Category: Reviews





A Review of President Obama's April 30 News Conference

By George Merlis

A president’s 100th day in office has been a media milestone, since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term. The Obama administration made clear early on that it considered Day 100 to be a sort of Hallmark holiday for pundits; not a serious benchmark. That said, the President used the occasion for a town hall meeting in St. Louis and a prime-time White House news conference.

When he was asked why, if the administration didn’t really believe Day 100 had any particular significance, the president was doing so much, presidential spokesperson press secretary Robert Gibbs came up with a great Grabber: “You know,” he told reporters, “You guys create the wave and we’ll try to surf it a little.”

That evening, President Obama surfed the wave of his third prime-time news conference, which played live on most major TV networks and on the cable news channels as well. (Fox network, providing instant fodder for Jon Stewart and other comedians, skipped the news conference and ran a drama entitled “Lie to Me.”)

Here, from a media trainer’s point of view, are some thoughts about the president’s performance at that news conference. These observations are drawn from a live viewing of the 55-minute conference followed by a reading of the full transcript.

First, I teach clients never to go into a media encounter without an agenda or four or five points. I believe, from the pattern of his answers, from his introductory remarks and from his selection of questioners, the president had five major agenda points and some sub-agenda points. The points were:

1. The government is prepared to handle the swine flu outbreak.
2. The economy remains a central focus of the administration -- with two sub-categories: a thank-you to Congress for passing the budget resolution and a status report on the fate of U.S. automakers.
3. Immigration Policy.
4. Foreign policy -- specifically the tenuous situation in nuclear-armed Pakistan. The uptick of sectarian violence in Iraq was a subcategory.
5. Torture of detainees.

I urge clients to express their agenda points in “Gotta use that” language -- in phrases that make a reporter think, “I couldn’t say that better myself.” An effective way to turn an agenda point into a soundbite is to use of Grabbers -- word devices that make a concept come alive: metaphors, smilies, analogies, comparisons, startling statistics, “st” words (“first,” “best,” “last,” “worst,” etc.), and brief anecdotes.

In his prepared remarks, President Obama unleashed these grabbers:
“But, even as we clear away the wreckage of this recession, I've also said that we can't go back to an economy that's built on a pile of sand.” (Word pictures.)
“I'm proud of what we've achieved, but I'm not content. I'm pleased with our progress, but I'm not satisfied.” (Implied comparison.)

As anyone who has ever given a speech and then taken questions can tell you, it’s a lot easier to write Grabbers than it is to ad-lib them. Let’s see how the president did in the Q & A. The grabbers are in boldface
On the question of closing the border with Mexico in response to the swine flu: “I've consulted with our public health officials extensively on a day-to-day basis, in some cases an hour-to-hour basis. At this point, they have not recommended a border closing. From their perspective, it would be akin to closing the barn door after the horses are out, because we already have cases here in the United States.” Closing the barn door may be a little tired as a word picture, but it helped make the rationale for not closing the border a little more quoteworthy.

Later in the same answer came this: “So we have to take additional precautions, essentially, take out some additional insurance. Now, that's why I asked for an additional $1.5 billion, so that we can make sure that everything is in place should a worst-case scenario play out.” (Metaphor.)

In the wake of Senator Arlen Specter’s defection from the GOP, the president was asked if the opposition party was in as dire straits as Sen. Specter portrayed it. The Grabber in his answer was an anecdote: “You know, politics in America changes very quick. And I'm a big believer that things are never as good as they seem and never as bad as they seem. You're talking to a guy who was 30 points down in the polls during a primary in Iowa. So -- so I never -- I don't believe in crystal balls.”

Here’s a Grabber he unleashed when talking about the politicizing of every conceivable issue in Washington: “I would like to think that everybody would say, you know what, let's take a time-out on some of the political games, focus our attention for at least this year, and then we can start running for something next year.” (Word picture/metaphor.)

Speaking of his office, he used this series of three word pictures in a two-sentence answer: “The presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life, and there are a lot of different power centers. And so I can't just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line.” He then went on to add: “And so, you know, what you do is to -- is to make your best arguments, listen hard to what other people have to say, and coax folks in the right direction.” Diminishing the impact of his three grabbers was the fact that he used the phrase “you know” three times in that response. You know is a verbal crutch the president uses with distressing frequency; in fact he said “you know” 22 times in the news conference.

