People: Obama media strategy expands into long-form conversations

WASHINGTON – The novelist tossed out phrases such as “religious humanism” and “the sinister other.” The interviewer asked her about her upbringing and writing process.

At an hour and 7,000 thoughtful words, the discussion sounded like a college seminar or an independent bookstore reading. But this was part of the White House’s new media strategy.

Even for a president well-practiced in using nontraditional media, the conversation in September between President Barack Obama and writer Marilynne Robinson – and a few others like it conducted in recent months – charted new territory in presidential communications.

Slow-paced, personal, nearly divorced from the news of the day and sometimes distributed by the White House, a series of “conversations” between Obama and prominent figures in arts, letters and entertainment captures a White House experimenting with ways to reconnect Americans to the president before they say goodbye to him.

“We had this idea that why don’t I just have a conversation with somebody I really like and see how it turns out?” Obama told Robinson, before diving into mutual rumination about Christianity, fear and politics that ran in two installments in the New York Review of Books.

Not all the chosen conversationalists are quite so high-brow:

Obama recently cruised around the White House grounds in a 1963 Corvette Stingray coupe with Jerry Seinfeld for an episode of the Web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”

He sat for an hour in comic Marc Maron’s garage in June for the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron.”

In March, the White House invited David Simon, a former journalist and writer of “The Wire” and urban dramas, to discuss criminal justice.

“We want to give the president opportunities to talk in more expansive ways about big ideas and subjects,” White House spokesman Eric Shultz said of some of these conversations. “Our goal is give people some insight into how he sees things that are not necessarily at the top of the news cycle at that moment. We believe when you feel like you really understand someone’s thinking, you understand their decision-making.”

Obama’s conversations aren’t narrowly targeted at a single constituency and aren’t typically organized around a single political message or timed to a policy rollout or debate. There tends to be a clear mutual interest– a peer-to-peer relationship, as one White House official described it. In some, Obama takes the role of interviewer.

That level of interest has given some of the conversations a “you only live once” feel to them, as though Obama were ticking through a list of people he always wanted to meet while he still had the staff to arrange the introduction.

The birthday bunch

Singer Patty Loveless is 59. Rock singer Michael Stipe is 56. Actor Patrick Cassidy is 54. Actress Julia Ormond is 51. Actor Josh Stamberg is 46. Actor Jeremy Licht is 45.