Same Gaffes, but Now on Twitter

THE MEDIA EQUATION


By DAVID CARR


Richard Nixon did some terrible things in order to maintain a grip on the Oval Office, but the dumbest may have been recording what went on there.

Published: June 12, 2011

Nowadays, the hidden recorder is no longer necessary: the Internet has become the Rose Mary Woods of the digital age, dutifully transcribing every wiggle and wobble of the people who hold office. Public officials are being ambiently recorded, one way or another, regardless of whether they intend to be.

Extensive efforts were expended over the weekend to comb through Sarah Palin’s e-mails from her time as the governor of Alaska. Ms. Palin may have thought that she was just chatting with her staff and friends, but now every comma, every aside, every random thought is being picked apart for meaning.

There may have been some legitimate news buried in the trove of e-mails, and she remains a person of significant public interest. So the press response makes sense, but she could not be blamed for feeling that she was under attack from a horde of biting ants.

“A lot of those e-mails obviously weren’t meant for public consumption,” she told Chris Wallace of Fox News, where she is a source, a commentator and a subject, all wrapped into one.

As it turns out, the 24,000 pages of e-mails that journalists and the public spent the weekend poring through contained nothing notable — quite an achievement that Ms. Palin seems guilty of nothing more than the excessive use of exclamation points.

But the results are beside the point. She is of interest not because of what she did as governor but because she has almost perfected the modern hybrid of politician and celebrity: once your daughter appears on “Dancing With the Stars,” your celebrity is far more important that your position on off-shore drilling. That means that all those e-mails are destined for public consumption whether she likes it or not.

Like all other celebrities, politicians are expected now to be in constant digital contact with their fans/voters. Ms. Palin has excelled at this with her ubiquitous Twitter messages, her bus tour and her frequent appearances on Fox News. But unlike during the early days of the Internet, when a static Web site was all that politicians needed, communication these days travels not just one way or two, but in all directions. Being in touch means that people can touch you back.

We could blame the transparency of our age, a time when the words “online” and “privacy” should never be juxtaposed. While the keyboard creates an atmosphere of intimacy — you can ask Representative Anthony Weiner about that — digital culture is the opposite of private. If it is typed, linked or attached, it will eventually become known. And as the line between celebrity and governance has been erased, the press tradition of staying away from the private lives of public officials has been rubbed out.

The creep of public officials into the age of telecommunications has been under way for a long time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt mastered the intimacy of radio with the fireside chat. Mr. Nixon understood, somewhere in his lower cortex, that the beast must be fed, and dished up the Checkers speech that referred to the family dog, a domestic motif that met the public media appetites precisely. John F. Kennedy, running against Mr. Nixon, did him one better, realizing early on the importance of appearing presidential on television.

With the stage management of Michael Deaver, the presidency of Ronald Reagan became “Morning (Show) in America.” Bill Clinton, who as a presidential candidate played the sax on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” relied on Hollywood friends to buff his image as the boy from Hope. George W. Bush stumbled with his “Mission Accomplished” moment — but then, like his father, he was never good at playing himself on television.

The Obama presidency was supposed to represent the culmination of governance as a media narrative for the modern age. People voted in favor of the historic narrative, eager to see how it would turn out. But the candidacy that was built on social media, on transparency and openness, has become something far more closed now that he is in office. He has opted for the most part for the historical Rose Garden approach to communications, honing a message to be broadcast to the general public.

And the administration has been particularly aggressive in hunting down and jailing leakers. Mr. Obama may want to be your friend of Facebook, but he, like every other president, wants to maintain custody of the narrative. Now that he actually has to govern, his ratings — an operative word in both politics and media — have dropped.

Perhaps the president realized early what Ms. Palin and Mr. Weiner were learning last week: while e-mail, Facebook and Twitter may be wonderful tools of engagement, easy communication has its downsides.

“The digital revolution for a lot of people in politics is like a high school party where they experience alcohol for the first time,” said Mark McKinnon, former media adviser to George W. Bush and John McCain. “They get very excited, lose their inhibitions, say and do things they shouldn’t, and realize too late they’ve made complete idiots of themselves. And then can’t undo it.”

He continued: “Digital politics invites and rewards quick triggers and does not reward thoughtful reflection or careful judgment. And so it is no surprise that we see so many politicians fail to clear their holsters before they drop the hammer.”

The lessons from this last week were anticipated by Martin Lomasney, a ward boss in Boston at the turn of the last century. “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

Eliot Spitzer, a host on CNN and a politician undone by his own indiscretion and a paper trail to match, has since added a fourth: “Never put it in e-mail.”