The Second Time As Farce:
Sarah Palin and the GOP Media ‘Bubble’

posted at 8:15 am on August 13, 2009 by The Other McCain
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“The practical way of looking at things . . . may serve well enough in ordinary, normal times. But our times are not ‘normal’ in the good old Victorian sense, and never will be again. . . . These men, even Halifax, were essentially middle-class, not aristocrats. They did not have the hereditary sense of the security of the state, unlike Churchill, Eden, the Cecils. Nor did they have the toughness of the 18th-century aristocracy. They came at the end of the ascendancy of the Victorian middle-class, deeply affected as that was by high-mindedness and humbug. They all talked, in one form or another, the language of disingenuousness and cant: it was second nature to them – so different from Churchill. . . . It meant that they failed to see what was true, until too late, when it was simply a question of survival.”
– A.L. Rowse, Appeasement: A Study in Political Decline, 1933-39

On my personal blog yesterday, when I quoted Rowse’s observation about the “ordinary, normal” attitude of the incompetent British leaders whose blundering appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s did so much to bring about World War II, one reader commented, “I feel like you’re trying to tell me something, but I just can’t wrap my brain around it.”

Astute reader! I had been re-reading Rowse (whose brilliant little book was assigned reading in a college British history class I took 30 years ago) when Dan Riehl called yesterday to talk about this “Gryphen”/Griffin affair.

For the past week, the anti-Palin blogger Griffin and his PDS-affected buddies have been claiming that Dan and I are “minions” doing the bidding of Palin’s team. In actuality, I can’t even get a comment from them. Two phone calls and a text message yesterday, seeking a response to the latest gossip tabloid smear, went unanswered.

Sic semper hoc. The people who control access to Republican leaders go out of their way to prevent their bosses from ever having direct contact with any rank-and-file conservative who wants to help. It’s a tragically familar story.

In 2007, I ran into former Virginia Sen. George Allen at an event in Washington and briefly told him how, when his 2006 re-election campaign was in meltdown mode, I had been frantically trying to reach him. I wanted to explain to Allen how his campaign team was utterly bungling the reaction to “macaca,” but there was absolutely no way — even for a veteran Washington conservative journalist — to reach the candidate to tell him this.

A couple years before, I’d interviewed Kate Obenshain, who was Virginia Republican Party Chairwoman. So as I watched the Allen campaign begin circling the drain because of the “macaca” controversy, I called Kate and asked her if she knew how to reach Allen. Alas, Obenshain explained, not even she had access to the candidate and was certainly powerless to get such access for an obscure low-level D.C. newspaper staffer.

Inside the GOP ‘Bubble’
What happened to Allen was that he got trapped inside the “bubble” that inevitably envelops any important Republican. In 2006, before “macaca,” everyone in the GOP expected that Allen would cruise to re-election and be well-positioned as the front-runner for the 2008 presidential nomination.

So Allen was inside the bubble, and his campaign manager Dick Wadhams carefully controlled access to the candidate. Wadhams, and not Allen himself, was thus in charge of the Allen re-election campaign. Wadhams made all the crucial decisions, including media strategy.

This is a bit of inside baseball that is essential to understanding the GOP’s media problem. In a Republican election campaign, the press/media people are flunkies with no independent authority, who are beholden entirely to the all-powerful campaign manager. Every Republican campaign manager considers himself an expert on media strategy and so, by a process of selection, GOP communications operations tend to be staffed by people whose true speciality is not media relations, but rather keeping the campaign manager happy.

You have to spend a while closely watching this dynamic at work to understand how it cripples the Republican Party from a public relations standpoint. It’s a persistent phenomenon. If you are a student of Ronald Reagan’s career, as I have become, you know how the Gipper repeatedly had to deal with self-important political operatives (e.g., John Sears) who came to believe that they, and not the candidate, were in charge of the campaign.

Proximity to power has a disastrously intoxicating effect on some people, especially people who spend their entire adult lives pursuing that kind of proximity. For all I know, Dick Wadhams is a fine fellow with whom I’d enjoy having a beer, but by the time he became manager of the Allen 2006 re-election campaign, Wadhams quite clearly believed he knew everything there was to know about running a campaign.

