Obama flunking media management

Kirsten Powers:

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Team Obama's response has made what should have been a one-day story into a full-blown p.r. crisis. So far, it seems to have adopted the early Clinton-administration approach - turn a minor problem into a big one by mismanaging the media.

The Obama camp has managed to violate almost every tenet of crisis communications - starting with Rule No. 1: Get all the information out quickly, accurately and fully.

It's imperative that reporters don't learn something from a third party that you could have told them. And, in the era of nonstop news, "quickly" means within 24 hours. Any longer, and reporters begin to get frustrated (they're under pressure from their editors) and feel that you're stonewalling them. And why would you stonewall unless you were hiding something?

In reality, politicians have lots of reasons not to "tell all" even when they have nothing to hide. Some insiders may not be totally forthcoming with the communications staff, making it hard to get out the whole story. Or top staff may disagree on how to respond - and, failing of consensus, wind up producing a drip, drip, drip of information - which can have deadly results.

Obama's response has been an exercise in dripping.

Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday, Dec. 9. As I write, almost a week later, the issue is alive as ever.

In the intervening time, Obama has repeatedly stated defensively that he had no contact with the governor or his office and had not discussed the Senate seat, as if either would somehow be inappropriate.

In a Dec. 10 interview, he refused to say whether Blagojevich talked with his top aides: "It's an ongoing investigation. I think it would be inappropriate for me to . . . remark on the situation beyond the facts that I know."

But then, in a press conference the next day, he had no problem stating emphatically, "I'm absolutely certain . . . that our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat" - and then said he needed to "gather all the facts" about what contact took place so he could release that info.

Which left everybody scratching their heads: How could he be "absolutely certain" if he still had to gather the facts?

The day after that, The Chicago Tribune reported Chief of Staff-to-be Rahm Emanuel had been taped talking to Blagojevich about the Senate seat. This was really unremarkable - but it became big news because it didn't come from the Obama camp. Why wouldn't Obama just tell reporters there had been contact between the offices? Stonewall! Coverup!

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It sort of reminds me of the way the US military responds to allegations by the Taliban that we have bombed a wedding party. The allegations have become so routine that you might think we were making war against Afghan weddings instead of the Taliban. Yet each time it takes a week or more to get a response and by then the news cycle has moved on an the Taliban have won the earlier new cycle.

What is different in the Obama case is they keep extending the news cycle. At some point this management style is going to have political costs.