There’s been a lot of buzz in the progosphere regarding dueling WaPo and NYT stories on  James L. Jones, Obama’s National Security Advisor.  Over the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of rumors going around that Jones wasn’t working out, that he couldn’t hold his own in meetings with the many large personalities in Obama’s national security team, that he wasn’t part of the inner circle.  The two stories appear to be some sort of pushback from the White House — it certainly isn’t a coincidence that the Post and the Times both decided to run the same story on the same day.

In both pieces, Jones comes across as a fairly down-to-earth, sensible guy.  WaPo:

In recent weeks, Jones has been portrayed in foreign policy articles and blogs as too measured and low-key to keep pace with the hard chargers working late hours in the West Wing. Some senior White House officials questioned early on whether Jones, 65, a retired four-star Marine general who barely knew Obama before the election, would succeed among younger staffers whose relationships with the president were forged during the long and arduous campaign. . . .

White House officials who cited early misgivings, more stylistic than substantive, insisted they have now disappeared. But Jones acknowledges that the road has not always been smooth, and he appears more comfortable than some of his administration colleagues in saying they still have some distance to travel.

It is “absolutely” fair to say that it has taken some time for him and his colleagues to get used to each other, Jones said in an interview Tuesday. “From this West Wing, in particular, because this is Obama Nation, right? True? This is where the Obama election campaign came, landed, en masse.”. . .

I’m not only an outsider, but I’m a 20-years-older-than-anybody-around outsider,” Jones said. “I’m a former general. And it took me a while to get the president to call me by my first name. Now, I’m ‘Hey, you,’ ” he said with a laugh.  “But there is a generational thing here. There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to a certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.”. . .

In the White House, Jones said he has had to adjust to the relatively free flow of advice that Obama encourages. “When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn’t expect six other people from the NSC to go with me,” he said. Now, he said, “I think the president and I are very comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to be the shadow. I don’t have to be there all the time. I really have great people. I want them to be trusted.”

Jones said he is “not used to being in the center of these things. . . . But if I’m not living up to other people’s views of what the national security adviser should look like he’s doing . . . like my hair is on fire all the time,” so be it. “I did that in my life, a couple of generations ago, I was a gung ho major, and a gung-ho lieutenant colonel, and I sacrificed my family life for my career.”

If he can reform the NSC’s structure and process, he said, “then everybody can go home and have dinner with their families. Because they’ll have enough depth and robustness so that we can tee up issues — not constantly in a crisis mode.”

And here are excerpts from the Times story:

In an interview on Monday, General Jones responded that low profile did not necessarily mean low impact. “You can be a leader that takes charge of every meeting and takes charge of every issue and rides it to its conclusion and plays a very, very dominant role,” he said. “For me, that has the effect of muting voices that should be heard.” . . .

General Jones described that behind-the-scenes “teeing up” process as an example of how he could be helpful to the president. He maintained his cool even when asked about sniping from staff members that he went biking at lunchtime and left work early, although he did, at one point, seem about to crush his coffee cup.

“I’m here by 7 o’ clock in the morning, and I go home at 7, 7:30 at night; that’s a fairly reasonable day if you’re properly organized,” he said. What about officials who pride themselves on being at the White House deep into the night?

“Congratulations,” he said. “To me that means you’re not organized.”

Some of General Jones’s critics say that his practice of keeping a schedule separate from Mr. Obama’s suggests that the former four-star general and supreme commander of NATO “thinks like a principal” rather than as a member of the staff of the president of the United States.

But Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that General Jones was “a Marine, and he believes in team-building,” an approach that Mr. Holbrooke said had produced “a sophisticated, multilayer decision structure at the N.S.C. that did not exist before.”

I’ve quoted these at length for several reasons.

First, the NSC press aide who pulled off this coup deserves an award of some kind.  The two reporters — Karen DeYoung at WaPo and Helene Cooper at NYT, both very very good journalists — were played.  It’s not just that Jones’s answers are similar — even their questions are almost identical.  This is a textbook example of the strengths of the White House’s message machine.

Second, much of the resulting blog commentary has expressed downright incredulity about Jones’s work ethic.  TNR’s Michael Crowley:

But with all due respect to the general, isn’t that a better argument for not being national security advisor than for working short hours? The big bad world never sleeps, and coup plotters and terrorists generally don’t schedule their activities around eastern standard time sleep schedules, after all.

Spencer Ackerman:

You get the sense that Jones is readying the shuffleboard while longtime Obama aides Mark Lippert and Denis McDonough are plugging in the Metallica edition of Guitar Hero.

Ah, the hubris of the young and caffeinated.  Only in Washington can a man who puts in twelve hour days (7 am to 7 pm, with time at lunch for excercise) be regarded as a slacker “working short hours.”

I respect and honor everyone who works for the President and puts in long hours.  For some, it’s absolutely necessary — if, like Reggie Love, you’re the President’s body man, you’re not going home for dinner.  But for many, it’s largely unnecessary.  As Daniel Drezner wryly observes, the West Wing is not real life.

