Josh:
As we often say, you never know which news maker is going to walk into the door of the New York Stock Exchange to ring a bell, be interviewed by one of the 30 or so news organizations that report out of here, or appear at one of the scores of events that happen every month at our Big Board Club. Well, the Big Board Club was buzzing this week with our annual Investor Relations Summit attended by hundreds of the investor relations chiefs of Fortune 500 companies listed here at the NYSE. The Summit focuses on key issues facing public companies from activist investors, to changing regulatory rules, to the potential impact of an ever changing political landscape.
Josh:
There was an all star lineup of speakers and conversations that we are honored to be able to share with our ICE House listeners in the coming weeks. And just because of timeliness, given that we're now less than 50 days out from what will surely be a monumental midterm election, we'll start with the conversation we held on stage with Joe Lockhart, former White House Press Secretary, and now vice chairman of Edelman Public Affairs. And between those, bookends a fascinating life that spans some of the major issues in politics, technology, sports, and culture that have made headlines for the last 20 years. My conversation with Joe Lockhart, right after this.
Speaker 2:
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Josh:
In Washington, the president is under siege. We've seen reports about his relationships with other women. The midterms are looming. Congress hangs in the balance and Bob Woodward has a book out. There's growing talk of impeachment. The year is 1998. 20 years ago, the president is Bill Clinton. The press secretary is Joe Lockhart. I'm going to go to this slide now. This is the New York times from exactly 20 years ago today, September 12th, 1998. The full text of the Starr Report transmitted to Congress. The day earlier, a vote had been held whether Congress would receive this report. Some of you may remember images of a black SUV and Capitol Hill police unloading file boxes of the Starr Report coming to Congress. In similar fashion, maybe sometime in the future, we will see the scene unfold as the Mueller Report makes its way to Capitol Hill. In 55 days, like 20 years ago, the president of the United States will face an agitated electorate casting a referendum two years into a term on his accomplishment and temperament.
Josh:
The time is different than 1998. The stakes are different than 1998 and the Press Secretary is different than 1998. Our guest today, Joe Lockhart has mellower clients today than he did back then. They are the Fortune 500 CEOs. The bosses of people like you and me. A native of New York, a graduate of Georgetown. After leaving the White House, Joe was one of the founding partners of The Glover Park Group, one of the most successful firms in Washington DC. And he has never shied away from the hairiest of assignments. John Kerry's campaign in 2004, leading communications at Facebook as it approached its IPO, leading communications for the National Football League. So, and Joe got his start working on the 1980 reelection campaign of Jimmy Carter. So he's used to working for one term president. And as Donald Trump would say, "We'll see what happens." Given how the issues in this election range from foreign policy to technology, to even sports in our National Anthem, we will cover a large part of the playing field to Joe today. Please welcome my friend, Joe Lockhart.
Josh:
Just a little grayer.
Joe Lockhart:
Brown hair.
Josh:
Good to see you. So let's start with a little history lesson. Set the stage for us. You think things were stacked up against the president back in 1998, but the results were pretty flat. You took over the podium on October 5th, and I'm showing you this sort of midterm slide over the last many midterm elections and that narrow little gap where red is right over blue shows the Senate was flat in '98 and the House was just a five seat gain for the Republicans in the middle of impeachment. A causal relationship with your appointment?
Joe Lockhart:
Yes, next question. No, the '98s midterms were interesting for a couple reasons. Democrats... The first midterm election for any incumbent president traditionally loses somewhere between 20 to 30 seats. It's bigger in the sixth year. In '98, we were going through impeachment, the president, and we were awaiting our fade in the Senate. And for the first time, I think since 1840, Democrats actually picked up five seats. We were... You would think given the environment, the political environment in Washington, it would've been a blood bath, but the reality is, as much as we were focused on these things in Washington, the economy was going well. People thought the world was a safer place than it had been before president Clinton. And they thought the priorities in Washington were misplaced. So it ended up being a very good year for Democrats.
Josh:
And I want to bring you back again, stick on memory lane for a minute because the election, I think was November 3rd. You're basically new to the podium. You're doing a briefing on November 4th. As the Starr Report has been transmitted to Congress, there will be at vote in the house during the lame-duck session on impeachment. You are asked about it the day after this voting happened. I want to play that video.
Speaker 5:
We went over this a little bit with the desk, but I wanted to come back to it on the impeachment inquiry. You have said from the beginning that the White House intends to cooperate with the committee. Do Tuesday's results make you somewhat less inclined to be cooperative?
