"When an activist president is seemingly credited for nothing and blamed for everything, he's doing a lousy job of selling himself."Robert Draper on Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary: Politics: GQ

If to some the beltway resembles a high school for bright but hopelessly status-fixated souls, then the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room is its detention hall, where the caste system is both starkly defined and trumped by a prevailing atmosphere of shared misery. The basement-level room—fittingly named after the victim of a madman—is, despite a makeover three years ago, cramped, colorless, and harshly illuminated. Its forty-nine seats remain empty most weekdays until sometime after noon, when a stern female voice announces over the intercom, "This is a two-minute warning for the start of the press briefing. Two minutes..."

The reporters shuffle in and take their assigned seats. Journalists from little-known organizations such as Salem Radio, the Washington Examiner, and the Christian Broadcasting Network are relegated to the two back rows. A muddle of the emergent (Politico) and the endangered (Newsweek) inhabits the middle three. The stalwarts of print and radio sit in the second. And in the front, we find (along with AP and Reuters) the five TV-network correspondents—your Chip Reids (CBS), your Chuck Todds (NBC), your Ed Henrys (CNN)—who, in the way of cool kids everywhere, tend to make their entrance well after the two minutes have elapsed. Everyone gazes at the door just to the left of the podium as if willing it to swing open. Eventually it does. From an upstairs office, a few steps away from the one occupied by President Barack Obama, press secretary Robert Gibbs descends for his near-daily encounter with the White House press corps.

On this afternoon—Friday the thirteenth of August—Gibbs is accompanied by Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano to tout a rare bipartisan victory for the White House: a bill that will secure the Mexican-American border with up to 1,200 National Guardsmen and two unmanned aircraft. Half of the questions Napolitano fields relate to the content of the bill. The other half are about process—the choreography of modern politics: "getting Republicans to the table," the "timetable for the next step," Congress saying that "leadership in the White House is needed." Gibbs hates these kinds of questions, which seem to imply that the ends are less important than the means and the motives. But he maintains his placid Buddha-Bubba countenance throughout Napolitano's expert retorts. Forty minutes later, the secretary steps back, and it is Gibbs's turn behind the podium.

The reporters first rattle off a few questions about the progress of the oil-spill cleanup. Then about the economic recovery, then: "On the president's trip [to the Gulf Coast] this weekend...any plans to get in the water?"

Gibbs smirks. "I doubt that will go out specifically on the guidance"—the president's daily schedule—"but stay tuned."

They persist, from each row. "Will we get in the water, and will there be pictures?" "Are the waters clean enough to get into?" "Would that say something, if he takes a walk down the beach but doesn't put his feet in the water?"

"Guys," Gibbs sighs, clearly exasperated, "why don't we all worry about what happens on Saturday."

A couple of hours after the briefing, the press secretary is in his office, sitting behind a semicircular desk that is itself a disaster site: teetering jumbles of paper, a spent tea bag, randomly affixed Post-it scribbles from his 7-year-old son, a computer screen endlessly hiccuping with newly received e-mails, and a small TV split four ways to reveal four little heads, none of whom seem to be talking about Napolitano's briefing. Gibbs is probably tired, but it's hard to say for sure. His 39-year-old face is more like a shield, with an immense forehead and tiny eyes that scarcely radiate. The smile, affable and empty, could be that of a small-town gas-station attendant or a hired assassin.

Gibbs is about to surf the Internet to read what, if anything, has been written about the border bill. "Few issues have been covered with as much emotion as immigration has over the past two months," he says. "It'll be interesting to see if something on the affirmative side of the ledger can garner any attention." Still, he's clearly chapped about all of the "what does this mean politically" questions. "Lord knows, we have proved fairly adroitly over the previous eighteen months that the decisions we make are not predicated on the polls," he says. "Because if they were, we'd have new want ads for pollsters, right?" And that probing line of inquiry about whether the president will brave the tainted Gulf waters strikes him as fairly "pointless"—though as one of the correspondents had said to me right after the briefing, "Why does he have to be testy about it? If he just gave a straightforward answer, that would've been the end of it."

In any event, none of this really matters. Despite Gibbs's efforts, the big news of the day won't be the successful passage of the border-security bill. Nor will it be whether Obama will go swimming tomorrow. That evening, at a White House gathering of Muslims, the president will declare that he supports the right of the Cordoba House planners to build an Islamic center just two blocks northeast of Ground Zero—a story to swamp all stories. Later, I asked White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer why Obama decided to step all over Napolitano's message. Pfeiffer patiently explained that "there are an exponential number of news cycles per day," that "there's an infinite amount of time between the briefing and what he said that night," and that the mosque matter "is something the president wanted to weigh in on, and [the Muslim event] had been on the calendar for months."

So even as Gibbs sat at his desk ruminating over whether the media was willing to cover something "on the affirmative side of the ledger," he knew it was a long shot. No matter how many border briefings he held that day, only one message would dominate the next several news cycles. And like so many stories about the White House lately, it was not an altogether affirmative one.

via gq.com

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