He swings….and it’s a home run!

Posted on Feb 02, 2012

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Talk about turning a negative into a positive. Talk about a lesson in crisis communications. 

As a political junkie and student of communications I’ve been trying to catch as much of the Republican primary debates as I can. I was especially interested in the one in South Carolina because it was on the heels of Newt Gingrich’s former wife saying he asked her if they could have an open marriage, so he could have his mistress on the side.

From a crisis communications perspective, you’d think that especially for a Republican, the party that consistently claims the high moral ground, that this would be somewhat of a problem. After all, it was infidelity that killed Herman Cain’s aspirations.

So how would Newt handle this? As it turns out, masterfully. As the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense.  And did he go on the offence.

He was as ready for the question as he could possibly be, probably even anxious for it,  and the why the moderator John King offered it up couldn’t have served him better.  Rather than framing it somewhat along the lines of whether he felt a strong moral compass in the area of a traditional marriage would be an important attribute for a president, King simply repeated what the ex-wife alleged and asked Gingrich if he wanted to respond.

“No” he said “but I will”, and with that he got as indignant as he could and unloaded on the media for bringing it up, saying it was the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the media that makes it harder to attract decent people to run for public office. He said he was appalled and the fact the moderator choose to start the debate with such a question is despicable. This earned him a standing ovation.

It was one of the best examples of turning the tables I have ever seen. A home run in his practiced response, and beyond that it set the tone for the night – for the rest of the evening he would own the room.

Why? Look, I don’t pretend to understand Republicans, but from a communications strategy point of view, he nailed it. The fact it worked is interesting but also a little troubling. 

The fact that attacking the media is met with such overwhelming support and enthusiasm says something that the American journalism should find discomforting, but that’s a topic for another day. But one point on that – if the American media were more respected, an attack on them wouldn’t be enough to allow anybody to skate around what would potentially be a game changer of an issue for a party that claims its roots lie in family values.

Thanks for stopping by.