Opinion: For McCain, Obama and Palin, ‘Good to talk with you (insert TV anchor name here)’

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With all the talk these days about the gazillions of millions of dollars involved in the presidential campaign, Americans could be excused if they thought money was the most important thing a campaign has.

It’s not.

The most valuable thing in any campaign is the candidate’s time -- 1,440 minutes per day, 69,120 left until Election Day, Nov. 4.

It’s up to each campaign’s senior staff, drawing on polls, on-the-ground aides and their own experience and gut, to decide how best to spend or invest that limited amount of time.

And that includes sleep times, which are planned during late evening flights to the next morning’s city.

One of the nifty little-noticed methods they’ve devised in recent cycles is the satellite interview, which enables them to appear in free media in a half-dozen or more states without leaving one room.

According to a spokesman for Barack Obama’s campaign, they use satellite interviews ‘several times a month.’ According to John McCain’s recent schedule, he’s using them every day or two. No....

...doubt with the demand to see McCain’s No. 2, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, she too will be doing them soon.

The satellite interviews are much like the now-ubiquitous telephone conference calls that candidates, their staff or surrogates do with reporters, bloggers and any other group of electoral significance, often daily, enabling them to reach large numbers of media at one time.

For the satellite chats, campaign communications staffers will book an hour or two of satellite time and then set up a seemingly endless series of brief, hurried interviews with TV anchors in key markets around the country. The candidate sits in a chair in a fake den with fresh flowers in the background in front of a campaign TV camera.

One-by-one for a few minutes at a time the candidate chats through a microphone and earpiece with local TV anchors he will never meet in person. Beneath the TV camera a staffer holds a card with the first name(s) and city of the local TV news people he’s talking with.

‘Well, good afternoon, Kathy and Bill. How are things in Tulsa today?’

On one recent afternoon McCain talked from 2:16 to 2:20 with Jon Delano of KDKA in Pittsburgh, from 2:24 to 2:28 with Steve Highsmith of WCAU in Philadelphia, from 2:32 to 2:36 with Kerri-Lee Hackett of WTXF in Philadelphia, 2:40 to 2:44 with Michelle Kingsfield of WDTN in Dayton, Ohio, 2:48 to 2:52 with KYW in Philadelphia, 2:56 to 3 with Shanikwa Stratford of WNWO in Toledo, 3:04 to 3:08 with Brad Edwards of WJBK in Detroit and 3:12 to 3:16 with someone from WGAL in Lancaster, Pa.

Sixty minutes and he reached several million viewers without leaving his chair.

The questions are generally quite repetitive and predictable, tied to recent news events. Yet the candidate must utter his practiced answer as freshly as if he’s never heard any of the queries before.

Plus work to ensure that he also slips in the campaigns’ theme/line of the day, whether job creation or Washington reform or whatever.

There’s a real knack to sounding genuine for the eighth time that hour.

The beauty from the campaigns’ points of view is the efficient use of the candidates’ time and the ability to reach large numbers of viewers at the cost of merely the satellite time, which isn’t cheap but a whole lot less than flying to each city.

The TV stations get what appear to viewers to be exclusive interviews with the possible next president of the United States. These clips are shown several times that night and typically again on the next day’s morning news programs.

In rural states like, say, Montana an interview with one station can end up being distributed statewide via repeater stations and cable systems for days afterward.

Some campaigns even follow up by mail or FedEx with what appears to be a personalized letter to each TV anchor from the candidate, thanking them for their time and good questions the other day and possibly including an autographed picture.

The autographs are written by machine.

--Andrew Malcolm

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