New addition to the CNN team of correspondents Jay Carney assumed his old role as White House press secretary as he tackled a question by Wolf Blitzer in an attempt to "clarify" President Obama's "no strategy" remark on ISIS.
The result? Laugh-out-loud funny.
Blitzer asked Carney to weigh in on how big of a mistake it was for the president to tell the world he had "no strategy" for dealing with ISIS. Carney squared up for a big one and said:
You know, Wolf, when I heard that, I'm sure folks who I left behind when I left the White House grimaced a little bit, because what he was saying, quite clearly, is that that strategy was being developed.
Carney dug even deeper into his obsequious role:
What you get with Barack Obama is, you know, somebody who was not, you know, a national politician even ten years ago and then he bolted on to the stage and it's been part of his appeal. So he's not always going to -- when he's speaking honestly -- going to say it the way communicators who advise him would have him say it. And I'm sure, you know, that's not the first instance where he'd wished he'd said it differently because that became a sideshow to the more substantive issues here which is what are we going to do?
Carney made one last attempt to help his old boss:
Can we rally Congress to support us? Can we rally a coalition both in Europe and in the region to support this action because this is a long-term, challenging proposition. It's going to cost money, it's going to put American, men and women at risk and that's really the substantive issue. And I know that the frustration comes when inadvertently, the White House or the president does, or anyone else in the administration says or does something, that takes the focus away from the substantive issues and it becomes an issue of optics -- as was the case with going golfing on Martha's Vineyard or with how you say what is an obvious truth which is that the specific strategy is still being developed.