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White House press secretary’s job is like of a juggler or clown: Don DeBar

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The White House press secretary’s job is like that of a juggler or clown and Jay Carney was cut out for the job, an American political commentator says.

Don DeBar, an anti-war activist and radio host in New York, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Saturday, commenting on an announcement made by US President Barack Obama that Carney is standing down after serving three and a half years as the chief White House spokesman.

“Carney has been press secretary for forty months. And in my opinion, by the way, he’s named perfectly for that job because the job is almost like that of a juggler or clown. ‘The People’ in a democracy are supposed to be sovereign, and the various elected officials are supposed to serve them, but the press secretary’s job is essentially to protect the confidentiality of the president’s actions from the press,” DeBar said.

“And the illusion here – and you see it from some of the reports of Carney’s resignation – is that the press has aggressively tried to get the information on behalf of the people from the president, and that the press secretary has to mediate that process. You see Ari Fleischer – who was one of the press secretaries for George [W.] Bush, for example, is making that claim in interviews about Carney’s resignation,” he added.

“The fact is that the presidential press secretary is a public relations face of the White House, in order to keep any questions that might upset the applecart and, really, to sell to the various constituencies of the United States the actions of the White House as being, if not what people want, at least tolerable. And there hasn’t been a revolution during his forty months; so he has been successful as well, given all the things this president, the last president and the prior presidents, have done,” DeBar stated.

“Absent aggressive public relations effort, there should have been some sort of response from the aggrieved. I guess, he succeeded in this and is ready for Madison Avenue, maybe, to sell some products to some unwilling public somewhere, some other products,” he concluded.

Obama announced on Friday that Carney had initially informed him of his decision to resign in April, adding he had accepted it with reluctance.

Carney has been Obama’s press secretary since 2011. Before that Carney served as spokesman for Vice President Joe Biden and also worked as a journalist for Time magazine.

The announcement came hours after Obama confirmed during a separate press conference that he had accepted the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki in the midst of a high-profile scandal.

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