Inside Story: The people who sell presidents

[WhiteTara]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/inside-story-the-people-who-sell-presidents-777640.html


Behind every 'Super Tuesday' there's a hidden PR bunfight to sell the US presidential candidates' strengths and conceal their frailties. Stephen Foley unveils the spinmeisters
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Monday, 4 February 2008


MIKE HUCKABEE

It was by courting a string of influential columnists that the little-known former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee first got into contention in the Republican race. The average political beat reporter had written off his presidential bid even before they had written about it, but columnists including The Washington Post's widely-syndicated E J Dionne picked him out ("a southerner with unassailable Christian evangelical credentials" and therefore "the Republican to watch", Mr Dionne wrote a year ago). David Broder, another senior Washington Post columnist and TV pundit, was also charmed into praising him in print.


BARACK OBAMA

The tension between the new politics that Barack Obama promises and the sharp elbows of traditional debate is felt most keenly inside the Obama media operation, where veteran Democratic party spinmeister David Axelrod has had the resources to build an operation as large and sophisticated as that of the Clinton campaign, but where he has also been trying to instill a calmer, less aggressive approach to dealing with the media.

JOHN MCCAIN

The headlines that resurrected John McCain's presidential campaign weren't ones massaged by his press team, they were the headlines coming out of Iraq. Before Americans decided the surge was working, McCain was a dead man walking, and the abdication last July of his entire communications team had appeared terminal for an already near-bankrupt campaign.

MITT ROMNEY

The best public relations operation money can buy – natch – for the multi-millionaire private equity mogul who has poured more than $20m of his own money into this campaign.

Unsurprisingly, they have built the most sophisticated of all the press operations – so sophisticated that hacks complain about being spammed during Republican debates, their inboxes filling up with Romney's rebuttals of rival arguments even while the candidates are still on stage. Once named (by The Hill newspaper) as the "second most beautiful person on Capitol Hill", Madden, in particular, is genuinely liked and respected by the press pack. He does that most basic of things: calls you back promptly and answers your questions. There's a pay-off from all this niceness.

HILLARY CLINTON

Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's communications supremo, hails from the Alastair Campbell school of spin doctoring, and the Hillary '08 press strategy is styled in his pugnacious image. Journalists complain about being cajoled, blackmailed and yelled at, and no negative story – hell, no negative sentence – goes unpunished. Access to the former first lady is strictly controlled, favours repaid, grudges nursed. Most notoriously in the campaign so far, GQ was made to pull a negative story on Hillary's presidential bid by a threat to stop co-operating with a Bill Clinton profile the magazine was also working on.

Wolfson is steeped in the politics of the New York Democratic Party and has flitted between campaign work and the private sector, where he is a partner and "crisis management" specialist at the New York office of PR firm Glover Park. Scared of flying, he will drive cross-country for hours, yelping on his cellphone at errant journalists. Other eccentricities include wearing bad jumpers on national television.

JOHN EDWARDS

Political PR rule No 1: Don't deliberately goad powerful people inside Rupert Murdoch's media empire. When it comes to tit for tat, it is the politicians that ends up looking a tit.

After John Edwards called on his rivals to hand back campaign cash from NewsCorp executives, NewsCorp revealed that its publishing arm had paid Edwards $800,000 (£400,000) for his book Home published in 2006. An indignant Jonathan Prince, deputy campaign manager to Edwards, fired off a furious email threatening to wage a PR campaign against Fox News; News Corp's spin chief Gary Ginsberg inquired "How do you spell 'hypocrite'?" The exchange degenerated even further and ended up splashed all over Murdoch's tabloid New York Post, accompanied by a picture of the Edwards book with the title rendered "Hypocrite".


The back story for why we get what we get. Lucky us