Imus Promises Revenge on Jake Tapper

Jake Tapper, ABC’s Chief White House Correspondent, traveled to Louisiana last week during President Obama’s trip to the region, and interviewed Governor Bobby Jindal for This Week while he was down there.

“He and I were wearing the same outfit,” Tapper said. “They call is ‘disaster casual’: the blue shirt and the khaki pants.”

BP, the oil company whose busted well is leaking tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico everyday, was criticized last week for (among other infractions) hiring day laborers to clean beaches it knew the President and media would be visiting.

“The locals said they’d never seen so many workers cleaning the beaches as when we showed up with our satellite trucks,” said Tapper, who wasn’t surprised. “That didn’t stop the fact that you just take three steps and find tar balls on the sand. It’s pretty disgusting.”

Though the Obama administration has been condemned for not stopping the leak, Tapper thinks they lack both the knowledge and equipment to do so on their own, and he wondered why Obama has rebuffed help from 15 of the 17 countries that have offered.   

“There are a lot of questions about whether everything that can be done is being done,” Tapper said. “And I think those questions persist.”

Though Obama was “never the most emotive candidate,” as Tapper put it, his biggest selling point was his competence and intelligence, both of which are being tested by this debacle.

As for another, less interesting topic, Tapper doesn’t think the Joe Sestak story—where Bill Clinton offered the Pennsylvania Congressman a position on an advisory panel to tempt him not to run against Senator Arlen Specter for the Democratic nomination for Senate in that state, which he did and won anyway—has legs.

“All the parties involved are giving the same story, and there’s no evidence to the contrary,” said Tapper. The main problem for Obama is that this looks like a case of “politics as usual,” which he had promised to overcome during the 2008 campaign.

Then Imus, who asked the question in the first place, said, “Make me care about it.”

The two touched on another subject that Imus presumably cares about, the Israeli Navy’s raid of a flotilla of aid ships traveling from Turkey to Gaza yesterday. Having spoken with a “senior administration official” whose name he would not disclose, Tapper told Imus that Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke three times yesterday about the incident, and that the U.S. is “taking the longer view” on the situation: that there can be no Middle East peace if Israel doesn’t feel secure, and Israel will not feel secure if the U.S. abandons it at a moment like this.

But all Imus could think about was Tapper’s unnamed source, and he reacted in a predictably childlike manner, telling his guest, “I’m going to find something out some time, and not tell you!”

Oh no, not that.

-Julie Kanfer