Transcript
Speaker: Thanks for tuning in to CARP Radio, the official podcast of George Mason University's Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab.
Speaker: Every month, we bring on new guests to explore the science of scandal, reputation, and character assassination, and how individuals and organizations can protect themselves against attack.
Speaker: My name is Deirdre Jane Prega, and I'm the Media Coordinator for the CARP Lab.
Speaker: We're a team of international scholars studying character assassination in politics, entertainment, and science.
Speaker: You can learn more about our mission at carpresearchlab.org.
Speaker: In the coming months, we'll be releasing conversations with authors, journalists, scholars, and other experts who have valuable insights about reputation and character assassination.
Speaker: For updates on our work, including information about our full conference on cancel culture, make sure to follow us on Twitter at carp underscore lab.
Speaker: If you'd like what you hear or have any suggestions for future episodes, please leave us a comment and a rating on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker: I'm so thrilled to be able to welcome my guest today, Sarah Isger.
Speaker: Sarah has extensive experience in the world of political communications, and her work on three presidential campaigns and in all three branches of government has lent her a unique perspective on how decisions really get made in Washington.
Speaker: A graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, Sarah clerked for Judge Edith H. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Speaker: She was the legal advisor to the Romney campaign, the political director of Texans for Ted Cruz, and deputy communications director for the RNC.
Speaker: As Carly Fiorina's deputy campaign manager in 2016, she was behind the scenes for over half a dozen presidential debates.
Speaker: Sarah also served as the director of the Office of Public Affairs for the Department of Justice and senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein during the Russia investigation.
Speaker: Sarah is currently a staff writer at The Dispatch, where she writes the weekly campaign newsletter The Sweep and hosts the legal podcast Advisory Opinions alongside her co-host David French.
Speaker: She has also been described as well-read and highly approachable, and I can vouch for that.
Speaker: Good morning, Sarah.
Speaker: Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker: I'm so glad to have you.
Speaker: I have no idea who described me as well-read and highly approachable.
Speaker: I mean, I have two cats.
Speaker: Like, by definition, I don't think I'm approachable.
Speaker: That's what cat people are.
Speaker: That's what your biography says on the Advisory Opinions website, so I don't know what to say.
Speaker: Oh no, let me check if I lost you.
Speaker: I don't know what happened.
Speaker: Oh no, I lost you, I think, but you're back.
Speaker: I'm back.
Speaker: I have like, it's really weird.
Speaker: Yeah, that was really weird.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, sorry.
Speaker: No, it's totally fine.
Speaker: Did you hear what I said or do I need to say more things?
Speaker: You cut off for me when you were saying it's on the dispatch, you know, bio of you or whatever.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So I will actually go back to there and then we'll cut all this out.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: No problem.
Speaker: Yes, so that is actually on your bio at the dispatch.
Speaker: So, you know.
Speaker: I mean, what intern wrote that?
Speaker: That was my thought when I saw it, but I think it's true.
Speaker: Based on my experience, it's true.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right, I appreciate that.
Speaker: So we just heard about where you are today, but do you want to talk about kind of how you got here?
Speaker: You're from Texas.
Speaker: So what took you from Texas to Northwestern to Harvard?
Speaker: And what was that like?
Speaker: How did that happen?
Speaker: First, let me just say that whenever you're asked this question, you wrap your life in this neat little narrative so that it all makes sense.
Speaker: I think that gives a little bit of a misimpression, especially to college students, that there's this obvious path that I went down and one thing led to another.
Speaker: At every step of the way, I knew what was coming next.
Speaker: Just at the outset, I want to say that, yes, this will sound like a neat little narrative, but that's not how life works and it's certainly not how mine works.
Speaker: But yeah, I grew up in sort of a rural part of Texas.
Speaker: My mother was a wildlife rehabilitator.
Speaker: So I grew up with lots of owls and deer and then somehow ended up at Northwestern where I was supposed to be a science and math major.
Speaker: And there was a computer glitch.
Speaker: It was the first online registration semester.
Speaker: And I, you know, because of my like math program that I was in, I needed a class basically at night and the computer system basically stopped
Speaker: Capping classes.
Speaker: And so I was like, oh, this is this class is at the perfect time.
Speaker: It's called Media and Campaign 2000.
Speaker: I'll just get into that because it's at like 8pm on Mondays.
Speaker: Turns out it was a senior level poli sci course that was supposed to be capped at like 10 seniors and instead, you know, 30 people show up.
Speaker: I'm the only freshman who was dumb enough to sign up for it.
Speaker: I begged the professor to let me stay just because of the time of the course.
Speaker: And then the 2000 election unfolded, you know, the recount, all of this stuff, you know, it's also some of the best Saturday Night Live sketches.
Speaker: And we would watch those every week.
Speaker: You know, the Al Gore versus George Bush
Speaker: Social Security system, lockbox, strategery, all of those Saturday Night Live moments come and we would watch them on Mondays after Saturday night, obviously.
Speaker: I just looked around and thought, gosh, if you think of college as four years to learn a skill,
Speaker: that maybe the skill I actually wanted to learn was to be able to talk about the world and engage with ideas the way that these seniors could.
Speaker: And I absolutely could not.
Speaker: At one point, I think the professor asked, who's your favorite op-ed writer?
Speaker: I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down.
Speaker: What's an op-ed?
Speaker: Where are they?
Speaker: You can name op-ed writers.
Speaker: I can't tell you how far behind I was.
Speaker: I had never read a New York Times before.
Speaker: To be able to name the writers in the New York Times, what voodoo magic is this?
Speaker: Anyway, I ended up changing my major to history and political science.
Speaker: I then applied to 20 internships, got rejected from 19 of them, got one with the Environment and Public Works Committee in the Senate because I thought like, oh, I'll do politics, but I'll do animal stuff because that's my background.
Speaker: And then proving the sense of humor that God really has, a month before I was supposed to start my internship, the Senate was split 50-50, just like it is today.