Joe Lockhart (Video):
No.
Speaker 5:
Your hand is strengthened somehow by the-
Joe Lockhart (Video):
No, I don't view it that way. Our view on the committee and the proceedings remains the same. We want something that's fair, nonpartisan, focused, and timely. And we will work with the committee to try to pursue that goal.
Josh:
What I'm struck by as I watched the- As I dug deep in C-SPAN last night, is that after an election, Press Secretary's back at the podium, dealing very methodically with the questions. There didn't seem to be hysteria. Just help explain for our audience here, what may happen after this election and a report comes out or the next steps in what the Press Secretary has to do with the podium.
Joe Lockhart:
Sure. I think politically in '98, after picking up seats, we had a sense at the White House that impeachment had been derailed, that the public had spoken. And the results from that night's voting was so out of character with a sixth year president midterm, that it was a pretty strong message. Again, a lot of the Republicans were arguing about a moral case against the president. The president and Democrats were arguing about the job that the president was being done, and it was pretty stark contrast. And we thought the public sent a message. We were wrong. We found that Congress was going to move and do whatever they wanted, because they had the votes and some very effective leaders at enforcing discipline in the Republican House, made sure that the votes were there. So it didn't have... It was disassociated from what the will of the public was at that point.
Joe Lockhart:
So, within a matter of a week or two, we realized that we were going down this path and there was nothing we could do to stop it. All we could do was make sure that we framed the environment as best we could for what was going to happen in the Senate. Again, the idea that somehow 15 or 20 Democrats would defect based on the evidence, based on the charges, based on the situation was pretty unlikely. And we needed to make sure that we gave them no reason to fundamentally reshape their own politics. I get asked a lot about, is this like 1998, what we're living now? And there's a lot of parallels, but there's one fundamental difference. Our political strategy and I'm not arguing, it was the right one or the wrong one. It's just what it was as compared to what the strategy is today. Our strategy back then was to at least from the White House, never focus any attention on the investing.
Joe Lockhart:
You never heard out of the president's mouth except on one rare occasion, which was a mistake, that "I'm a victim. They're after me. I didn't do anything wrong." All he did was say, "I'm focused on your business. I'm focused on the economy. I'm focused on healthcare. I'm focused on making trade deals." And that was our strategy. Now we has plenty of people on the outside who were out attacking the independent council and fighting the political war, but it never came from the president. And what we were able, I think to achieve, was to have enough support among Democrats and independents, that somehow thought that this was just a partisan attack on their president, but to keep for all of the electorate, the idea that the president was focused on their business, not his own. That's the big difference with now.
Joe Lockhart:
And I don't... For it's... It is the president's current strategy and his team, but they do everything there they can to focus as much attention as they can on this issue. I mean, we are, today facing what some meteorologists are calling the most cataclysmic storm that's come our way in five decades. And the president was tweeting about Bob Mueller this morning. So, and it may work. Again, I am very leery of the knee jerk rejection of any Trump's strategy because he won. And I thought he... I told groups like this leading up to the election, "Don't even bother to vote. It's not even going to be close. He can't win.: And I had numbers to back it up and 35 years in this business to back it up, and he won. So I think there is reason to be cautious about making broad, bold statements. I can, just as a observer of the last year and a half, say that the two organizations approached the situation in a fundamentally different way and history will tell.
Josh:
Yeah. So people might have in our question and answer session, real questions about how '98 and '99 unfolded for you as you went through impeachment. Let's now skip forward 20 years. We're looking at this picture up on the screen and it shows the House race ratings by the Cook Political Report. The GOP has 237 seats. Now the Democrats 193, Republicans need to hold 218 seats to keep the speakership. Do those yellow districts and the pink districts represent a route map for Air Force One over the next 55 days?
Joe Lockhart:
Yes and no. Many of the hardest and closest races for Republican incumbents, they can't come out and say, but the last thing in the world they want is Trump to come. If you're the state of New Jersey, if you live in the state of New Jersey, you're running in New Jersey seven or at New Jersey 11, the last thing you want is Trump to come, because he both depresses suburban vote. That's Republican or independent center right. And energizes the left. So their map looks different. Their map looks... They're going to go to places that are rural. They're going to go to places that are the bluest of blue and stay away from probably the toughest races. I think they're going to do that. The one thing that I think observers have... Independent observers, so this is not a partisan comment, is there's a lot of strategy that goes on.
