts and using the short attention span of social media to obfuscate the truth.

Critics of Donald Trump, including this columnist, object to his policy incoherence and flip-flops. But the Obama administration set a new low bar for cynicism that for many makes even a celebrity candidate seem reasonable in contrast. Mr. Obama promised hope and change, but his administration gleefully misled the public, on everything from ObamaCare to immigration policy. Now we see up close how the administration’s manipulation extends even to the most important change to U.S. foreign policy in decades.

Mr. Rhodes, whose official title is deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, is described by Mr. Samuels as “the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press.”

Mr. Samuels adds: “His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes great responsibility for the fate of nations—like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing—is still startling.”

Mr. Rhodes says he has a “mind meld” with the president. “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

He proudly discloses the false narrative regarding Iran that claimed the nuclear negotiations started only after Hassan Rouhani became president in 2013. In fact, the deal was set well before the supposed moderate was in power. Mr. Samuels calls the administration’s arguments “false” and “actively misleading.”

Mr. Obama’s strategy all along was to cede power to Iran, hoping this would reduce U.S. responsibilities in the region, or as Mr. Samuels puts it, “would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey.”

This argument for faith in Iran was so absurd that it could not be made or even admitted in public—the foreign-policy experts Mr. Rhodes dismisses as “the blob” would have been astounded at the naïveté of elevating terrorist Iran above allies.

But the false-narrative strategy worked, justifying what Mr. Samuels calls the “brutal contempt” Mr. Rhodes has for journalists. “The average age we talk to is 27 years old and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Mr. Rhodes says. “They literally know nothing,” making them easy to spin.

Mr. Samuels describes how Mr. Rhodes and his team “ventriloquize” sympathetic columnists and reporters. The administration’s media “compadres” acted as “force multipliers.” One of Mr. Rhodes’s staffers says: “I’ll give them some color and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have hugeTwitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.” Another brags of an “echo chamber” of cheerleaders for the Iran deal at think tanks who “were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Mr. Samuels, who is known for his lengthy reporting on complex topics, says the Obama administration found it easy to manipulate an “information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about.”

Mr. Obama’s serious foreign-policy advisers seem taken aback by what happened under their watch. Leon Panetta, Mr. Obama’s former CIA chief and defense secretary, assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Mr. Obama would never let the Iranians get the bomb. Mr. Samuels asked Mr. Panetta if he still thinks Mr. Obama would block Iran from going nuclear. “Would I make that same assessment now?” Mr. Panetta said. “Probably not.”

As more details such as the role of Mr. Rhodes emerge about how the Obama administration operates, there may be more voters who see Mr. Trump simply as an equal and opposite reaction to Mr. Obama. False narratives and media manipulation worked for Mr. Obama and have empowered Mr. Trump, making him seem to many voters just another flavor of politics as usual.

 

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