At Hetrick, we teach clients how to work with the media—what’s news, what’s not and how to help reporters get timely, accurate information. One lesson we teach: “Get bad news out fast for a quick story death.”
You may arrive at your own conclusions about the wisdom of Sen. John McCain’s selection of a running mate—and history will tell whether it was a politically savvy choice—but in the announcement itself, we have a powerful new example of the slings and arrows that can result from hoping bad news stays buried.
Within 72 hours of Gov. Sarah Palin’s rollout, we learned that she’s the subject of an abuse-of-power investigation, that she was a director of a 527 group (the non-regulated but influential political organizations Sen. McCain dislikes) in support of recently indicted Sen. Ted Stevens, that she may have been involved with a political party that advocates Alaska’s secession from the U.S., that she hired a lobbyist to secure the kinds of earmarks Sen. McCain opposes, and yes, that her 17-year-old, unmarried daughter is pregnant.
None of that—especially the family matter—may prove relevant to the McCain/Palin team’s ability to win an election or run the country, but given McCain’s choice of a running mate, any competent political handler or candidate vetter could have predicted the fallout and better prepared the candidates and their party to release the bad news up front, with appropriate explanations and context.
The best defense is a good offense. With the Palin rollout, we went straight to defensiveness.
Was this the best way to launch a campaign?
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