Did
you miss President Barack Obama the other day discoursing on college
basketball on ESPN? Then perhaps you caught him instead Thursday night
chatting with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.”
Wondered how the first family stays in such fine shape in the White
House? Michelle Obama described their morning workouts earlier this
month in People magazine. Last winter, before taking office, the
president-elect and his wife also shared their thoughts on the family’s
eating habits for Parents magazine.
From CNN to Men’s Journal, Obama has decided to make himself the Everywhere President.
In the midst of a severe recession, with two wars overseas, a new
president is unavoidably going to be at the center of the news
universe. Obama has taken this intense public interest to a new level —
encouraging a highly personalized, uncommonly intimate presidential
image.
As communications strategy, the idea seems to be that Obama is the
Oprah of politics: People will buy his policies because he is on the
cover. But a personality-driven presidency does have its risks.
Part of the dignity of the Oval Office comes from a sense of distance,
says Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for
Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, and that makes
what Obama is doing tricky. “He’s trying to metaphorically remove the
moat from around the presidency, but that can be a dicey kind of
thing,” he says. “People can be really fickle about this kind of stuff.
It is a tough balancing act.”
Different presidents have struck this balance in different ways. George
W. Bush did not seem interested in (or, by the unpopular end of his
presidency, capable of) creating a cult of personality. Bill Clinton,
by contrast, surrendered any mystique when prosecutors in the Monica
Lewinsky case gave the public a far more intimate view of his personal
life than he ever wanted.
For this president, Obama’s “charm and glamour” give him an opportunity
that a lot of presidents don’t have — but one that he’s got to take
carefully, said former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee
Myers. When a president is in the public eye too often, she says, “at
some point, people stop listening.” And right now, she adds, Obama’s
ubiquity may also remind the public that he’s got a shallow bench: It
“underscores that he doesn’t have the team of surrogates that he needs
yet.”
For example, Arruda says, the public forgave Martha Stewart’s stock
snafu because her transgression was not a violation of what people love
about her. “If we learned that she didn’t know how to make papier-mâché
snowflakes, or that none of the recipes were actually hers, or that she
stole them from someone else,” he says, “her brand would not have
survived.”
Thompson says the strategy’s long-term success is a sort of
chicken-and-egg proposition: Obama’s presidency will lean heavily on
his popular appeal — and his reception in the popular culture will
depend on how successful he is as a president. “We will keep liking him
if people get a sense that there is a forward trajectory to the
positive. If not, not only could it become a disadvantage, but each of
those appearances gets a target drawn on it.”
The Republicans have already started aiming at it. During a news
conference Thursday, Senate GOP leaders took shots at Obama for
appearing on ESPN to fill out his NCAA tournament bracket and doing
“The Tonight Show” in the midst of an economic crisis.
Of
course, the Republicans attacked Obama as a “celebrity” during the
presidential race, and that didn’t get them very far then, either.
Obama may be everywhere now, but it seems he hasn’t worn out his
welcome with the public. Although Gallup’s latest poll shows that the
president’s approval rating has declined a bit since his Inauguration,
it is still higher than either President Bill Clinton’s or President
George W. Bush’s was at this point in their administrations. “He may be
the guy who makes this work forever,” says Myers. “I think the folks in
the White House are aware of the potential risks, but at the moment,
he’s still effective. It’s still working.”
Obama hardly needs publicity or even to “humanize” his image, as some
presidents have. So why does he continue to court this kind of
attention, even after Us Weekly magazine has already told us “Why
Barack Loves Her” and People has shown us exclusive photos of “the
Obamas at Home” and dished all about the family’s life in the White
House?
Perhaps because some footage of him filling in his bracket might help
him build trust and personal capital with an audience he’s less likely
to connect with through his weekly radio address.
“Just look at ESPN,” says Variety Managing Editor Ted Johnson, who
writes the Wilshire & Washington political blog. “Those are the
armchair politicians and judges that they’re trying to reach. Those are
probably the harder people to convince to sign on to his budget plan or
his economic plan.”
Likewise, says Johnson, his plan to appear with Jay Leno was not about
producing a “sock-it-to-me” moment. It was more likely an
acknowledgement of how much sway Leno and his peers hold over the way
the public perceives politics and policymaking these days, as well as
an opportunity to take the battle to the enemy. “A lot of outrage over
AIG and the economy is being defined and fueled by these late-night
talk shows, so it makes some sense that he would go on there to address
it,” he said.
And indeed, while the president's "Tonight Show" appearance will
probably be remembered most for his "Special Olympics" slip, Obama did
spend much of his time with Leno talking about the economy. He said he
was "stunned" by the bonuses paid out by AIG, and he came to the
defense of his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner.
There is, of course, the chance that doing something like late-night TV
might look frivolous, particularly when there is so much serious news
afoot. And the most important thing for the president to remember about
his celebrity, says publicist R.J. Garis, is that he is not one.
“When it becomes just a ‘it’s fun to be famous’ or humorous appearance
— that can degrade respect for a government official,” says Garis,
whose company specializes in mainstream popular media. “They are not
pop stars, and it is inappropriate and risky for them to try and
maintain a pop-star-type image. Too much of that and people stop taking
them seriously.”
But Thompson says Obama can do pop-culture appearances precisely because he has “gravitas to spare.”
“He never appears to be one of those guys who’s on the verge of making balloon animals,” he says.
In addition, notes Myers, he picks arenas in which he’s comfortable and
where he knows the turf, which allows him to be genuine. “When he’s at
the NBA All-Star Game doing the half-time thing, people know he’s
watching the game. He’s authentically interested in the mediums which
he chooses.”
Arruda says Obama is “perhaps the best example of personal branding we
have today.” Echoing Myers, he notes that effective branding is “based
in authenticity, and the thing that makes [Obama] so successful and so
confident is that he is being who he is.”
Still, Thompson notes, even for Obama, ubiquity has its limits.
Whatever you do, he says, you want to avoid the moment when the public
begins to wonder why you’re asking if they’re ready for some football
when you’re supposed to be running the country. “You don’t want to give
the impression,” he says, “that you’re spending all your time talking
to us.”