The frenetic twenty hours a day, seven days a week schedule kept by many young type A Presidential aides is the product of these folks’ desire to look like they’re willing to sacrifice their bodies, their families, and their health to the altar of the presidency. They want to be there so they are there, near the President, and thus will, at least in their own minds, be indispensible to him.

What people seem to forget is that the White House has a sit room, the State Department has an ops center, the CIA has an ops center, and dozens of other departments and agencies have similar operations, each of which is staffed 24/7 — but not by the same people all the time.  Each agency has a regular rotation of staff, each set working eight hour shifts.  And somehow, each and every one of them manages to do their job and get enough sleep.

You want to know what happens when people are crazy overworked?  They get crazy tired.  They get crazy brain-damaged.  And they give the President crazy bad advice.

Does anyone seriously think a retired Marine general can’t handle the pace?  Jones’s approach is exactly the right one:  be there whenever he’s needed, delegate whenever possible, build his staff’s confidence in their own capabilities, and make sure he’s not completely worthless when the real crisis comes.

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It’s good to know that really smart people are running things over at CNN (h/t: Think Progress)

It’s as if CNN learned everything they think they need to know from “Gone Quiet,” that horrible episode of The West Wing where Hal Holbrook, playing “the Assistant Secretary of State” for Curmudgeonly Old American Affairs, lectures President Bartlett.  Memo to CNN (and Aaron Sorkin, for that matter):  there are something like forty Assistant Secretaries of State, and none of them have anything to do with domestic constituencies.

This just demonstrates the degree to which the MSM doesn’t understand the most basic mechanics mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy.  But then again, they never had to learn any of this under Bush, did they?

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UPDATED:  This story keeps getting better and better — new info, including the McCain campaign’s response (and a deconstruction of why it’s not true) at the bottom.

In case you missed it, here’s a shot of the backdrop McCain used at the beginning of his speech last night:

At the time, a lot of people wondered what this building was.  Some joked that it looked like one of McCain’s mansions.  It turns out that it was a photo of Walter Reed.

Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood CA.

They thought it was a photo of Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC:

Whoopsie!

Throughout their Convention, the Republicans had used the giant screen behind the podium to great effect.  And in fairness, the problem wasn’t the technology, it was the campaign’s reasearch.

The McCain campaign had intended the first shot to evoke the courage and sacrifice of American veterans.  Instead, it evoked the terrors of junior high.  Or the wonders of the McCain family’s real estate holdings.

To make matters even worse, this particular photo made it look on television like he was standing in front of a throbbing neon green background.  Given McCain’s history with that particular color, that was not exactly auspicious.

It gets better.  The school is not happy.  Here’s what its principal had to say:

It has been brought to the school’s attention that a picture of the front of our school, Walter Reed Middle School, was used as a backdrop at the Republican National Convention. Permission to use the front of our school for the Republican National Convention was not given by our school nor is the use of our school’s picture an endorsement of any political party or view.

Wait — it gets even better.  I’ll have to violate my self-imposed Sorkintorium to tell you, but this is just too good.  Turns out that the school was used as a backdrop during “The West Wing” for a scene where a young, vibrant Matt Santos announces his candidacy — and talks about. . .wait for it. . .hope.

Talk about a completely fubar moment.

Meanwhile, some veterans are feeling dissed:

Sen. McCain wanted a back-drop of Walter Reed so that he could be seen as a champion for reform in DC and to remind us that he will never allow it to happen again. And if that is the case why did Sen. McCain vote against an increase in funding for military and veterans hospitals(Roll Call Vote)? He voted against it because the “maverick” sided with his party in order to keep tax cuts for the wealthiest.

But even then, the story is not over.  You see, Senator John McCain is the the Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Serviced Committee, which, among other responsibilities, conducted hearings at the time of the March 2007 scandal over bad conditions at Walter Reed.  This is what he said at the time:

Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee personally apologized today for what he called “unacceptable” conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, currently the subject of hearings on the Hill.

“I will take responsibility for being a member of the Armed Services Committee and not knowing about it and not doing anything about it,” the Republican 2008 contender told a group of county officials from across the country today. “I apologize for my failure” to act, the Arizona Republican added. “I should be held accountable.”

It’s not like McCain isn’t familiar with the facility.  He has visited it on numerous occasions, most recently in June of this year.

So I’d like to ask the campaign a simple question.

At any point during what Marc Ambinder on Twitter said was six weeks of rehearsal, did his staff ever sit down with the Senator to discuss the photos that would be projected behind him?  If not, what were they thinking?  If so, didn’t he notice?

I would not want to be in the shoes of the staffer who made this mistake right now.  McCain might be reconsidering his position on Guantanamo.

UPDATED:  The McCain campaign is in full denial mode, incapable of admitting a mistake.  Here’s what McCain spokesman Tucker “Out of” Bounds had to say today (Saturday):

“The changing image-screen was linked to the American thematics of the speech and the public school was simply part of it,” Mr. Bounds said, adding that during the speech, Mr. McCain “called for public education reforms that empower parents and students before bureaucrats and labor unions.”

