This appeared on Politco Tuesday about Martha Joynt Kumar, my sister-in-law. She's supposedly on vacation, but as you'll note, not entirely:
Scholar Martha Kumar tracks President Obama and the media
By ABBY PHILLIP | 8/1/11 10:00 PM EDT
At about 3:35 p.m., hours after President Barack Obama appeared in the press briefing room for thesecond time in a week to discuss debt ceiling negotiations, an email landed in the inbox of White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest.
Subject line: “From Martha: News Conference As Seen in Hilo Hawaii.”
“Or more specifically from the treadmill … in Hilo on the Big Island. It was carried in its entirety on CBS as probably on all the others,” wrote Martha Kumar, the Towson University professor widely considered to be the foremost scholar of tracking the interactions between the presidency and the press. “The newsers have worked to [Obama’s] benefit,” she added in her July message, as debt ceiling negotiations intensified.
Kumar, 70, is perhaps the only academic to spend more time in the White House briefing room and the West Wing than most correspondents. She records every instance of the president’s dealings with reporters — from press conferences and joint availabilities with world leaders to one-on-one interviews with local affiliates.
Kumar travels from her Georgetown home to Pennsylvania Avenue on her zippy silver Vespa as often as four days a week. She sits in the cramped basement of the White House press room among the scribes, and when she’s not conducting interviews for her book about Obama’s presidential transition, she makes the rounds in the West Wing, offering a political scientist’s insights on the administration’s communications strategy, home-baked treats and small talk.
Earnest said that when Kumar speaks, he listens. She advises from the prism of an academic who has scrutinized presidential administrations dating back to Gerald Ford.
“She’s agenda-free,” Earnest said. “I would say that most of the time that she comes with the data, she comes with some insight to share: The data comes as a one-pager, the advice comes in her gentle tone.”
Underlying all that work, Kumar says, is a desire to help each administration learn from the communications and organizational mistakes of its predecessors.
“Generally my feeling is as political scientists we should share the information that we gather to make government operate more effectively,” Kumar said in a phone interview with POLITICO from her home in Hawaii, scheduled during a marathon writing session for her book. “That is my goal: not only develop an understanding about how government works and how the White House communications operation works but also to assist people in government.”
It’s not unusual to spot Kumar perched on a small folding bench next to the briefing room’s front row. With clipboard in hand, she collects statistics about the briefing, including the number of questions asked and the number of reporters present. She has offered her data as a resource to White House press secretaries since the Clinton administration.
“Who’s that lady with the gray hair?” former Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry remembers thinking soon after he started the job. “A lot of people just assume she’s a reporter.”
Smart press secretaries learn quickly to use Kumar as a resource, McCurry said.
“She doesn’t have any of the barriers that the members of the Fourth Estate have,” McCurry said. “She’s somewhat outside of the adversarial relationship, so she can observe it and comment on it. She helps the White House understand the press and the press understand the White House.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60431.html#ixzz1TvzT3eQk
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