The problem with that belief, however, was that Wadhams (a) had never run a campaign for a candidate seen as the odds-on favorite for the next GOP presidential nomination, and (b) had never run a campaign with the D.C. media establishment on the candidate’s front doorstep.

Why ’Macaca’ Couldn’t Be Stopped
You can look back at that 2006 campaign in Virginia and see how Wadhams sadly underestimated the influence of the Washington Post, which is the dominant newspaper throughout the populous northern Virginia suburbs. Wadhams came out of Colorado politics, where the Denver papers play a similar role, but reporters in Denver don’t feed their stories straight to the Drudge Report — a mainline injection into the MSM bloodstream — the way the Post‘s reporters fed “macaca” into that bloodstream in 2006.

At one point, a colleague and I sat in the offices of The Washington Times and counted the number of consecutive days the “macaca” controversy and its fallout made the front page of the Post. (Nine, if I recall correctly.)

Wadhams mishandled that affair from start to finish, and he did so precisely because — as Rowse said of the British appeasers — of the “practical way of looking at things [which] may serve well enough in ordinary, normal times.”

Wadhams’ personal political playbook, his own habitual way of running campaigns, had served him well in his ascent through the ranks of GOP operatives. Yet when the “macaca” controversy hit, nothing in Wadhams’ experience prepared him to cope with this unprecedented crisis. And because of the “bubble,” myself and others who saw with absolute clarity what the Allen campaign was doing wrong were unable to get the ear of anyone who might be able to remedy the problem.

Eventually, Wadhams hired the brilliant blogger Jon Henke to help the Allen campaign deal with online media, but by then it was entirely too late. Besides, although left-wing bloggers played a key role in pushing “macaca” into the MSM, once the Post picked it up and ran with it, Wadhams was dealing with a traditional P.R. problem, not New Media per se.

A key reason the Allen campaign couldn’t fix the “macaca” problem was because they had no friends in the MSM — and this by design, rather than accident. Republican campaign operatives routinely and habitually treat reporters as the enemy. Somewhere, I believe, there must be a boot camp where GOP staffers are trained in an attitude of hostility and suspicion toward the press.

Understand that my career in journalism has been quite varied, and not limited to politics. With most stories I’ve covered, my attention was eagerly welcomed by the people I was covering as a news reporter, sports editor or feature writer. These people would solicit coverage with press releases or phone calls, and when I showed up, they were only too happy to talk to me.

To put my sources at ease, I developed the habit of joking around, as a way of signaling an intention of friendship and cooperation. I took care to explain that I wasn’t there to play “gotcha.” If they didn’t want something in the paper, if they needed to revise a quote or correct a fact, I was perfectly willing to oblige. Winning the trust of my sources, you see, was essential to getting the whole story, even if I couldn’t put the whole story in the paper. A good reporter never burns his sources.

Enemies and Anonymity in Washington
Such, then, were the habits of more than decade in the news business that I brought to Washington in 1997, where I quickly became aware that an entirely different attitude prevailed in the D.C. press corps. “Adversarial journalism,” in which the reporter views the people he covers as enemies, is the norm in Washington.

In D.C., a friendly familiarity between reporter and source — the way I used to sit around talking casually to high-school football coaches in Georgia — is considered unethical and unprofessional. A Washington reporter’s habitual hostility toward the people he covers is, of course, returned in kind. The job of a press secretary in D.C. is to make sure her boss never has to speak to a reporter, who is always presumed to be playing “gotcha.”

So I spent the next decade watching this adversarial principle in operation, and occasionally scoring scoops by using my old-fashioned Georgia methods of breaking down the walls of hostility that separate the press from the political class. Something else I learned was how the media practice of ”blind sourcing” — the use of anonymous, off-the-record or “background” sources — poisons the atmosphere in our nation’s capital.

