Spidey sense

So, President Obama just finished his long-anticipated speech to a joint session of Congress about plans to grow the American workforce—HOLY CRAP! Terrorist chatter about a possible 9/11 anniversary terrorist attack!!!

That’s not an exaggeration. President Obama was still shaking hands in the House chamber when Wolf Blitzer interrupted CNN’s roughly 15 seconds of speech analysis to tell us – breaking news! – that the Homeland Security Department had specific, but unconfirmed, intelligence about an anniversary-related attack.

The timing got my PR spidey sense tingling. And my politics-related PR spidey sense is rarely wrong.

Not that I doubt the information (and profoundly hope it isn’t true). No president would just make up a terrorist threat for political reasons. (At least, not this one. The last guy, on the other hand…) Here’s the thing, though. People who work with the media, especially at the level required at the White House, are very skilled at managing the flow of information so that news comes out precisely when they want to move the news cycle. They’re also skilled at managing relationships with the journalists that cover the government. If something leaks, they can still usually work around it. Rarely does anything catch a DC PR person utterly by surprise.

There’s a reason this news came out when it did, and not 3 p.m. this afternoon or 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. There’s a reason the president was able to give his speech without news cycle distractions, and then was able to keep his remarks from being immediately dissected because OMG TERRORISTS!!! Oh, the media will come back to the jobs policy, and it should. But it will have calmed down and digested a bit first.

Either the White House communications staff is crazy brilliant, or they just got once-in-a-career lucky*.

*”Lucky” meaning that their jobs were made slightly easier. Not lucky that al Qaeda still wants to kill us.