Joe Lockhart:
And then there's one strategist who sits above all of them and makes some decisions. And that's the president. So he'll go where he wants to go. I can tell you, there are places that... If you're a Republican running in central New Jersey, you can't say, "I don't want Trump in my district." Because 30% of your vote loves him. But 70% of the district hates him. 50%, 20% is like, "I wouldn't vote for him, but if he came to my district, that might give me incentive to go and vote for the Democratic challenger." So I think his map looks different. It'll be a question whether they'll have the discipline to stay out of the places.
Joe Lockhart:
You look at the statewide races, say in Georgia, a pretty conservative state. I don't know that there's anyone there who really wants Trump to come. Now, Montana they definitely want them to come. And because it really does... A presidential trip into Montana gives them a week of good press. And there's no real downside to that. So it's a question of whether they're strategic this fall or whether it's ego driven. Which we're going to just have to watch and wait.
Josh:
Another president touched down in Urbana last week. Number 44, Barack Obama gave a long speech, had a quote, something like, "They can't even manage to say Nazis are bad." President Trump responds sort of effectively saying, "I couldn't watch it. I fell asleep." If you were a Democrat in Josh Gottheimer's district in New Jersey, do you want Obama to come in and see him?
Joe Lockhart:
Yeah. It depends on the district. If it's Josh's seat, our friend, probably yes based on the district. The really interesting thing that happens. And like everybody, I follow politics now very differently than I did 20 years ago. So about once an hour, I'll pull the phone out, look at Twitter. And for the last year and a half, it's been fun to read, particularly because all of my Republican friends are kind of never Trumpers. And I get asked questions. I go on CNN. I do all this stuff. And my stock answer is, "What he said." Or "What she said. Whatever of the Republican just said, I agree with." Because it's much stronger coming from them. The only day that didn't happen, that I realized that my Republican friends are actually Republicans, is the day Obama went out, because it united them in being critical of Obama. And I remembered, "Oh yeah, these guys are-
Josh:
They hate him.
Joe Lockhart:
These guys are my opponents and yeah, I mean, they're my friends, but we argue about stuff and it's real. And we haven't been arguing for the last 18 months.
Josh:
Right.
Joe Lockhart:
So I think there's a flip side risk with Obama and that's why I think he'll pick his district. If you look at-
Josh:
Same with Nancy Pelosi on the cover of Time magazine.
Joe Lockhart:
Sure, sure. And if you look at-
Josh:
Stick your head up.
Joe Lockhart:
Obama did a bunch of endorsements about a month ago. Candidates that he wanted to personally endorse and it wasn't the most important races. It was very surgically picked to the races that they thought... And it went down to county supervisor level, where he thought he could make a difference without there being a downside. So they will, I believe they'll be very surgical about this. And we'll just have to see where the president goes and what his strategy is.
Josh:
Quick on the Senate. Put the Senate map up there body like this. Currently GOP is holding it 52 48, a lot more Democrats in play than red. Just a couple tossups. Take your pick on where you think we might see a few surprises.
Joe Lockhart:
Well, I don't know about... I don't think we're... I can't look at a state and say, "I really do think that Nevada's the place where Democrats are going to win." Or, "Arizona's the place where Democrats win." Or, "How does Heidi Heikamp hold on for another term?" I really think the poll that Josh was referencing in the beginning, the new generic ballot, if you read down into it, if there's a democratic wave, the Hawaiian experts say it's got to be plus six in the generic for the Democrats to take the House. There has to be a tsunami for the Senate. Just based on who's up. Democrats have like... Six years ago, the Republicans in the height of the power of the Tea Party, nominated about five political corpses to run against Democrats.
Joe Lockhart:
And they were just truly flawed, terrible candidates had nothing to do with the Republican party, had nothing to do with the national scope. They just put people up who, as soon as the camera was in their face, revealed themselves as very bad politicians. It happened in Indiana. It happened in Missouri. They haven't done that by and large this time. But the pollsters say that if Democrats are plus 11 in the generic, then the Senate will go democratic. The Democrats are, I think, plus 14 or 13 right now. So there's, like the storm sitting off the coast, literally, figuratively the ingredients are there. The one thing that I think we all have to add now is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand who's voting. Not how you're going to vote, who's actually going to show up.
