NYT Magazine: Between Obama and the Press

[DeepModem Mom]

Between Obama and the Press
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: December 17, 2008


(Brian Ulrich/NYT)
Robert Gibbs

Robert Gibbs' heady Washington rise was certified on a humid day in June when a procession of media and political fancies gathered in tribute to Tim Russert....In a smiling stampede of congratulations, mourners were wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center to get to Gibbs, a journeyman campaign flack who had latched onto Barack Obama’s Senate race four years earlier and has been his chief spokesman ever since. By now a senior adviser to Obama, Gibbs was here, along with Obama’s chief strategist and message guru, David Axelrod, to represent the soon-to-be Democratic nominee....

The paradox of this scene was that the Obama campaign’s communications strategy was predicated in part on an aggressive indifference to this insider set. Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”

The campaign bragged that Obama never even visited with the editorial board of The Washington Post — a decision that would have been unheard of for any serious candidate in a previous presidential cycle. “You could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo and understand that people aren’t reading The Washington Post,” Gibbs told me last month in Chicago.

It was a source of great amusement to Obama’s staff that people thought they could use conventional schmoozing practices to win favor with them....

There was a sense among Obama’s communications team that not only did they have a gifted candidate to ride but also that they had figured out new ways to maximize their advantages. The campaign highlighted its mastery of new political media that included a vast database of e-mail addresses and an ability to quickly put up Web sites and use blogs, online video and text messaging. They viewed themselves as “game changers” (the 2008 cliché for innovators), avatars of a New Way organization that had more in common with a Silicon Valley start-up — think Google or YouTube — than with any traditional political campaign that came before it.

But Obama’s New Way organization was grounded largely on Old School codes — notions of loyalty, aggressiveness and discretion. Keep things in the family. “We all believe this isn’t about us, it’s about something bigger than us as individuals,” Gibbs told me. “And that governed our ability to keep information to ourselves.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/magazine/21Gibbs-t.html?bl=&ei=5087&en=73d146a43792db59&ex=1229835600&pagewanted=all