A recent Bloomberg Businessweek story focuses on how both the Romney and Obama campaigns try to control the story by limiting press access to fund-raisers. That's comparatively rare considering usually journalists like to complain only about Republicans doing so.
"Policies to limit coverage at a fundraiser help promote a feeling of exclusivity for top donors, and insulate candidates from verbal gaffes that have the potential to overpower their public messages," says the article by Bloomberg News’s Kate Andersen Brower and Julie Bykowic, summarizing why both campaigns do it. And yet, while both campaigns restrict the press to being present only for portions of most fundraisers, the story - and a follow-up commentary published yesterday - reveal just how much further the Obama campaign goes in trying to prevent the public from knowing what Obama says to donors in private.
Kristen Hinman, a Bloomberg associate editor, comments, "Let’s break that down: On the same day that his campaign unleashed a brutal media blitz attacking Romney’s background in private equity, the president showed up for a fundraiser hosted by one of the country’s most successful private equity executives. Before the president delivered his remarks, his staffers didn’t ask people to turn their cell phones off. They confiscated the phones of the people who had paid $35,800 apiece for the privilege. ... That way nobody could Facebook or tweet or, presumably worse, videotape the president’s statements for a public airing.
"This wasn’t a one-off. It was one fundraiser among others where the handlers enforced the check-your-phone-at-the-door policy," writes Hinman. "Obama’s handlers are apparently hoping to avoid a repeat of a dustup in 2008. That year, as Obama and Hillary Clinton were duking it out for the Democratic nomination, a donor at a San Francisco fundraiser taped Obama saying that small-town voters who had lost their jobs were 'bitter,' and had no other way to deal with their anger than to 'cling to guns or religion' — and then released the tape to a news organization that wasn’t allowed into the event.
