Yesterday, it was a 'sea change' in millennials' support for Obama and today it's this:
A column in Politico magazine today makes the astonishing claim that President Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had just one in-person meeting at the White House between March 23, 2010, the day the Affordable Care Act was signed, and Nov. 30, 2013. The author of the column, Peter Schweizer, bases his assertion on an analysis of the president’s public schedule and offers an explanation for why it shows the President and the chief implementer of his signature policy achievement “almost never” met over the past three years.
Perhaps the insular White House team wanted to distance the president from the bureaucratic process in the hopes of granting him a halo of deniability if the launch failed. . . . Obama’s critics say his loner style makes him unusually uninterested in working with other politicians.
The problem? Sebelius and the President did meet— a lot. “She is frequently at the White House for meetings related to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, including dozens with the President in the last year alone,” says Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for HHS. “In fact, she met with the President just yesterday.”
The problem with Schweizer’s analysis is his data set: Cabinet Secretaries who regularly come to the White House are not always recorded in the White House visitors log or listed on the president’s public schedule. But Schweizer, a former foreign policy adviser to Sarah Palin and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, based the column on an analysis of the official presidential schedule and a presidential calendar published by Politico
Oh-dear-
God, why didn't some editor on reviewing this scratch themselves and think, "that doesn't look right" then tell this Schweitzer joker to follow up with a phone call to the White House to verify his findings before publishing something pejorative like this?