OOOOOOOPS

Jay Carney is floundering under pressure, say Washington insiders

By Toby Young

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney (Photo: AP)

There is increasing concern in Washington that Jay Carney, the new White House Press Secretary, isn’t up to the job. Even when faced with an innocuous question that requires only that he trot out the official line, he looks completely stunned, as if the questioner is Bob Woodward asking him about Deep Throat. He gathers himself, embarks on a stuttering reply, pauses for what seems like an eternity, then starts gabbling, tripping over his words, rephrasing what he’s just said, then looking plaintively back at the questioner as if to say, “How did I do? Was that okay? Or would you like me to try again?”
“I think he’s doing very badly,” says a political contact based in Washington. “And I’ve heard others say that he’s really struggling.”

This is a pivotal moment in Barack Obama’s presidency, a moment when the eyes of the world are locked on Washington. In the global battle for hearts and minds, it is essential that the leader of the free world exudes an air of calm authority at this time. Yet the White House’s handling of the media in the aftermath of Sunday’s events has been breathtakingly amateurish, planting seeds of doubt about the legality of the operation and about Osama bin Laden’s death that would not otherwise be there. The constantly changing narrative – or “fact pattern”, as one White House official described it – suggests that the president and his advisers have been caught on the hop and have no clear strategy for dealing with the fallout from bin Laden’s death. This is epitomised by the halting, timid delivery of Jay – “How’m I doin’?” – Carney, who must bear some of the responsibility for this communications failure.

The White House press operation should be a well-oiled machine – and under Carney’s predecessor, Robert Gibbs, it sometimes gave the impression of being just that. But with Carney at the helm, it is more like that of a rinky-dink City Hall somewhere in the Deep South. One colleague described Carney’s rabbit-in-the-headlights performance as “sub-Whitehall” – worse, even, than that of a lone British civil servant with a cellphone and a laptop in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. For the public face of the White House to be someone so lacking in gravitas is a PR disaster.

Unless Carney is capable of raising his game, he needs to be thrown under a bus. President Obama is coming dangerously close to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Somehow, he and his Press Secretary have created the impression that Operation Geronimo was carried out by the Keystone Kops rather than an elite unit of Navy SEALs. In fact, the only amateurs in this unfolding story are in the White House.