Lawless. David E. Bernstein
associated with a liberal political outlook, they once had a professional ethos that encouraged them to ferret out political scandals whether the source was Republican or Democratic.
The establishment media, however, has largely given up its role as an independent watchdog. Liberal reporters and news editors, i.e., the great majority of reporters and news editors, are less willing to put their ideology aside, and more willing to exhibit partisanship in favor of President Obama and the Democrats.
An important factor in the decline in nonpartisan investigative zeal among establishment reporters is that well-paying jobs in journalism have been decimated, and working in politics has emerged as an important career alternative. Given that journalists who cover national politics are overwhelmingly Democrats, working in politics means working in Democratic politics, including potentially serving in the Obama administration. Jay Carney, for example, went from being Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief to running Vice President Biden’s communications operation. He ultimately served as President Obama’s press secretary. The career-driven need to keep good relations with the White House and prominent congressional Democrats inhibits hard-hitting journalism.
Political ideology, of course, has also played a significant role in the decline of the media’s watchdog role. Reporters have long leaned liberal, but they increasingly grow up, go to college, and work in “deep blue” liberal environments where liberal Democrats are presumptively the good guys and conservative Republicans the bad. Former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson was one of the few journalists not working for a conservative outlet who seriously investigated Obama administration scandals such as Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and Solyndra. For her efforts, she got a tongue-lashing from various administration officials, the silent treatment from administration spokespersons, hacking of her personal and work computers by the government, attacks from administration partisans like Media Matters, and, crucially, the contempt of her liberal CBS colleagues.15
Attkisson eventually felt “marginalized and underutilized” at CBS,16 and left. Attkisson later told CNN that some managers at CBS News are “so ideologically entrenched that . . . they have a difficult time viewing a story that may reflect negatively upon government or the administration as a story of value.”17 And if media elites are not willing to encourage their reporters to cover “sexy” Obama administration scandals, they surely are not going to express much interest in the administration’s steady and often subtle undermining of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Progressive “new media” outlets are even more partisan than establishment outlets are. As one former liberal blogger put it, “The incentives are to play ball, not to speak truth to power. More clicks. More action. Partisanship drives clicks.”18 The Obama White House has actively cultivated partisan bloggers, but White House perks come with an implicit threat: annoy the wrong people with your blogging, and you can find yourself on our enemies list—and forget about ever winning that dream job as a speechwriter for the vice president.
Obama has not gotten away scot-free, as the conservative media—from Fox News to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages to Rush Limbaugh and other radio talk shows to hundreds of blogs—have relentlessly followed and criticized Obama’s scandals, including the constitutional ones. But the increased prominence of conservative media may have had the perverse effect of making reporters for mainstream liberal outlets more hesitant to criticize the president. This is partly because they fear contributing to what they see as a right-wing feeding frenzy, and partly because establishment outlets may feel less responsibility to cover a story if conservative media are doing so.19
Arrogance is also a factor in the Obama administration’s lawlessness. All presidents are arrogant; no humble person gets up one morning and says to himself, “I really think I should be the leader of the free world.” Obama is no exception. In 2006, he told a staffer: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speech-writers. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna’ think I’m a better political director than my political director.”20 But the Obama administration’s arrogance is pervasive. As a leading left-wing activist told the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein: “These guys are stunningly arrogant. They really believe that their shit doesn’t smell, that they have all the answers. And that arrogance continues to hurt them.”21
The source of this arrogance lies, at least in part, in the attitudes of post-1970s graduates of elite universities. Past generations of elite political types derived their sense of superiority from a WASPish Old Boy Network. The Obama generation of elite political liberals, including many of the president’s top aides and appointees, believe in meritocracy. But their version of meritocracy is based not solely on demonstrated achievement, but also on where one went to college and graduate school—but only if one is on the left side of the ideological spectrum, as conservative or libertarian views mark even the most accomplished people as fools or knaves, if not both. The converse belief is that progressives are presumptively wiser and morally superior to their ideological opponents, which undermines any desire to compromise with them.
President Obama graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Many of his advisors went to similarly elite colleges and graduate schools. The political culture at these schools considered far-leftists to be within mainstream political discourse, but run-of-the-mill conservatives to be, at best, on the extremist fringe.
It’s hard to exaggerate how far skewed to the left the political environment was at Harvard Law School and other elite law schools in Obama’s day—even while most students eagerly lined up for high-paying jobs representing large corporations. As one Harvard Law School graduate, class of 1994, puts it, at Harvard “radical was mainstream and conservative was radical.”22
I can attest to this from my years at the Yale Law School, which I attended from 1988 to 1991, exactly when Obama attended Harvard. At the time, Harvard was considered significantly less friendly to right-of-center students than was Yale. Nevertheless, a significant fraction of Yale law students actively shunned, encouraged others to shun, and sometimes tried to publicly humiliate, those classmates they deemed to be “reactionaries”—a category that included people with moderate or right-of-center political views that would be utterly mainstream almost anywhere else. Even the more fair-minded liberal students who were polite to, or even friendly with, their conservative and libertarian classmates—and Obama was very polite to his conservative classmates at Harvard23—accepted their classmates’ hostility to non-left-wing peers as a mundane part of life at an elite Northeastern university.
Attending such institutions and then working in liberal Democratic politics inevitably gave Obama and his advisors of similar background a very slanted perspective on the “respectable” ideological spectrum. This perhaps explains how Obama, the most liberal president in decades, someone whose known intellectual influences were all on the left,24 could tell supporters with a straight face, that “I’m not a particularly ideological person,”25 or how biographer Chuck Todd can report that “nothing irks Mr. Obama more than the idea that he’s somehow a leftist or liberal.”26 After all, at Harvard Law School, he was a moderate!
If being on the liberal left makes someone moderate, the corollary is that conservatives are extremists. Does Obama himself believe that? The evidence suggests that he does and that he is hardly the only one in his administration to feel that way. Consider Obama’s response when journalist George Stephanopoulos asked Obama in April 2008 about his ties to Bill Ayers. Ayers is a far leftist who was involved in several domestic terrorist bombings in the 1970s. He told the New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs, I feel we didn’t do enough.”27 After downplaying his friendship with Ayers, Obama added, “I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate,”28 as if the law-abiding Oklahoma senator is somehow the right-wing extremist version of Ayers.
Even the Obama administration’s friends have noticed its hostility to conservatives. Former Obama Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has explained that President Obama sees congressional Republicans as “people that simply won’t—don’t