The president unleashed this word picture in answer to a question about the auto industry: “I don't think that taxpayers should simply attach an umbilical cord between the U.S. Treasury and the auto companies so that they are constantly getting subsidies.”

You can kill a Grabber by overusing it. Remember Al Gore’s Social Security lockbox during the 2000 election campaign? President Obama’s getting dangerously close to that with his ship of state analogy. In his March 24 prime-time news conference, he said: “This is a big ocean liner -- it's not a speedboat -- it doesn't turn around immediately.” He clearly liked the analogy because when he addressed a town meeting of students in Turkey on April 7, he used it again, changing the ocean liner to a tanker (when you get closer to the Middle East, you tend to think oil): "States are like big tankers, they're not like speedboats. You can't just whip them around and go in another direction." And in the 100th day news conference, he used it again but not before blowing the whistle on himself: “This metaphor has been used before, but the ship of state is an ocean liner. It's not a speedboat.” Then Mr. Obama’s ocean liner morphed: “ And so the way we are constantly thinking about this issue, of how to bring about the changes that the American people need, is to -- is to say, if we can move this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction....” Maybe it’s time the president put the ship of state metaphor into dry dock so the barnacles of repetition can be scraped off its hull.

Here’s a Grabber that’s a comparison, but an implied comparison: “I'm not an auto engineer. I don't know how to create an affordable, well-designed plug-in hybrid. But I know that, if the Japanese can design an affordable, well-designed hybrid, then, doggone it, the American people should be able to do the same.”

Another one, also in an answer about Detroit: “It was my obligation and continues to be my obligation to make sure that any taxpayer dollars that are in place to support the auto industry are aimed not at short-term fixes that continue these companies as wards of the state, but rather institutes the kind of restructuring that allows them to be strongly competitive in the future.”

Grabbers can go awry if metaphors are mixed, as in this answer: “So my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by, for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax cuts for working families as opposed to the wealthiest that level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth.”

A correspondent asked the president if he thought the previous administration had sanctioned torture and he gave a long answer justifying his decision to release the Justice Department’s memos that offered a rationale for what the memos called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” At the end of the answer, the reporter repeated the question about whether the Bush administration sanctioned torture -- clearly looking for the president to use the phrase “sanctioned torture” or at very least agree to it. The president wouldn’t rise to the bait. He responded: “I believe that waterboarding was torture. And I think that the -- whatever legal rationales were used -- it was a mistake.”

I thought that response was evasive; the question wasn’t whether waterboarding was torture, it was whether he thought the Bush administration sanctioned torture. You could make a case that the president was answering, “Yes,” albeit very indirectly. (1. Waterboarding is torture. 2. Legal rationales from the Justice Department justified waterboarding very specifically. 3. Therefore, the legal rationales sanctioned torture. Ergo, the authors of the legal rationales -- i.e. the Bush administration -- sanctioned torture.) But Obama characterized the rationale as a “mistake.” I suspect there were arcane legal issues as well as political issues at play here, which is why the word “sanction” never passed the president’s lips. But if that is the case, perhaps the president should have said so: “There are complex legal issues here. So what I will say is that waterboarding is torture and I believe that the legal rationale that permitted waterboarding was a mistake.” I always encourage clients not to evade a question they can’t answer, but to, instead, explain why they are unable to answer and then bridge to something they can talk about.

One pitfall Mr. Obama avoided deftly was worst-case scenario speculation. The media love to present nightmare scenarios and ask a subject to speculate about he would respond to that scenario. Or, if the reporter is being particularly lazy, he asks, “What’s the worst thing that can happen,” inviting the interview subject to come up with their own most dire fears. I tell clients to never speculate and to label hypotheticals for what they are and then bridge to a more likely scenario. That’s exactly what the president did. After giving an answer that very clearly and specifically indicated he and his national security team were confident Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would not fall into the hands of the Taliban, the reporter began to follow up with, “But in a worst-case scenario...”

The president jumped in immediately and said, “I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals of that sort. I feel confident that that nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands.”

In his last news conference, the president’s answers were long and occasionally redundant. This time around, the answers still bordered on spoken essays, but they were not redundant. I encourage clients to speak to the media at the average grade level of the audience. For a general interest publication or broadcast, that means speaking to the national average grade level which is somewhere between the 10th and 11th grades. How did Obama do? I put the entire news conference transcript through Microsoft Word’s readability tool. Here’s a screen shot of the result -- the grade level was 9.5