Joe Lockhart:
There's two celebrated races now. Oh three, actually. The Florida governor's race, the New York congressional districts in the Bronx, the Boston Congressman Capuano's district where these people had 20 and 30 point leads three weeks before election day. And one of them lost by 20, which meant that the pollsters really had no idea who was going to go out, where people were and the traditional measurements don't work anymore. It's a long winded way of saying, I have no idea who who's going to come in. I have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen in the House. I think Democrats will retake the house.
Josh:
So then-
Joe Lockhart:
Senate, I just don't know.
Josh:
So then there is this X factor that has 55 days to continue to a play out and that's presidential job approval. According to RealClearPolitics, just yesterday 41% approve, 53% disapprove, a differential of 12.5%. You look at the 600 days of Trump's presidency. That's the green line against all of his predecessors, Obama, Bush, Clinton, down the line, sort of holding the base strong in that 30 to 40 level. And all of the sort of the way history has affected his predecessors, but 55 days and 40% approval. Now, how does that impact those races?
Joe Lockhart:
Well, I mean, the really interesting thing about the job approval is, the first time since I've been working in politics that it's totally not correlated with the state of the economy. It couldn't be more disassociated. I love to say that we got through impeachment in the late nineties, because we were brilliant. We got through impeachment, because people were feeling really good about where they were. They were feeling good about where their family was. Their wages were rising, they had a sense that they had a president who cared about the issues that they cared about and they didn't want to rock the boat. Trump should be in the high fifties based on where the economy is and he's not. So it's very hard to go back and find a historical precedent that says, "Oh, it's this kind of election. It's like Johnson in '66. This is happening."
Joe Lockhart:
So there really isn't one and the really hard thing then to determine is then how much baggage do Republicans have to assume in congressional districts around the country for the president? And as a partisan, it's hard for me to feel sorry for Republicans because they've made my life miserable. I've worked in five presidential campaigns and won one. So let's just start there. I'm reliving my brilliance, but it's almost impossible to be a Republican right now, politically. Unless you live in a very conservative, rural state because Trump is a lightning rod and 35 to 40% of the country loves him and will do anything for him. And it doesn't matter what Mueller has. It doesn't matter. Like he said, he could walk down fifth avenue and shoot someone and get away with it.
Joe Lockhart:
Well that 35 to 40% makes up about 75 to 80% of any incumbents, primary voters. So you can't make them mad. You can't tell them you don't like Trump or you're against Trump. But then when you face the fall election, you're faced with an electorate that is stacked against you. So they are in a bind and there is no... There are as many smart Democratic strategists, there are just as many, maybe more smart Republican strategist. There's no strategy to work your way out of this when the president will not implement a strategy that makes sense for the Congress and for them politically. So it's just hard to know how important this is, his disapproval, except that it is very important. And the real clear politics is an average of, I don't know, something like 15 polls.
Joe Lockhart:
So it always is, this one's lagging. If you look at the last four, he is been anywhere between 35 and 37. So it's trending down to, his base is about 35 and if he's lucky, he gets at best, he gets to 45 with soft Trump voters. If we go into the midterms at 36, 37, they're likely... They're not going to come out and vote for Nancy Pelosi's party. They're likely just to stay home. And Republicans will lose for the same reason that Hillary Clinton lost because a bunch of Democrats and moderates stayed home.
Josh:
So with the time that we have left, before we get to questions, let's roll quickly through some of the things that do affect job approval. Beginning with the book that was published yesterday by Bob Woodward, Joe, you're no stranger to this you must... You're reliving it. When you were campaign spokesman in 1996, Woodward was rooting around you and your colleagues writing the choice about the election between him and Bob Dole certainly came out, reflecting better on Clinton than fear does on president Trump, but bring us behind the scenes of dealing with Bob Woodward and how this White House is dealing with Bob Woodward.
Joe Lockhart:
Well, Bob Woodward is an institution unto himself and he's probably listening to this conversation. So I've got to be careful.
