Stopping The Viral Spread: Obama’s Reputation Management Strategy

Face it- you think politics, you think spin. You think maneuvering. You think manipulation — not to mention rumour and innuendo. Don’t you?

That may be about to change due to a new PR tactic that the already Internet innovative BarackObama campaign has put into play: Emphasizing the truth.

How utterly strange.

Just a few days ago Senator Obama’s campaign announced the launch of a new website called www.fightthesmears.com.

The Purpose of the Site

The purpose of the website is to debunk the nasty whispered untruths that have been seeping out of the American right-wing media and spreading like wildfire across the Internet.

And, as Time magazine noted, Obama’s method for combating those ugly insinuations is through a form of community building with this website as a hub.

“Obama is enlisting his millions of supporters to help him hunt down and quash these stories, just as those supporters helped him turn his insurgent campaign into a history-making juggernaut. Says Obama adviser Anita Dunn: ‘We will not allow Michelle — or, for that matter, Barack — to be defined by rumors.’”

It is a clever idea and a canny use of technology. And it will be fascinating to see if it works.

The Site(In Brief)

www.fightthesmears.com is well-conceived, laying out the false allegation made about the candidate and counteracting it right below, often with supportive scans of documents or video clips.

It’s fairly well done and it’s already had a lot to tackle in terms of reputation management. The New York Times gave a brief run down of the rumours that the site is currently addressing, even though the candidate has already addressed them himself in other media countless times:

” ‘Fight the Smears’ is designed to systematically dismantle Internet rumors by letting users see both ‘the smear’ and, the campaign’s response. The site already features sections fact-checking rumors that Mr. Obama refuses to say the pledge of allegiance, or has written racially incendiary remarks into his books or that he is a Muslim.”

Will it Work?

If anybody can make this kind of approach effective, Senator Obama can. His campaign’s use of the Internet and social media has been tremendously savvy from day one. In their last edition focusing on the current crop of candidates for the President of the United States, The Economist mentioned Senator Obama’s ability to connect with his supporters via the Internet:

“His website was thus a vast social networking site….a mechanism not just for translating enthusiasm into cash but also for building a community of fired-up supporters.”

The question now is will he be able to sway those who do not yet (or just plain don’t) support him? Will this be an effective form of reputation management? Will this work? And is this method one that will be used again by PR practitioners in other political campaigns? What do you think?

You Always Hurt the One You Love? Musings on Bill & Hillary

Presidents and Presidential contenders have always had relatives they wished they could lock away until their nomination, if not their term, was over.

Remember Billy Beer?

But the latest relative that has embarrassed and seriously damaged a candidate’s chances is a genuine shock. Who would have thought the supremely savvy politician Bill Clinton would in fact be a liability rather than an asset to his wife during her historic presidential campaign

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband has brought her yet more negative publicity. As noted in a New Republic blog by Michael Crowley, this is due to an anger-fueled outburst concerning Todd S. Purdum, husband of President Clinton’s former Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers and author of an admittedly unflattering, possibly unfair and apparently dubiously-sourced Vanity Fair article about the former President.

But it was not the ex-President’s first major gaffe during the campaign.

That unfortunate distinction falls on his ungracious handling of Senator Barack Obama’s landslide South Carolina primary victory.

As Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post noted, the former President’s reaction was the comment that Jesse Jackson had won in South Carolina in 1984 and 1988. It was a statement that discounted Senator Obama’s sizable victory and tacitly suggested that it was only due to the state’s strongly African-American demographics.

That, as well as his furious tirades at the press after that statement generated justified media backlash, certainly wounded his wife’s campaign.

It also raised an interesting question- How should a candidate handle negative publicity when it is generated by one who is near-and-dear to them? And what do you do when that relative is as famous as you are?

Furthermore, how did Bill Clinton, an adroit master of the political game, blunder so badly?

With Senator Obama finally having sewn up the Democratic nomination, it is unlikely that former president Clinton’s latest outburst can have any further negative impact on his wife’s political career, despite the mushrooming coverage of his ranting denunciation of Purdum as a “scumbag” (and worse) to a reporter from The Huffington Post.

But one has to wonder what might have been if the man had been on his game- if he had managed to generate positive publicity for his wife’s campaign rather than negative. Would it have made a difference?

Stars, Stripes and Spin

Yes, I used the S-word. In our profession, it’s a rather dirty one. (Just ask the folks at PR Watch.)

But if there is one arena in which that term is truly applicable and where spin can be seen at its best, worst and ugliest- it is American politics.

Therefore it is kind of ironic that one of the more candid peeks behind the heavily fortified curtain of W’s administration comes from…his former press secretary.

In his new book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, Scott McClellan apparently alleges that the current administration used slick propaganda tactics to hoodwink the American public and lead them to support the war in Iraq.

According to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

If this is the case, if these allegations prove to be true, one would have to consider those responsible as the Sith Lords of spin- dark masters of a pitch black version of the profession of public relations.

And that is why their lackluster attempts at crisis management in reaction to the book are an additional (and much smaller) shock.

According to The Huffington Post, their response to one of the administration’s former foremost champion’s searing accusations is this:

“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, a former deputy to McClellan. “We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.”

Seriously?

True, they are trying to manage a crisis and sometimes speed is of the essence but surely someone should have considered giving this draft one more polish? This is their response to a former insider, one of their own, having made deeply troubling accusations? That’s it?

Surely they had an inkling that this book was on its way to being published and so they must have had time to plan crisis management strategy to have one ready when needed? But this is it?

As for Mr. McClellan, it could be that he’s just trying to get his take on this massive mess in first and put himself in the best possible light. (And hey, that’s human. We all try to make ourselves more attractive every day, be it to potential dates and mates or potential employers- in Mr. McClellan’s case, he also has to try to make himself more attractive to future historians who will scrutinize this period mercilessly.) But it could also be that he’s not. And that possibility is, frankly, beyond scary.