UPDATED: Sorry, video link wasn’t working. Is fixed now.
I’ve said it for years and years – anytime that you are going to be interviewed, record it. Out in public? Get a camera of one sort or another (smartphones have pretty good ones now so no excuses). On a telephone interview? Do an audio recording with a digital audio recorder (again, smartphones are also pretty good at this as well so NO excuses). This is especially true of candidates because you NEVER will know ahead of time when an interview YOU think went well has the opposite effect when it goes live. Like when Paul Steinhauser of both the Concord Fishwrap (er, Monitor) and Fox News (such a combo gig!) interviewed Bill O’Brien ahead of his rally this past Tuesday night. Here’s what he wrote for a headline in the Monitor:
On the Trail: Fiscal conservative O’Brien says he’d probably support deal to increase federal spending
And the setup for the “hit” by relating what he has most famous (infamous, if you are a fan of Big and Bigger Government like Democrat / Socialists lust after) (reformatted, emphasis mine):
Bill O’Brien was known as a conservative fiscal hawk during his tumultuous 2010-12 tenure as New Hampshire House speaker. O’Brien is well remembered for pushing through massive cuts to the state budget that his conservative supporters cheered and his opponents decried. Among the areas where he took a hatchet to the budget – cutting the general fund from the previous budget by nearly 18% – and slashing by nearly 50% the state money for New Hampshire’s university system.
And then Steinhauser took his “hatchet” to O’Brien by attempting to make him look like a flip-flopper – it’s always a “But! moment:
But fast-forward to present day. While O’Brien – who’s now running for the U.S. Senate – continues to highlight his fiscal conservative credentials, he indicated he’s open to supporting a two-year federal budget deal worked out between President Donald Trump’s administration and congressional Democrats. While the deal has the blessing of the White House and Republican leaders in both the U.S. House and Senate, it’s opposed by two leading conservative groups in the House, and it’s being targeted by the New Hampshire chapter of a top national fiscal conservative organization.
And a majority of Republicans voted against it.
“I would probably go along with my leadership on that issue,” O’Brien said when asked if he’d support the compromise agreement if he were in the Senate right now…The two-year, $2.7 trillion budget deal – which was approved in the House on Thursday – would further balloon the nation’s deficit by increasing Pentagon and domestic spending by $320 billion over current federal budget caps. It would also suspend the nation’s debt ceiling for at least another two years….But O’Brien appears to back the agreement, emphasizing that “we have to be realistic and the government can’t default.”
First, if you were a TEA Party dude or gal, you know that one of the primary principles of the movement was that Government needed to live within OUR means. In no small measure, the TEA Party exploded onto the political scene showing that people were tired of politicians spending their tax monies and spending their childrens’ futures, too. This agreement has made many angry – and sad in that the TEA Party movement may have now died when this agreement was settled – no keeping to any sense of a debt ceiling and no notion of limiting government in anyway, shape, or form.
Secondly, this is written to be a “kiss of death” message to O’Brien’s followers – “Oh, look what your guy has just done – approving the opposite in DC of what he did in NH. How can you trust him?”.
The Monitor has hated him for years – is this payback? Let’s face it, few people are reading the papers and even fewer Conservatives read the Monitor at all. However, if you did, you probably stopped there and either threw the paper on the floor or clicked the tab closed, muttering not nice things.
Was that the intent? I can’t be sure but boy it looked suspicious to me even with a little bit of further verbiage by O’Brien after that. No matter – the way it was written, you’d have to go to the bottom of the piece and I’m betting few did. But after reviewing it, it was clear that the entire context wasn’t there.
Now, back to what I said at the top: record, record, record. So I did.
I was there during the time of the interview; Steinhauser saw I was there, and I was setting up my cameras in advance of the Rally – it’s what GraniteGrok does when I can get to something. And hitting the record button is what I do. Thus, this is a slice of that interview covering this topic:
I’ll put up the entire interview later for full context. IMHO, this is a far better sense of the actual context of what O’Brien said – and what he meant. While you MIGHT be saying “but he IS saying what was written above, Skip” the latter part of what O’Brien says and how he says it makes it clear he want a ramp down of the enormous spending going on as it is all in one piece and contiguous. I do wonder why Steinhauser just didn’t post the video in its entirety – it is clear that he is recording O’Brien, right? Wouldn’t that have been better and more direct – unfiltered by a journalist’s writing?
That’s one reason why we put up ALL of our video and we generally only edit them for time purposes (e.g., smaller bites as Internet attention spans are small).
The O’Brien campaign has already put out a response to Steinhauser’s reporting on Facebook. Of course, I left a reply. Unlike being Speaker here in NH, where he controlled tempos and intensities, as a Jr. Senator he won’t have that clout. Now, if he joins in with the Freedom Caucus, his (as his campaign tagline is stating) “stronger voice for NH” would get a force multiplier and it is clear that they, as a block, voted against this bill – in line with what O’Brien is best known for as Speaker.
Note: Apologies for the “view blockage” – nothing I could do about it at the time.
