The Whitehouse Press Gaffe spokesperson confused Biden with Obama (who is half white). She is confused by many things like facts and the truth, but this one is a doozy. She couldn’t have been the best candidate for the job, just the most woke and the most letters in the alphabet of weirdness.
(I’m counting on that last paragraph for a new round of censorship, enjoy while you can)
Video here.
I spent most of my career in either Press or Analyst Relations. I have seen my share of successes and failures. I’ve been in both. We know each other well. My work includes dealing with behemoths (IBM), so I understand what it’s like dealing with a Kraken.
When I see others making mistakes, it’s cringe worthy. Tactical mistakes happen. Strategic planning mistakes are usually worth termination, like Gillette trashing men on Super Bowl Sunday. Putting incompetent people in front of a crowd is inexcusable.
I’ve seen unqualified, and that is what we have at the White House Press Podium right now. If anyone cries racism or sexism at this, you are wrong. So wrong that 180 degrees from now you’d still be wrong. There are professionals and there are amateurs. We have someone who is not seasoned enough to be where she is. It reared it’s ugly head yesterday more than the usual incompetence that is rookie material.
I’ve overlooked a lot of what has been said. Jen Psaki lied every day, but was skilled at how she said it and commanded the room. She was a professional and acted for the most part like one. So did almost every other White House Spokesperson prior to her. They handled some tough ad hominem attacks.
In the arena of politics, incompetents and charlatans can have long careers in ways that others in fields like medicine and architecture cannot. If someone botches a heart bypass operation or designs a wobbly skyscraper, the consequences of those mistakes arrive quickly and cannot be explained away. Even when their policies fail spectacularly, politicians can obscure, deflect, and mislead for years and not be held accountable.
This is essentially what we are seeing now from the Biden Administration, practiced to a more shameless and insulting degree than any of its predecessors have ever attempted. The latest nadir of this strategy happened recently when Fox News reporter Peter Doocy confronted White House flack Karine Jean-Pierre about the glaring hypocrisy of not allowing unvaccinated tennis star Novak Djokovic to fly to the United States to compete, while untold numbers of unvaccinated illegal aliens enter the country on foot daily and are allowed to stay.
“But that’s not how it works,” Jean-Pierre said over Doocy’s indignation. “It’s not like somebody walks over.”
Millions walk over the border in full view of cameras (and hidden by coyotes) bringing fentanyl, diseases (Covid) crime and a drain on the taxpayers. They are given phones, EBT and rooms in luxury hotels. The new American dream.
THE TRUTH SLIPS OUT
When you can’t keep track of your lies, the PR mistakes happen. You step in it like KJP did. It is a rookie mistake by an unqualified person. You have to have ice water in your veins when you stand up and mis-direct questions or deflect issues. You don’t give the press the gun to shoot you with.
When Doocy pressed further, Jean-Pierre could only respond by reading talking points about how the administration is adding technology at the border and securing more funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Those bullet points do nothing to explain why thousands of unvaccinated aliens are being allowed into the country.
Such comments are indicative of either next-level gaslighting or ignorance of the issues on a breathtaking scale. Any sentient being who has followed the news the last two years has surely seen the ubiquitous videos showing thousands of foreign nationals crossing the Rio Grande into Texas, then processed by the Border Patrol.
Biden’s own Customs and Border Protection has reported 1,822,160 encounters with illegal aliens so far in fiscal year 2022, a 586 percent increase since 2017. It is reasonable to assume that most, if not all, of those people are still in the United States. Maybe Jean-Pierre was being too literal and splitting hairs, since technically the border-crossers are swimming and wading across the border, not walking. Regardless, noncitizens are clearly traversing our border in record numbers and are being allowed to stay.
How did the situation get this bad? While the border security problem has been festering for decades, it is only in the last two years that the situation has spun out of control at its current record-breaking pace. The White House, again in gaslighting mode, has blamed the spike on everything from COVID to climate change. It couldn’t possibly be anything they did, right?
Even in a sea of political spin, the truth occasionally slips out. During a recorded deposition as part of discovery in a lawsuit filed by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody against DHS and other border agencies, Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz made a succinct and honest statement. Under questioning about the number of people crossing the border, Ortiz, a 31-year law enforcement veteran, said, “In my experience, we have seen increases when there are no consequences,” said Ortiz during the deposition.
HOW IT STARTED
This story actually began with the unplanned running aground of the Mercedes I in Palm Beach. It desecrated the private holy grounds of the hoity toity for over a hundred days in late 1984. They eventually towed it away and made an artificial reef making almost everyone happy.
About the same time IBM introduced the PC-AT, billed as the most powerful personal computer ever built. It had one problem though as internally sat a 20 MB disk drive made by CMI. It was based on stepper motor technology and it both failed at alarming rates and was as slow as cold honey. It was that flaw which helped give birth to the drive aftermarket in the PC industry and caused one of the biggest black eye’s to the PC’s reputation.
