The Reporter Who Speaks for Obama

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 2008 10:18 AM

ST. LOUIS--As Barack Obama started fielding questions at a hospital here last week, Linda Douglass stood off to the left, scribbling in a reporter's notebook, as she has in every presidential campaign since 1980.

It wasn't until 20 minutes later, when she shouted "Last question!" that her former colleagues were reminded of her new role as a traveling spokeswoman who will be the public face -- a female face in this post-Hillary period -- of the campaign.

After three decades as a television correspondent, Douglass is now on the inside -- but still not getting all the answers. She recalls Obama telling her that he would not talk to her, let alone the outside world, about the vice-presidential selection process, saying: "We're locking it down, we're buttoning it up."

Which is fine with Douglass: "That was so the people who are trying to claw me every day won't get anything. I expect to be kept in the dark."

Douglass, 60, who did her share of clawing while working for ABC and CBS, may be the highest-profile TV reporter to jump into presidential politics since NBC's Ron Nessen became Gerald Ford's White House press secretary in 1974. In the modern era of sound-bite warfare, campaign spokesmen tend to be political operatives or, in a few cases, former media commentators, such as Tony Snow, President Bush's third press secretary.

Given her background, is Douglass, who covered John McCain's 2000 campaign, prepared to slam the presumed Republican nominee?

"I do like McCain and the people around him, and I consider him still to be a friend," she says. "But I have fundamental differences with John McCain on the issues and always have. I don't have any problem criticizing John McCain."

Describing her disagreements with the Arizona senator -- on the Iraq war, health care and the Bush tax cuts -- Douglass says: "It was no secret to the reporters around me that I have Democratic-leaning views. But they said I was always fair."

Douglass lives in Georgetown with her husband, lawyer John Phillips. He is an Obama donor, but it was she who was first intrigued by the freshman lawmaker in 2005, when she was covering the Senate for ABC. "I'd come home and say, 'This guy is really impressive. He's got an unusually calm demeanor. He's very smart and strikes me as someone with good judgment.' "

Douglass briefly offered Obama some debate advice in early 2007, while she was teaching at Harvard but before she joined National Journal. It wasn't until a 45-minute job interview with Obama last month that she decided to leave journalism for good.

"The thing that really made me feel at peace with the decision is this conversation we had about telling the truth," she says. "He wants me to tell the truth. Coming from a background in journalism as opposed to PR, that was really the thing I wanted to hear."

At first, "I was afraid I'd slip into on-one-hand/on-the-other-hand mode. I think reporters are constantly struggling with themselves to suppress their own opinions." Because she believes in Obama's message, Douglass says, "for me this is really liberating."

Douglass consulted Mike McCurry, a White House press secretary for Bill Clinton, for advice. "He told me," she said, "that you really have to dump your own opinions out of your head" to properly spout the candidate's views.

McCurry likens the switch to a film critic who is handed a camera and told to make a movie. "She wants to do it in a different way from the spinners of the past," he says. "She wants to get away from the rat-a-tat-tat back-and-forth and keep focused on what journalists need to get the job done."

GOP strategist Dan Schnur, a spokesman for McCain's 2000 campaign, says that Douglass was known for being fair but that the transition may be difficult. "The more us communication types are trained in spin, the more different we become from the reporters who are covering our candidates," he says.

Obama's closest confidant, David Axelrod, says Douglass is already an asset. "She's very fluent in national issues," he says. "Obviously she understands network television from the inside out."

During the long slog through the primaries, Obama earned a reputation for keeping the press at a distance and still holds a news conference only once a week -- compared with McCain's near-daily interaction with reporters -- although the Democrat sometimes takes questions on the fly. "He likes to talk to reporters; he told me that," Douglass says. "He's going to be plenty accessible."

Obama is still feeling his way with the national media. He has hesitated to agree to an Associated Press proposal for a "body watch" -- a pool of reporters who shadow him at all times, even when he is on vacation -- in part out of concern for his daughters' privacy.

The Illinois senator may have unrealistic expectations about news management. In telling reporters on his plane that he would no longer discuss his search for a running mate, he said that if they heard "secondhand accounts, rumors, gossip about this election process, you can take it from me that it is wrong." Of course, details usually leak out, and they are sometimes accurate.

With Hillary Clinton's withdrawal, the campaign entered a new phase last week. Gone are the brutal, eight-stop days that exhausted both the candidate and his press corps. The new schedule is one or two events a day, perhaps a fundraiser, and selected interviews.

