Clinton’s Foot in Mouth Disease
There’s a reason politicians spend many hours being trained to juggle issues and spout statements that won’t blow up in their faces.
Apparently, Hillary Clinton’s vow to “obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Now she’s suggesting (ABC News) a potential assassination of presidential nomination opponent Barack Obama is a good reason to stay in the race when her chances of winning are now less than 5%.
This is a symptom of the always-on news cycle, in which someone who doesn’t have a lot of ad money has to stay newsworthy at least once a day to stay alive in a political campaign.
If you aren’t controversial enough, you don’t get any news coverage. If you step over a moral or ethical line, you run the risk of looking like a loose cannon willing to say anything to get elected.
She backtracked by offering a pseudo apology to the Kennedy family (YouTube video), ignoring any slight to Obama. As one commentator says, “she’s running on fumes.”
Flickr photo by Tony the Misfit, used under a Creative Commons licence.
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POSTED IN: Apologies, Communication Skills, Communication Tactics, Crisis Communications, Ethics, Media Relations, PR, Politics, Reputation Management, Spin
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