Washington DC is all atwitter about White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler’s decision not to notify the president that an Inspector General report on the Internal Revenue Service was going to reveal that the IRS had improperly harassed right-wing groups pretending to be social services organizations. Apparently, the president was supposed to get involved prior to the completion of the report so that he could bias the results. Fortunately, David Plouffe doesn’t have any time for this bullshit.
Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis said Ruemmler lacks political and media savvy. He said she had “an obligation to give the president a heads-up and generally describe what might be coming down the track [on the IRS] so you can do crisis management planning.”
Plouffe rejected that criticism, saying, “I know blowhards like Lanny Davis have posited this question, but they’re dead wrong.” Obama, he said, has “plenty of people who give him political advice. He needs a top-flight lawyer who’s going to run a good process, and that’s what she’s done.”
There’s basically nothing that could endear me more to Plouffe than him unapologetically denigrating Lanny Davis. That, in a nutshell, is why I preferred Obama to Clinton.
