Bob McCarty Writes

Last night, President Barack Obama proved himself unskilled when it came to handling the following question — or, more accurately, set of related questions — asked by Fox News Channel’s Senior White House Correspondent Major Garrett:

“Mr. President, at a speech Friday that many of us covered, Vice President Biden said the following thing about a conversation the two of you had in the Oval Office about a subject he didn’t disclose: ‘If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, if we stand up there and we really make the tough decisions, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.’

“Since the vice president brought it up, can you tell the American people, sir, what you were talking about? And if not, can you at least reassure them it wasn’t the stimulus bill or the bank rescue plan and if, in general, you agree with that ratio of success, 30 percent failure, 70 percent success?”

Having worked as a “spin doctor” for more than a dozen of the past 25 years, I’ve dealt with all manner of journalists, ranging from small-town newspaper reporters to Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News fame.  One lesson I learned along the way is this:  Always tell the truth and, if telling the truth involves delivering information that is not particularly flattering to you or your organization, keep your answer brief.

Had I been President Obama, I would have answered the question above this way:

“I think what Vice President Biden was trying to convey is the fact that we cannot guarantee that everything in the economic stimulus package will be successful.”

Instead of saying something short and sweet (i.e., 25 words), however, President Obama waxed less than poetic, using 269 words and coming off looking like an inexperienced boob:

“You know, I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to…(LAUGHTER)… not surprisingly. But let me try this out. I think what Joe may have been suggesting — although I wouldn’t put numerical — I wouldn’t ascribe any numerical percentage to any of this — is that, given the magnitude of the challenges that we have, any single thing that we do is going to be part of the solution, not all of the solution.

“And as I said in my introductory remarks, not everything we do is going to work out exactly as we intended it to work out. You know, this is an unprecedented problem.

“And, you know, when you talk to economists, there’s some general sense of how we’re going to move forward. There’s some strong consensus about the need for a recovery package of a certain magnitude. There’s a strong consensus that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, all tax cuts or all investment, but that there should be a range of approaches.

“But even if we do everything right on that, we’ve still got to deal with what we just talked about, the financial system, and making sure that banks are lending again. We’re still going to have to deal with housing. We’re still going to have to make sure that we’ve got a regulatory structure, a regulatory architecture for the financial system that prevents crises like this from occurring again.

“Now, those are big, complicated tasks. So I don’t know whether Joe was referring to that, but I used that as a launching point to make a general point about these issues.”

If President Obama wants to improve his approach to conducting news conference, I suggest he have the people at the Defense Information School Public Affairs Officers Course stop by and give him one-on-one training in media relations.  They sure helped me 23 years ago.