Fred Kaplan writes: About a week ago, I told a friend that I didn’t understand how people like Ben Rhodes — who’s been working as deputy national security adviser since President Obama’s first day in the White House — could stand the nonstop pressure without going crazy. Then came David Samuels’ profile of Rhodes in the New York Times Magazine, and I wondered if he’d gone nuts after all.
The piece quotes Rhodes as ragging on the press corps (27-year-olds who “literally know nothing” other than political campaigns) and the foreign policy establishment (“the Blob”); boasting of how he manipulated reporters and commentators on the Iran nuclear deal (“We created an echo chamber,” with reporters “saying things that validated what we had given them to say”); and boosting his own status considerably (“I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends”).
Why was an experienced operator like Rhodes saying these things to a reporter on the record? And does he believe what he was saying?
It’s a very strange article all round. Samuels presents Rhodes — a 38-year-old, erstwhile aspiring novelist — as “the Boy Wonder of the Obama White House,” “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy” besides the president himself, “the voice in which America speaks to the world.” The story’s headline hails Rhodes still more dramatically as “Obama’s foreign-policy guru” who “rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age.”
Many have commented on the article as a fascinating, if gruesome portrait of how power works and how official narratives are woven in the age of Obama and social media. It is all that, but not entirely in the way that many bloggers and tweeters have inferred. It struck me as interesting in two ways: first, as a story of a senior staffer who has been hunkered down in a windowless West Wing office for too long; second, as the story of a freelance writer — David Samuels, the author of this piece — who has an ideological agenda to push and who hides it by hyping the importance of the man he’s profiling. [Continue reading…]