From 1987 to 1997, I worked in Georgia for a publisher who absolutely forbade the use of anonymous sources. “Let ‘em put their name on it,” was Burgett Mooney III’s attitude. No anonymous busybody was going to use his paper to advance some private ax-grinding agenda.

Well, Washington is a whole different game, and for good reason. The federal government is a monstrously powerful thing, and if somebody’s up to no good, the guy who’s got access to the dirty laundry doesn’t want to lose that access by being named in the paper as a source. In such cases, the anonymity of sources protects people who are doing a quiet service to the citizenry, and the reporter’s agreement of anonymity for such sources is rightly considered almost sacred.

However, just as a good reporter never burns his sources, a good source never burns a reporter, and the source who knowingly peddles false or misleading information to a reporter thereby forfeits the agreement of anonymity. (This is something that the anti-Palin blogger “Gryphen” still can’t seem to grasp after “one of [his] best sources” gave him that bogus Palin divorce rumor.)

Washington journalists and their anonymous sources can do good things, but they can also do very bad things, and the abuse of anonymity has become commonplace in D.C. media. The classic example of this is the “senior administration official” who uses leaks to the media as a way of advancing his status in the administration, often by disparaging or embarrassing his rivals.

Anyone who knows how this game is played must nod with recognition when he notices — as I noticed a few weeks ago – press coverage disparaging various members of Obama’s economic team (e.g., Lawrence Summers) while suspiciously exempting Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner from such criticism. It was clear to me that Geithner and/or his allies within the Obama White House were trying to undermine anyone who posed an obstacle to Geithner’s influence over the administration’s economic agenda.

Palin and the Press: Missed Opportunities
The astute reader surely perceives how all this background relates to what has happened to Sarah Palin since that bolt-from-the-blue news, nearly a year ago, that my distant kinsman, Crazy Cousin John, had chosen the Alaska governor as his vice-presidential running mate. As thoroughly as I despise “Maverick” – an unprincipled and self-aggrandizing traitor to the conservative cause – I must credit him for the undiluted genius of that one decision.

Like most other conservatives, my reaction to the Palin pick could be summarized in the lyrics of an old pop song — a song I would later notice booming from the sound system during the warm-up for Palin’s appearances on the campaign trail: “She’s got it. Yeah, baby, she’s got it.”

And, no, it’s not just her healthy good looks. If you’ve watched Palin up close, away from the blinding glare of the TV lights — as I watch her encounter with an ”overflow” audience following a late-October rally in Shippensburg, Pa. — you know that what she’s got is the same kind of basic love for ordinary people that was the real secret of Reagan’s political popularity. If all you know of Sarah Palin is TV appearances like her awkward deer-in-the-headlights encounter with Katie Couric, you don’t know Sarah Palin at all.

It is that trait, Palin’s down-to-earth personality and her aptitude for engaging with ordinary people at their level, without any sort of condescension, which is recognized by her admirers (among them, Bill Kristol) and scorned by her detractors. And a natural “people person” like Sarah Palin is particularly ill-served by being encased in the “GOP bubble” that always seems to surround Republican leaders.

Whatever her shortcomings — and even an admirer like Kristol admits she may not have been entirely ready for the national spotlight last fall – Palin is certainly not incapable of dealing with the press. This was the great missed opportunity of the 2008 campaign.

Had Steve Schmidt been on his game, he would have called an impromptu press conference immediately following Palin’s debut appearance Aug. 29 in Dayton, Ohio. Given how surprising the Palin choice was, the press corps would have had no time to research their “gotcha” questions. Any reporter who posed a hostile question could have been rebuffed with a clever one-liner. 

Dealing with a press conference — including blowing off questions you don’t like — is a piece of cake for any reasonably clever politician, compared to the kind of high-stakes one-on-one interviews with network anchors that the McCain campaign used as Palin’s introduction to a national viewership. Even a 20-minute press conference on Aug. 29 would have done wonders to improve Palin’s credibility with the media assigned to cover the campaign.