Josh:
I just want-
Joe Lockhart:
I'll tell you two things about- One big thing and then one anecdote. Woodward's a good reporter. He's a great reporter, but he leverages being Bob Woodward. I would say 85% of the people who talked to him in Washington, talked to him because, "Oh my God, Bob Woodward called me. He wrote... He knew Deep Throat. And for a lot of people, it's like validating that you've made it. And it's crazy. You have people who are mature, hardened, cynical, political strategists, and Bob Woodward shows up and they say, "What can I tell you? I can tell you everything, let me-" And it's crazy. And then-
Josh:
Is he prepared? Does he get you? Or-
Joe Lockhart:
Oh yeah, no, no. And he makes you feel like you're somewhat important. He'll say in his Midwestern twang, "Everybody says, you're the guy. Everybody says that, so..." And then you open up and tell him everything. The other small percentage of people, I mean, the smart ones are the ones who just take a vacation. Like, "I'm going to be gone for six months. Bob's working on a book." Or realize that, "Well, I know he's going to get all those dummies to talk. So I better talk to him so that I get my point of view out there." But here's when I realized what an institution Bob was. I was working for John Kerry in 2004. And Bob smartly was really trying to dig in on the Iraq war and Iraq policy. And as you remember, Bush was kind of flailing a little bit.
Joe Lockhart:
It had begun from a big winner to sort of a political liability for him. And Kerry was hitting him. And Bob had sent us a list of 25 questions about what would president Kerry's Iraq policy be. And it was just, each of them was a trap. Each of them was, if we had answered, it would've opened up and Bush had said he wasn't going and to answer them. And so, Bob called me several times and I said, "Bob, I mean, I realize these are important questions, but I want to help this guy get elected, not sink him. I can't answer these questions." He said, well, he said, "Well, okay." And then that Sunday, the Washington Post ran the questions. The Sunday before the election in the paper, without the answers. The paper thought it was so important, that his questions were so important that they wanted to run them being unanswered by John Kerry. And I was like, "Okay." So I called him. I said, "What can I tell you? I mean, who can I dump on?"
Josh:
The Lynn Downey era? Is that still, or?
Joe Lockhart:
Yeah, it was right at the end of Lynn, yeah.
Josh:
So the other big news last week, obviously, and just want to run through this quick, but the anonymous, op-ed your successor, Sarah Sanders. I put her response up there, say, "Call the New York Times, call the failing New York Times and express your displeasure." Should the times have entered the fray like this with, let's call it a sub cabinet senior director type or whoever you think what level it might be, but for a big swath of the country, you call someone a senior administration official. The presumption is it's Mattis , but it is a high likelihood of not being Mattis.
Joe Lockhart:
Yeah. I mean, I think only the Times can answer that question fully. The two editors involved, I've known for a long time. And I think they're men of high integrity. And I am assuming that when they say senior administration, they mean it's someone that we'd all know who it was, not some no name because it is going to get out and they are going to get killed if it's someone that everyone in this room doesn't know who it is and I'll join the charge. I mean, nothing like taking on the New York Times to get your blood going.
Joe Lockhart:
I think their decision, as long as it was a really senior person, a known name, I think was relatively easy to put out. I think the other side is the much more interesting thing of, whether that person should come out or whether... And I've gone through four different versions in my own head. At first I thought, this is someone who is showing courage. And then I thought I was someone showing cowardice. It's important that in my view, that this information is out there so that you got to start there. The secondary issues is, I kind of work through what would I be doing if I was there? And what is the White House trying to do? There are two reasons why the person... Why it's valuable to remain anonymous.
Joe Lockhart:
One is that as soon as the person comes out, let's say it's Mattis. I mean, I doubt it is, but say it was, the White House would have a singular person to impeach. Not an anonymous staff. And you would find out that, Mad Dog Jim Mattis in sixth grade, cheated on a biology test and that impeaches him for the rest- I mean, you'd find out, they would try to destroy him. And it's just part of politics. I mean, there were people made charges against the cleanse and we went after them because most of them weren't true. Some of them were half truths. So I think that had value. The second one goes to the whole... The bigger and most broad question, which is what's your obligation? Is your obligation to pull the fire alarm or put out the fire?
Joe Lockhart:
And I don't know the answer to that, because I know from the idea... The country really is split ideologically these days on politics, but people in Washington, the friendships remain across party lines. And so I get a pretty good sense of what's going on in that building, just from talking to some friends who were talking to friends. And for every idea that seems a little out of the norm, there are five that never get out. And that's what I think Woodward was getting at. That this is really worse than you think, according to Woodward.
Joe Lockhart:
And so there is a service being done, and I worry... I'm not sure what I'd do. I don't feel like I had this dilemma of myself in the Clinton impeachment, nobody left. It was a personal act and people were free to make their own judgment, moral, political, but nothing in the country was put at risk. I think what Anonymous is trying to tell us is, people like me within this so-called resistance. If we leave, the country's at risk. It's a hard one. And fast forward 25, 30 years, historians are going to have... They'd say it'll be one of the richest periods to ever look at.
