I made a comment the other day that I’d like to see the next Democratic President hold daily news conferences. There was some pushback on that, so I want to outline a little more about what I’m thinking.
When you think about most people who become President, one thing most of them have in common is a lack of managerial experience outside of government. Looking back over the last 50+ years, Jimmy Carter (ran a peanut farm) was the only Democratic President who had non-governmental management experience. The biggest enterprise ever managed by Obama and Biden before becoming President was their Senate offices. So, it stands to reason that these guys are going to be more hands-on than they probably ought to be.
This leads to the main reason people think it’s a bad idea for a President to have a daily news conference: they’re too busy running the country. But what if they delegated more and left more time for communication? The reality is that there are many, many more decisions made in government than can be made by a President. What’s the reason for him or her making the decisions they make? Is there some law, guide or best practice that says the President needs to be involved in as much day-to-day as they are? I think it’s a combination of lack of experience managing large organizations, timid staff who are afraid they’ll be called out if something didn’t hit the President’s desk, and tradition.
In Mexico, the morning news conference by the President (mañanera) is a daily tradition, and it’s an orchestrated presentation of whatever the government wants to talk about that day. Claudia Sheinbaum seems to get the business of government done even though she takes part of her day to run the mañanera.
In hindsight, I think one of the Obama and Biden mistakes was fighting with the press rather than trying to simply co-opt them. (At the time, I thought they were doing the right thing, but I’ve changed my mind.) As Steve M writes today, the press is full of knee-jerk habits, one of which is their 20th century mindset on foreign affairs that makes Signalgate a “gate” rather than something they’ll ignore. Another of those habits is to always cover the President when he speaks, as long as he makes news.
Trump makes news in these dumb Executive Order (EO) signing ceremonies in the Oval Office. There’s no reason that a Democrat couldn’t break some newsworthy item every day in the Oval, surrounded by all the stuff that DC correspondents wank about like the Resolute Desk. Josh Marshall has a good explanation why the DC press is having such a hard time reporting clearly about EOs not being orders from the king:
Any good journalist covering the federal government knows this [about EOs], though it could be hard to see it last night. But watching the initial press response, I realized it was something that runs deeper. What’s clear in these headlines is that the big news organizations simply lack a vocabulary or a strategy for how to report to readers when the president claims to do something he not only lacks the legitimate authority to do but even the power to do. That’s a very basic, foundational thing, and it requires some explanation about why we’re still here since we’re 10 years into this. But there we are.
News organizations have deep muscle memory creating the default assumption that when the president speaks it is if not fully accurate (as to legal authority or interpretation) or true, at least in the general ballpark of the same. So we see adjectives like “audacious” and “aggressive.” Fuzzy words that scrum around something rumbly and tough because the territory is somehow too daunting for journalists to walk on to. It’s the difference between “this is an outrage” and “that won’t even work.” Ten years in, Trump is still able to gobble up the space between the traditional assumptions of the political press and their lack of an idiom and vocabulary to accurately describe what he’s actually doing.
I know that the good government folks will tell us that we need to re-educate people on how Congress is a co-equal branch of government and that the President isn’t king. But, the unfortunate fact, as we saw with Biden, is that the President is going to be blamed for things whether or not they’re his or her fault. So I’m advocating that we accept that reality and leverage it to our benefit.
