The Unavailable Candidate

July 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, International Affairs, News media 

During the course of his run for the Presidency, Sen. Barack Obama has received overwhelmingly favorable attention from the overseas media, especially from European reporters.  But he’s been disinclined to give them much attention, as Christoph von Marschall, the Washington bureau chief of the Berlin Tagesspiegel, observes in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post. Marschall has covered the Obama beat for years, and has even published a book in German about the candidate – but has never been able to obtain a sit-down interview with him.  He says that this, indeed, has been the case with every foreign journalist, and that the closest Obama has come to that kind of contact with a overseas news source was in February when he gave Israel’s Yediot Ahrenrot a set of written answers in reply to written questions about Mideast issues.

In an amusing and also telling sidelight, Marschall describes a lecture he gave in Iowa in September 2007 in which he discussed this lack of access. Several members of the audience took it upon themselves to write Obama’s office to ask why the gentleman from Illinois wasn’t speaking with foreign reporters.  They received replies assuring them that the senator was committed to openness with the press, but this produced no tangible results where the overseas media was concerned.

In his column Marschall ponders what could be the reason for Obama’s reluctance to grant such interviews. He suggests that incidents such as Obama foreign-policy advisor Samantha Power’s describing Sen. Hillary Clinton as a “monster,” in an interview with The Scotsman, might have something to do with this.  My guess is that Obama simply prefers situations in which the questions will be as softball as possible, and in which the chances are good that any gaffes he might utter will be omitted or played down.  A lot of overseas reporters are willing to ask questions of politicians that test the extent of the interviewee’s knowledge of situations and events, and to seek specifics when it comes to policy issues.

For example, where Iraq is concerned, Obama is walking a tightrope, seeking to keep the support of his old peacenik base while trying to assuage the concerns of voters disinclined to support a unilateral pullout, and is likely in no mood to be pinned down on specifics by a reporter for a foreign newspaper.  The internet makes a big difference; it used to be that interviews with the overseas press would only make a splash here if they appeared in British papers or in the most prestigious European media such as Le Monde, but now that nearly every newspaper and newsmagazine worldwide has a website, very frequently with an accompanying version in English, this is no longer true.

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