The sun shined this week on the shadowy details of what it takes for the White House to push through unpopular legislation in the digital age.
In a lengthy profile of President Obama's foreign policy speechwriter and advisor, Ben Rhodes, published Thursday in the New York Times Magazine, Rhodes described one advantage the White House has over modern news outlets:
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington."
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change.”
"They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes's assistant, Ned Price, adds that the White House has “our compadres” in the media who act as “force multipliers” in promoting the message the Obama administration wants made public:
"And the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”
Just weeks before the Iran deal would survive a vote of disapproval by a Democratic-controlled Senate, a Quinnipiac University poll revealed that just 25% of Americans supported it, while 55% opposed it.
The New York Times Magazine profile, written by David Samuels, outlines how Rhodes and his team shaped the “story” of the Iran deal to make it as appealing as possible, though misleading as well.
In the official version, negotiations around a nuclear agreement began in 2013 when “moderate” factions in the Iranian government beat out “hard-liners” in an election.
The moderates were portrayed as a group the Obama administration could work with.
In reality, in July 2012 a close aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with the Iranians with a message from the White House regarding their willingness to “open a direct channel to resolve the nuclear agreement.”
In March 2013, three months before the Iranian elections, the American side of the table finalized its proposal for an interim agreement with Iran.
A staffer who works with Rhodes told The New York Times Magazine that they approached the different audiences (in her words: “the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress”) using the same tool so effectively waged during Obama's presidential campaigns: Big Data.
Samuels writes for the magazine:
“By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.”
Effectively, administration-friendly nuclear arms-control experts began appearing online and in Washington, D.C., foreign policy think-tanks and they were the sources used by reporters covering the deal.
Rhodes tells the magazine:
“We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
When asked if the possibility of future administrations using a similar spin-campaign, Rhodes responds:
“I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote. But that’s impossible.”
In the end, 58 senators voted against the Iran deal on their own sober, reasoned grounds. But that wasn't enough to counter the White House's campaign.
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