Josh:
And yet in 72 hours, historians might also look at another cataclysmic event, literally a cataclysmic event, hurricane Florence bearing down in the Carolinas or Georgia. We looked at those approval ratings, 2005 George W. Bush gets a dip because of Katrina. Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. This hurricane is going to hit on Friday, and there's not time to recover if this response is botched. So will Trump take Bill Belichick's admonition, just do your job? Because this is what this is where presidents and FEMAs are supposed to shine.
Joe Lockhart:
Yeah, my guess is no. Not that he won't do... That FEMA won't do his job. I have no way of knowing, but I think today is a good example. I think the John McCain week was another good example where there are times when traditionally, we turn off our partisan political microphone and put on the, "We're all one country." As Josh will remember, we had one of those that happened in one day. The day the president was impeached also happened to be the day that we concluded a military campaign against Iraq, because they were violating UN sanctions. And it was one of... The day of contrast where it's four o'clock, at four o'clock. We were out having a rally with Democrats talking about how Republicans were terrible. And at 5:30, the generals came in to announce the end of this successful campaign, talking about how we're all Americans, there's no political parties and we somehow got away with it.
Joe Lockhart:
Trump takes the opposite approach. He just feels like it's, what's on his mind. I think by and large, he thinks the country reflects his voters and his voters love what he's doing. I mean, they love reading his tweets. And I think he's just, in some ways, just kind of blocked out the rest of the country or he either doesn't think they really exist or they're just crazy Democrats. And, "Everyone told me I was going to lose last time and I won. Everyone's telling me we're going to lose this time. I know we're going to win. I'm Donald Trump." Who knows? But I suspect that, and again, if yesterday's any indication, this is going to be political. I think the tweets in the last 48 hours about Mueller and an FBI agent, plus the comments yesterday about the success in Puerto Rico.
Joe Lockhart:
I mean, from a communicator's point of view, nothing would've been stronger than I think the president saying we didn't do everything we could in Puerto Rico, and here's what we've learned, and here is how it's going to be applied. And he did just the opposite. So he's basically got 65% of the country looking and hoping he fails. There's no Democrat that's going to support Trump because he's Trump. There's no Republican, who's a traditional Republican that's going to support him because they... It's part of the DNA for free trade. So on paper, as a strategist my age who's been through a few of these things, will look at it and say, "Well, no one's going to support this. This is crazy." I think what Trump is betting on is that he can turn this into a sort of nationalistic sort of 1980s style, anti-foreigner.
Joe Lockhart:
It's an offshoot of his immigration policy, which is that everyone else in the world is out to get us and we should get them first. And that does appeal to his base. And it's this very odd thing that you, and this has been going on for a long time, the people who are most against government spending are the states that get the most federal spending. Mississippi, Alabama, there's again, a disassociation that people don't understand their own self-interest. And in this case, the very people who he says he's trying to help are the ones who get hurt except in a couple of industries that he selected as symbols of the coal industry, a sliver of the steel industry, not the whole steel industry, just a little bit of it. And I think it reflects how he views the world.
Joe Lockhart:
So politically, he's gone from what was about a 50/50 fight, which he could have taken at one of the traditional sides and started at 50, and then tried to build on that. And he's gone to a place where most people... The people who have been most engaged on this issue start against him, the most vocal. He has his base, but at some point it's going to start reverberating with them in a very real way. So I don't think it's sustainable over the long term, unless somehow... I could do this on a number of issues. His strategy North Korea is crazy, except maybe it'll work. I mean, maybe they'll denuclearize. Maybe China will start acting as a more appropriate trading partner in the world. Maybe. Those are big maybes. From a traditional political strategy point of view though, it is drawing to an inside straight across the board.
Joe Lockhart:
Josh did a little bit of my resume and my experience. I don't know whether I drop into a crisis or I caused them, but either way I've been in a bunch of them in the middle of some of them. And the single... Everybody has their theory about how to deal with the crisis. And everyone's got their... Our friend Dulany Davis has a book about get all the information out immediately. If we had done that in the first week of the Lewinsky story, vice president Gore would have been a two term president because we would've been gone. So it's not that simple, but I have found going to your question, that the single biggest mistakes that get made are not that the people at the communications level aren't competent, it's they don't have the proper access to the CEO and the decision maker.
