Sessions with opinion columnists have become more frequent in Obama’s second term. President Obama, off the record

President Barack Obama is often accused of being insular. He’s not a schmoozer. He doesn’t like meeting with lawmakers, and he doesn’t particularly care for talking to reporters, either.

But get him in an off-the-record setting with a small group of opinion columnists — the David Brooks and E.J. Dionne types — and he’ll talk for hours.


“He likes the intellectual sparring element of it,” a source familiar with the president’s thinking told POLITICO. “He likes talking to reasonable adversaries.”

He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings. “He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he wants to win columnists over,” said another.

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The president appreciates the back-and-forth exchanges at the sessions, past participants told POLITICO. He even occasionally asks aides or administration officials what a specific columnist thinks about an issue. Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about ‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about ‘x,’” one columnist explained.

The off-the-record meetings are held over coffee around the long wooden conference table in the Roosevelt Room, just off the West Wing lobby. Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there are regulars. Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’ Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential representatives from the right.

The sessions, which have become more frequent in Obama’s second term — he held at least three in October — provide a stark contrast to the combative, sometimes cantankerous relationship between the White House and the press corps. They also serve as an alternate means of shaping the debate in Washington: a private back-channel of genuine sentiment that seeps into the echo-chamber, while Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, delivers largely scripted responses in the public briefings. Obama holds the occasional off-the-record meeting with top White House correspondents, but they are few and far between — a fact that rankles some members of the press corps. (POLITICO has attended off-the-record sessions with the president.)

At the same time, these bull sessions give validation to an oft-heard critique: that Obama prefers the law school salon to the bully pulpit — that he would rather be regarded as smart by the people he regards as smart than be feared by the opposition or seen as effective by the people he governs.

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The presidency is a job preeminently of public communication and persuasion, and yet Obama’s public campaigns have often failed to achieve tangible results. His signature healthcare law is struggling. He hasn’t moved the needle on gun control or the sequester by going public. Syria was a muddle of mixed messages and wild improvisation. On such issues, private meetings with his intellectual peers hardly seem effective, let alone an adequate substitute for more on-the-record press conferences.

The goal in these get-togethers, participants said, is two-fold: First, the president wants to convince the columnists that he’s right — about the debt ceiling, about health care, about Syria — and that his opponents are wrong.

“The president is thoroughly convinced that the course he has set out is correct, and that his opponents are either wrong-headed or crazy or, in the case of [House Speaker John] Boehner, insufficiently courageous,” said a journalist who has attended off-the-record meetings. “By getting together a group of intelligent people who are going to be writing about him or talking about him, he thinks he can show them how obviously everything he is doing makes sense.”

The second goal is more tactical: By meeting privately with the people who shape national opinion, the president ensures that his points of view will be represented in the media — even if those points of view aren’t directly attributable to him.

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“He sees columnists as portals,” another journalist who has attended meetings said. “It works — I feel it work with me. It’s almost impossible to spend hours face-to-face with the president, unfiltered, then write a column or go on television without taking his point of view into account.”

For that reason, calling these sessions “off the record meetings” is actually inaccurate, said Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, who held similar meetings.

“It’s a misnomer. After these meetings journalists will go on the air and say, ‘Here’s what the White House is thinking on this,’” Fleischer explained. “It’s smart. Every White House should do it.”

The line from the president’s off-the-record remarks to a pundit’s authoritative, on-air commentary can often be charted. New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait attended one off-the-record meeting on Oct. 17. The next day, he appeared on CNN and said that the president had “a lot of administrative action [planned] on the environment.”

“He didn’t mention that yesterday,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said, referring to public remarks the president had made hours before the off-the-record meeting. “He mentioned the budget, the immigration, the farm bill — I didn’t hear anything about the environment.”

“Yesterday is what he wants congress to do,” Chait said, referring to the president’s public remarks. Then: “He can do the environment without congress. That’s the real attraction… I think that’s the big move of his second term.” Of immigration reform, Chait said the president “probably” couldn’t get it passed, “but he’s going to try.”

Reading columnists or watching them on cable news after they’ve attended an off-the-record session at the White House thus becomes a form of tasseography. If you want to know where the president stands on a foreign policy issue, it is often said among Washington’s national security experts, read the latest column by David Ignatius.

“The facts are off-the-record, but the sentiment is not,” Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director and chief White House correspondent, said of the meetings. “When you know how the president thinks about something, when you understand his point of view, how do you avoid talking about it?” Todd said. “It’s in your head.”