Speaker: And one of the Republicans, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Vermont, by the way, used to have lots of Republicans, still does actually.
Speaker: Anyway, Jim Jeffords switched parties and he became a Democrat and that switched the entire balance of the Senate.
Speaker: And I lost my internship most importantly.
Speaker: It was a huge, huge problem again for me.
Speaker: Forget the country, forget the legislative agenda, the Bush administration, me personally, what was I going to do?
Speaker: Basically the Republican Senate
Speaker: Senator, who was now the minority chair of the committee, took me on as a personal intern and they put me in their press office.
Speaker: And then the press secretary and communications director went on August recess and left me in charge of writing press releases.
Speaker: And it was incredible.
Speaker: So from there, I worked on a Senate campaign, fell in love with campaigning and just what that lifestyle was.
Speaker: And it was all kind of history from there.
Speaker: I graduated college, got a job as a press secretary on the Hill, was fired six weeks later, decided that I was fired because, you know, they just weren't taking me seriously enough.
Speaker: Legally Blonde had come out two years earlier and I thought, yeah, that's exactly my problem.
Speaker: So I went to Harvard Law School as like, ha, now they'll take me seriously.
Speaker: Worked on the Romney campaign in 08 while I was there and then came back in 12, Carly Fiorina's campaign in 16, and then worked in the Department of Justice in the Trump administration during the Russia investigation and all that excitement.
Speaker: So, you know, this is about reputation and character assassination.
Speaker: I definitely have experienced both sides, obviously, working for
Speaker: Candidates, people in office, judges, everything else.
Speaker: But also, little known fact, perhaps, hopefully, I have even been on the front of the National Enquirer myself.
Speaker: So anyway, I'm excited for this conversation.
Speaker: It's going to be a good time.
Speaker: That is quite the answer.
Speaker: I have to say, I don't know what I expected, but I didn't know computer error and Elle Woods would play such a prominent role, but I'm glad that they do.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: If legally blonde has not played an important role in your career choices, we have nothing in common.
Speaker: The big question, has legally won the musical played any role in your life as of late?
Speaker: Because certainly it has in mine.
Speaker: I would say that Hamilton is still playing a larger role in terms of musicals having an impact on my day-to-day life today.
Speaker: But really disappointing, my 14-month-old son
Speaker: Not a Hamilton fan yet, but we're going to keep listening to it because eventually just the familiarity alone, I think will turn him into a fan, but he does like Moana.
Speaker: So I know he's into Lin-Manuel Miranda generally.
Speaker: You have time, you have time to work on him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we're, we're spending, this is like his school right now.
Speaker: Like, you know, a couple hours a day, he has to listen to Hamilton.
Speaker: So we heard about how you decided to move into political communications a little bit by accident and how you got your first job, kind of your trajectory.
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about how candidates' public images as well as the public image of their opponent shapes the strategy you use in communications?
Speaker: Are there any particularly interesting or memorable examples of that from your time in communications?
Speaker: Yeah, I think there's this big misperception that someone in my position, the communication strategist, like I go in with this like tabula rasa of a candidate and that I just get to create from this lump of clay who this person will be and what their persona is and how the communication strategy will play out.
Speaker: When in fact, it's the exact opposite.
Speaker: You know, my campaign newsletter is called The Sweep.
Speaker: And I named it that because the best analogy that I've ever come up with for my entire career comes from Olympic curling.
Speaker: You know, we're only six months away from the next Olympics.
Speaker: It's my favorite thing in the world.
Speaker: I love, love, love the Olympics.
Speaker: I become really obsessed with curling.
Speaker: Our guys won gold last time around.
Speaker: They're going to be defending their gold medal this time.
Speaker: I've in fact even become friends with the coach of the team.
Speaker: I'm going to be screaming extra hard at the TV.
Speaker: But the reason that I think it is the closest analogy to my career is maybe not the gold medal part.
Speaker: I don't win a lot of my races.
Speaker: Those guys with the broom, you know, there's this really heavy rock on ice and it's heading in a very certain direction.
Speaker: And then you have these guys furiously sweeping with a broom in front of the rock.
Speaker: And you can't imagine that they're actually making any difference at all.
Speaker: That's my career.
Speaker: That's what I do for a living.
Speaker: Now, it turns out if you ask anyone who's actually knows anything about curling, those guys with the broom are making a difference.
Speaker: But yeah, they're not going to be able to turn that rock 90 degrees, certainly not 180 degrees.
Speaker: They're going to be able to slow it down a little, maybe let it speed up a little, um,
Speaker: small incremental changes to a trajectory and a momentum that is already well underway before their broom ever hits the ice.
Speaker: And that's really similar to what your job is as a political communications operative.
Speaker: You walk in, the worst thing you can do is try to turn your candidate into someone they're not.
Speaker: What you want to do is find ways to help your candidate be their most authentic self, because sometimes that is hard for people, unless you're a sociopath.
Speaker: It is hard to actually fully be yourself in front of a bunch of cameras all the time, answering questions in front of people.
Speaker: For those of us who have more people-pleasing tendencies, when someone asks you a question, you want to give them the answer that they want, even if that's not actually what you believe.
Speaker: All of these things contribute to what your real job is, and the people who are not good at this job are the ones who in fact are going to walk into a campaign and say,
Speaker: here's what's going on in the country and here's the candidate you're going to be.
Speaker: Nope, that's never going to work.
Speaker: And in fact, I think it's why Trump did so well.
Speaker: He was so authentic that even if people didn't like him, and lots of people don't, you look at the polls, they don't like his personality, but they think it's at least him, that he's being honest, that he's who he truly is and his authentic self, and that appealed to them.
Speaker: So
Speaker: That is, in fact, what your job is when you work for a candidate or campaign.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: I think that's really important for anyone to understand if they're thinking about kind of what we see on the news every day.
Speaker: Moving into something else we see on the news every day, character assassination.
