The Harvard law professor told me he misspoke when he said in a Bloggingheads video that “the White House is encouraging me to talk about the Kagan nomination.”
A few weeks ago I interviewed Salon’s Glenn Greenwald after HuffPo reported that the White House had dispatched allies to respond to Greenwald’s criticisms of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Though there were several prominent legal scholars who had replied to Greenwald in places like HuffPo and Slate, most of them ignored my requests for comment. Nobody would go on the record and say the Administration had asked them to opine.
So I was surprised when I watched a recent Bloggingheads exchange between Greenwald and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig the other day. Lessig, a widely-read legal voice in the blogosphere, wrote a post praising Kagan on May 11 and then appeared in a Rachel Maddow segment after Greenwald to counter the Salon blogger’s earlier comments. After the appearance, he penned a response to another Greenwald post that attempted to refute Lessig’s claims on Maddow’s show. This back-and-forth eventually led to the Bloggingheads episode between the two, which lasted for nearly an hour. Listening to the piece, I was surprised when Lessig made an offhand remark in which he seemingly admitted that the White House had asked him to publicly support Kagan.
The brief snippet comes at about the 39 minute mark. After listing off a number of grievances Lessig has had with the Obama Administration capitulating to the influence of special interests — the watered-down health care reform, his support of off-shore drilling — he says, “I’m not saying that’s stupid strategy, it’s just the kind of strategy that he said he would change and he hasn’t done that so I have been very critical of him. One of the reasons the White House is encouraging me to talk about the Kagan nomination is because I’m also talking about the failure of the Obama administration in this particular respect.”
I spoke to Lessig this morning about his statement and he disagreed with my interpretation of it. He stated unequivocally that he had not been contacted by the Administration. “Though I was a strong supporter of Obama, I’ve been very critical,” he told me. “I would expect that they are not keen at all that I’d be a spokesman in this context, because when I speak about it I also speak about my criticism of the Administration.”
I asked Lessig to explain what seemed like a discrepancy with what he was saying now and what he had said on Bloggingheads. “I think you dropped a ‘not’ there, or I simply misspoke,” he replied. “They would not be asking me about Kagan because I’m critical of the Administration.” I told him that I had interpreted what he had said as this: because he had accused the Administration of catering to the right, then he would have been the perfect person to alleviate those same fears that Obama’s nomination of Kagan was also catering to the right. He responded with humbleness: “I’m not that big,” indicating (at least this is how I took it) that the White House wouldn’t consider him prominent enough to push this message.
Watch the Bloggingheads exchange below:
Simon Owens is a journalist and social media consultant located in DC. You can follow him on Twitter, read his blog, or email him at [email protected]