Howard Kurtz is a neocon “Media Critic.” Here he comments on Obama’s strange press tactics:
(Remember how Arthur Miller said charisma is not making people like you, it’s making people want you to like them? It looks like Obama read the same Arthur Miller book we did – and is taking Miller’s advice to heart. Either that, or he just knows it in his bones. – promoted by Ben)
Team Obama Is Courting Everybody But the Press
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 28, 2008;
GREENVILLE, S.C. — When reporters filed onto Barack Obama’s press plane after his acrimonious debate with Hillary Rodham Clinton last week, one thing was noticeably missing amid the wine and snacks on the Boeing 737.
There was no high-level campaign spinner to argue that Obama had gotten the better of the exchanges or that the verbal fisticuffs were part of some precisely calculated strategy. On the press bus the next day, mid-level aides dealt with travel logistics but made no attempt to shape the coverage.
In an age of all-out political warfare, the Obama campaign is a bit of an odd duck: It is not obsessed with winning each news cycle. The Illinois senator remains a remote figure to those covering him, and his team, while competent and professional, makes only spotty attempts to drive its preferred story lines in the press.
“There is no charm offensive from the candidate toward the press corps,” says Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe. “The contact is limited. . . . They see the national media more as a logistical problem than a channel for getting stuff out.”
As Obama’s blowout victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary shows, an aloof attitude toward the media may not be a liability for a candidate with his oratorical gifts. Even the pundits’ attempts to minimize his win by focusing on Obama’s capturing a quarter of the white vote — no small achievement in a three-way contest — came after a week in which journalists talked about race far more than he did. But the contrast in his press strategy is striking, not just with Clinton’s campaign — which aggressively lobbies journalists around the clock — but also with the Bush White House and the Clinton White House before that. And that, Obama aides say, is by design.
The Clinton camp, says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, “is hyperbolic about it. What we don’t do is spend six hours a day trying to persuade you guys that red is green or up is down. . . . Their own spin was ‘We are the biggest, baddest street gang on the block.’
“We can’t be pacifists and cede the battlefield,” Axelrod says, but “what’s powering this campaign is a rejection of tactical politics.”
“That’s the best spin I’ve heard all day,” replies Clinton communications chief Howard Wolfson, inviting Axelrod to “send over some leather jackets.” “My sense is the Obama campaign spends eight hours a day spinning.” Clinton, for her part, abandoned her inaccessible approach after losing Iowa, scheduling far more time each day for interviews and press conferences. “She felt it was the best way to talk to the American people,” Wolfson says.
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