Obama on Putin: "A White Man...Rooted in Patriarchy, Tribe, and Religion."

How Obama Racialized Foreign Policy and Sold It to a "Know Nothing" Media

To be fair, the headline quote comes not directly from Obama, but from foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes summarizing then President Obama’s take on Putin. Rhodes and Obama were tight. Rhodes, in fact, borrowed the Star Trek phrase “mind meld” to describe how closely he and Obama were aligned on foreign policy issues, none more important than those involving Russia.

In his 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, Rhodes attempted to explain the apparent chill between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Obama, but Rhodes was writing after the Russian collusion narrative had become set, if not in stone, at least in type, thousands of times over.

Rhodes had a hand in creating that narrative. He shows his complicity in the book by failing to give Putin any credit for his essential role in Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the 2015 Iran deal. Rhodes’s account of the Obama-Putin relationship strikes the reader as still more messaging for a sycophantic media, this time after the fact.

Here is Rhodes’ full quote on his boss’s perspective: “In Obama’s view, Putin was a white man standing up for a politics rooted in patriarchy, tribe, and religion, the antiglobalist.” A white man? For all of Putin’s nationalist posturing, to cast the drama as racial is as perverse as it is predictable.

No, what seems clear in retrospect is that Obama and his allies projected Trump’s personality onto Putin and pushed the “Putin as evil conspirator” message as shamelessly as they pushed “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” or “the video caused the Benghazi attack,” the latter message Rhodes helped craft.

Until they could attach Trump’s name to tales of Russian espionage, Rhodes’s media minions largely ignored stories of Russian intrigue. Just the opposite, in fact. The media, like Obama and Rhodes, publicly sucked up to Putin through the summer of 2015 to secure his help on the Iran deal.

For the two years prior, Obama and his aides were more critical of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who challenged the deal, than they were of Putin who supported it. According to Rhodes, getting the media to echo the pro-Putin line wasn’t all that hard.

In the spring of 2016, Rhodes shared his thoughts with journalist David Samuels. He and Samuels had much in common. Both were Jewish liberal Democrats from New York City, and both were writers by profession, Samuels a very good one.

Trusting Samuels’s liberal credentials, Rhodes threw open all the relevant White House doors. The one that most intrigued Samuels led to what Rhodes’s team called the “war room.” It was here that Rhodes, by all accounts Obama’s most influential foreign policy adviser, ran the “messaging campaign” that led to the successful completion of the Iran deal.

Despite what Samuels saw as a “startling” lack of real-world experience, Rhodes understood the way the media worked. This was especially true in the realm of foreign policy. Having a brother (David) who ran CBS News gave Rhodes at least the illusion of savvy.

Major newspapers used to have foreign bureaus, Rhodes told Samuels. They no longer did. “They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo,” he added. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

A Rhodes assistant named Ned Price filled in the details. Among the reporters, Price explained, he and Rhodes had their favorites, their “compadres.” When Price shied from naming names, the observant Samuels shared his list of likely suspects. It included several “prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.”

Price laughed in agreement. “I’ll give them some color,” he said of the named journalists, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

Rhodes handed Samuels even more rope. “We created an echo chamber,” he boasted, answering a question as to why so many supportive arms-control experts popped up in the media. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

What particularly troubled Samuels was that Rhodes routinely put messages into play that were either misleading or completely false. One such story was that Obama and his people began to engage with Iran only after moderates came to power in 2013. According to Samuels, that story was “largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”

The Obama White House entered these talks well before the moderates took power, and “power” in this case was an illusion. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had “handpicked” these alleged moderates, who did little more than provide cover for the nuclear deal. Rhodes preferred they turned out to be reformers, but, as he admitted, “We are not betting on that.” Rhodes made no bones, said Samuels, that his efforts represented “a potentially dangerous distortion of democracy.”

Speaking of threats to democracy, in his 2018 memoir Rhodes offered an inside look at President Obama’s final messaging campaign. Writing of a time a week or two before Election Day 2016, Rhodes makes a claim so deep in exculpatory BS it needs to be read in full:

Wrote Rhodes, “Of course, we had no idea—Obama had no idea—at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House, and I wouldn’t even learn about it until long after I left government, in the press.”

This was nonsense. Obama was intimately involved with the collusion frame-up from the very beginning. As Peter Strzok told lover Lisa Page three months before the 2016 election, “The White House is running this.”

A media eager to buy wolf tickets from Rhodes on Iran were even more eager to swallow the White House line on the Russia Collusion hoax: “We created an echo chamber,” said Rhodes of his media strategy. “[Journalists] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” After all, laughed Rhodes about his “compadres” in the media, “They literally know nothing.”