The Political Chase

Jake Tapper’s role in Obama-Ayers dust-up

The Boston Globe has a piece today that suggests there was more to ABC’s drilling of Obama on William Ayers than just a conversation between George Stephanopoulos and Sean Hannity. Based on ABC spokesperson Jeffrey Schneider’s statements in the piece, several motives can be spun multiple ways, but regardless of the spin. Jake Tapper is caught up in the mix.

Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said the Ayers question arose because it has been in the political ether and addressed by several other news organizations in recent months - and because the network’s own queries to the campaign had yet to yield a comment from Obama….

Among the mainstream reporters looking into the Ayers story, it turned out, was Jake Tapper, ABC’s senior political correspondent. Tapper outlined Ayers’s background in a April 10 blog entry titled "Stormy Weather." He also asked Obama about Ayers on the campaign trail, but didn’t get an answer, Schneider at ABC said.

Hence, Schneider said, the Ayers question was posed in the debate….

Schneider denied any Hannity connection.

Rewind. On April 3, Ace Reporter Jake Tapper indignantly reported he "ran into" Obama in the U.S. Capitol and his "unusually keen sense of smell" detected "cigarette smoke on Obama." Since his civic duty compelled him to inform the public on this very important personal issue, he asked Obama’s campaign if he was smoking and "they denied it." Instead the campaign "insisted" Obama "chewed nicorette."

So, as evidenced by the Tapper’s April 3 piece, he is angry, which is exacerbated by not getting the answers he wants on Ayers.  One week later Tapper publishes his "Stormy Weather" piece, and five days later the whole deal breaks out in the debate before 10+ million people. Sounds like Tapper got the revenge he was seeking and the "political ether" was more ABC’s angry mob than anything else.  Moreover, it gives Schneider plausible deniability to take some of the heat off of Stephanopoulos. It by no means absolves the Stephanopoulos-Hannity connection either.

I don’t know what line of questioning Tapper was pursuing before the Stormy piece, but an argument can be made that Obama might could have defused the situation in advance if he had answered Tapper’s questions earlier. Then again, Obama may have decided it was better to defend himself publicly and turn the whole thing around on ABC.

Whatever the case, the Ayers link is little more than fodder for Clinton and the GOP wingnuts.