I think we must be a friendly political movement. When some of us would get a little hotheaded, Ronald Reagan used to say, “Whoa, boys! Remember: We have no enemies, only opponents. We are all Americans after all.” And we must have deeply at heart the best interests of our fellow Americans including those who haven’t made up their mind, ... and even those who disagree with us most strongly.
In Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff describes the comprehensive approach of the White House press operation:
Courting the dinosaurs, the Obama people feed the increasingly hungry new media the scraps—and manage, mostly, to have them thankful for them. The Huffington Post has become an ideal back door for the most partisan stuff. ... Indeed, while the Times seems reserved for the more weighty exegesis, and the HuffPo for its attacks, Politico, the politics-focused site that began during the last political campaign and is now trying to build an off-election-cycle business, has become the prime outlet for Obama White House gossip—the fuel of the day’s political kibitzing, the candy by which an odd intimacy is created with both the media and the political hard core. It’s politics as a short take—politics as an item. “They use it for the quick pops. They get the headline out there. They short-circuit analysis. They keep momentum going. All day, rat-a-tat-tat,” says one pressroom-watcher. “They essentially write it themselves.”
