From the NYT: Obama After Dark: The Precious Hours Alone

An interesting look at Obama's decision-making style.

- Click here for article.

Mr. Obama calls himself a “night guy,” and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essential as his time in the Oval Office. Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence.

There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself.

He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing papers delivered at 8 p.m. by the staff secretary. He reads 10 letters from Americans chosen each day by his staff. “How can we allow private citizens to buy automatic weapons? They are weapons of war,” Liz O’Connor, a Connecticut middle school teacher, wrote in a letter Mr. Obama read on the night of June 13.

The president also watches ESPN, reads novels or plays Words With Friends on his iPad.

Michelle Obama occasionally pops in, but she goes to bed before the president, who is up so late he barely gets five hours of sleep a night. For Mr. Obama, the time alone has become more important.

“Everybody carves out their time to get their thoughts together. There is no doubt that window is his window,” said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s first chief of staff. “You can’t block out a half-hour and try to do it during the day. It’s too much incoming. That’s the place where it can all be put aside and you can focus.”

NYT: Obama’s New Approach Takes a Humorous Turn

A key part of a president's White House Staff is the communication office. Strategies for using the media effectively have been part of presidential administrations since Washington's day. Jefferson and Hamilton has newspapermen on their respective payroll's.

As media technology changes, so do the strategies.

The New York Times reports on President Obama's recent appearance on Funny or Die's Between Two Ferns.

The pop-culture appearance is the latest public relations gamble that Mr. Obama and his aides have taken in their pursuit of new ways to deliver their message to the connected-but-distracted generation. “Between Two Ferns,” which satirizes the low-budget look of public access television, much as “Wayne’s World” did, has had episodes that have been viewed as many as 30 million times, often because of their outrageous content.

“We have to find ways to break through,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser and chief communications strategist. “This is essentially an extension of the code we have been trying to crack for seven years now.”

Aides said Mr. Obama’s immediate reason for subjecting himself to Mr. Galifianakis is to urge young people to sign up for health insurance on the government’s website, healthcare.gov. As a March 31 deadline for enrolling for 2014 approaches, the White House is making one final push to try to increase the numbers.

Although Mr. Obama has hardly abandoned traditional set pieces like interviews with network anchors, he has been more willing than his predecessors to ditch the oh-so-serious playbook that dominated White House communications strategy for decades.

The president has appeared on several late-night comedy shows, including once “slow-jamming” the news with Jimmy Fallon. He has held Google Hangouts and Facebook town halls, and did an interview about housing onZillow.com, a real estate listings website. He has sat on the sofa with the ladies of “The View” and done an interview with the basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley. His televised town halls have appeared on MTV, Black Entertainment Television, the Country Music Channel and Univision, the Spanish-language network.

- Click here for the article, and here for a second.

Richard Wirthlin

Richard Wirthlin, a pollster who worked with Ronald Reagan died recently. Both 2301s and 2302s ought to read up on him as he is credited (if that's the proper word) with developing the field of campaign polling.

From the Huffington Post:

He first polled for Ronald Reagan when the future president was seeking reelection as California's governor in 1970. As recounted to author David Moore for his book, The Super Pollsters, Wirthlin had not previously been "a strong Reagan supporter," at least not "until I met him." Although he initially thought of Reagan as "a two-bit, B-grade actor, four degrees to the right of Atilla the Hun," Wirthlin's view changed after he spend two hours alone with Reagan explaining the results of a poll on policy issues.

He soon became a trusted adviser, chief strategist of Reagan's successful 1980 presidential campaign and the pollster who reportedly met with Reagan in the White House every month to brief him on his latest surveys. Reagan later described Wirthlin as "the best in the business ... when he speaks, I listen."

Former colleagues interviewed by The Huffington Post spoke of Wirthlin as a trailblazer in the then-emerging field of campaign polling. "When we started in this business," recalled former Wirthlin Worldwide Executive Vice President Vince Breglio, "there really only were three firms operating in the political realm."

. . .

Wirthlin's former employees and colleagues credit him with a series of innovations that continue to influence the practice of campaign polling today. These include:

The right direction/wrong track question. Colleagues credit Wirthlin with being the original author of the question that asks whether things in the country are "generally going in the right direction" or have gotten "pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." Most national media polls now track that question as a leading indicator of support for incumbent officeholders. As Wirthlin explained in a 2004 op-ed, the question helped inspire Reagan's now famous rhetorical question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Nightly tracking polls. David Moore credits Wirthlin with the first systematic use of the nightly tracking poll, in which a relatively small number of respondents are polled every day and their results are averaged in "rolling samples" of those interviewed on the day before.

Dial group tests. Newhouse says Wirthlin was the first campaign pollster to do what is now called "dial testing," the process of wiring up focus group respondents to mechanical dials that they use to constantly rate a presidential speech or debate.

Other innovations may have been less about invention than application within the realm of campaign-sponsored polling. Breglio credits Wirthlin with the first extensive application of advanced statistical techniques such as multiple regression and factor analysis. Republican pollster Steve Lombardo never worked for Wirthlin, but nonetheless sees his most "powerful and lasting" contribution as his pioneering measurement of political values. "He forced us to go beyond surface attitudes and to find the key 'value' that was driving that attitude. His feeling was that core values like beliefs in fairness or freedom were often at the core of public opinion, and that only by peeling back that onion could we begin to understand how to change attitudes."

The Power of the President

In light of the midterm elections, some notable Democrats have written recommendations to Obama outlining how he can advance his agenda without Congress. Depending on one's ideology, this can be a good or bad thing, but it does highlight how the powers -- and tools -- of the office have expanded over American history.

The report mentioned the following mechanisms:

- executive orders
- rulemaking
- agency management
- convening and creating public-private relationships
- commanding the armed forces
- diplomacy

Their recommendations amount to a blueprint for action over the heads of Congress.

Presidential Commissions

The "Debt Commission" report issued this week, points out a deficiency in my notes. I have little about presidential commissions, which are created from time to time to focus on certain issues not otherwise dealt with by Congress or other existing institutions. From Wikipedia:

In the United States, a Presidential Commission is a special task force ordained by the President to complete some special research or investigation. They are often used politically in one of two ways: either to draw attention to a problem (the publication of a report by a commission can generally be counted on to draw attention from the media, depending on how its release is handled); or, on the other hand, to delay action on an issue (if the President wants to avoid taking action but still look concerned about an issue, he can convene a commission and then let it slip into obscurity). However, there have been cases (the Tower, Rogers and Warren Commissions) where the commission has created reports that have been used as evidence in later criminal proceedings.


Here's a list of -- according to The Week -- the seven most controversial U.S. presidential commissions.

A Sample White House Staffer

Stephanie Cutter, Assistant to the President for Special Projects, is responsible for developing messages promoting health care legislation. She better get to work.

- GOP will do everything to undo health care law.
- Who Runs Gov.

A Conservative Reappaises Carter's Presidency

And likes what he sees.

Presidencies are reconsidered from time to time, today's success is tomorrow's failure, and vice versa. Jimmy Carter began increasing the size of the military, deregulated tracking and the airlines, and a few other things that conservatives normally like. Being a Democrat, they'd be naturally inclined to discount his achievements, but things change.

Does Press Access Make it Less Likely the Press Will Take Critical Stances in Their Stories?

Yes, it does. Presidents have counted on this for years.

White House Video Blog

Each new leap in technology allows the White House new ways to frame how it presents itself to the public. This doesn't meant the efforts are necessarily successful. Here's a link to the White House's video blog.