[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 72 (Monday, May 9, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2650-S2652]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE PUBLIC TRUST
Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise this evening to read into the Record
a portion of the New York Times Magazine profile yesterday of Ben
Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama.
Before reading the article, though, titled ``The Story-Teller and the
President,'' I wish to explain briefly why I think this piece is so
important for us to consider in this Chamber.
We live in a time of precipitous change, both in American Government
and in communications more broadly. We don't admit it enough in this
body, but the Congress in the last decade-plus is extraordinarily weak
by historical standards. At the same time, the media is rapidly
fragmenting. These two vacuums are being filled by the executive branch
in ways that are badly damaging, both to the separation of powers and
to the idea of a meaningfully engaged citizenry. There can be little
doubt that our Founders would be troubled by what is occurring in our
time.
Washington is in the process of replacing self-evident truths with
self-serving spin, and this is dangerous, for no one is entitled to his
or her own facts. I sit intentionally at the desk of Daniel Patrick
Moynihan in this body precisely because he was committed to the idea of
a shared set of facts before our debates began. Yet this story makes
clear that the executive branch feels empowered to proclaim its own
narratives.
This is bigger than Republicans and Democrats. This is about the
legislature's check on the Executive, and it is about all of our
accountability in this city to the people. To my Democratic colleagues
who supported the Iran deal, does it trouble you at all that the White
House displays obvious contempt for you? For your voters and for my
voters, will you stand for this kind of fundamentally dishonest spin
from future Republican administrations--because I pledge to you that I
will not from any administration of either party.
Some will say this is just one story of one staffer who wanted to
brag and got carried away--someone who wanted to boast about if the
whole world could be his canvas, but we should be clear that it is
ultimately elected officials who bear responsibility for the ongoing
evaporation of public trust in our time.
I want to underscore this point. These, my comments tonight, are not
about whether you share the President's view that the Iranian nuclear
deal was a prudent move or whether you share my view that it was a
disaster. That is not the point at issue today. Obviously, foreign
policy is critically important, but this story tonight is about whether
we take truth seriously. It is about whether we care about the public
trust.
There is a widespread view around here that our chief job is ``to
pass legislation.'' That is incorrect. Our main job, and indeed the
oath we took, is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,
which is about limited government and about the separation of powers.
Our job is to ensure that the Nation is well governed and that the
public can believe that the public can have trust and confidence that
the Nation is well governed. This necessarily means that oversight is
at least as important as passing or repealing particular pieces of
legislation. This horrific story should be a screaming siren to all of
us of both parties.
Newsrooms are obviously still struggling to understand what vigorous
and independent reporting will look like in the digital age, but it
remains true that freedom that ordered liberty will remain dependent on
an informed citizenry, and that requires a serious and a free press.
Good journalism, serious journalism, that takes actual facts seriously
and then grapples with those facts honestly, is an important and a high
calling.
I plan to read about one-fourth of this New York Times piece into the
Record, but please note that I will skip over many proper names for
ease of audible understanding. Picking up then about 40 percent of the
way into the profile, the story continues:
The job he [Ben Rhodes] was hired to do, [was] namely to
help the President of the United States communicate with the
public, [and this job] was changing in equally significant
ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that
people in Washington
[[Page S2651]]
were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard
for many of us to absorb the true magnitude of the changes in
the news business--40 percent of newspaper industry
professionals have lost their jobs [inside] the last decade--
in part because readers can absorb all [forms of new] news
they want from social media platforms like Facebook, which
are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars
and pay nothing for the [so-called] ``content'' they provide
to their readers. You have to have skin in the game--[that
is] to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death
way on its products--to understand the radical
and qualitative ways in which words appear in familiar
typefaces [but have yet] been changed. Rhodes [was
singling] out a key example to me one day, laced with the
brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private
utterances. ``All these newspapers used to have foreign
bureaus,'' he said. ``[But] now they don't. They call us
to explain to them what's happening in Moscow [or in]
Cairo. [And] most of the outlets are reporting on world
events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is
[just] 27 years old, and their only reporting experience
consists of being around [a few] political campaigns.
That's a sea change. They literally know nothing.''
In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at
ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes's
assistant, gave me a primer on the way it's done. The easiest
way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is
[just] from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own
dedicated press corps. ``But then there are [all of these
force] multipliers,'' he said, adding, ``We have our
compadres, [and I] reach out to a couple [of] people, and you
know I wouldn't wanted to name them--''
[I interrupt him and I say] ``I can name them,'' [and I
tick] off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and
columnists who often tweet in sync with [the] White House['s]
messaging [operation].