CORE INTERNATIONAL TO THE RESCUE
A small storage company in Boca Raton – the home of the IBM PC saw the obvious problem and created a marketing campaign which recalled the IBM drive. It then sold you a 40 MB drive made by Control Data Corporation and rebadged as CORE product for $2,595, gave you a $1000 rebate and ran an ad claiming it was going to build an artificial reef out of the CMI drives (you can buy gigabytes now for less that $100). CORE was making over 100% profit so the perception of value is greater than reality. The users still paid one of the highest cost per byte of storage possible.
Here is a portion of the ad which created a sensation in the print media, as both IBM and the PC had been infallible up to this point.
PC MAGAZINE CATCHES ON
At this point Paul Sommerson, Bill Machrone, Bill Howard and other writers contacted CORE and asked for pictures of the reef being built. The company owner confided in me that he had a contract to send the drives back to CMI for a rebate and to not lose too many, we staged the entire event. We took his boat, the MEGABYTE out of Jupiter (not Boca) and made it look like we were really dumping the drives into the water. I’m sure the Nanny state EPA would have been all over us had we really done it, but the rest of the story is that we only dumped the drives in the picture (note the false bottom). We tried hard to drop a drive on a string while posing with the box in the picture, but that was produced were lame results. I finally convinced him that we needed to actually throw some drives overboard and that one shot is now etched into PC history. It was the last picture on the roll of film (if you remember film). We tried fishing for sharks after the shoot to put a drive in one of their mouths for the table of contents. We had one on, but it bit through the line and we ran out of time.
The film was immediately Fed-ex’d to NY as they were on deadline for what is known as the Fire Ax issue. The title was “Is Your PC Safe”, but there was a fire ax coming down on a PC-AT and the picture was in both the table of contents and the article.
It should be noted that neither CORE nor PC Magazine was trying to attack IBM products. The owner at CORE was excellent at marketing and had big balls to do this stunt. It paid off handsomely both in dollars and visibility. PC Magazine was at the height of their prowess as journalistic leader of the PC industry. Kudos should be given to Bill Machrone for approving a story that would never have a chance at seeing the light of day in this day and age. He was a visionary at the publication. IBM did themselves in by releasing a defective product and not being nimble enough to deal with the issues.
Both parties were able to take advantage of the arrogance (some say ignorance) on IBM’s part for not ensuring quality control of their product and suppliers. Further, the moribund IBM PR machine, having used their death grip to the throat of PC journalism to direct results they wanted (because they were the 800 lb. elephant in the room) didn’t know that the journalists were ripe for this. They never saw this coming and were ill-equipped to deal with it. The result was that both the reputation of the PC and IBM PR was tarnished.
It should be noted that the Wilmott’s were related to the Ziff’s, who owned PC Magazine. It took me 30 years to make that connection,
THE AFTERMATH
As I mentioned earlier, the boom of peripherals was starting and this poured gasoline on that fire. CMI went out of business after losing their contract with IBM and CORE shipped hundreds of drives while becoming famous.
I personally conducted many interviews discussing drive technology and the stunt (if I recall, the story became far better than the actual event) and the owner had to move his boat. He had rented a slip from an IBM’er in Boca, but due to the kerfuffle he was asked to find another docking space.
IBM had a PR nightmare on its hands now. I’m told that Lou Gerstner’s personal speech writer was called in to clean up the mess. CORE (meaning me as I handled all of PR by this point) got years of mileage from this event. I developed relationships with the leaders in PC journalism as they were happy to have a person to talk to rather than an army of IBM suits that outdid the White House press corps in obfuscation. We even took a drive to trade shows and put it into a fish tank with fish. Everyone in the industry knew about it and we even had hats made up saying things like:
My drive won’t stay up, I built the PC that IBM didn’t, My Drive is bigger than your drive and others.
We gave away thousands. In fact I think we invented the show hat give away in the mid 80’s (one time while leaving the show, we saw a drunk bum outside a convention center at with a CORE hat on).
The owner made show participants suffer through a sales pitch they didn’t care about, but the rest of us just gave them away.
EPITAPH
It is funny to me that I was hired by IBM to do PR for them 14 years later, and even did a stint in the PC division. I wonder if they had known it was me that helped cause one of the great PR nightmares for them, would I have gotten the job?
IBM had dropped to 6th place in PC’s by then and the PC PR department was led by two nincompoops when I got there (Mike Corrado and Ray Gorman). I always chuckled when the story came up at IBM and enjoyed the looks on their faces as they found out my part in this event. I was never involved with anything this creative while doing PR at IBM (see the moribund part), although I used some tactics from this event to be successful, so long as I didn’t tell IBM communications “leaders” about it until after the fact.
Now, did anyone read to here and notice that for a while I misspelled artificial in the title? It was a PR project for you.
Delusions of Adequacy 