Outside the Beltway

Softball Questions And The Limits Of Running On Anger

Unpacking J. D. Vance's bad PR instincts

Matt Bernius · Saturday, August 10, 2024 · 17 comments

I am post yesterday, I mentioned that I would like to see Presidents and Presidential canidates do more press. This includes both taking quick questions from media scrums, press conferences, and long-form interviews. I personally see a lot of value in all of those formats as each help illustrate different aspects of the person who is answering questions.

I realize that is a little different than the way other people think about this. For example, regular commenter MarkedMan wrote in yesterday’s comment threads:

On another thread Matt Bernius commented that he thought candidates should do more interviews and take more questions. While I agree with him in a general sense, I feel that for the most part reporter’s questions are so hackneyed that they generate nothing of interest. And the worst example are found at the typical press conference. First, we have to get every TV reporter asking a variation of the same inane question of the day because their network needs to run a 10 second tape of the candidate responding to their perfectly coiffed guy rather than the one from the competing network. Then we get a whole series of questions which boil down to, “how do you respond to this piece of borderline slander that was slipped to my by one of the opposition and for which I haven’t even made the barest attempt at investigating it before I assist your opponent in spreading it?”

While I understand some of that frustration, I want to unpack the importance of a candidate knowing how to respond to those 10 second tape question and other softballs. To do that, I first want to discuss media training. It’s what all politicians, PR folks, and people who are going to represent a company or organization in public go through. I’ve been through it at least three times if not more.

Ultimately media training comes down to three main rules:

1. Stay on message. Know your talking points and make sure you hit them.
2. Answer the question you want to answer, not the question that’s asked. People hate this rule, but its a critical one. Interviewers will try to pin you down with questions and your goal is to always find a way to get back to message.
3. Never repeat a question as part of an answer–especially if it’s a provacative question. Especially with accusations, repeating them–even to then disprove them–gives them extra credence.
4. Don’t go on too long. The longer you speak, the more likely you are to say something that will be off message.

There’s also a fifth, more unoffical, rule: do all of the above in a way that makes you seem human. That fifth rule can, in places include breaking some of those rules.

Ok, onto a specific question that V. D. Vance was asked earlier this week:

This is a perfect example of someone who has been through media training and is sticking so hard to those three main rules that he totally misses the forth one (be human when following the rules). Here is the exchange in full:

REPORTER: You’ve been criticized for being a little too serious, even angry sometimes. What makes you smile? What makes you happy?

SEN. J.D. VANCE: I smile at a lot of things — including bogus questions from the media, man. Look, if you watch a full speech that I give, I’m having a good time out here and I’m enjoying this. Sometimes you’ve got to take the good with the bad, and right now, I am angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country and done to the American southern border, and I think most people in our country, they can be happy go lucky sometimes and enjoy things sometimes, and turn on the news and recognize what’s going on in this country is a disgrace.

If what Kamala Harris has done at the southern border and raise groceries and housing and it doesn’t bother you — I think my message to the American people is very simple on this. That president trump in particular has the best sense of humor of anybody I’ve ever seen in American politics. He loves to joke. He loves to tell, he loves to make fun of everybody out there. I think you have to do that from time to time but he is also a guy who is very frustrated with what Kamala Harris has done though this country. Both things can be true. I think most Americans can joke around and pissed off about the direction of this country.

The inital question is what’s known as a softball question–a light question that is in theory easy to answer. Yes, The framing is a bit hostile “You’ve been criticized for being a little too serious, even angry sometimes.” It’s also accurate. It gets to why the “weird” thing lands against Vance.

For someone with good PR instincts, this is an opportunity to disrupt the narrative and show some humaness. All Vance has to do is talk for a moment about his kids or his wife or a hobby. Then, if he wants, he can then follow rule 2 and 1, and get back to messaging.

Vance, however, doesn’t do that. No, “I smile at a lot of things — including bogus questions from the media, man. Look, if you watch a full speech that I give, I’m having a good time out here and I’m enjoying this,” doesn’t count as an answer. Firstly, it doesn’t work because most normal people can imagine campaigning as fun (or more fun that doing non-professional things). Secondly, Vance’s campaign role has been, so far, to be an attack dog–which while critical, doesn’t translate as “fun and happy” to most people. So all this does is remind the viewer of the initial framing of the question.

Vance immediate chooses to answer a different question “Why am I angry” and then gets on message. In theory this is following good media training rules, but its done inartfully. It’s also a great reminder that as in 2016, and to a lesser degree 2020, the Trump campaign has choosen to run on an “anger platform.” Everything is broken and terrible and we are the only people who can fix it. The choice to “run on anger” is explore more indepth in this New York Times article.