Speaker: When you were working in political communications, working on campaigns, did you see any particularly interesting, memorable, or even just crazy examples of character assassination?
Speaker: And I also wanted to ask, what are the kind of strategies that you most commonly use when you're working in communications, kind of trying to do damage control, doing that sweep, to counter character attacks against your candidate?
Speaker: I think that,
Speaker: you can put them into two buckets, or at least I think of them in two different buckets.
Speaker: When I'm on a campaign, my candidate has their sort of chief strengths and their chief vulnerabilities.
Speaker: And the two types of attacks that their opponents are going to bring that are going to have the most impact on our strategy and on our ability to win are going to be the attacks that try to take away the strength, that chip away at like what this person is supposed to be good at,
Speaker: and then the ones that take advantage of their vulnerability and try to make that into a larger deal.
Speaker: So obviously there's plenty of examples of both.
Speaker: I think one of my
Speaker: Favorite examples of, and I was not on this campaign, but it was one of my previous bosses.
Speaker: So when Ted Cruz runs for Senate, and again, I was on his attorney general race, not a Senate race, but in the Republican primary, his opponent tried to paint him as Red Ted, a communist sympathizer.
Speaker: And this falls in a bucket number one right so one of Ted's strengths was going to be that he was this you know tea party guy super conservative his father had escaped oppression in Cuba, you know came with I think 100 bucks sewn into his underwear by his mother, and so.
Speaker: that was going to be a chief strength of Ted's.
Speaker: And so to attack him as Red Ted and have these ads that have Chinese party logos everywhere and sort of scary music in the background was going to try to take that narrative away from Ted.
Speaker: And what we saw in that one was despite it actually having a lot of money behind it,
Speaker: it just didn't have any stickiness.
Speaker: There wasn't really enough.
Speaker: So it was all based on this idea that Ted had represented when he was an attorney in private practice, a Chinese interest, I forget even, it was like a private business based in China.
Speaker: There just wasn't enough sex appeal to that argument to really chip away at Ted's core narrative of his dad escaping communist Cuba
Speaker: And so that was an example where it was sort of silliness.
Speaker: On the other hand, I can certainly think of examples where attacking someone's strength has worked.
Speaker: Andrew Cuomo, who's in the news a lot, you know, I'm forgetting whether it was his first race or his second one, but, you know, he was running against someone who was going to be running on an anti-corruption platform.
Speaker: And so the first thing he did before the race even started was attack his opponent for corruption.
Speaker: The idea that he had taken the governor's helicopter to go somewhere.
Speaker: Totally normal, really standard operating procedure.
Speaker: But because he had attacked first and said that he was part of the corruption in Albany, it then handicapped that guy from being able to say, like, no, I'm the anti-corruption candidate.
Speaker: And that I think was a really effective way to attack someone's strength, to get out there first, muddy the water with something that actually wasn't particularly true.
Speaker: And it's because if you just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, voters do have a hard time sorting through what actually matters, what doesn't matter, which one's true, which one's false.
Speaker: Okay, so that's the first bucket, the strength bucket.
Speaker: Then on the weakness bucket,
Speaker: you're going to see a lot more of this because it's a lot easier to do.
Speaker: You find out your opponent's weaknesses and then you try to tell voters like, see, you can't have this person and there's usually not a great response back.
Speaker: Obviously, we got a ton of this with Carly Fiorina, this idea that she had been the CEO of HP and then had been fired.
Speaker: Well, why was she fired?
Speaker: And so there's tons of negative stuff put out there that she was imperious, that she wasn't well liked, that she ran HP into the ground, all of these attacks that you're going to spend then a ton of your time pushing back of like, well, no,
Speaker: you know, the things that you're saying that they said now, like sound really sexist.
Speaker: And in 1999, 2004, she was the first female CEO of any major US company.
Speaker: It was a fortune 11 company.
Speaker: So yeah, there were a ton of sexist attacks.
Speaker: But like the reason we don't,
Speaker: think that now is because we understand that female leaders are often attacked with that language.
Speaker: But right from the beginning, you're on your heels defending a weakness.
Speaker: And that's always a rough place to be in.
Speaker: So those are some examples of, I think, what are generally fair game.
Speaker: They repeat over and over again.
Speaker: You obviously then have the more outlandish ones, mostly during the Trump years, frankly.
Speaker: Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.
Speaker: His dad was part of the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker: It's funny because those did have a stickiness to them because people thought they were silly.
Speaker: They didn't have the effect of making, I think, anyone think that Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: I actually think they did have the effect of making Ted Cruz look weak, that he wasn't able to respond and make the Trump campaign look stupid for floating these ideas.
Speaker: Yeah, that's really interesting.
Speaker: And I think that leads me to my next series of questions.
Speaker: You might call them a bucket about working on the presidential campaign for Carly Fiorina.
Speaker: How did you deal with Donald Trump?
Speaker: What was your strategy?
Speaker: Because we know that Donald Trump, he's probably the all time king of ad hominem attacks, at least in recent memory.
Speaker: And he's also pretty unconventional, especially in 2016,
Speaker: People didn't know how to predict him like maybe they would have known four years later.
Speaker: So how do you create a campaign strategy when you're dealing with such an unconventional actor, an unconventional candidate like Donald Trump?
Speaker: So you have to start with what our goal was.
Speaker: Carly Fiorina entered the race as the outsider.
Speaker: At that point, we didn't think Donald Trump was going to run.
Speaker: One of the things we were going to have to work really hard was this idea that it was even possible for someone to get elected when they had never held elected office before.
Speaker: And what's really funny is that was really hard for us to push back on.
Speaker: And then Donald Trump enters the race and reporters like mostly accept that he could win.
Speaker: Very frustrating, by the way.
Speaker: So our goal entering the race was we knew we had to up her name ID.
Speaker: you know, vast, vast, vast majority of the country had never heard of Carly Fiorina.
