This week's perspective from Bob Reid: Donald Trump couldn’t wait to get in front of the media cameras Wednesday morning, to crow about how he was the one who finally got the White House to release U.S. President Barack Obama’s full birth certificate. And for that brief, shining moment, Trump was leading the news agenda and dominating the message: he was the guy. But he was very soon under fire from the assembled reporters as to what he had really won, other than re-confirmation of the fact that Obama was, in fact, born in the USA (Hawaii, to be precise) as the president had always said, and as he had previously proven with other documentation. So it was even more perfect timing when CNN and other news channels would break away from Trump in mid-bluster, to a relaxed Obama in the White House press briefing room, joking about how it’s the first time in a long time he could get the networks to cut away to him for darn near anything. Then he went on to dismiss Trump’s grandstanding on the “birther” issue as the work of a “carnival barker” whose goal is to distract people from critically important issues to matters of trivia. By the time he was finished, Obama had done two things: buried the “birther” thing once and for all (and well ahead of the 2012 presidential campaign), and shredded Trump’s credibility as a serious potential Republican candidate. Trump was re-positioned as essentially saying “Aha! There’s the proof that I’m completely and utterly wrong!” The communications lesson in all of this: if you’re going to engage in a high stakes, high-wire gambit in the media, best have a net underneath you somewhere. War-game the contingencies, and be prepared to account.
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