This week, the White House, in another unforced error, decided to pick a fight with Drudge (full disclosure, he's a former client of mine) over Drudge's posting of a statement Obama made in 2007 where he concedes that a public option health plan will eventually lead to single payer (something Obama says in another 2003 video that he fully supports).
The White House immediately went on the offensive, stating that Drudge (although not mentioning him by name, even though it was clear that Linda Douglass, Communications Director for the White House Office of Health Reform, was pointing to a headline on the Drudge Report), took the "sentences and phrases out of context and cobbling them together to leave a very false impression."
Even if the White House were right, it would have been a serious mistake to pick a fight with Drudge. But given that Drudge had the goods on Obama, it was just plain stupid. Obama could simply have ignored Drudge, but as it turned out, he egged him on so that Drudge posted an uncut version of the 2003 video, and, you guessed it, it said just what Drudge represented it to be. It was Douglass (and by extension Obama) who were exposed as the liars.
But the White House didn't stop there. Douglass later told the public to report health care reform disinformation to her office. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs claimed that the anger being displayed by people at town hall meetings toward Democratic legislators was "manufactured" by Republicans and special interest groups.
Is this wise? To dismiss the anger directed at sweeping changes in the healthcare system as partisan manipulation? To act as if the substance of what you're trying to accomplish is unimportant to voters? How insulting.
Other examples of ill-planned tactics includes Rahm Emmanuel's letters threatening governors to cut off stimulus funds because Republican senators (like John Kyl of Arizona) have the temerity to state that maybe Congress should reconsider how it will spend funds that have not yet been released. Maybe this stuff works in Chicago, but it's a real turn off everywhere else.
In 2006, Obama advisor David Axelrod told Obama that:
You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don't relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched.
Then there's Sarah Palin. In no way do I mean this to be Palin-bashing. I wish her the best. I only hope that this might lead her to seek better advice than she was getting from the obviously not-so-ready-for-prime-time players in Alaska.
There is really no good reason for Palin to respond to every pundit or celebrity that criticizes her. She should have ignored David Letterman and Ashley Judd. (Although I applaud her response to a joke about her by Senator John Kerry saying in effect, of all the governors that could have disappeared (referring to Mark Sanford) why couldn't it have been the Governor of Alaska? To which Palin responded, "Hey John, Why the long face?") I also think she should adopt as her own the really cool nickname ("Caribou Barbie") given to her by Maureen Dowd.
Also, Palin's resignation announcement was a horrible act of self-inflicted cutting:
Oh I see. It is the people who finish their terms who are the quitters. And it is just the opposite for those who quit their terms.Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would beapathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow". Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow.
Puhleez. Her advisers should never have either written that line or allowed her to utter it. It's as bad an example of Orwellian newspeak as Obama claiming to mean the opposite of what he plainly said.
I think he's too arrogant to learn from his missteps. I hope she's not. We'll soon see.
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