Speaker: And even among the tiny percentage that had heard of her, they didn't really know much about her.
Speaker: You know, Carly Fiorina ran for Senate in California, head of some company.
Speaker: So we needed, we had a huge uphill climb for familiarity, name ID, stuff like that.
Speaker: And in that sense, Donald Trump was a potential positive.
Speaker: nobody can get you more attention than Donald Trump, the guy who was getting all the attention.
Speaker: So when he initially attacked Carly Fiorina and said, look at that base, that base could never be president United States.
Speaker: That was, you know, a gift in a lot of ways, because then all of a sudden the reporters turned to us.
Speaker: Carly is great in a fight.
Speaker: She loves it.
Speaker: She had, you know, all of these ready-made zingers to shoot back at him.
Speaker: And just crushed him at that CNN debate at the Reagan Library when it was that one-on-one battle between the two of them.
Speaker: The problem, of course, became that he learned quite quickly to ignore her
Speaker: And when he started ignoring her, so did all of the media.
Speaker: And that starved us of the one thing we needed most, which was attention, name ID, familiarity for voters.
Speaker: And the reporters, the media all followed Donald Trump wherever he wanted to go, whatever he wanted to talk about, that's what they wanted to talk about.
Speaker: And so when he then started attacking Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, we were forgotten.
Speaker: I think it is important to remember what a big role the media coverage played in all of this.
Speaker: In some ways, it is completely dependent on who's being covered and Donald Trump has always had this effect.
Speaker: He walks into the room and he sucks out all the oxygen.
Speaker: So that's a really interesting thing to keep in mind.
Speaker: Candidates can get benefit from being attacked, even if it might not seem that way to outside observers.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we raised a ton of money.
Speaker: Our polling numbers shot up, a lot more media interview offers.
Speaker: It was just no question that that attack was the high moment of the candidacy, which obviously is not a good thing.
Speaker: That does lead me to another question.
Speaker: What was it like to be behind the scenes for the 2016 debates, which were so memorable?
Speaker: I think the fact that we can still remember the sort of zingers and the lines from some primary debates five years ago says a lot.
Speaker: So what's it like to be behind the scenes for debates?
Speaker: How do you prep candidates before they go on?
Speaker: And what kind of role does research, focus groups, and other findings like that play when you're creating that strategy?
Speaker: Man, there's a reason that debates are sort of, I don't know, lionized in fiction a lot because they are so much fun.
Speaker: preparing for them is fun doing them is like the most nerve wracking high wire experience.
Speaker: It feels a little
Speaker: I don't know how to describe it.
Speaker: It must be what it's like to have your kid in the Olympics or something.
Speaker: And like at the end of the day, like you're in the stands and they're down there, you know, on the mat about to do their, you know, triple vials or whatever on the vault and your heart, you're just like, you can't wait for it to be over and like have someone tell you how it went.
Speaker: You're just so nervous for them.
Speaker: And it also, you know, we would have these candidate forums where all the candidates would be in one place together and these are your like sworn enemies at the time but you also have relationships with them you have friends on the other campaigns the candidates know each other.
Speaker: And so what happens behind the scenes is that the candidates sort of are all in the center, making really awkward small talk with each other.
Speaker: And the campaign operatives are all around the outside, like, you know, parents at the playground, you know, oh, Margot, no, no, no, don't bite Chris.
Speaker: No, don't bite him.
Speaker: No hair pulling.
Speaker: And, you know, we like chit chatting about how our candidates are getting along and who's talking to who.
Speaker: It's funny, you do see these like little, not even like political alliances, like just friend alliances be created.
Speaker: So like Rick Perry and Carly Fiorina were famously close, you know, behind the scenes at a bunch of these candidate forums and stuff.
Speaker: Sarah Raychard, And then there were there were some candidates who will remain unnamed it was like the cheese stands alone no you know what I will name them like nobody talked to john casick like at any event ever the poor guy was just so unliked by his fellow candidates.
Speaker: Sarah Raychard, In terms of prep so there's like.
Speaker: two different kinds of prep.
Speaker: There's the immediate prep for the debate, which I'm actually not a fan of the so-and-so is a stand-in pretending to be whoever.
Speaker: When you're in the general election and there's one other person on that debate stage, of course, that's what you need to do.
Speaker: But these primary debates, it's almost not fair to call them debates.
Speaker: You're not debating against anyone.
Speaker: You're debating against yourself.
Speaker: You're trying to get a moment where you get to say your thing and you get to stand out.
Speaker: So what you're doing is trying to get practice interjecting,
Speaker: getting quippy comments out there, synthesizing your thoughts into something that resonates in 30 seconds or less.
Speaker: So it's a lot of running, I call it running questions.
Speaker: where you'll just sit there for an hour and it's just the debate moderator.
Speaker: Like, you know, I play the debate moderator and throw questions out and then interrupt them when they start giving their answer and sort of that real life.
Speaker: But I don't put, you know, seven other people up there and pretend that like one's Chris Christie and one's Marco Rubio and stuff.
Speaker: That's, I don't find that to be very productive.
Speaker: Now,
Speaker: bigger picture outside of debate prep, yes, you have focus groups, you have polling.
Speaker: And again, you're trying to gauge your candidates' strengths and vulnerabilities.
Speaker: What do voters want to see from them if they're on the fence about supporting them?
Speaker: How can I pull someone who says that Carly Fiorina is their second choice and Marco Rubio is their first choice?
Speaker: What would make Carly Fiorina their first choice?
Speaker: What would make her more attractive?
Speaker: what you're trying to gauge in those focus groups.
Speaker: And then you're going to translate that into those debate prep moments to see whether she can showcase either, you know, if they're like, well, she's too shrill.
Speaker: Okay, well then let's work on that in the debate prep.
Speaker: Or, you know, I want to understand her foreign policy better.
Speaker: Okay, well, then we need to give bigger picture answers on foreign policy, not sort of, you know, nine bullet points on how to fix Iran.
