Yesterday afternoon, Senator John McCain announced his plan to suspend his presidential campaign while he joined Congress in addressing the nation’s current financial crisis. As just reported, that suspension may be short-lived, since Congress today reached agreement on a bailout plan.
But for the better part of the past day, McCain’s dramatic announcement attracted huge amounts of attention from all parts of the media landscape. That is, from everywhere except the McCain campaign’s own Web site — a conspicuous omission.
While catching up on the story this morning, I checked JohnMcCain.com to see what information the campaign was releasing. It wasn’t until about 10 am MT that the site offered any info at all about the announced suspension. Prior to that, the feature spot on the site’s homepage continued to tout the campaign’s new series of TV ads (which the candidate had said would be suspended). As of this writing, the feature story on the McCain campaign site is: Remarks on the Economic Crisis, which only recaps the candidate’s previous brief public remarks on the campaign suspension.
However, McCain did talk to the press about the suspension — a little bit. He was interviewed on the CBS Evening News last night, but the campaign suspension was not discussed beyond briefly noting McCain’s announcement and McCain claiming that Obama refused to agree to a similar suspension.
Why this matters, even if McCain’s campaign suspension is now moot:
Such a lengthy delay (from the perspective of today’s Internet and continuous news cycle) in even mentioning the suspension on the campaign’s own site — as well as the minimal nature of info offered while public debate and curiosity is raging — represents a highly conspicuous lapse in transparency.
Today’s citizens expect to hear directly from candidates on important developments. For more and more voters, campaign Web sites are a primary source of campaign-related news and information. And so far, the McCain campaign has tried to position its site as a direct conduit of campaign-related news and information.
The delayed, tight-lipped nature of the McCain campaign’s communication regarding its own suspension, however short-lived, is especially jarring considering this candidate’s notable prior history of media accessibility — plus his campaign’s recent switch to demonizing and shutting out the press.
Just yesterday, NPR’s Morning Edition noted that McCain’s Straight Talk Express [Is Now] Less Talkative. The intro for this piece said, “[Tuesday] marked a milestone for John McCain. For the first time in 41 days he took questions from reporters who travel with him.” And campaign reporter David Greene described how at a Tuesday event at a Michigan factory, the campaign added a “media availability” where McCain answered for questions for a grand total of seven minutes.
It’s true that under ordinary circumstances, failing to update a campaign Web site immediately may not be a big deal. But here, a candidate for president deliberately sparked a very public controversy — and then went virtually silent on the matter, especially in terms of direct communication with the citizenry. But under these circumstances, one might expect direct communication to become a high campaign priority. I won’t speculate as to why this lapse happened, but I do think it is important context to keep in mind as this election proceeds. And it may well bear further probing or reflection.
…Meanwhile, in my own state of Colorado, McCain campaign communications about the suspension went awry. Yesterday a state campaign spokesperson allegedly accidentally e-mailed to several members of the local press the campaign’s internal list of talking points regarding the suspension. The Rocky Mountain News elaborated on this incident: “Reflecting the confusion of the day, McCain’s Colorado communications director, Tom Kise, accidentally forwarded the campaign’s talking points to reporters including the instructions, ‘Please do not proactively reach out to the media on this.'”
