Obama-NYTs honeymoon ends
Campaign press office “irked” over reporting

Well now… it appears the BHO campaign press office is going after the NYTs writer, Adam Nagourney, over his July 17th piece, “Poll Finds Obama Isn’t Closing Divide on Race”.

The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman had a little ditty yesterday, “End of the Affair”, documenting the BHO press offices rather terse emails to Nagourney, complaining about the Times conclusions of a poll showing Obama’s not making much headway against JSM in closing the divide between Americans, based on the constituents’ race. The email text is not provided, and we do not know what the BHO press types were attempting to accomplish with their complaints specifically.

Around midnight on July 16, New York Times chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney received a terse e-mail from Barack Obama’s press office. The campaign was irked by the Times’ latest poll and Nagourney and Megan Thee’s accompanying front-page piece titled “Poll Finds Obama Isn’t Closing Divide on Race,” which was running in the morning’s paper. Nagourney answered the query, the substance of which he says was minor, and went to bed, thinking the matter resolved.

But, the next morning, Nagourney awoke to an e-mail from Talking Points Memo writer Greg Sargent asking him to comment on an eight-point rebuttal trashing his piece that the Obama campaign had released to reporters and bloggers like The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and Politico’s Ben Smith. Nagourney had not heard the complaints from the Obama camp and had no idea they were so steamed. “I’m looking at this thing, and I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” Nagourney recently recalled. “I really flipped out.”

Later that afternoon, Nagourney got permission from Times editors to e-mail Sargent a response to the Obama memo. But the episode still grates. “I’ve never had an experience like this, with this campaign or others,” Nagourney tells me. “I thought they crossed the line. If you have a problem with a story I write, call me first. I’m a big boy. I can handle it. But they never called. They attacked me like I’m a political opponent.”

Apparently, Talking Points decided to act as the campaign’s mouthpiece, publishing a rebuttal in their words, and on their behalf, in a piece with the Greg Sargent byline story, “Obama Campaign Criticizes New York Times Story On Poll”.

“The NYT story about their poll ignores multiple and significant pieces of data that actually indicate a trend much different from that which the story suggests,” the critique reads. It goes on to list “some straightforward points from their data that are omitted from the story.”…

… followed by why they felt the conclusions were in error. Or perhaps more aptly put in Seinfeld-eses….yada yada…

Nagourney came up with his own retort to the Obama press office retort (that masqueraded as a Greg Sargent article), published as a counterpoint on TPM.

The New York Times’s Adam Nagourney has sent me a long and detailed response to the Obama campaign’s complaint that his story today on the paper’s big poll on race omitted key info that would have been more favorable to Obama.

While Nagourney says he is “comfortable” with the story, he does concede that he left out one key data point about Michelle Obama that he should have included. He allows that headline was imperfect, in that it implied some sort of failure on Obama’s point to close the racial divide:

This was a long and detailed poll that yielded a lot of interesting results. We could have chosen to focus on any number of themes; we decided to focus mainly on what we could learn from the poll about how blacks, whites and Hispanics view politics and society at the critical moment. The critique from the Obama campaign seems to be directed at findings from the poll that we did not address in much depth in the story, particularly the head to head matchups between the two candidates.
We make our polls public in the spirit of transparency and so that others can take a look and draw their own conclusions. In this case, there’s plenty of data to consider on about questions we did not include in our story, and there are other valid ways of framing the results.

But we are comfortable that our story accurately captured the results on the questions that most struck us, those that sought to illuminate how blacks, whites and Hispanics see the United States at a moment when Senator Obama’s candidacy is putting race front and center in a new way.

One last point: I do think there is room for discussion about the headline – “Poll Finds Obama Candidacy Isn’t Closing Divide on Race”. The point of the story is that black respondents apparently do not see the fact of Mr. Obama’s candidacy as evidence of significant improvement in race relations. The story does not suggest that there is some onus on Mr. Obama himself to be closing this divide. I also, on a smaller matter – and the one matter the Obama campaign did raise with me – should have included, in saying that 20 percent of white voters had a favorable view of Michelle Obama, the fact that 72 percent either have no opinion about Mrs. Obama or hadn’t heard enough about her, to avoid any suggestion that 80 percent had an unfavorable view of her.

If this is to be their response to what little criticism BHO receives from the MSM… busy following up and emailing reporters who give less than glowing reviews… just what will he do to the press corps if he wins the Oval Office?

And I guess we have now determined what TPM is…. a press outlet for BHO propaganda and complaints.