One limitation of that strategy is that it makes it difficult to answer softball questions like this one, lest you take your foot off the “angry” petal. BTW, this was an issue that also created problems for Sarah Palin as a candidate for VP. Trying to swing for the messaging fences with a softball question rarely works out well for people.

A second way that Vance’s answer shows bad PR judgement is his decision to break rule four (keep it short) and go on to discuss how funny the former President is:

That president trump in particular has the best sense of humor of anybody I’ve ever seen in American politics. He loves to joke. He loves to tell, he loves to make fun of everybody out there.

First, this is an issue because Donald Trump is not well known for his sense of humor. More importantly, Vance is calling out that Donald Trump enjoy’s punching down and making fun of other people. That’s something that’s been displayed a lot over the near decade Trump has been involved in President Politics–including as recently as yesterday when he made fun of John Tester’s weight. You rarely, if ever catch Trump making fun of himself, and when he does, it’s almost always a “humble brag” as noted in this contributed Politico editorial from 2020:

In front of a friendly crowd, though, Trump is free to unleash his self-mocking self, knowing he’ll get the reaction he wants — provided the subject is right. It’s notable, after all, that Trump’s moments of self-aware humor tend to stem from subjects where he feels on top: his ability to plop a Trump hotel in any location; his ability to win an improbable election; his ability to grab attention with a single, well-placed tweet. These are areas where he can afford to take himself down a notch, and revel in the roars of his supporters.

I realize that I’m opposed to Trump and therefore biased, but I don’t see how joking about any of those things is Trump taking himself down a peg. If someone wants to explain it to me in the comments, I’ll add the rebuttal to this article.

Either way, all Vance is doing is pointing out that Trump has at best a “ball busting” if not full on cruel sense of humor. While, again, that’s keeping with the overall “running on angry” message, it’s not going to be something that brings new voters to the ticket. BTW, I should note that Trump’s “sense of humor” helped set up Vance’s yelling at his child:

Mr Vance was flying with his family to Milwaukee for the RNC when he realised that the airplane had no Wi-fi. He landed after an hour and had over a hundred messages. He said that he got one message from the Trump campaign which said, “Hey, you just missed a really important call.” He then called Mr Trump and said, “Hey Sir, what’s going on?” The 45th US President told him, “J.D., you missed a really important phone call, and now I’m going to have to go with someone else.”

Mr Vance continued, “My son, who is seven, is in the hotel room with me. And he is really into Pokemon cards right now. He’s going through a Pokemon phase…he’s really into it. So he’s trying to talk to me about Pikachu and I’m on the phone with Donald Trump and I’m like, ‘Son, shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu.'”

Nothing like hearing your boss joke about firing you to put you in a relaxed mood. Also, Vance choosing to tell this story is another prime example of not having good PR instincts. Yes, parents have moments like these, but especially when you are fighting a narrative that you are weird and angry, don’t try to humanzied yourself by telling funny stories about yelling at your kids.

Okay, in a bit of compare-and-contrast, let me turn to Kamala Harris. First, YES, she should be doing more media. It’s also understandable that she wants to get all her campaign ducks in a row and do it from a position of strength. And in her first, brief media scrum, you’ll see the benefits of taking that approach.

There is such a difference in her responses to multiple softballish questions to Vance’s response to the question above. Harris’s responses are short and to the point. They’re a bit pithy: “I am beyond trying to speculate how he thinks.” Her demeanor is far more open and joyful than Vance’s (this is an advantage to explicitly not choosing to run on anger*). And she does all that and manages to stay on message (see how she keeps reiterating the same message about the debate). Also, note the way she answers the question about Walz’s service and didn’t take the potential bait to attack Vance’s record. That’s a perfect example of answering the question you want, not the question you were asked.

This is what a person with good PR instincts does, and it’s something you often only see in these types of softball questions.

Now, to be fair, this is a short interaction, about 2 minutes. That won’t satisfy her critics on the Right, but let’s be honest, nothing she says will satisfy them (especially as they are apparently now on “Team Joe Biden should retake the ticket at the Democratic National Convention”). Harris says they will start doing multiple forms of press, and they need to do that–after all, different things can be learned through different forums. So time will tell if Harris and Walz will be able to always perform this well.

But so far, compared to their opponent’s approach to “press events,” this is a good start for Harris/Walz.

*-Harris and Walz are explicitly taking a “Joyful/Happy Warrior” approach right now. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. One thing Trump supporters may not be counting on is that many voters may be tired of the former President’s strategy of running on anger and grievance. It’s been nearly a decade of that. Granted, Trump’s supporters, particularly those who often post on sites like OTB, seem to have near-limitless reserves of anger and grievances. I’m just not sure that’s true of the majority of the voting public–though time, as always, may prove me wrong.