http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=FBBEEBAE-BEEB-484A-9E59-DC22D396FAA6 Obama, Ebola and optics
By: Edward-Isaac Dovere
October 15, 2014 03:55 PM EDT
President Barack Obama is on high alert about Ebola, and he wants nobody to think otherwise.
Any time Obama is campaigning or on vacation when something big goes wrong — from a downed plane to race riots — aides scoff at the idea that he is not focusing on his day job. Air Force One has a pretty good conference call feature. The president does his job from wherever he is, they say.
Not this time.
Now that two people in Dallas apparently have contracted Ebola from the Liberian man who died of the virus, the situation warranted scrapping what was to be his first rally of the midterm campaign season, along with a fundraiser for Senate Democrats who are clinging to their seats.
Optics, which Obama and his staff dismiss as never being much on their minds, always means a lot to this White House. Aides in the past have pointed out that any abrupt changes to Obama’s schedule have the potential to convey more of a crisis than may exist.
But facing the risk of embarrassing juxtapositions of dying health care workers while Obama was out campaigning, that’s exactly what they did.
Two weeks ago, when the first case was reported in the U.S., White House aides made a very conscious decision not to have Obama speak publicly about it. They figured any kind of presidential statement would have raised public panic, and left the microphone instead to Tom Frieden, the clinical public health doctor who runs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now the White House is demonstrating enough concern that Obama’s entire schedule for the day — a day trip to New Jersey and Connecticut — was canceled so he could host a meeting in the Cabinet Room of agencies to talk about the government’s response to the outbreak. Obama appears to be stopping short of a full presidential appearance, keeping to a brief statement to reporters at the end of his afternoon meeting.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest Wednesday said the decision reflects the seriousness with which the White House is taking the situation, and is entirely consistent with the decisions that have been made in the past.
“The president was not able to host that meeting and travel at the same time,” Earnest said. “The president determines that if it’s necessary to return to the White House to perform his duties as commander in chief, then he’ll alter his schedule.”
Earnest declined to commit either way to whether Obama will stick with his planned Thursday schedule for an event in Rhode Island and another fundraiser in Long Island, saying the administration is responding to a dynamic environment and only being “guided by the science.”
But the administration spent Wednesday trying to project calm, even as officials acknowledged that things might be on the verge of getting worse.
“Ebola is hard to fight, but we know how to fight it and we know how to beat it,” Frieden said Wednesday on a conference call with reporters. “We’re preparing for the possibility of additional cases in the coming days.”
Highlighting just how much the White House is looking to make of its management response is how rarely Obama’s changed his schedule in response to crises.
Just in the past few months, Obama went forward with a highway funding event and a pair of fundraisers the day a passenger jet was shot down over Ukraine. He headed straight from his condemnation of James Foley’s beheading to a round of golf on Martha’s Vineyard — part of a vacation he stayed on even as the riots in Ferguson erupted.
Going ahead with the campaign rally for Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy would likely have drawn similar criticism, and also draw attention to the fact Democrats haven’t been eagerly booking the president. The best thing Obama can do at this point, Democratic operatives involved in this year’s midterms say privately, is kill the ISIL terrorists and stop Ebola, brandishing his role as commander-in-chief to make voters feel a little more confident in a Democratic Party already being weighed down by his low approval ratings.
Earnest said that politics weren’t part of the consideration at all, and promised that the White House would be looking to reschedule the trip for Malloy before Election Day. As for the rest — just Wednesday morning, aides had confirmed a campaign schedule that would take him through a number of other governor’s races — they’re up in the air.
“If necessary, I have no doubt the president will postpone his political travel to attend to priorities here,” Earnest said.
Wednesday’s last-minute schedule change isn’t the first that Obama’s leaned on optics around the Ebola scare. He made a brief visit to the CDC headquarters in Atlanta last month as part of a swing that then took him to Florida to check in on Central Command about the ISIL strategy. Then on Sunday, before heading out for a round of golf, the White House had pool reporters briefly leave their vans in the waiting motorcade to glimpse the president through the Oval Office window speaking on the phone to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell.
Obama’s not the only one grappling with optics.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who made a lot of hay out of Obama’s refusal to make a photo-op visit to the Mexican border while traveling to the state in July during the unaccompanied minor crisis — “We’re not worried about those optics,” Earnest said then — was in Europe as the makings of a crisis mounted back in Dallas.
Perry put out a statement saying he had called White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Burwell “to ensure state and federal management of this issue is tightly coordinated.”
Perry spokesman Felix Browne confirmed that the governor had actually made those calls while on a trip to England, Germany, Poland and Ukraine to promote economic development in Texas, and was spending Wednesday visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum in Poland.
Browne told POLITICO Wednesday afternoon that Perry is now planning to fly back from Europe on Thursday.