Speaker: So that's where those bigger questions can feed into debate prep, but they also feed into town halls and media interviews and everything else.
Speaker: When we're talking about strengths and vulnerabilities, which seems to be the big takeaway, always keeping those two things in mind, you were discussing some of the attacks against Carly Fiorina and that some of them were just sexist.
Speaker: I want to ask what role do you find that gender plays when you're dealing with character attacks and how were the types of challenges and attacks that
Speaker: Curly Fiorina faced different perhaps than some other male politicians you have worked for and is there any specific way that you try to counter that?
Speaker: You know this topic we could do like several hours on just this topic because I feel like a lot of people think that sexist attacks need to be um you know
Speaker: she doesn't have big enough boobs or something like it needs to be so directly and obviously about gender.
Speaker: When in fact, I think that everyone has immediate assumptions that are made about them based on how they look.
Speaker: You know, so I'm going to make sort of mean generalizations like,
Speaker: I don't think many people find Ted Cruz to be sexually attractive.
Speaker: And so there's going to be certain ways that he's treated by the media or by other candidates or by even voters
Speaker: based on the fact that they don't wanna date him in a way that like George W. Bush, who some women, I'm not saying I was one of them, some women thought George W. Bush was kind of cute.
Speaker: And so he's gonna get treated differently based on that.
Speaker: Tall men are treated differently than short men.
Speaker: So there's all these things wrapped into immutable characteristics, race, gender, good looking, bad looking, tall, short, blonde, foreign, whatever.
Speaker: And so I think sometimes we make too much of gender as if it's the only immutable characteristic or race.
Speaker: Well, that's not true.
Speaker: But there are, of course, things that are gendered in the way we think about female candidates.
Speaker: So just at the very outset, we've never had a female president.
Speaker: And so there is this background program running when people think about
Speaker: you know, there's 20 candidates in the field who looks like they're going to be president.
Speaker: Well, right off the bat, Carly Fiorina doesn't look like any of our past presidents.
Speaker: Neither did Barack Obama, by the way.
Speaker: You have to overcome that immediately.
Speaker: That can be hard because reporters, voters, everyone have these unconscious biases of looking for patterns that they've already experienced and the patterns they've experienced as president are men.
Speaker: I think the man one truthfully is harder to overcome often than the race.
Speaker: We can get into a whole thing on that separately.
Speaker: Right away there was that.
Speaker: There was also the way how aggressive a woman can be or should be what you expect of femininity.
Speaker: Hillary Clinton wearing pantsuits, Carly Fiorina always wore dresses.
Speaker: On the one hand, presidents, you know, it looks more presidential.
Speaker: It looks more like what male presidents have worn to work, wear a pantsuit.
Speaker: But on the other hand, it defies that our expectation of how women look.
Speaker: And so Hillary Clinton was in this sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't catch.
Speaker: Carly obviously took the other approach.
Speaker: Yep, male presidents have not worn dresses, but it looks more feminine.
Speaker: So there's those things that you're constantly dealing with.
Speaker: at sort of that big level.
Speaker: But look at the micro level, there were hilarious things as well.
Speaker: At that CNN debate that I mentioned at the Reagan Library, they had to build a set so that the plane was in the background.
Speaker: The plane is actually pretty high up off the ground.
Speaker: I don't know, 30 feet, 40 feet.
Speaker: So they built all this scaffolding so that the stage was 30 or 40 feet off the ground.
Speaker: Well, there was a men's bathroom
Speaker: nearby, but there was no women's bathroom and the commercial breaks are three minutes and 20 seconds.
Speaker: And so we had to work out with CNN, how there could be a women's bathroom that Carly Fiorina could get to in high heels in a commercial break and still make it back in the same time as the men, you know, like that took up
Speaker: real time.
Speaker: It's not sexism exactly, but it is a difference in gender when it's only been men running for president.
Speaker: I think that's really a great way to put it into context.
Speaker: There are things that they're not even necessarily malicious.
Speaker: They're just more difficult.
Speaker: I think that's a really interesting kind of vulnerability.
Speaker: The things that
Speaker: are not done on purpose, the things that are not done with any malice, but the things that are hard nonetheless, and sometimes in absurd ways.
Speaker: I mean, frankly, just getting the pantyhose off was going to be such a trauma.
Speaker: If anyone goes back and watches, I will tell you, Carly Fiorina did not go to the bathroom during that debate.
Speaker: Seems like it would have been difficult based on what I'm hearing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would love to move into talking about your time at the Department of Justice.
Speaker: I don't know how much of it is under lock and key, top super secret material, but I would love to discuss what that job entailed
Speaker: specifically how, as a spokeswoman, you act as an intermediary to the media.
Speaker: Because there's so many interesting examples of that.
Speaker: I remember on your podcast, you discussed a very interesting story that had been covered for a couple weeks on the news, which was that the Department of Justice had spied, I believe was the term that was being used, on congressional Democrats, also turned out on Republicans.
Speaker: And kind of the likely explanation for that was that their phone number was incidentally collected during an investigation of a staffer that had been leaking classified materials.
Speaker: And you realize that this was probably likely and then a couple of weeks later I remember seeing an article which basically concluded that yes it had been incidentally collected during a probe into leaking.
Speaker: Just jumping off from that, I want to ask a little bit about your experience of how the media interprets and sometimes misinterprets information and how you deal with that when you're working in communications.
Speaker: When character attacks come from the media, is that more difficult?
Speaker: Does that present an extra liability?
Speaker: Oh man, there's so much wrapped up into that.
Speaker: You know, it was very frustrating when that story broke about the congressional subpoenas that you're mentioning because you had a few factors built into this.
Speaker: It is always hard to deal with reporters on a subject that they don't know a lot about.
Speaker: On the one hand, it gives you as the operative a lot of power because if you understand something and they don't,
Speaker: they have to rely on you for all of these details.
