I had trusted Robert Gibbs initially, with his Southern charm and amiable manner, far more than I should have. I had thought he was just a 'talking head.' This is why I'm writing these 'Obama Staff' profiles. We should know more about the people who send us government information. Or any information.
My first profile, Stephanie Cutter, remained in the shadows. Gibbs spoke to the American people via the press virtually daily, sometimes several times a day. His face was omnipresent. It's essential to trust such a person. To trust, you must know someone.
"Bobby" Gibbs, an Alabama native, grew up in the South playing soccer and saxophone. He belonged to the high-school debate team. Benefit may not have accrued to Bobby as an adult from the first two but the imprint of the latter is easily seen in his Democratic Party activities.
Both Gibbs' parents worked at Auburn University. So, presumably, their academic careers compelled them to involve young Robert in their political pursuits. First, his mother involved him in League of Women Voter meetings (because no babysitter was to be had -- if you can believe that). Then Bobby worked on 'voter re-identification' at the county courthouse.
If 'voter re-identification' doesn't sound creepy enough, let me explain briefly: voter re-identification in many cases involves purging of a (mostly Southern) state's or region's voter lists to remove voters that somebody (who dat?) considers ineligible.
In the South, where a young Gibbs was working hard at an early age, these 'purges' were apparently removing registered black voters from the election rolls in some cases. According to Black Enterprise magazine (July, 1981), this dreadful activity took place in Alabama and similar places around the time when Mrs. Gibbs was making sure little Bobby got to the courthouse to process these voter-roll eliminations. I hope this is creepy enough for you now.
How must African-Americans feel when they wake up to this kind of betrayal by the Democratic Party? It seems that they are waking up, right now. After all, supposedly the Republicans were up to such nastiness. Supposedly it was the Republican Party -- the Dems constantly droned on about this -- that was so unwelcoming to minorities.
But the Democrats are not the Party of a rainbow of nationalities, skin colors and religions holding hands with the American white middle class. They are not the 'Party of Lincoln' that freed the slaves. That's the Republican Party. Exposed, the Democratic Party has racial-hypocrisy skeletons rattling around in their closet -- big, lanky ones like 'Dixiecrats' Thurmond, Byrd & LBJ.
But I digress.
Of recent White House Press Secretaries, Robert Gibbs seems to have the strongest Democratic pedigree, especially having worked for the 2004 John Kerry Presidential campaign, Sen. Fritz Hollings and a couple of different Deep South Congressmen. Gibbs acquired a bit of a 'hit man' reputation: he resigned from Kerry's campaign before it got started and immediately shifted gears into attacking Howard Dean, whose run ended with the infamous shrieking shrill-fest, that he should have had the sense to avoid.
Fortuitously catching a ride with Obama's 2004 campaign for the Senate, Gibbs then became a kind of wimpier 'Karl Rove' for the then budding Obama. Gibbs then morphed into, according to sources such as the increasingly questionable New York Times, Obama's constant companion and chief advisor. Gibbs, perhaps more than any other individual, was reportedly key to Obama's rise and subsequent election as President.
I wonder how much Presidential hopeful Obama and Gibbs discussed the spokesman's work in 'voter re-identification?'
Whenever I heard of Obama's team and the 'brain trust' they represented, I had presumed Gibbs was a nonentity. With names like Axelrod (regularly positioned as a genius), Jarrett and Plouffe, my impression was that Gibbs was just the talking head selected once Obama was President and was just "a journeyman campaign flack," as the NYT referred to him in their piece above. I could not have been more wrong.
Dark horse "Bobby" was more pivotal than I or anyone else had imagined.
His crucial communications role in Obama's election, how he smugly 'handled' the press during the lifeless first two years of Obama's sovereignty and how virtually every campaign promise Obama made remains unfulfilled, tell me that when a 'spokesperson' is involved in the actual administration of a President, prevarication (to put it kindly) might ensue.
In January 2011, Gibbs announced he would be leaving the Obama White House yet would remain an 'outside advisor' which sounds menacing to me.
Gibbs, the latest in a long line of Obama ship-jumpers, fueled a rapaciously speculated leak that he would join Facebook. For a few weeks it seemed that he would be made independently wealthy by Zuckerberg's zeitgeist but according to Politico, and others, talks to hire Gibbs collapsed because--amongst other distasteful dynamics--the interview didn't go well.
Gibbs, never leaving the last word for another, left us Americans with the troublesome possibility that he would reappear on the political scene to 'contribute' to Obama's re-election ... if there is one, I hasten to add.