The resignation early Sunday of “green jobs” adviser Van Jones says as much about the Obama White House as it does about Jones – marking the latest sacrifice to the political gods after a long summer of compromises and surrenders highlighted the limits of White House power.
The departure – nominally the choice of a still-defiant Jones, who said he feared distracting from important business – confirmed Obama’s choice of pragmatism over confrontation and a belief that controversies sometimes are better solved by capitulation, a view that infuriates Obama’s allies on the left.
It confirmed that the real opposition party to Obama right now is the conservative grassroots that draws its energy from Fox News, talk radio and the Drudge Report, and often leaves Republican elected officials scrambling to catch up.
And it was a fresh reminder that the White House’s vetting process didn’t fall down only on high-profile nominees like Tom Daschle. It barely touched the lower reaches of the administration – a White House official conceded Sunday that Jones’ past statements weren’t as thoroughly scrubbed due to his relatively low rank. Jones’ selection also was propelled by powerful patrons, who included the first lady and the vice president.
In his statement, Jones was defiant. "On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” he said. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs cast the move the same way.
“What Van Jones decided was that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual,” Gibbs said, agreeing with the show’s host, George Stephanopoulos that Obama “doesn’t endorse” Jones’s remarks on race and politics, his apparent flirtation with the “9/11 Truth” movement, and his advocacy for the convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The logic of the departure was clear: A hope of keeping the national conversation where Obama wanted it this week ahead of his health reform speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday.
“Between Cambridge cops; whether administration officials are or are not for the public option; right wing mobbing at town halls; and the back to school welcome contretemps, the White House has been forced to play defense and loose-ball control over [the summer],” said the former Clinton White House aide Chris Lehane, who noted that a “very important week” could have been consumed by “ a discussion related to an obscure staffer who no one has ever really heard of.”
Jones’s departure resonated sharply, however, with the other topic on Sunday’s television rotation: The public insurance option in the health care debate. There, too, the White House has responded to conservative opposition by pointing first to the outright distortions – and then running the other way.
To the outrage of the House Progressive Caucus, MoveOn, and other liberal voices, Gibbs and senior advisor David Axelrod said Obama this week will continue to advocate for a government-run plan to compete with private plans, but won’t insist on it, as some foes have cast the option, inaccurately, as equivalent to a government takeover of all health care delivery.
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Never heard of Jones, but well informative let me say the least.
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