Obama the Ingrate

President Obama has decided to ban coverage by local reporters of his latest visit to the 1%-ers’ ATM machine in San Francisco, as relayed by Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle:

President Obama is scheduled to appear before hundreds of donors at a $7,500-a-plate noontime fundraiser today at San Francisco’s W Hotel – but not a single local reporter will be allowed inside to cover his only stop in the area, the White House said Monday.

Coverage instead is being restricted to a small pool of Washington-based reporters – a move that is a sharp departure from the practices of past administrations, political observers said.

Three former top White House press aides called the move insular and politically short-sighted. And some press watchers said it is hypocritical for an administration that Obama promised would be “the most transparent in history.”

… Earlier this year, the White House threatened to ban The Chronicle from future local pool coverage after political writer Carla Marinucci, serving as a print pool reporter, recorded a video of a protest inside a fundraiser.

The White House said Marinucci had violated a rule forbidding print reporters from recording video. But there is no such rule. The White House denied making the threat.

Marinucci is of course among the locals who won’t be allowed to attend — and instead of following their alleged convictions and banning her, they decided to ban every local news source.

What makes Obama an ingrate is the fact that Marinucci deserves partial credit — arguably huge credit — for Obama’s primary victory over Hillary Clinton and his presidential triumph over John McCain.

In a January 17, 2008 interview with the Chronicle written up by Marinucci and Garofoli, Obama said the following about his energy policy ideas:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a (sic) ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.

Although the paper posted the video, Marinucci, who actually authored the writeup (link is to article as saved at the ProQuest library database), didn’t consider the quote about coal companies going bankrupt if they try to build new plants under his authoritarian energy regime newsworthy, and didn’t mention the statement’s existence.

Based on where things were at the time of Obama’s interview (he was NOT the clear leader), it’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton could have used the raw material, and perhaps could have fended off Obama on Super Tuesday and won her party’s nomination.

As POR Economy creators Nancy Pelosi, Obama, and Harry Reid ramped up their anti-energy rhetoric during the summer of 2008, the passage just cited remained virtually invisible. Marinucci had to know that what Obama had said in January was legitimate news, and that the electorate’s knowledge of Obama’s stated objective to use cap and trade to prevent new coal plant construction and to bankrupt anyone who tried would have badly hurt his campaign. But she kept it hidden. Naked Emperor exposed it in the final days of the campaign. By that time, thanks in part to the travesty known as “early voting,” it didn’t make much of a difference.

And in spite of this, she and he local media colleagues are banned from Obama’s San Francisco appearance.

What an ingrate this man is. He should be using the occasion to hand Ms. Marinucci a trophy: Second-Most Valuable Press Apparatchik.

Ryan Lizza, writing at the time for The New Republic, as explained here, “deserves” the Most Valuable Press Apparatchik trophy, because he alone knows (besides parishoners, and they’re not going to talk) that Obama’s claim never to have read the church bulletins of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ was false. He virtually wrote it in March 2007 when he noted that Obama was “taking notes” during Wright’s sermon. Obama was more than likely doing so in that day’s bulletin’s blank “Notes” pages. Exposing such a simple statement (“I don’t read the bulletins” as a lie could have badly hurt Obama’s campaign. Given when the excitement over Wright occurred (March 2008), it probably wouldn’t have sunk his nomination, but it would have been very harmful in the general.