Speaker: But on the other hand, if someone else gets to them first, then this narrative gets out there and it's really hard to pull it back.
Speaker: So what you saw in that case was democratic members of the house say,
Speaker: OMG, the Department of Justice during the Trump years was spying on us, was, you know, they implied, you know, listening in on our phone calls because we were enemies of President Trump.
Speaker: That made no sense for someone who's worked at the Department of Justice, you know, on three different occasions.
Speaker: And
Speaker: At the same time, like there's things you don't know.
Speaker: And so I sort of put on my old hat and called the senior team, let's say, a whole bunch of people who were in senior leadership of the Department of Justice and was like, hey, guys, what the what?
Speaker: They're saying that we were, you know, listening in on Eric Swalwell's Saturday night, you know, life.
Speaker: Nobody had heard anything about it.
Speaker: It didn't ring any bells.
Speaker: There weren't any briefings, all the things that you would expect in a large bureaucracy never happened.
Speaker: So then you start backing up and asking, okay, well,
Speaker: Clearly, this wasn't made up out of whole cloth.
Speaker: It's one thing when it's just a total lie.
Speaker: Those are actually pretty easy to bat down.
Speaker: And you can normally get a double bounce because you can discredit the source, and then they can't usually lie again the next time.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: But in this case, it obviously wasn't a total lie.
Speaker: Apple was the one who sent them emails saying, we responded to a congressional subpoena with information on your account.
Speaker: Well, OK.
Speaker: So clearly, they did.
Speaker: So anyway, it takes time.
Speaker: Often your job is to be a reporter, a reporter with really good sources.
Speaker: When you can just call up the Deputy Attorney General and the Attorney General and chit chat with them, that's a pretty good reporter lifestyle.
Speaker: But it's to go and find out what happened as best you can.
Speaker: And so that's what I did.
Speaker: And it was kind of fun.
Speaker: I haven't had that job now in several years.
Speaker: And so to get to talk to all my old coworkers and
Speaker: be the sleuth to try to figure that out.
Speaker: And what I found out was that for this not to get reported up the chain, here's what would have needed to happen.
Speaker: And basically it's what you said, there's an investigation into someone else.
Speaker: All they're going to get from that are the phone numbers that that person called.
Speaker: Well, if I handed you a list of 500 phone numbers,
Speaker: that's useless to you.
Speaker: You need to know who those phone numbers belong to.
Speaker: And so what you're gonna do is send those 500 numbers to Apple and say, I need account subscriber information for those 500 numbers.
Speaker: When Apple then turns over 500 names, you then go through and are looking for certain names that you think would be involved in the leak of classified information, the unauthorized disclosure.
Speaker: If you see Eric Swalwell's name or Adam Schiff, you're just like, you don't even notice that they're there because that's not part of your investigation.
Speaker: It's not who you were looking for.
Speaker: And that's, I believe what happened in this case.
Speaker: But then of course, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell get this email.
Speaker: It's like, we've turned over information about you.
Speaker: Well, they don't know that it's only account subscriber information.
Speaker: They don't know that it was incidental to this ongoing investigation of someone else entirely.
Speaker: As you said, Don McGann, the White House counsel, also received an email like this as part of a different investigation, but it was the same thing.
Speaker: Someone's being investigated and they happen to call the White House counsel.
Speaker: Well, the White House counsel's name is going to show up.
Speaker: They're going to then ignore it and move on to other potential suspects or witnesses.
Speaker: That can be a really interesting and fun moment in a comms person's world because then now you've done your reporting internally, right?
Speaker: You now believe that you know what happened.
Speaker: You have lots of sources for this.
Speaker: And now, okay, what do you do with that information?
Speaker: You having it isn't enough.
Speaker: And what you're gonna do is you're gonna call through
Speaker: the reporters at the major news outlets and walk them through this and say, here's who I'll have talked to.
Speaker: Here's why the narrative that's out there doesn't work.
Speaker: Here's what I think did happen and here's why.
Speaker: Then you answer all their questions and it feels like
Speaker: the job that you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker: That's how comms works when it's working well.
Speaker: It's okay that the wrong story gets out there at first.
Speaker: That's going to happen at times.
Speaker: The question is what you can do to fix it, how quickly you can fix it.
Speaker: A lot of ways is going to depend on your credibility with those reporters.
Speaker: Do they trust you that you called those people?
Speaker: Do they trust you when you tell them how the Department of Justice works?
Speaker: That's why when I talk to my students,
Speaker: You never, ever, for any reason, never, ever undermine your own credibility.
Speaker: That means not lying, but it also means not misleading.
Speaker: It also means not ignoring phone calls just because you're going to have to admit to something that's not good for your guy.
Speaker: There's so many ways in which you can choose every day to bolster your credibility or undermine your credibility.
Speaker: And so often you see people make the short term decision to undermine their credibility.
Speaker: either out of loyalty to their boss.
Speaker: It's not helping your boss when you then don't have credibility for the next crisis.
Speaker: So that's what it's always about, credibility building.
Speaker: That's really interesting.
Speaker: I think I detect a thread throughout all of this that the things that from the outside can look like massive vulnerabilities and liabilities can be turned into strengths and positive opportunities.
Speaker: You know, if you take all the right steps, if you do all the right things, and if you don't sacrifice your credibility for short term outcomes.
Speaker: Yeah, and you know, look, working at the Department of Justice was just such a privilege to work on behalf of taxpayers to work on behalf of the rule of law and incredibly wonderful experience and very different than working on campaigns.
Speaker: So sometimes the two are not the same and the rule books, not the same, but one example that comes to mind is when we had
Speaker: Jennifer L. police involved shootings the Department of Justice would investigate those and determine whether to charge the officers involved.
Speaker: Jennifer L. When the Department of Justice would decline to charge the officers that were often protests, there could be unrest, we saw violence during the Obama years, for instance, when they would define to charge some of those.