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”

Still, the meetings are very much “off the record” in the sense that the White House stalwartly refuses to discuss any of the details, including who was in attendance. The answer to such inquiries is almost always the same.

“In addition to giving press conferences and interviews, the President meets on occasion with groups of reporters and columnists for off-the-record discussions,” said Eric Schultz, the White House Deputy Press Secretary. “We don’t provide lists of participants.”

Such secrecy can stoke conspiracy theories about a liberal media plot — never mind that the president also meets with conservatives like Krauthammer and Gigot.

It’s also worth noting that the tradition of off-the-record meetings has long been a fixture of the presidency, extending at least as far back as the 1830’s, when Andrew Jackson held private meetings with Francis Preston Blair, whom he had invited to Washington with the express interest that he become editor of the Washington Globe.

The modern practice of “off-the-record meetings,” however, was set in place by President Bill Clinton and his former press secretary, Mike McCurry.

In March of 1996, on a night-flight from Israel to Washington, McCurry came up with the concept of the “psych-background” session, in which reporters were not allowed to record, take notes, or directly attribute Clinton’s remarks — which, that night, ran to almost three hours. The point was simply to let reporters have a better sense of the president’s thinking.

“It’s useful to provide situations where people can get sense of what’s on the president’s mind,” McCurry told POLITICO.

The result, which even Clinton himself made fun of in his address at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner later that year, was that his remarks were attributed to an anonymous figure described as “the highest authority.” In the Washington Post, John Harris, now the editor-in-chief of POLITICO, wrote that McCurry had taken “the controversial Washington practice of anonymous sources and ‘background conversations’ to an unprecedented level.”

But “psych background” was also a way of avoiding the grief of a presidential gaffe. Seven months earlier, Clinton had casually suggested on the record that the country was in a “funk,” which the press likened to Jimmy Carter’s politically disastrous remarks on American malaise.

Like the Clinton White House and the Bush White House after it, the Obama White House sees such off-the-record meetings as a chance for the president to speak his mind without having to worry about accidentally stepping on a land mine. And by giving the president that freedom, journalists come away with a better understanding of the president’s motivations and worldview.

“I’m not going to deny that we hope this informs people’s reporting — the point is to have a good discussion, but also to deepen their understanding of our perspective,” the source familiar with the president’s thinking said.

Few columnists see an ethical problem in attending such “off the record” meetings, as they provide a greater understanding of the president’s thinking.

“I understand the suspicions, but in my experience these meetings do not involve exchange of any secrets; rather, they are way for officials to expand and explain their positions in little more open way that allows me to better understand what is going on,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York wrote on Twitter after attending this month’s meeting with conservative columnists.

Still, Patrick Pexton, the former Washington Post ombudsman, wishes journalists would band together and demand that meetings be held on-the-record.

“I don’t think it’s a huge ethical thing. For me it’s about strength — the press is extraordinarily weak right now,” Pexton told POLITICO. “It would make the press stronger if we said ‘No,’ if we made the White House come to us on our terms, rather than the other way around.” He acknowledged that such hopes were “a little pollyannaish.”

Meanwhile, reporters envy the columnists’ access to the president, and complain of watching their contemporaries funnel in and out of the Roosevelt Room while they remain held at bay in the briefing room.

“Months and months and months can go by where the people that cover him never get a chance to ask a question in public or have any interaction with him off-the-record,” said one reporter.

Still, Obama’s preference for columnists surprises few. Both reporters and columnists believe he prefers talking to people who are thinking about — and willing to be influenced on — grand concepts, rather than those who might pepper him with questions about day-to-day events and process. Indeed, in an effort to ween White House staff off their obsession with the “who’s up, who’s down” Washington culture, he has encouraged them to spend less time watching MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and more time watching ESPN’s “Sports Center.”

“Every president likes these sessions, because unlike negotiations with congress, which is hard and where the president has to yield ground, these sessions are a chance for the president to get on his high horse and opine,” Fleischer explained.

Obama does opine: journalists said that one reason the off-the-record meetings run so long is because the president spends so much time talking: “The confidence he exudes in these sessions is even greater than the confidence he exudes in public,” one attendee said. “And, as in public, it’s the president who does most of the talking.”

Still, no one doubts that the president values hearing the thoughts and opinions of his contemporaries.

“The president cares a lot more about the opinions of Fred Hiatt or Tom Friedman than he does about the average U.S. Senator,” said one journalist. “He’s naturally predisposed to analysis. In his own mind, that’s what he is: he’s like us. He wants to be a writer, and so he likes to talk to writers.”

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