Obama response to swiftboat attack book

Corsi, Obama, and threading the p.r. needle
Posted August 14th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

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It’s the quintessential campaign conundrum: ignore an attack or respond forcefully. The prior denies the criticism oxygen, but campaigns generally don’t want to risk leaving an attack out there without a response. The latter gets the campaign’s message out, but it runs the risk of bringing attention to criticism that might otherwise go unnoticed.

With that in mind, there’s Jerome Corsi’s latest hatchet-job against Barack Obama, which we talked about earlier. The Obama campaign has barely uttered a word about Corsi or the book, but as Marc Ambinder noted today, “[D]on’t think for a minute that his aides aren’t paying attention, and don’t confuse the relative silence for a lack of action.”

Chastened by Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 refusal to respond quickly enough to Corsi and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, the campaign is determined to discredit Corsi, quickly.

“We are aggressively attacking the factual errors in this book, and making sure that everyone knows about the deeply offensive things Corsi has said that will give readers of any political affiliation pause and ample reason to question the lies he’s written,” Tommy Vietor, an Obama spokesperson, said in a statement.

“This book is nothing but a series of lies that were long ago discredited, written by an individual who was discredited after he wrote a similar book to help George Bush and Dick Cheney get re-elected four years ago. This is his attempt to perpetuate those politics for four more years. The reality is that there are many lie-filled books like this in the works, cobbled together from the internet to make money off of a presidential campaign. We will respond to these smears forcefully with all means necessary.”

In this case, it’s a delicate threading of the needle — quietly working behind the scenes to discredit Corsi and expose his lies with the media, which seems to be largely effective, since most reporters (whether they admit it or not) remember the Corsi’s Swiftboat smears from four years ago were largely a work of fiction.

I say “quietly” because we probably won’t see Obama addressing the subject personally, and the campaign probably won’t be distributing any press releases on the subject. But aides are already contacting news outlets covering the book, highlighting Corsi’s falsehoods, and arguing that this is a right-wing hack who isn’t to be taken seriously.

All of this, of course, is an example of the Obama team learning from what happened to Kerry, and preventing it from happening again.

“The idea that you can sit on something and hope it doesn’t break through simply no longer applies,” an Obama aide said.

Greg Sargent reported on what the pushback looks like at Obama HQ.

Obama advisers say that whenever they hear that Corsi has been booked for an appearance on a network program, they are quickly contacting the program’s producers to rebut the book’s charges in phone conversations and giving them a whole run-down of past Corsi quotes that are controversial.

Obama aides also vow to insist that the producers allow them to have on a campaign surrogate to attack the charges, and are expecting to recruit more campaign surrogates, well plied with talking points, to push back against the book.

Obama aides also say they’ll soon be blasting an extensive fact-check of the book to the campaign’s national press list. They’ve also created something called “Action Wire,” which is designed to use the campaign’s formidable email list to spread debunking of the book’s charges.

“Despite the fact that Mr. Corsi has no credibility, we understand the reality that it’s going to get covered, and are going to aggressively work to make sure people understand that this is nothing more than a rehash of already debunked lies,” an Obama adviser said.

That’s precisely the right attitude. The book is going to get some attention. It shouldn’t, and news outlets should ignore deceptive hatchet-jobs rather than help promote them, but the media is the media. The campaign has to run with the media landscape it has, not the media landscape it might want or wish to have at a later time.

In other words, ignoring Corsi’s book was never a reasonable option. That the Obama campaign realizes this, and is responding accordingly, is an encouraging sign.