NYTimes: Between Obama and the Press
ROBERT GIBBS’S HEADY WASHINGTON RISE was certified on a humid day in June when a procession of media and political fancies gathered in tribute to Tim Russert, the “Meet the Press” host who died of a heart attack several days earlier. The memorial service was a sweet, solemn and star-struck occasion that, as these events often do, yielded a neat snapshot of the Celebrity Washington food chain - who was up, who was down, who was winning the week.
In a smiling stampede of congratulations, mourners were wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center to get to Gibbs, a journeyman campaign flack who had latched onto Barack Obama’s Senate race four years earlier and has been his chief spokesman ever since. By now a senior adviser to Obama, Gibbs was here, along with Obama’s chief strategist and message guru, David Axelrod, to represent the soon-to-be Democratic nominee.
“The new It guys,” declared Anne Schroeder Mullins, a gossip columnist for Politico.com, noting the shameless run on Gibbs and Axelrod. “I bet they’re being inundated with people trying to book Barack on their shows.”
The paradox of this scene was that the Obama campaign’s communications strategy was predicated in part on an aggressive indifference to this insider set. Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”
The campaign bragged that Obama never even visited with the editorial board of The Washington Post - a decision that would have been unheard of for any serious candidate in a previous presidential cycle. “You could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo and understand that people aren’t reading The Washington Post,” Gibbs told me last month in Chicago.
It was a source of great amusement to Obama’s staff that people thought they could use conventional schmoozing practices to win favor with them. “In part because we were in Chicago and in part because of our approach, we did not do ‘cocktail party’ interviews,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the campaign’s communications director, who will be the deputy communications director at the White House. “These are interviews that you agree to because you were always bumping into the reporter at cocktail parties, and they keep asking for the candidate’s time. We could laugh every time our opponents would do them.”
There was a sense among Obama’s communications team that not only did they have a gifted candidate to ride but also that they had figured out new ways to maximize their advantages. The campaign highlighted its mastery of new political media that included a vast database of e-mail addresses and an ability to quickly put up Web sites and use blogs, online video and text messaging. They viewed themselves as “game changers” (the 2008 cliché for innovators), avatars of a New Way organization that had more in common with a Silicon Valley start-up - think Google or YouTube - than with any traditional political campaign that came before it.
But Obama’s New Way organization was grounded largely on Old School codes - notions of loyalty, aggressiveness and discretion. Keep things in the family. “We all believe this isn’t about us, it’s about something bigger than us as individuals,” Gibbs told me. “And that governed our ability to keep information to ourselves.”
As much as the Obama communications philosophy was geared to attacking George W. Bush, the operation itself had a lot in common with Bush’s presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004, and the Bush White House. Like Bush’s, Obama’s campaign brain trust was unusually small and close-knit. This was especially true of the candidate’s traveling orbit - “the plane” or “the bubble,” as it is known in campaign shorthand. Gibbs was a relentless presence there, usually at Obama’s side. Along with Axelrod, they formed a trio at the front of the plane. (Plouffe rarely traveled after the primaries, nor did Anita Dunn, another top adviser.) This enabled the Obama team to maintain tight control of its information. They prided themselves on never leaking. If there was any turf-wrestling, power-grabbing or tantrum-throwing in the Obama campaign, it was never for press consumption - in contrast to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton or John McCain, both of which (God love ’em) dished out all-you-can-eat buffets.
Obama’s operatives spoke with a single voice and a precise message and only when they wanted to. They did it with a smile, not complaining - at least not publicly - about how the press was the enemy. And they did it using interactive tools that bred a feeling of real-time connectedness between campaign and voter.
At the forefront of Obama’s tightly held communications operation was Gibbs, an affable Alabaman with pit-bullish tendencies behind the scenes in defense of his boss. He bragged that he did not tell even his wife that Obama had picked Joseph Biden as his running mate until the campaign revealed it in a mass text message.
As he prepares to become the White House spokesman, Gibbs is acutely aware that it will be harder to enforce discipline from the seat of government than from the seat of the campaign plane. And sure enough, the incoming administration has endured a leaky few weeks. The names of several cabinet nominees appeared in the media before they were announced or even finalized in some cases.
When I spoke to Obama by phone earlier this month, he said he was not surprised by this. “The transition involves an awful lot of people who don’t actually work for me,” he said. “You’ve got a slew of volunteers in every agency in the vetting process. You’ve got F.B.I. folks involved when it comes to appointments. So we anticipated that we weren’t going to be able to march in lock step on our communications as effectively.” Still, Obama was said to be furious over the serial public airings about Hillary Clinton’s eventual nomination to be Secretary of State. He sent an explicit message that anyone caught leaking would be fired - and he sent it through his newly named chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who a couple of weeks earlier conducted a very public hand-wringing about whether he would take that job.
Obama’s advisers today convey some weary acknowledgment, if not shell shock, over how they no longer inhabit the contained decision-making cocoon of a few months ago. “The campaign is over,” Plouffe told me. “It’s never going to be the same. I think everyone is wistful.”
Obama said that it will be easier to replicate the leak-free environment of the campaign “once we get into the building,” meaning the White House. But he is also realistic: “This is Washington. Or it will be Washington. So I’m sure it will not be perfect.”
Continued for 5 more pages...