Price [laughs]. ``I'll say, `Hey, look, some people are
spinning this narrative that this is a sign of . . .
weakness,' '' he [continues].
[And I interrupt again] ``but--''
``In fact, it's a sign of strength!'' I [say, chuckling
with him].
``And I'll give them some color,'' Price [continues] ``and
the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com
publishing space, and [they] have [their] huge Twitter
followings, and [then] they'll be putting this message [as
their own].''
This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which
tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world
where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where
carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no
matter which party was in power, it was much harder to
sustain a ``narrative'' over any serious period of time. Now
the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote
will almost always carry the day, and it [will be] very
difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where
the spin is coming from or why.
When I later visited Obama's former campaign mastermind
David Axelrod in Chicago, I brought up the soft Orwellian
vibe of an information space where old media structures and
hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires
who convinced the suckers that information was ``free'' and
everyone with access to Google was now a reporter. Axelrod, a
former newspaperman, sighed. ``It's not as easy as standing
in front of a press conference and speaking to 70 million
people like past presidents have been able to do,'' he said.
The bully pulpit by and large doesn't exist anymore, he
explained. ``So more and more, over the last couple of years,
there's been an investment in alternative means of
communication: using digital more effectively, going to
nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue
your constituencies are going to be found,'' he said. ``I
think they've approached these major foreign policy
challenges as campaign challenges, and they've run campaigns,
and [their] campaigns have been very sophisticated.''
Rhodes's innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is
likely to be a model for how future administrations explain
foreign policy to the Congress--
Note that. The administration is going to have to campaign to the
Congress--
and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard
the story of the Iran deal presented--that the Obama
administration began seriously engaging with the Iranian
officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new
political reality in Iran, which came about because of
elections that brought [so-called] moderates to power in that
country--[this story of 2013] was largely manufactured
[``manufactured'' is their verb] for the purpose of selling
the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true,
the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to
take away from those particulars are often misleading [and]
false. Obama's closest advisers always understood him to be
eager [for] a deal with Iran [back in 2012] and even since
the beginning of his presidency. ``It's the center of the
arc,'' Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal,
officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,
was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the
administration's foreign policy aims and priorities converged
[in] Iran. ``We don't have to be [in the kind of] cycles of
conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,''
he said. ``We can do things that challenge the conventional
thinking that, you know, `AIPAC doesn't like this,' or `the
Israeli government doesn't like this,' or `the gulf countries
don't like it.' It's the possibility of improved relations
with adversaries. It's nonproliferation. So all these threads
that the president's been spinning--[and in this sense I
don't mean it] in the press sense [of spinning, spinning] for
almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.''
In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the ``story'' of the
Iran deal began in 2013, when a ``moderate'' faction inside
the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat a regime of
[so-called] ``hardliners'' in an election and then began to
pursue a policy of ``openness,'' which included a newfound
willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its [so-called]
nuclear weapons program. The president set out the timeline
himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14,
2015, [President Obama]: ``Today, after two years of
negotiations, the United States, together with our
international partners, has achieved something that decades
of animosity has not.'' While the president's statement was
technically accurate--there had in fact been two years of
formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the
J.C.P.O.A.--it was also actively misleading, because the most
meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran [were from mid-
2012] many months before Rouhani and the ``moderate'' camp
were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by
Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah. . . . The idea that
there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the
Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for
the thought that there was a significant split in the regime,
and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-
minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their
neighbors and with America, Obama was [therefore] able to
evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but
clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that [the]
administration was making.
I want to repeat that sentence, by misleading the public on the date
on which negotiations began and therefore seizing upon this election
that happened a year later, ``Obama was able to evade what might have
otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy
choices that [the] administration was making.''
By eliminating the fuss about Iran's nuclear program, the
administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural
tension between the two countries, which would create the
space for America to disentangle itself from its established
system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration
would effectively begin the process of a large-scale
disengagement from the Middle East.
The nerve center for the selling of the Iran deal to
Congress, which took place in a concentrated three-month
period between July and September of last year, was located
inside the White House, and is referred to by its former
denizens as ``the war room.'' The White House Office of
Legislative Affairs helped run the team, which included three
to six people from each of several agencies . . . which were
the State Department, Treasury, the American delegation to
the United Nations (i.e., Samantha Power), at times . . . the
Department of Defense and also the Department of Energy and
the National Security Council. Rhodes ``was kind of like the
quarterback,'' running the daily video conferences and coming
up with lines of attack and parry. ``He was extremely good
about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the
message out that just made more sense,'' [staff members
report]. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war
was Rhodes's go-to move--and proved to be a winning argument.
