Expertos elogian la estrategia de control de daños de Perry

The Daily Beast:

“Oops” means you screwed up, you’re sorry, you’re human just like the rest of us. And who doesn’t want a human president? Rick Perry’s presidential chances rest on that premise as he tries to recover from a historically awful #debatefail.

As they deal with potentially fatal political crises, Perry and Herman Cain present striking contrasts in damage control. Team Cain’s response to sexual-harassment allegations has been so bad that conservative blogger Erick Erickson says Cain should fire his staff and start over. Perry is executing a model approach after his painful memory lapse in Wednesday’s debate that was seen by millions.

Veteran Republican media consultant Alex Castellanos says he’s never been a big Perry fan (he compares him to a coffee table book that’s “all pretty pictures and no text” that “nobody picks up twice”). But he does credit Perry with near-heroic efforts since he went blank for nearly a whole minute while trying to summon the name of the third federal agency he would eliminate if elected. “I can’t remember a candidate who has tackled a campaign crisis so forcefully and so strongly,” Castellanos told me.

That doesn’t mean Perry is going to vault back into contention as a frontrunner for the GOP nomination. But here are five things he’s done right since his brain-freeze:

1. Perry acknowledged and fixed his misstep in a disarming way in real time.

2. Perry showed up personally in the post-debate “spin room” to try to defuse the mess.

3. The Perry team sent a letter to “friends and supporters” at 2 a.m.—just a few hours after the devastating moment. The headline: “So, what agency would you like most to forget?” The opening paragraph: “We’ve all had human moments. President Obama is still trying to find all 57 states. Ronald Reagan got lost somewhere on the Pacific Highway in an answer to a debate question. Gerald Ford ate a tamale without removing the husk. And tonight Rick Perry forgot the third agency he wants to eliminate. Just goes to show there are too damn many federal agencies.”

The letter goes on to ask supporters to submit suggestions for the federal agency they’d most like to forget.

4. Perry put himself in front of every camera and microphone he could find on Thursday. (...) The exposure allowed Perry to repeatedly inject himself into the conversations everyone was having about his screw-up, show he was a good sport, and demonstrate tenacity.

5. Perry stuck to a consistent, self-deprecating Everyman message.

(...) All in all it was fast, textbook damage control under difficult circumstances. “It’s a campaign and you need to move quickly. We decided to take the issue head on,” Miner told me. Perry, he said, is “not a person of excuses. He’s not going to try to pretend something didn’t happen. He’s not going to run from something. When something like this happens, he’s the first to say ‘I messed up.’”