Speaker: At one point, a news outlet found out that we were about to decline to prosecute and to announce that.
Speaker: I believe we were going to announce it on a Wednesday.
Speaker: They found out the Friday before.
Speaker: They called and said, we're reporting this.
Speaker: Do you have a comment?
Speaker: Look, at that point, I could have lied and said, oh, you're just wrong.
Speaker: Don't report that.
Speaker: You have incorrect information.
Speaker: But they didn't.
Speaker: They were correct.
Speaker: But if I say they're correct and then they report that on a Friday and we're not set to announce it till a Wednesday, there's a whole lot wrong with that.
Speaker: And so what I said was, look, can we talk off the record?
Speaker: Which they agreed to.
Speaker: And I said, I am not at liberty to confirm your reporting because this involves grand jury material and everything else.
Speaker: However, I am not going to deny what you're about to report.
Speaker: But here's what I want to tell you.
Speaker: We want to have federal law enforcement and local and state law enforcement on the ground to make sure everyone is safe that day and to make sure that there are peaceful protests and that people can exercise their First Amendment rights.
Speaker: And at the same time that we have that presence on the ground to make sure that everyone else gets to stay safe.
Speaker: And we had this back and forth that not only was productive, was how you want
Speaker: reporters to work with government officials.
Speaker: Also, it built that relationship so that we had trust going into the next time.
Speaker: I could have easily lied, I could have screamed at them or whatever else.
Speaker: In the end, for what it's worth, I think it turned out exactly how it should have.
Speaker: Once we had law enforcement on the ground, they reported it and they reported it before our announcement.
Speaker: That was embarrassing for the department that we had had a leak like that.
Speaker: It was upsetting to the family that it was out in the news before they heard from the Department of Justice.
Speaker: At the same time, people were able to protest and there was plenty of law enforcement there to make sure that everyone was safe and that those protests were also, the protesters themselves were also protected.
Speaker: That is a great end of the day at work where you feel like,
Speaker: the country worked the way it was supposed to and its institutions worked the way they were supposed to.
Speaker: But that only works if you have credibility and those moments build credibility for the next time so that you can work with that bureau chief
Speaker: and build those relationships.
Speaker: It's so, so important.
Speaker: And I feel like that's something that's being lost currently in our political environment is that campaign operatives are coming up watching, I don't know, House of Cards or something.
Speaker: And they think that the way to do your job, the way to judge the success of how well you've done your job is how antagonistic you've been with reporters and how bad your relationships are with them.
Speaker: It doesn't serve your boss and it sure doesn't serve your country.
Speaker: There is a really weird culture right now that tries to measure your success and how well you're doing based on how much the other side hates you.
Speaker: And if the other side hates you a lot, that means you are doing the best job for your candidate.
Speaker: But that's not always true.
Speaker: I'm sure sometimes people do get an advantage by getting to brag about, you know, the media hates me.
Speaker: But at the same time, are you really doing the best by your candidate, your boss, by sabotaging those relationships?
Speaker: I would love to move into your history with character assassination, which is something you alluded to earlier in the episode.
Speaker: I want to ask, what is it like being the target of these kind of attacks after you've been behind the scenes?
Speaker: I also know that you've been the target of different kind of character attacks.
Speaker: You mentioned you've been on the cover of the National Enquirer.
Speaker: You've been attacked after you're hiring at CNN, kind of with the goal of, quote unquote, unhiring you.
Speaker: Can you talk about the experience of both types of character assassination?
Speaker: What some people today would call a cancel culture campaign in the second case.
Speaker: Do these kind of attacks differ in any way?
Speaker: And what advice would you give to someone that's being attacked?
Speaker: So it's so funny, you work for 20 years in politics working for candidates who get attacked every day, and you're constantly telling them like, oh, don't worry about it, who even cares?
Speaker: And staff for most of my career was largely off limits unless you're, you know, the White House chief of staff or the White House press secretary.
Speaker: And that's no longer really true.
Speaker: And I think I was sort of on the leading edge of some of that.
Speaker: So in March of 2016, the National Enquirer calls my cell phone and leaves a message and says, we're going to run a story that you are one of Ted Cruz's mistresses.
Speaker: Do you have a comment?
Speaker: I thought this was a joke.
Speaker: I mean, if you can just imagine, like I just left, I remember exactly where I was.
Speaker: One of my favorite sushi restaurants in Houston.
Speaker: And I was walking out to the parking lot.
Speaker: And I was just checking my messages.
Speaker: And like that one pops up and I was like, is this some sort of prank?
Speaker: What in the world?
Speaker: And then it slowly sunk in that it was true.
Speaker: Fast forward.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, my picture's on the cover of the National Enquirer.
Speaker: They didn't use my name in the story, but, you know, the internet took about two hours to figure out that that was my picture and what my name was and that I had in fact worked for Ted Cruz in 2009.
Speaker: I'm happy to tell your podcast listeners that I did not have an affair with Ted Cruz.
Speaker: Wholly fabricated.
Speaker: But, you know, social media being what it is, just tons and tons of vitriol, name calling, really gendered stuff.
Speaker: It was very unpleasant.
Speaker: And it's in part because while, you know, I don't think any of us need to be liked by everyone all the time or think that's realistic.
Speaker: Nobody likes to be hated.
Speaker: And you're like, wait, you don't even know me, hold on.
Speaker: But I think that it was such a valuable experience because it did teach me A, what my candidates had been going through over and over again.
Speaker: And be I think it helped almost like a an inoculation because it wasn't true at all, you know so many people get attacked for something they did do.
Speaker: And that they're not proud of and that's embarrassing but it's particularly hard because it's true and in this case I think it was helpful.
Speaker: to get attacked for something that wasn't true because I could, you know, like I didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker: Like you're calling me these names and it just makes no sense to me.
Speaker: There's no evidence, there's no photos, there's no phone records.
Speaker: I mean, literally there is not even a shred of smoke, let alone fire.
