The capital’s empty jousting

What the daily press briefing almost always

misses

The White House press corps, like nature, abhors a vacuum. So for a revealing hour last week, Robert Gates filled the vacuum and provided a window onto a stifling ritual and a democratic necessity. The White House daily press briefing often is a melancholy staple where the chief spokesman spins events or evades unpleasantries, while the media presses, and at times preens, as it seeks answers it knows are not forthcoming.

The generally doleful air is of low-grade rhetorical combat, especially in an age in which the press is relegated to stenography due to the ever-more controlling impulses of each successive administration.

And in an Internet world, whatever meteor Tweeted across the media horizon an hour earlier can dictate the topics at hand.

On Wednesday the room was abuzz with word of the latest memoirs of Gates, President Obama’s (and George W. Bush’s) former defense secretary.

Apparently, nobody there had seen the book yet. But stories in the Washington Post and New York Times, which were based on reading it, indicated Gates frustrations over the Afghanistan War and how Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and he doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

By my count, there were 25 consecutive, often highly repetitive questions asked about that and related quotes, as well as shots Gates takes at Vice President Joe Biden.

Spokesman Jay Carney had his talking points. One of them was this: “The President greatly appreciates Secretary Gates’ service to the President’s administration and to the country.”

Predictably, there was a defense of Biden but no rebuke of Gates. No surprise, either, was the claim that Obama couldn’t spend time on this since he was focusing on real business, like extending jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed.

But what did one expect Carney to say? Perhaps: “The President said, ‘Screw that ungrateful, self-serving, truth-bending, indiscreet ass whom I should never have kept on from the Bush cabinet’”? Of course not. “What makes the briefings so stultifying is that after the first few questions, the battle lines are established and nothing else can be gleaned even as people try anyway,” says Reid Cherlin, a Brooklyn-based writ- er, who as an assistant press secretary for the first two Obama years, helping to prepare then-spokesman Robert Gibbs for the daily combat. In part, that meant producing the generally sterile, self-serving onepagers on various topics that a spokesman will literally read aloud.

“By the time you get to the tenth question on the same topic, the nature of the diminishing returns is almost embarrassing,” Cherlin said. “But people don’t want to give up the ‘topic of the day’ for something that might then be seen as minor.”

Indeed, the press corps is dominated by white alpha males and the briefing driven by TV reporters in the first row. It was thus curious Wednesday that the first three non-Gates questions, on jobless benefits, were asked by women.

By Thursday, interest in Gates had dissipated. He was eclipsed by topics including the Chris Christie bridge debacle.

It was all a reminder that while the briefing is useful on those few days when there is important, real news, it’s often a frustrating exercise, demeaning to both sides.

This brings us back to Gates and his book.

He’s a man with an impeccable reputa- tion and impressive legacy of public service. My subsequent perusal of the book suggests someone wracked with guilt, shame and exhaustion.

He was one of a distinct capital species of “wise men,” focused on the larger public good and drawn to service. It’s a designation that’s traditionally meant being discreet, which Gates clearly has not been in this second set of memoirs.

But we should prefer the likes of Gates’ writing amid a growing (and lucrative) tradition of memoirs by White House officials big and small — Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, David Stockman, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Stephanopoulos, Scott McClellan (George W. Bush spokesman) and David Axelrod (coming).

Every White House too often asserts executive or “deliberative process” privilege, saying that disclosures of many meetings would curtail full and robust deliberations. The penchant is to withhold.

Together, these books tell us things we wouldn’t otherwise know for years — and certainly not from the daily White House press briefings.