Anderson Cooper’s interview with Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt is fantastically ineffective. CNN’s Cooper asks LaBolt questions about the hypocrisy of Obama’s attack on Bain Capital. LaBolt refuses to answer them, choosing instead to simply repeat his talking points. This isn’t unheard of in American politics, of course. But LaBolt’s mechanical, rigid, and robotic style — his refusal even to acknowledge Cooper’s question if only to pivot off of it — is beyond parody. It is message discipline ad absurdum.
It’s impossible to know why the Obama campaign would think there is any up-side to putting someone like LaBolt on the air. Anyone even remotely objective would come away from this interview less impressed with the president’s position, correctly assuming that LaBolt’s inability to address the questions directed at him means he has no counter-argument to offer.
The assumption of the White House staff is that offering talking points in the LaBolt manner is more useful than saying nothing at all. They’re wrong. An interview with an empty chair would have been less harmful to Obama’s cause, if only because it would come across as less condescending to viewers. It’s a flawed assumption that the public is stupid enough not to see what’s going on, or realize that they’re being played for fools.
There are many signs that the Obama campaign in 2012 isn’t nearly up to the standards of the Obama campaign in 2008. LaBolt’s appearance is just one of them.
Obuam's campaign message is so pathetic, stupid and low; they cannot trust anyone, absolutely anyone with 1 sigma of independence. Look what happened when Booker started to "acknowledge and pivot"; he ended up completely against the entire Obuma message. Booker's auto-da-fé was much like LaBolt interview. Even Joe Scarborough wondered if we could see "the guys with the swords" somewhere in the video.
The link to the interview is broken (goes to an old article)
Obama's top people were never that fantastic in 2008. They were lucky to have the politically correct John McCain as their opponent—-and the first black presidential candidate as the product to sell to well meaning Americans desperate to prove they were not racists.
Well, looks like you weren't fooled David! Though if you get past the one-drop-of-negro-blood criteria Obama qualifies under the updated New York Times post-Zimmerman stylebook as a "White African-American". True, Andrew Sullivan says this election we should vote for him because he is our first *gay* President, so you never know.