HeadlineUpdate

When Bad PR Happens to Good People, or, Jeffrey Birnbaum’s Revenge

                                Read a version of this post on the Huffington Post

Washington Post columnist Jeffrey Birnbaum has his panties in a twist again about the practice of public policy advocates employing professional writers to help them draft newspaper op-eds.  As a writer who specializes in just this niche I have an objection to his objection, and you should too.

Just ask yourself—do you really want to read op-eds whose every word is written by lawyers, scientists and Henry Kissinger?  Is Senator McConnell as good a writer as Salman Rushdie?  When you see a politician’s or celebrity’s byline on a newspaper page, do you believe they wrote it all by themselves?

Of course not.  But the Washington Post apparently believes something different.

A few months ago, Jeffrey Birnbaum wrote a pair of articles that “outed” a PR campaign which included a “white paper” circulating on Capitol Hill making the case for Congressional earmarks, and also an op-ed in the Washington Post “written” by three big-city mayors.  He must have imagined a scene out of the Dick Van Dyke show, where the mayors stood around a computer, chomping on cigars and arguing over participles, but then was disappointed to find the hidden hand of a PR firm.

“Soon after my column on the paper ran last week,” Birnbaum wrote last May, “the company's president, W. Roger Gwinn, phoned to admit that his firm's seven-person budget and appropriations policy team wrote it -- initially to explain to clients why they tended to get more money from congressional earmarks than from federal agencies left to their own devices. It was later distributed to lobbyists and congressional staffers.

That's when it became famous as a bold defense for the much-maligned earmarking process.

The document's facts were used in an op-ed piece praising earmarks that appeared under the names of mayors of three cities represented by the Ferguson Group. The firm had a hand in placing that op-ed in the Washington Post, though it initially denied any involvement.”

Now, Birnbaum is at it again.  In a recent column headlined, “The Man Behind the Byline Isn't Behind the Article. So, Who Is?”  Jeffrey Birnbaum revisits the shocking practice of ghostwriting.  Reading between the lines, you can see how the machinery of government, journalism and public relations really works.

Backbiting! Backstabbing! Skullduggery! Sniping!

Fun and Games in the McCain Campaign

As I've previously written, it's not the cost of campaigns that's out of control, it's the mark-up. The greed and egotism of political consultants can be a drag on democracy, and a distraction from the business of winning elections. There's something wrong when a campaign's consultants and strategists get their names in the paper as often as the candidate.

Consider what's been happening in the last few days in the McCain campaign. The news has been dominated with "process" stories--inside baseball about how inept McCain is as a candidate (see: teleprompters), how off-message the campaign has been (see: foreign trip) and how many slogans and re-launches the campaign has burned through. Now, a year after the last staff shake-up to end all staff shake-ups, the knives are out again.

First, Karl Rove's disciple Steve Schmidt was brought in to stop the campaign's internal bleeding and make the trains run on time--but the candidate couldn't quite bring himself to say he'd demoted his current campaign manager.

Then, a trial balloon the size of the Moon was floated suggesting that McCain's longtime advisor Mike Murphy would be brought in as top dog, but in the few hours since Bill Kristol gave this suggestion national prominence in his New York Times column, Murphy's enemies succeeded in shooting it down. A campaign staff already known for temper tantrums must have boiled over again in the last few days, leading Murphy to tell the Times today,

"I'm not expecting to join the campaign. I'm trying to kill and end all this stuff."
"I think this staff speculation is not helpful to the campaign," he said. "I don't want to be controversial and I don't want to be distracting from the senator's message."

Of course, this is what's known in the trade as a "non-denial denial," paving the way for a future reversal. There's a big gulf between a firm "no" and a vague "I'm not expecting to," and no one would be surprised to see Murphy in and Rick Davis out, perhaps by the time you read this. McCain clearly trusts Murphy and wants him on board, but since he can't bring himself to fire people he may have to settle for Murphy playing the role Dick Morris had in Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign--the shadowy unofficial campaign guru who gives back-channel advice to the candidate and drives the staff crazy. Watch for more disarray and feuding and a growing chorus among Republicans of "can't anyone here play this game?"

News Update: Obama to Accept Nomination on the Moon

HeadlineUpdate Update:  Read this on the Huffington Post (but come back to this site for more jocularity)

Barack Obama will accept the Democratic presidential nomination on the Moon, and not as previously reported Denver's Invesco Field at Mile High, a 76,000-seat stadium home to the Denver Broncos, the Democratic National Committee announced Monday.

"We thought about the stadium thing," a spokesman for the Obama campaign said.  "But the Rolling Stones weren't available as a warm-up and besides, we've done stadiums already.  Barack Obama sees the Moon as a chance to talk not just to everybody in Denver, but everybody in the world."

The Obama campaign, in cooperation with NASA, will launch dozens of satellites in the next few weeks that harness what scientists call "the IMAX Maximus" effect, which creates a field of particles that can receive projected images from fifty thousand miles away.  The Obama speech is expected to reach 85% of the world's population.

Talking to reporters on his campaign plane on Monday, Senator Obama said,
"When I was going door to door on the streets of  Chicago talking to poor folks about hope, people said I was promising them the moon.  I wasn't then, but I am now."

A spokesman for NASA, when asked whether the agency was under any political pressure from the Bush Administration to refuse cooperation to the presumed Democratic nominee, said, "Sure we were.  But "f--k" 'em.  They won't be around much longer, and we'd love to keep our jobs."

When asked how much the broadcast would cost, an Obama spokesman declined to provide a specific amount, but said it was in the "low hundreds of millions."

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign's bold move is being eyed with interest on Madison Avenue. Coca-Cola, long known to be interested in buying naming rights to the Moon, sees the satellite technology as a satisfying first step.

"We always said that we'd like to give the world a Coke," the company said.