Scouring Carney's Time archives, the four most obvious areas are:
The role of the press secretary Carney's cutting 2003 assessment of Ari Fleischer's 28 months as White House press secretary (coauthored by John Dickerson, now of Slate) hints at a lack of patience for the stonewalling that is such a big part of his new job. While acknowledging that "it is a press secretary's job to 'spin'— to take a set of facts, however unpleasant, and give them enough English to make the president look good," Carney criticizes Fleischer for not being open enough. Rather than engage in the "tacit commerce" of sharing information with the White House press corps, he faults Fleischer for "rewriting the rules of the exchange" by "shriveling the practice of imparting useful information...strolling right by uncomfortable facts, always with a smile."
President Obama's
strengths What has been President Obama's strongest moment on the
national stage? According to Carney it was his "breathtakingly
unconventional" March 2008 address
on race in the wake of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy. Carney
deemed the speech "profound, one of the most remarkable by a major
public figure in decades," which might be true, but seems at odds with the White House's efforts to move to the political and ideological
center for the 2012 re-election.
Leon Panetta A 1994 profile of Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta is largely positive, but contains enough red meat to potentially complicate Carney's relationship with the current CIA director. Carney credits Panetta with bringing order to a "White House famous for its preternatural state of disarray" in his first two months on the job, but also cites "mixed results in an area where [Panetta] should be strongest: dealing with Congress," noting that "the original defeat of [President Clinton's 1994] crime bill occurred despite Panetta's intense lobbying." On health care reform, Carney attributes "confusing signals from the White House about what the President would settle for" to Panetta.
Russia Carney earned his degree in Russian and Eastern European Studies from Yale and served as Time's Moscow correspondent from 1990 to 1993. But could Carney's familiarity with Russia's national character be a liability. He'll have to avoid repeating his 1992 remarks about the Russian people's "predilection for the rhetoric of impending apocalypse and unfamiliarity with the concept of loyal opposition or healthy difference of opinion [that] tend to exaggerate the risk of a putsch" the next time Dmitry Medvedev comes to town.
Leon Panetta A 1994 profile of Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta is largely positive, but contains enough red meat to potentially complicate Carney's relationship with the current CIA director. Carney credits Panetta with bringing order to a "White House famous for its preternatural state of disarray" in his first two months on the job, but also cites "mixed results in an area where [Panetta] should be strongest: dealing with Congress," noting that "the original defeat of [President Clinton's 1994] crime bill occurred despite Panetta's intense lobbying." On health care reform, Carney attributes "confusing signals from the White House about what the President would settle for" to Panetta.
Russia Carney earned his degree in Russian and Eastern European Studies from Yale and served as Time's Moscow correspondent from 1990 to 1993. But could Carney's familiarity with Russia's national character be a liability. He'll have to avoid repeating his 1992 remarks about the Russian people's "predilection for the rhetoric of impending apocalypse and unfamiliarity with the concept of loyal opposition or healthy difference of opinion [that] tend to exaggerate the risk of a putsch" the next time Dmitry Medvedev comes to town.
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Ray Gustini
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