Joe Lockhart:
And when it finally does get to the CEO, you hear this all the time, and in my consulting world, I'd hear this all the time. The CEO would say, "Why didn't someone tell me this? Why didn't someone tell me what my options were?" So I think the most important thing for communicators across the board, but particularly in a crisis, is having a seat at the big boy table and the big girl table. And making sure that the decision makers are appropriately engaged. And I said appropriately deliberately. They shouldn't spend all of their time on it, but they shouldn't be divorced from it. I'll go back to president Clinton for a second. He spent during his working hours, almost no time working on impeachment. Working on that strategy, all of that stuff, he spent a little bit more time in the off hours talking to friends and doing what presidents do, but he was appropriately involved, because he also had a country to run. CEOs, have a company to run.
Joe Lockhart:
So I think both access appropriate engagement, and then division of resources. And again, for the same reason, which is, if you've got everybody in your office working on a crisis, you're going to get through that crisis and find your business has suffered because no one's been paying attention. At the White House, and Josh, you know as well as I do, taking in all the agencies, all the place, there's probably a thousand communicators. We had two or three people working on impeachment. Everybody else was forced to do their job. I was not interested in what... If they got anywhere near this, they were told to go home. One, because I didn't want them meddling. And two, I didn't want all of a sudden our healthcare agenda to fall apart because they were worrying about helping the president. So-
Josh:
And you starved it from television too.
Joe Lockhart:
Yes. Yep. So I think that's... I mean, I think it goes across the board for just your regular strategic communications. But particularly when you get into something that is a crisis, I'll take one more second on this, because I don't think people understand it all what a crisis is. A crisis is not a bad story. And my example of this is, I hope there's no one from the airline industry here, because I'll just randomly pick an airline. If 3,000 American flights get canceled tomorrow because of the storm, it's a bad story. People are all over the airports. They've slept there for two days. They're yelling. It's not a crisis. If an American plane crashes, that's a crisis. Because the brand is built on one thing alone, which is safety. Everything else is extra.
Joe Lockhart:
And now when I get on a plane, the one thing I assume, I don't assume it's taking off on time. I don't assume it's landing on time. I don't assume they know where my bag is. And I don't assume at any point I'm going to see anyone who's going to give me anything, but I assume I'm going to get from here to there safely. And if I have a doubt about that, then I'm not going to exercise... I'm not going to use that brand. And that's another, I think key thing or best practice in looking at as something comes in, it helps you decide how to engage, whether to engage, whether to ignore.
Josh:
I'll just leave us on one more bit of video. If you guys can rack it up because it is that same briefing, November 4th, 1998 at the end of the briefing Wolf Blitzer is pestering you on whether the president has indeed surfed that thing called the interweb. Let's watch.
Joe Lockhart (Video):
Report Democrats, which provided a big lift for Democrats on the country, and also African Americans and Hispanics.
Speaker 7:
Talk about how the presidents used the internet last night and what impact that may have had, what sites he went to.
Joe Lockhart (Video):
I don't know the affiliation of the site. There's so many good ones, but he was able to, like anyone can through some of the great sites that are out there that do political news look at as races unfolded particular people who he knew were races that he had paid some attention to were actually gone in a campaign for. And sort of check around in a very real time way which, through the power of the internet, we're all able to do now.
Josh:
Thank you. Thank you guys. Joe, how far we've come.
Joe Lockhart:
Oh, I do have to say... Just to add a little color to that. The night of the midterm elections, we did a very small gathering in the Chief of Staff's office and over in the Eastern were hundreds and hundreds of people to do an election night party. And the president sat down at the desk and you remember Craig Smith, his political director, showed him. I don't know whether it was CNN or somebody's election site that had all this stuff. Well, the president had never seen the internet before. He proceeded to sit there for three hours. He never went to the party. He just was so fascinated with, I can see how these 42 counties in Arkansas voted in real time. And he just kept going around the country. And it was like this... In amazement. And I guess this internet thing is real.
Josh:
Thank you, Joe. Thank you everybody.
Josh:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Joe Lockhart, vice chairman of Public Affairs for Edelman. He appeared at our 2018 annual Investor Relations Summit at the New York stock exchange. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at NYSE. Our show was produced by Pete Ash and Ian Wolf, with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steven Portner. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening and see you later in the week when we continue our series of episodes from the 2018 IR Summit
Speaker 2:
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