The media intensity has faded a bit as well. With news organizations having obliterated their budgets covering the nonstop Democratic primary, NBC's Lee Cowan was the only television correspondent on last week's Obama swing through North Carolina and Missouri, and reporters for just four newspapers -- the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune -- tagged along.

Douglass's first television appearance as a newly minted flack took place on her old network, ABC, the morning after Obama clinched the nomination. The campaign plane had landed at 3 a.m. in Chicago, where Douglass has taken an apartment next door to campaign headquarters, and she was the leadoff interview on "Good Morning America."

After saying, "All right, Linda, the niceties are over," anchor Chris Cuomo asked whether Obama might pick Clinton or another woman as his running mate. Douglass deflected the question -- "There is no short list, there is no long list" -- and pivoted to her talking points, ticking off "the very sharp contrasts" with McCain in "health care and whether the tax cuts go to the rich, as John McCain wants, or to the middle class, as Barack Obama wants, and getting out of Iraq."

Behind the scenes, Douglass tries to dig out answers to reporters' questions. "I bug everyone all day. I'm driving our staff crazy," she says. She also preps Obama for interviews and news conferences, such as Tuesday's session in St. Louis, when she and Axelrod helped him craft a response to McCain's attack on his tax policy hours earlier.

But there are limits to Douglass's clout, as she learned when she twice tried to end the news conference and Obama didn't stop taking questions.

"If he wants to keep talking, he'll keep talking," she says.

A Clintonite's Choice

Fox News's newest contributor, to be announced today, may surprise the liberal crowd: former Clinton White House lawyer Lanny Davis.

"Fox has always treated me with respect and given me a chance to express my point of view," Davis says of the network that the Democratic candidates refused to grant a debate out of concern that it favors Republicans. He will be a frequent guest, along with such Fox stalwarts as Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich.

A relentless surrogate for Hillary Clinton, Davis says, he felt "ganged up on" during appearances on the other cable channels. He says that Clinton was "demonized" by MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, and that CNN's primary-night panels were tilted toward the Obama side.

"Does Fox have a conservative slant on some of their programs? Yes," Davis says. "They're giving me a chance to provide a counterpoint, and that's all I can ask."

Remembrances of Russert

We'll get back to the campaign in a moment, but I wanted to share a few of the many fine remembrances of Tim Russert. I must say how utterly struck I am that Russert's death seemed to touch a nerve among the public, not just Washington journalists, and that owes much to his passion and personality.

Noam Scheiber in the New Republic:

" 'Meet the Press' consistently made news, a rare and precious accomplishment for an interview program--for all of television news, in fact.

"Of course, the real trick is figuring out Russert's secret news-making sauce, which is slightly more complicated. A show like "Meet the Press" hinges on a delicate equilibrium: Prominent guests show up to impress its important viewers. But the important people only watch if the guests say semi-interesting things. Without the opportunity to impress all those viewers, the guests wouldn't show (at least not with the same frequency). Without the chance at some drama, the viewers wouldn't tune in (at least not in the same numbers).

"Russert's ingenious solution to this problem: The gotcha. The delicious possibility of seeing a secretary of state or joint chiefs chairman get that shifty-eyed, busted-for-filching-the-homeroom-Jolly-Rancher-stash look when they contradicted an earlier pronouncement kept us watching week after week. But the questioning was rarely so probing or aggressive or unpredictable that a reasonably agile guest couldn't study his way to a passing grade.

"The gotcha may have been a wearying journalistic device. But, as a strategy for getting big names in front of big audiences on a regular basis, and driving the political news cycle in a way that no other TV program could, it was a stunning success. For that, Russert deserves real credit."

But how much of a gotcha is it, really, when you're confronting the guest with his or her own words?

New Yorker Editor David Remnick:

"Google was his tool and Gotcha his game. But it was Gotcha at its highest form. Russert's gift was to employ his bluff, nice-guy, good-son Irish Catholic upstate persona ('Go Bills!') to offset the avidity with which he would trip up his interlocutors. Arianna Huffington, who once called Russert a "conventional wisdom zombie," was among the many critics who pressed him to go much further, but Russert, more than anyone with a remotely equivalent job, did not back off easily, whether it was with Dick Cheney, in 2002, peddling nonsense about Iraq or with Al Gore, in 2000, trying to ease his way out of a line of questioning on abortion . . .