Media Bias: Who’s to Blame?
This points to another crippling weakness of the GOP: Almost no one in a position to influence Republican media operations has ever earned a week’s paycheck as a reporter. To say that Republican political operatives treat reporters like dirt would be to suggest that Republican political operatives have an unusually fanatical hatred of dirt, because in more than two decades of journalism, I have never experienced the kind of frigid hostility I encountered when I went out and tried to cover the McCain campaign. (“Tried” being the key word, since it’s very difficult to cover candidates who almost never hold press conferences and instruct their campaign staff not to talk to you.)

Republican leaders habitually blame media bias for all their woes, but rank-and-file Republicans need to start asking to what extent this media bias is fomented and exacerbated by the cluelessness of GOP leadership and the insulting arrogance of GOP political operatives.

H.L. Mencken once said that the only way a journalist should ever look at a politician is down. Imagine, then, a reporter’s reaction when he goes out on the road to cover a candidate and finds himself being bossed around by some rudely superior-acting 23-year-old punk fresh out of a College Republican club. The very first time I went to a John McCain campaign event — a poorly-attended July rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., before Palin had added her own excitement to the campaign — I was struck by the unhelpful attitude of the campaign staff.

And I was a friendly reporter! Despite my profound personal loathing of John McCain, I certainly didn’t want to see the Democrats win the White House. (As an ex-Democrat, I’ve sworn an oath to destroy the vicious left-wing parasites who now control my former party.) I went out on the campaign trail as a representative of Pajamas Media and The American Spectator, both well-known conservative journalism outfits. Quite frankly, however, I was treated much better by Hillary Clinton’s people when I’d gone out in the spring to cover the final months of her campaign.

Here is where it becomes difficult to distinguish between purposeful hostility to the press and simple incompetence on the part of GOP leaders. You might expect that, in assigning personnel to deal with the media at a campaign event, Republican officials would try to find people who had some special interest in or knowledge of the media.

If you expected such a thing from the 2008 McCain campaign, you would have been sadly mistaken. The folks staffing the media sign-in table may have been decent, well-meaning people, but . . . well, “clueless” doesn’t really begin to describe it. I might understand the elderly GOP volunteer not being familiar with an online operation like Pajamas Media, but their unfamiliarity with The American Spectator – a venerable organ of conservative journalism whose pedigree is rivaled or excelled only by National Review and Human Events — was shocking to me. (Me to GOP media operative: “R. Emmett Tyrrell? Syndicated columnist? C’mon. You must be kidding me. You never never even heard of Bob Tyrrell?”)

It wasn’t just me. I was sitting in the media area at an October event in Hershey, Pa., when I saw Sean Hannity walk in and look around, as if trying to figure out where he was supposed to be. Hannity was with a couple of his crew members, and they obviously didn’t expect to sit around in the nosebleed section of a hockey arena with the rest of us poor schlubs in the press corps. Finally, after a minute or two, one of his assistants made a cell-phone call and the Hannity posse made a 180-degree turn and went off to wherever they were actually supposed to be.

Yet those brief couple of minutes were quite telling. Here was a Fox TV star and leading talk-radio personality just standing around the media area, quite evidently lost, and none of the campaign staffers on hand even seemed to notice. You might have expected some press aide to walk up and say, “Oh, excuse me, Mr. Hannity, can I help you?” But that didn’t happen. Hannity wasn’t all slicked up like a celebrity — it was raining outside, and he was wearing an overcoat — so nobody seemed to recognize him as a VIP, and for a moment he was just another schlub in the press corps, ignored like the rest of us.

Professional GOP Campaign Nazis
Well, I could tell other stories of the routine indignities inflicted upon reporters by Republican political hacks, but you see the rough outline. And the thing is, I don’t believe either GOP politicians or rank-and-file Republican voters understand how the impudent and at times sadistic treatment doled out to the press corps by Republican staffers contributes to the GOP’s negative image. The typical reporter’s opinion of Republicans as brutal fascists is certainly accurate, insofar as it applies to GOP media handlers like that evil witch who chased me out of the daily-press filing center in Wilkes-Barre. (As if a mere Internet outfit like Pajamas Media were less important than the New York Times, you see.)

