Carney, left, had jumped the shark, the author writes. | AP Photos The White House jumps the shark

Last Thursday afternoon, in the briefing room, it finally happened.

Nobody was prepared for it — least of all White House press secretary Jay Carney. But it happened. The White House, which on a near daily basis has been ladling out credulity-straining explanations for President Barack Obama’s actions, finally jumped the shark.


To set the stage: The White House, in campaign mode for months, now has the credibility level of a campaign. Meaning virtually none.

Carney was at the podium, huffily insisting, as usual, that Obama toils solely for the interests of the nation, while politics is the constant companion of Republicans, whose petty ambitions are interfering with the president’s noble efforts.

Carney was asked if, in his view, it was “mostly on principle” that Obama had claimed executive privilege to withhold documents demanded by House Republicans investigating the administration’s Fast and Furious gun-running operation.

Carney agreed. “This is entirely about principle,” he said.

The White House press corps burst into peals of laughter.

Carney was rattled. He tried to put down the insurrection. “It has nothing to do — no, no, this has nothing to do …” He never said just what this had nothing to do with since he must have realized that he would only be met by more laughter.

Carney had jumped the shark. Not that he looked like Fonzie in “Happy Days.” But he had gone too far, and maybe he knew it. Just as Henry Winkler, who played The Fonz, clearly realized that the sitcom writers had taken his tough guy character to a ludicrous extreme. He was on water skis, in a bathing suit and leather jacket, and he, literally, leaped over a shark.

The White House had been airing lead-ins for Carney’s “Jumping the Shark” episode for weeks.

In an episode earlier this season, Carney announced to a startled press corps that a journalist they’d never heard of had determined that Obama had actually increased the deficit at a lower rate than any recent predecessor.

This was debatable on technical grounds, though George W. Bush had certainly handed off a large deficit.

But whether the statement was literally true was beside the point. Carney was trying to suggest that a president who had added some $5 trillion to the deficit was a fiscal tightwad.

This was ridiculous. Like saying an alcoholic, who had been drinking 15 beers a day, was doing great because he had merely increased it to 17 a day.

There was also the old White House saw that Obama, our most liberal president, was not politically motivated when he described his position on gay marriage as “evolving.”

Without warning, however, Vice President Joe Biden, whose views on the matter were also “evolving,” accidentally blurted out the truth — he supports same-sex marriage.

Obama suddenly found himself to Biden’s right — at a time when gays are among the leading donors to a reelection campaign struggling to hit its fundraising targets. The president’s evolution was over. Obama now voiced strong support for same-sex marriage.

Then there was Obama’s miscalculated contention that “the private sector is doing fine.” This was a spin too far — with the unemployment rate at 8.2 percent and the economy expanding at an annual rate of less than 2 percent. Obama soon reeled that back in, acknowledging that the private sector was not doing so fine after all.

But then Carney added an extra helping of dissimulation by claiming that the press had misreported Obama’s words — failing to put them in proper context. Obama, Carney claimed, was obviously saying the private sector was doing fine relative to the public sector.

But reporters knew that, though Obama had mentioned public-sector job losses, he had made no comparison. For example, if I in the same sentence said, “spinach is disgusting and lobster is delicious,” virtually no one could conclude I meant lobster is only delicious relative to spinach.

There was Obama’s recent canard that he was stopping the deportation of Latinos who had arrived in the United States as children in part to “focus our resources more wisely” on other immigration matters. Perhaps he meant focusing campaign resources on other ethnic groups.

There have been other random fibs. Like Carney’s suggestions that Obama isn’t traveling to swing states for political reasons.

The background music has been the constant refrain that everything wrong is Bush’s fault. Obama continues to sing this tune like some aging vaudevillian barnstorming in the Catskills, desperate for one last round of applause.

It all added up to a laughable collection of ham-handed deceptions.

But nobody was laughing. Until Thursday — when Carney finally jumped the shark.

Keith Koffler, who covered the White House as a reporter for CongressDaily and Roll Call, is editor of the blog White House Dossier.