"There were limits to his approach, and blogs both liberal and conservative sometimes purveyed the notion that he was nothing more than a cozy role-player in the Beltway drama. That notion was deeply unfair. His preparation insured that a politician could not drift long in a mental comfort zone. After one particularly contentious Sunday session, John McCain recalled that he told Russert, 'I hadn't had so much fun since my last interrogation in prison camp.' That expression of grudging admiration may well have been McCain's clever means of D.C. ingratiation, but one can guess it's not one he would have thought to extend to most of Russert's network and cable colleagues."

Politico's Roger Simon:

"Last year, just before the Iowa caucuses, when I was standing in the lobby of the Des Moines Marriott hotel nervously waiting for a cab that was never going to arrive for an appointment for which I was already late, Tim came up and put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Hey, I've got a car. I'll drive you.' And he did. Just like that. He was not a creature of Washington. He was a kid from Buffalo, and it showed. People in Buffalo treat each other like neighbors, and that's the way Tim treated people."

Walter Shapiro in Salon:

"TV news is built around illusion, from the powder-puff makeup artists to the off-screen producers dictating detailed instructions into the earpieces of the on-air talent. As a result, it remains the perfect medium for newscasters and guests to present themselves as something they are not. But there was no blow-dried artifice to Russert, no secret Svengali bequeathing him unearned wisdom. He came across in private conversations on the campaign trail pretty much as he did in public, as bright, bemused, bipartisan, Buffalo-centric and a bit bedazzled by his own good fortune in life. For all his televised ferocity when he trapped a sputtering politician in a web of contradictions, Russert was a true Happy Warrior."

And Howard Fineman has a nice recollection about how Russert dealt with his aging dad.

Back to Politics

Obama was back in church yesterday--no, not that one--and, the Chicago Tribune reports, had this to say:

" 'If we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that too many fathers also are missing, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.'

"The theme of fatherly responsibility is important for Obama, especially now that he is the presumed Democratic nominee for the White House. While his dogma is decidedly liberal, his talk about personal responsibility crafts an appeal to religious conservatives and political centrists. And while he clearly aims the message at Americans of all races, he has chosen more than once to broadcast that message from black churches."

In light of Obama's new anti-smear Web site, this report from the Chicago Sun-Times's Lynn Sweet is enlightening:

"When I phoned the Obama press shop a few times in recent weeks to check out rumors about whether there was a videotape with Michelle Obama using the word 'whitey,' the campaign declined to issue a denial or to pass along the question to Michelle's staff to find out what might be fueling the rumors.

"That's been a standard tactic in dealing with the mainstream press. Unless there is some evidence, ignore the matter and reporters for mainstream outlets probably won't publish anything about racially charged language without proof."

Peggy Noonan has thoughts on McCain's age, beginning with his speech the night Obama sewed it up:

"It should not count against a man that he has not fully mastered the artifice of his profession. Then again, he should have nailed the prompter by now. Such things show a certain competence. Voters are slower to trust you with big things if they see a lack of skill in small things . . .

"Mr. Obama is ahead 47% to 41% in this week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, and no one is surprised. Everyone knows he's ahead. Everyone knows this is a Democratic year. But I think there are two particular subtexts this year, or perhaps I should say texts. One, obviously, is youth versus age. This theme is the clearest it's been since 1960, when the old general who'd planned the Normandy invasion found himself replaced by a young man who had commanded a rickety patrol torpedo boat in World War II."

Did Obama make more than a minor mistake in picking his VP screener? David Corn sees a larger context:

"The selection of Jim Johnson was itself troubling--whether or not Johnson did anything wrong regarding his dealings with Countrywide. He's a longtime Democratic Party insider, a 'big-business Democrat,' as Craig Crawford put its, who headed Fannie Mae in the 1990s and forged a close relationship with Countrywide. He's no agent of change in Washington.

"The Democratic Party is full of 'wise' men and women who jump between government jobs, campaigns, and well-paid private gigs. They can be campaign strategists one year, and corporate consultants or lobbyists the next--or sometimes, as in the case of Mark Penn, both at once. They are part of Washington's permanent establishment. And some will be making a beeline to the Obama campaign, now that he's the party's presumptive nominee.

"To keep his message of change clear and honest, Obama is going to have to say no to these folks, even though they might come with experience and the best of intentions."

Of course, you don't want folks without a day's worth of experience, do you?

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."