Under this approach, a president wants the fact-checkers to call him out (again and again) because that hubbub keeps the issue in the news, which is good for promoting the issue to the public. It is the political equivalent of “there is no such thing as bad publicity” or the quote attributed to Mae West (and others): “I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.” The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama’s journey in office.

Officials in every White House crowbar the facts to make their cases. Administration officials over time have also learned how to turn lemons into lemonade, harnessing the frenzied news coverage from a perceived White House miscue to the president’s advantage. Losing the news cycles between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. doesn’t necessarily matter; if by the end of the saga you’ve got a coherent story to pitch, the frenzy has simply given you a larger audience who will listen to it. “Stray voltage,” the term Obama strategist David Plouffe used to describe this approach, is also a great buzzword that makes it look like you’ve got a theory for what might otherwise look like chaos. But this twist is a new, higher order of deception: creating the controversy for the purposes of milking it.