And just to be clear, that wasn't the choice. The choice wasn't
between war and peace, and they knew it. They were spinning the public,
the press, and the Congress.
The person [credited] with running the digital side of the
campaign . . . the director of digital response for the White
House Office of Digital Strategy, . . . became known in the
war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal.
That is the Twitter handle.
Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response
account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran
deal. ``So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal
is literally going to be the tip of everything we stand up
online,'' [we were told]. ``And we're going to map it onto
what we [already] know about the different audiences we're
dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing,
Congress.'' By applying 21st century data and networking
tools to the white glove world of foreign affairs, the White
House was
[[Page S2652]]
able to track what United States senators and the people who
worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing [at
different moments] online--and make sure that no potential
negative comment passed without a tweet.
As she explained how the process worked, I was struck by
how naive the assumption of a ``state of nature'' must seem
in an information environment that is mediated less and less
by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior
knowledge of the subjects they write about. ``People
construct their own sense of source and credibility now,''
[the staffer told me]. ``They elect whoever they're going to
believe.'' For those in need of more traditional-seeming
forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey
Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped
retail the administration's narrative. ``Laura Rozen was my
RSS feed,'' [the staffer said]. ``She would just find
everything and retweet it.''
Rhodes's messaging campaign was so effective not simply
because it was a perfectly planned and executed example of
digital strategy, but also because he was personally involved
in guiding the deal itself.
In the interest of time, I am going to skip over a few paragraphs
that tell how Jake Sullivan and other administration players traveled
to Oman to secretly meet with the Iranians in the summer of 2012.
The White House point person during the later stage of the
negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is
currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian
dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. During the course of the
Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact
with Rhodes. ``I would often just call him and say, `Give me
a reality check,' '' Malley explained. ``He could say, `Here
is where I think the president is, and here is where he will
be.' '' He continued, ``Ben would try to anticipate: Does it
make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself:
How do we sell it Congress? How do we sell it to the public?
What is it going to do to our narrative?''
Malley is a particularly keen observer of the changing art
of political communication; his father . . . who was born in
Cairo, edited [a] politics magazine . . . and proudly
provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat, in the
days when the leaders' words might take [several] weeks to
travel from Cuba or Cairo to Paris. ``The Iran experience was
the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and
messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that
Ben is really at the intersection of all three. He reflects
and he shapes [all three] at the same time.''
As Malley and representatives of the State Department,
including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry,
engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify
details of a framework that had already been agreed upon,
Rhodes's war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with
reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-
control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social
media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-
clueless reporters. ``We created an echo chamber,'' he
admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of
freshly minted experts [who were] cheerleading for the deal.
[He continued:] ``They were saying things that validated what
we had given them to say.''
When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play
seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America's
future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. ``In the absence of
rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive]
out of this,'' he said. ``We had test drives to know who was
going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to
use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and
whomever else [they needed to use]. So we knew the tactics
that worked'' [he said]. He is [very] proud of the way he
sold the Iran deal. ``We drove them crazy,'' he said of the
deal's opponents.
Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been
anything deceptive about the way the agreement itself was
sold. ``Look,'' [he said] ``with Iran, in a weird way, these
are state-to-state issues. They're agreements between
governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that
Rouhani and Zarif . . . are real reformers who are going to
be steering this country into the direction I believe it can
go in, because their public is educated and, in some
respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on [any of]
that.''
Do you all remember what we heard last summer when they were
testifying before us? We never heard this. We never heard this was the
spin, but they didn't actually believe it. But now here, when the guy's
thinking about his next step in life, we hear the real story. I will
continue.
In fact, Rhodes's passion seems to derive not from any
investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or
centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the
future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are
matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it
derived from his own sense of urgency of radically
reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to
make the prospect of American involvement in the region's
future wars a lot less likely. When I asked him whether the
prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign
being run by a different administration is something that
scares him, he admitted that it does. ``I mean, I'd prefer a
sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of
Congress reflect and take a vote. . . . But that's
impossible'' [he concluded].
Mr. President, truth is bigger than talking points, and self-
government deserves more than spin. Does President Obama think there is
such a thing as domestic propaganda? Does he think it is OK? Do we in
this Chamber think it is OK?
I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
____________________