Why The Greg Craig Debacale Matters

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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29716.html

Why the Greg Craig debacle matters

President Barack Obama is returning from his trek to Asia Thursday to a capital that is a considerably more dangerous place for him than when he departed.

While he was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.

The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can’t be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don’t understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.

The Craig embarrassment gives these people a new reason – not the first or only reason – to conclude that he wasn’t the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought, and, more fundamentally, that his ability to move people and actually lead a fractured and troubled country (the reason many preferred him over Hillary Clinton) is not what had been promised in the campaign.

This may seem like a lot to hang on a Washington personnel move. After all, intramural back-stabbing or making people fall guys when things go wrong (think Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary Les Aspin after the disaster in Somalia) are not new to Washingtonians.

But Craig’s ouster did not occur in a vacuum. It served as a focal point to concerns that have been building for months that Obama wasn’t pressing for all that might be possible within the existing political constraints (all that one could ask of a president); that his presidential voice hadn’t fulfilled the hopes raised by his campaign voice (which had also taken him a while to find); that he hadn’t created a movement, as he had raised expectations that he would; that would be there to back him up and help him fulfill his promises.

That is why it is worth pondering how the Craig story, unfolded in detail – its consequences likely will echo far longer than anything Obama said or did in Asia.

Briefly, here’s what happened, some of it told for the first time: Craig, who had known the Clintons since they were all at Yale Law School together, had served as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, but in 1998 gave up that job to help defend Bill Clinton against impeachment. Yet in 2008, he supported Obama for the nomination – not so much a turning against Hillary Clinton as being impressed early, as were some other prominent Washingtonians, by the then-state senator but would-be U.S. Senate candidate at a fundraiser held by Vernon Jordan, seeing Obama as the first potentially inspiring Democratic figure since Robert Kennedy. In the course of the campaign, Craig wrote a highly publicized memo questioning some of Hillary Clinton’s claims of foreign policy experience, such as coming under enemy fire in Tuzla, Bosnia. During the campaign, Craig coached Obama for the debates (playing McCain), and praised him highly. Craig’s imprimatur helped the neophyte Obama in certain influential circles.

He hoped to get a high foreign policy position in an Obama administration, but when Clinton was named secretary of state, this of course became untenable. The Clintons are an unforgiving lot. So, Obama and Craig agreed that Craig would take the job of White House counsel for a year, and then they’d discuss what he’d do next. Thus, Craig was handed a very tricky portfolio.