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His PR honeymoon coming to an end, will Obama learn lessons of his predecessors?
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Barack Obama knows he can
influence, but not impose his
will, on the media.
On Tuesday, as my wife and I gathered our 5-year-old twins to witness President Barack Obama's inauguration, a pair of other January 20 moments in U.S. history came to mind.
Exactly 20 years ago, I was an intern at the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph & News, helping edit the front page that included news of George H.W. Bush's inauguration as our nation’s 41st president.
And 20 years before that, I was in diapers as Richard M. Nixon was sworn in as president.
Unlike Obama, both Nixon and Bush had relationships with the media that were strained, at best, and often disastrous.
In Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, among other truths that Ambrose reveals is this one: Nixon recognized the impact of public relations perception on his political viability.
At the same time, it's even more obvious that Nixon terribly misgauged the magnitude of his actions on generating the worst kind of PR.
He also had a fundamentally flawed view of the media's very nature. He tried to battle journalism's investigative, cynical, "gotcha" qualities instead of accepting those traits as fact and proceeding accordingly.
Of course, in the immediate aftermath of the June 1972 Watergate Hotel break-in, Nixon's options ranged from really, really bad to politically lethal.
The really, really bad part: if he had 'fessed up immediately that his subordinates - though not Nixon himself - had ordered and orchestrated the botched Watergate break-in, such a disclosure may have jeopardized his re-election in November 1972, which he won in a cakewalk.
The ultimate, politically lethal part: he hid his subordinates' role and then hid his role in the cover-up, then concealed each successive half-truth, distortion or outright lie that followed in the ever-growing tangled web.
As for the elder Bush — fittingly, he was among those advising Nixon during the disintegration of his administration in 1973-74—his view of the media became remarkably unrealistic and embittered over time.
In 1997, four years after he left office, Bush 41 issued a ridiculously impossible “no media allowed” demand on a talk that he gave in Elgin, Ill., where at the time I was a reporter for The Courier News, a daily newspaper.
What brought him to town? He was the featured speaker at Money magazine’s “adoption” of the city to teach personal finance lessons. While the magazine was at it, maybe they should have added a PR lesson for Bush.
As his talk before thousands at Elgin High's gymnasium approached, reality set in, and Bush’s handlers had no choice but to “waive” the unenforceable media ban.
Obama, on the other hand, appears to have developed a clear-eyed view that he can influence, but not impose his will, on the media.
That realism will be put to the test as his honeymooning media-darling phase comes to a close in rapid fashion, and he begins bearing the inevitable brunt of criticism that confronts all Presidents.
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