Pileup at the White House
By Dana Milbank,
It has been a Junius Horribilis for President Obama.
Job growth has stalled, the Democrats have been humiliated in
Wisconsin, the attorney general is facing a contempt-of-Congress
citation, talks with Pakistan have broken down, Bill Clinton is
contradicting Obama, Mitt Romney is outraising him, Democrats and
Republicans alike are complaining about a “cascade” of national-security
leaks from his administration, and he is now on record as saying that
the “private sector is doing fine.”
Could it get any worse?
Early
Monday morning, Obama learned that it could. His aides delivered the
news to him that his commerce secretary had been cited for a felony
hit-and-run after allegedly crashing his car three times over the
weekend. In one incident, the previously obscure Cabinet officer
apparently rear-ended a Buick, spoke to the car’s occupants, then hit
the vehicle again as he left.
Thus did Jay Carney, the
oft-besieged White House press secretary, have another briefing
carjacked by bad news. And Carney, who either didn’t know the details of
the bizarre episode or wasn’t at liberty to divulge them, had to
execute a full range of defensive maneuvers.
“I can simply tell
you that he was engaged, as has been reported, in a couple of traffic
incidents,” Carney began, as if the secretary, John Bryson, had been
photographed by a speed camera or two. Bryson “suffered a seizure, was
hospitalized. But beyond that I’ll refer you to Commerce for the
details.”
“Is the secretary healthy and fit to serve?” inquired Ben Feller of the Associated Press...........
Apparently Bryson will have to clean up his own wreckage. This White House has too many other pileups to deal with.
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