So, whose fault was it that the MSM portrayed Sarah Palin as a ditzy bimbo? You can blame the press all you want, but at some point — if the Republican Party wishes to present itself as representing the principles of accountability and personal responsibility — the role of GOP campaign staffers in mishandling the media needs to be examined. Some of the same staffers who botched Palin’s media relations then turned around and, by anonymously peddling malicious gossip, tried to scapegoat her for their own failings. This should suffice as a damning testimony to the low character of such people, who thereby did a cruel disservice to their party’s rank-and-file supporters.

Personally, I’ll never forget watching an interview that McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds did with CNN’s Campbell Brown. Bounds was supposed to defend Palin as qualified for the vice presidency, and Brown was clearly hostile to the idea, but Bounds showed himself hopelessly incompetent for the task he’d been assigned. I watched that interview with stunned amazement, wondering to myself what idiot at Team Maverick had chosen Bounds for this job.

“Good grief!” I said to myself, perhaps in much stronger language. “Who put this clown on TV? Why even send a spokesman to defend Palin, if you’re going to send a complete moron? Why not just let Sarah Palin speak for herself?”

That’s the real question. Had Palin been permitted to talk to reporters at her own discretion, allowed to trust her own (very good) political instincts, America would surely have gotten a much better impression of her than it did. Palin probably would have made some gaffes, but considering that her Democratic rival was Joe “Gaffetastic” Biden, how bad could she have been?

However, GOP media strategists don’t get paid for — and do not benefit by — just letting candidates talk to the media on their own. If politicians are presumed competent to do press interviews without the advice and coaching of professional “media strategists,” that kind of brings into question why professional “media strategists” make the big bucks, doesn’t it?

Public relations is not rocket science, and I could easily name two dozen PR professionals in Washington who could have handled Palin’s media operation better than it was handled. (Can anyone imagine that it could possibly have been handled worse than it was?) But the people who make big bucks as Republican “media strategists” engage in a self-serving rhetoric of expertise, endeavoring to promote the impression that they possess some magic formula that justifies their exorbitant consulting fees and salaries.

During the 2008 election cycle, the national Republican Party apparatus spent $792,121,768, and a substantial share of that expenditure went to the general category of media and communications. What did GOP contributors get for their $792 million? How much of that money was spent to pay the GOP staffers and consultants whose blundering efforts hurt, rather than helped, the party they were paid to serve? Think of all those “campaign insiders” who dished dirt on Palin to their MSM buddies. Now attempt to calculate in your mind the combined salaries of those professional backstabbers.

A Republican Dunkirk?
The mere thought of these things ought to inspire rage in the hearts of every rank-and-file Republican voter, to say nothing of the donors whose cash was squandered in such a manner. There may have once been a time, when the GOP had clearly recognized leaders like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, and before Democrats improved their own media operations, when the Republican Party could win no matter how badly their mishandled the press. Yet that time has passed.

Like the “high-mindedness and humbug” of middle-class Victorianism that furnished the narrow minds of those British leaders who led their nation into the folly of appeasement, today’s GOP leaders have a tendency to repeat mindlessly a limited vocabulary of “Reaganesque” catch-phrases that act as erzatz substitutes for actual ideas. These same lazy mental habits are exhibited in the predictable – and predictably bad – media strategies employed by Republican campaign operatives.

Perhaps the shortcomings of those strategies were less obvious in “ordinary, normal times,” when the Democrats employed strategists like the legendarily inept Bob Shrum and offered the nation as potential leaders the insufferably phony Al Gore or the insufferably snobbish John Kerry. Yet the Democrats have adopted new strategies, and in Barack Obama they have now elected as president a politician whose persona less easily lends itself to attack by the “ordinary, normal” Republican tactics.

If the GOP does not learn from the blunders that destroyed George Allen’s campaign in 2006, and which have badly damaged Sarah Palin’s image, they may — like those British leaders who foolishly pursued appeasement in the 1930s — learn the lesson “too late,” when the Republican Party finds itself faced with “simply a question of survival.”

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