Dear Madam President by Jennifer Palmieri

Author:Jennifer Palmieri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

It was October 2013. I was the White House communications director and responsible for press around the launch of HealthCare.gov, the website to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t going well. The website did not work and there was devastating wall-to-wall press coverage of the failure. I saw it as my responsibility to fix it.

On one level, it was kind of a silly crisis. Our national security wasn’t threatened. Nor did we face any real health threat, as we did the following fall with the Ebola outbreak. It was simply a website that did not work but eventually would get fixed. Nevertheless, the failure presented a very serious risk to us. The press coverage was relentless and was doing real damage every day to President Obama’s standing, the credibility of the health care program, and people’s belief in the ability of government to tackle big problems. There was a lot on the line, and I felt enormous pressure to do something to stem the tide of terrible press.

My colleague Tara McGuinness and I spent a lot of time and effort trying to come up with ways to improve the news coverage. We searched for the few people who had gotten the website to work and have them tell their stories. I worked to draw attention to other important work that was happening in the Obama administration. None of it helped. I was searching for a moment that would count as a turning point in the crisis that would successfully move the press off of covering the website and on to other issues. It eluded me.

The team working on health care held daily meetings with President Obama to update him on our progress. At the end of each meeting, Tara and I would tell him our latest plans to try to improve the press around the website. After one meeting, as we got up to leave, the president told Tara and me to stay back. He told us, “I want you to know that I know that the press isn’t going to get better until the site actually works.” He went on to say, “It’s great that you are trying and you should keep at it. But I just want you to know that I know this story isn’t going away till we get the website working.”

I was grateful that he saw the situation clearly and knew it was not possible for us to generate better press under the current circumstances, and that he had the heart to know that Tara and I needed to hear that from him. It relieved a lot of the stress I had been feeling and gave me the ability to look more clearly at the situation and come up with a realistic plan for how to manage press while the website was being fixed.

We did that by establishing a credible timeline for when the site would be repaired. We would do periodic press calls to update the media on the progress we were making.

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