What’s A Press Secretary Good For?

Following Jay Carney’s resignation, Weigel isn’t sure we need a White House press secretary:

Carney’s many ways of dodging questions became so infamous that former Slate-ster Chris Wilson compiled them into a usable chart format. In that exercise, he highlighted one of Carney’s most meta dodges.

We have a team here that works really hard trying to anticipate the questions you’re going to ask. The problem is, there’s a lot of you and you’re good at your jobs and you’re smart.

This basically gave the game away. The tragedy of the White House beat, as hacks like me keep pointing out, is that the White House is forever innovating ways to make it useless.

Kenneth T. Walsh observes that “the White House press secretary has increasingly become a flak catcher, policy and political debater, and public relations strategist for the president rather than the conveyor of straightforward information to the media and the public”:

During Carney’s tenure, journalists raised frequent objections to what they considered reduced access to Obama and his senior advisers. They complained that Carney sometimes didn’t seem to know the president’s thinking or what was happening in the administration on key issues. There was distress within the media over the administration’s attempt to crack down on unauthorized leaks. And there was concern among White House correspondents that White House officials were shunting them aside and dealing instead with new media or communicating directly with key constituencies via the White House website and the Internet.

Reid Cherlin contrasts Carney’s tenure with Gibbs.’ His bottom line:

The good news for Carney is twofold. As soon as his successor, Josh Earnest, assumes the job, Carney’s reputation will undergo a rehabilitation, just as Gibbs is now remembered with nostalgia by White House reporters. More important, Carney will get to step out of one of Washington’s most fruitless positions and go make more money doing something rewarding.