There’s only one small problem with that argument. The part of McCain’s speech that dealt with education issues came after the shot of Walter Reed Middle School was no longer up on the screen.

So that you can see it for yourself, I’ve included the YouTube video of the speech here.  You do not have to watch it, but it’s handy to have as a reference while I point out a few things.

The Walter Reed Shot appears at about 2:39 into the video, when a giant waving American flag transitions to a still of the school.  It stays up on the screen (unless they used a second slide with the exact same green background) until somewhere around the 7:38 mark, just after he introduces his mother.

The first mention of education — “We will use our community colleges to help train people for new opportunities in their communities” — takes place at the 28:46 mark.  At that point, the backdrop is blue, with a smaller American flag waving from the top of a flagpole.  In fact, that image begins at about 7:40 (right after the Walter Reed shot) and remains on screen for the rest of his speech.

Although I can’t be absolutely sure, since close-ups of McCain make up most of the video, it looks like they only used three images during his speech:  a giant waving flag when he comes out, the Walter Reed Middle School photo for about five minutes towards the beginning, and then, for the rest of the speech a looping video of a long shot of an American flag on top of a flag pole.

If, as Bounds claims, the “changing image-screen was linked to the American thematics of the speech and the public school was simply part of it,”  why are there no other thematic images?  Not one.  No shots of nuclear power plants, wind farms, or offshore oil platforms.   No images of the troops in Iraq, the threats posed by al Qaeda/Iran/Russia, or the heroes of 9/11.  No photos of him when he was a POW.  And not one glimpse of the hard-working families he mentions by name.

So that leaves us with an even weirder situation.  Why was that one shot chosen?    If it was to highlight his education platform, why did it appear twenty-six minutes before he started talking about education?

There are three plausible explanations.

• The Powerpoint slide presentation failed somehow, and after the first shot of Walter Reed Middle School appeared out of order.  They kept the shot of Walter Reed up on the screen for five minutes while they tried to fix the problem, then gave up and abandoned the slides in favor of a looping video of the American flag.
• The Walter Reed Middle School shot was out of sync and should have appeared later, during the education section.  It was on-screen for five minutes before they noticed it was out-of-sync and took it down when they realized the mistake.  But they had no intention of using any other illustrative slides.
• They really did think it was a photo of Walter Reed Medical Center.  They used it early in the speech to highlight the themes of McCain’s service, courage, and patriotism.  It appeared exactly where it was supposed to appear.

I’ll let you make up your mind on your own, but as you do, remember Occam’s Razor:  all other things being equal, the simplest solution is also the one most likely to be true.

Hat tip on The West Wing:  TPM

Image:  Gothamist, used under a Creative Commons license

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Okay, I’ve had it.  Enough with the Aaron Sorkin references already.

First there were The West Wing comparisons between Matthew Santos and Barack Obama.  Then came the Joe Biden-Leo McGarry comparisons.  We’ve even had a few comparisons between John McCain and Arnold Vinick.  Then during Obama’s acceptance speech we kept hearing about The American President.” And when Sarah Palin got picked to be McCain’s VP candidate, we even saw some pseudo-Sorkin references to Commander-in-Chief.

Now we have this from Marbury, in response to the fact that the McCain campaign has released a bunch of information on the Palin family today:

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The Onion strikes again:

On day two of the 2008 San Diego SorCon, the biggest Aaron Sorkin convention in the world, screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin revealed plans for his next project, an animated continuation of his most popular franchise, The West Wing.

“I’m excited to bring my Emmy Award–winning writing to the field of animation,” Sorkin said in a speech before approximately 30,000 screaming fans, many of whom were dressed up in the business-suit costumes of their favorite Sorkin characters. “The costs of live-action production restricted me to a set only slightly larger than the actual White House and an ensemble cast of under 15 actors. But animation technology will enable us to provide fans with extended 40-minute walk-and-talks, digitally compressed dialogue for faster delivery, and a cast of over 70 main characters. My vision will finally be presented in its truest, most uncompromised form.”

The new project, which was rumored in the Aaron Sorkin press in the days running up to SorCon but unconfirmed until yesterday’s announcement, marks Sorkin’s first television project since 2006’s Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, which was canceled after only one season. The new show, tentatively titled The West Wing: The Santos Administration. . . .

Following his speech, Sorkin screened a four-minute clip from the pilot episode of The West Wing: The Santos Administration and explained the premise behind the new show. Beginning about two years after the last episode of the original series, the animated version focuses on President Matt Santos as he deals with his party’s crushing defeat in the midterm elections and his advisers struggle with the death of President Jed Bartlet, who has finally succumbed to complications from multiple sclerosis. The pilot ends, Sorkin said, with a 15-minute speech from President Santos about holding unpopular ideals.

I have to admit that I was a West Wing junkie.  Molly used to leave the house when I watched it because it always made me nostalgic for the Clinton Administration (no small feat, even in the Bush years).  So while part of me laughed, there was a tiny little voice inside that also said. . .”OMG that would be so great.  He totally should do it!”

Heh.

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