Karen just asked me to ask Swamphusband, if the Punjab memo’s substance is so relevant, why did the Obama people send it out “not for attribution.”
I can’t speak for Swamphusband, but it’s been a topic of conversation around the Swamptable, so I’ll offer some half-baked thoughts. First: The move was clearly not well thought out. If the Obama team had sent out a more sedate email, with the same information, either for attribution or not, we’d be having a different discussion right now. Maybe about something substantive, but it could well be about how hunky Fred Thompson is (count your blessings, liberal blogosphere!). It would probably still not be about outsourcing.
Second: They sent it out “not for attiburion” because the iffy truism that Americans don’t like negative campaigning has never had much of an impact on the actual practice of negative campaigning — just the desire to avoid even the APPEARANCE of negativity. (At least one take away from this incident is admiration of Clinton for never making any kind of explicit promise not to engage in negative campaigning. In this view, Obama’s pledge for a (ultimately unfeasible) “new kind of politics” is just another rookie mistake.
Anyway, campaigns’ wish to keep the mud off their public faces means that a great deal of what a reporter receives from a campaign is “off the record,” or “not for attribution,” even when the information is often a) publicly available and b) boring: A report that Romney mangled the name of one of his New Hampshire county chairs. A link to a particularly creative homebrew Obama t-shirt. Someone once sent me poll numbers. I know: HOT STUFF. I’d tell you who, but I can’t!
Or can I? As Karen wrote last week, “off the record” and “not for attribution” are agreements journalists make with their sources, not declarations the sources make whenever they feel like it. If you say, “I want this off the record,” and then the reporter says, “I want it on the record,” and then you keep talking, well, by most standards, you’ve no one but yourself to blame. Sending out an email with that declaration attached is the same mistake, made virtually. In the last cycle, Kerry aide Stephanie Cutter became something of a political flack martyr when New York Times journalist Adam Nagourney put that logic into practice and published quotes from an “off the record” email that Cutter sent out to several reporters. “We all should have learned from that,” one staffer at a major campaign told me. (To judge by the way that communications personnel in both parties speak of this incident, one imagines it is told at night, by the flickering light of Blackberrys, a la “The Tale of the Hook.” Or maybe it has a more dramatic ending, like, “and the press release was coming… FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!”)
Of course, “off the record” emails continue because campaigns have the upper hand. Or at least journalists and campaigns both imagine they do. In theory, reporters could refuse to recognize a contract they didn’t agree to — as Nagourney proved — but they have to weigh that strict interpretation of the source-reporter relationship against some other factors: the need for access and the simple truth that presidential campaigns have bigger research budgets, and more time, than most news organizations. Though most of the material campaigns send is both publicly available and trivial, getting it from a campaign – the rationalization goes – is a part of an ongoing dialog that might, at some point, bear true news-like fruit. Burn someone over an email and you risk losing access to everything. Reporters, as you might guess, tend to err on the side of access and thus “off the record” emails continue to fly.
Indeed, to me, one of the most remarkable things about last week’s “D-Punjab” dust-up was that the reporters covering it felt the need to point out that while most had been sent out under the heading “not for attribution,” – as the New York Sun put it — “At least some copies of this document contained no such disclaimer,” as if they were concerned themselves about the appearance of breaking the journalistic compact that actually has scant purchase in reality: See, no broken fake agreement, please keep sending us stuff!
UPDATE: Jared asks: “Your column seems to discount Obama’s explanation that this memo was not reviewed by senior campaign staffers. Do you not even consider the possibility that it was a low level individual who thought he could impress everyone with his wit?” I don’t “discount” anything — I just point out that the memo was not well thought-out. Not having been reviewed by senior staffers would seem to be proof of that.