Jeff Greenfield Makes Too Much Sense Sometimes

In an effort to start the new year off right, Imus kindly suggested his guest, CBS News’s Jeff Greenfield, read the forthcoming book Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, which he said, “reads like a 350-page Page Six item” about the 2008 Presidential campaign.

An astute political observer, Greenfield’s smile was almost audible as he said, “It sounds like a big bowl of candy.” He added that people seem more preoccupied with campaigns than ever before.

“They started talking about the midterm elections eight months ago,” he said. “My guess is we’ll start seeing the first serious chat about the 2012 presidential campaign, oh, I don’t know, in about a week.”

Speaking of Presidents, ours was on his way back to Washington, DC this morning from Hawaii. While vacationing there, Obama had been criticized for his response to the failed terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

“The whole response isn’t grounded in reality,” said Greenfield, speaking not just about Obama or his administration, but about the backlash as well.  Obama was accused by his detractors of failing to “connect the dots” on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man who tried to blow up the plane. But Greenfield insisted that expecting the 160 counterterrorism agencies involved to do so would have been ridiculous.

“You’ve got one agency hearing about ‘the Nigerian who is going to do something’—what it is, we don’t know,” said Greenfield. “I’m not sure what the population of Nigeria is, but I’d guess it’s several tens of millions.”

He went on, “Then another agency gets the word from somebody’s father that his son is talking dangerous stuff—the idea that somehow that makes a logical connection that people show know about, I think is absurd.”

The most entertaining aspect of the response to such terror incidents is the insane rules that people concoct. In this case, those crazy people would be the airlines.

“My favorite was for the last hour of an international flight, you have to sit on your seat with nothing in your lap,” said Greenfield, who promised to one day explain commercial air travel to Imus.

Citing a report that the various counterintelligence agencies accumulate far more data than is in the Library of Congress, Greenfield said, “The notion that ordinary—or even really smart—human beings faced with that kind of data can piece together a jigsaw puzzle, and should have known what was going to happen, doesn’t track with human nature, and doesn’t track with the limitations of human beings.”

Greenfield was holed up in Santa Barbara this morning, where he’s working on a book. Prompted to divulge its topic, Greenfield refused, saying he would tell Imus off the air.

“But will you be telling me off the record?” Imus asked. “Because if it’s not off the record, I’ll just tell everybody anyway.”

-Julie Kanfer