My apologies if someone has covered this already, but it needs to be said: Dana Milbank is a hack. When I read his column this morning, I literally threw a box of frosted flakes across the kitchen in rage. For those who haven't had the pleasure, it begins with the following thesis:
Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.
Believe it or not, it only get's less clever from here. Consider Milbank's evidence for Obama's newfound "presumptuousness":
Exibit A: Obama's Itinerary:
Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president's) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally.
Never mind that McCain himself received a private briefing from Bernanke in March, or that he lunched with the King of Jordan, went speedboating with the President of Columbia, or held a press conference with the Dalai effing Lama. McCain may have done these things, you see, but he didn't do them presumptuously.
Exibit B: Obama's meeting on the hill
…an adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, as if for the State of the Union…
(Punctuality=Presumptuousness.)
Capitol Police cleared the halls -- just as they do for the actual president….
(Precaution = Presumptuousness)
The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door -- just as they do for the actual president.
(Not wanting to be gunned down by white supremacists = presumptuousness.)
Exibit C: Obama's words
Inside, according to a witness, Obama told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."
Ok. That does sound a bit presumptuous. At least until you read the full quote in its context. With respect to the "moment" line, Obama was actually quoting Pelosi -
"this is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for", he said –
a detail suspiciously buried under Milbank's weaselly ellipsis. As for Obama’s self-description as a “symbol of possibility” – it was not some unsolicited boast, as Milbank implies, but rather an attempt to explain his European popularity. You'd never know that from the column.
Exhibit D: Obama's Transition
The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder reported last week that Obama has directed his staff to begin planning for his transition to the White House, causing Republicans to howl about premature drape measuring.
Never mind that McCain has also started planning his transition – as did Bush and Reagan around this time of year - apparently, their transitions were not planned presumptuously.
Exhibit E: Obama's Chit-Chat
Obama was even feeling confident enough to give British Prime Minister Gordon Brown some management advice over the weekend. "If what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything, then you end up being a dilettante," he advised the prime minister, portraying his relative inexperience much as President Bush did in 2000.
First of all, Dana, get your fucking facts straight: it was David Cameron, not Gordon Brown, with whom Obama was overheard chatting. Second of all, the advice Obama dispensed was not his own, but that of a high-ranking Clinton staffer. Obama was merely passing it on.
Milbank's inventory of presumptuousness - which also includes blocking traffic with one's motorcade and making Adam Nagourney cry - is too long and absurd to fully enumerate here. Nor is Milbank alone in peddling this ridiculous double-standard. A Lexis-Nexis search of news items since June 1st finds “Obama” sharing a sentence with “presumptuous” “arrogant” or “cocky” in no less than 104 separate articles. For “McCain”, that number is just 17. That number includes Michael Gerson's column, "The Miracle of McCain", in which he praises the young POW for being “arrogant enough” to withstand torture, and a breezy editorial on his youth as a “cocky flyboy” pilot. And so it seems that even insofar as McCain himself is ever presumptuous, it is a presumptuousness to which Obama can only hope to aspire.