Speaker: And so what it allowed me to do is learn how that can work and how to not care.
Speaker: Like if you're someone on Twitter
Speaker: who I don't know, who I've never heard of, who's this anonymous person.
Speaker: Yeah, I just, and you're willing to believe a story you saw in the National Enquirer with zero evidence, I probably don't need to value your opinion of me, but also of anything else.
Speaker: And so it taught me a really valuable lesson that, okay, then when they do call, or when it is something that's maybe more personal, like the CNN hire,
Speaker: I don't, that's the same people, right?
Speaker: So if I didn't take them seriously during the National Enquirer situation, why would I take them seriously?
Speaker: Why would I care about their opinion of me now?
Speaker: It's much easier said than done.
Speaker: You know, during the CNN thing, the idea was that I worked in the Trump administration and therefore I could not work in journalism.
Speaker: I think that's a real misperception of how we want journalism to work.
Speaker: You know, we don't want a whole bunch of newly minted college graduates working in journalism who have never held any other job, have no idea how campaigns work behind the scenes, have no idea how the government works, except through their lens as a reporter.
Speaker: It makes them incredibly vulnerable to whatever expert they talk to.
Speaker: It's also just not how journalism has ever worked in the past.
Speaker: Almost at least half of the most famous journalists that you can think of have all held some job, often in politics, often in campaigns, and look, we only have two teams.
Speaker: They have worked for Democrats or Republicans at some point, or even better,
Speaker: they've worked in finance or they've worked in healthcare.
Speaker: In fact, I think we need, especially right now, way, way more people who have been doctors or nurses or healthcare professionals going into journalism so that we can have a better understanding of something like a pandemic.
Speaker: At the same time, back to my CNN thing, I can say all that and it's still very hurtful when someone says, well, you have no journalism experience, you've never written,
Speaker: Well, wait, I have.
Speaker: I've published law review articles.
Speaker: I've written in neuroscience journals.
Speaker: And that's not going to break through.
Speaker: And instead, this narrative takes hold that none of those stories mentioned that I had gone to Harvard Law School.
Speaker: It was just this, you know, it felt a little gendered.
Speaker: at some point where I was like, this dumb, dumb press secretary thinks she's going into journalism instead of this entire legal career I had writing that I had done.
Speaker: So yeah, that can be more hurtful.
Speaker: But at the same time, again, care about the people who you respect and know and who know you.
Speaker: If they're telling you you're doing something wrong, if they're
Speaker: critiquing you publicly, take that to heart.
Speaker: Sometimes that's going to be hurtful.
Speaker: What you should never do is care at all what is happening on Twitter.
Speaker: It's not representative of the country and it sure as hell isn't representative of your friends and family who actually know you and who can say like, hey, we think you went off the path here.
Speaker: That can be a valuable lesson.
Speaker: It can be a really hard one and not one that I would recommend for most people.
Speaker: It's particularly hard, I think,
Speaker: If you're not in the public eye like I am and you're walking your dog or your bird watching and all of a sudden now you're a celebrity.
Speaker: I have to say my takeaway from that is that I need to trust every story that runs in the National Enquirer, the opinions of Twitter and ons and that journalism should be filled with 20 year old college grads.
Speaker: So thank you so much.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: The more I can proselytize that Twitter is not representative of the country, of voters, of the Democratic Party, of the Republican Party, like that is a real victory.
Speaker: You go look at some of those statistics and they will blow your mind that basically the political conversations happening on Twitter represent about 1% of the American public.
Speaker: Every time I hear stuff like that, it kind of confirms what I already know.
Speaker: But also it sort of blows my mind again that that's not the disclaimer on half the articles that you see every day.
Speaker: Just to wrap up, I'll end with a softball.
Speaker: It's about libel law.
Speaker: Because we live in the United States, obviously we've got really robust First Amendment protections and we have weak libel law.
Speaker: How do you think that this affects character assassination in the United States?
Speaker: Are reputations just more fragile here than in Europe, for example?
Speaker: And how do you think American individuals and organizations can protect themselves or at least try to inoculate themselves against character attacks without resorting to the legal system like you might in another country where libel law is more protective?
Speaker: It's so funny you ask this because I've been struggling with this a little bit.
Speaker: You look at a country like the UK, who you're right, have a much lower standard in a sense to bring libel lawsuits.
Speaker: Yet their tabloids are far more out of control than ours.
Speaker: I think they have a far worse.
Speaker: If you want to be a celebrity, I'd rather live here than there.
Speaker: Why aren't their libel laws working the way we would expect them to work?
Speaker: I don't have a great answer for that.
Speaker: At the same time in our country, two different things are going on.
Speaker: One, we have at least two justices on the Supreme Court who are interested in revisiting the current standard for libel against public figures.
Speaker: Right now, it's not only do you have to prove it was false, but you have to prove that the person who said it knew it was false at the time.
Speaker: And that's a very, very high bar.
Speaker: And, and it's also made up.
Speaker: There's nothing in the law that requires us to have a different standard for someone.
Speaker: And what is a public figure these days?
Speaker: If you voiced an opinion on Twitter, did you make yourself a public figure because you said something publicly?
Speaker: Or do you need to be on cable news?
Speaker: Or do you need to be running for office?
Speaker: So that's turned into, I think, a bit of a mess.
Speaker: But I think something that we have here that's often overlooked at the state level, many, many states have these things called anti-slap laws, where if you bring a meritless libel lawsuit to try to silence your critics, they can get attorney's fees back
Speaker: and court costs back by showing that you filed this lawsuit just to harass them for exercising their free speech rights.
Speaker: Look, as a society, every society has to decide how to balance the speech of one person versus the reputation of another.
Speaker: I'm not saying that America has gotten it perfect through our whole lifespan of the country.
Speaker: But boy, if we're going to have a thumb on one side or the other, I would rather have the thumb on free speech.
Speaker: I think in the long run, it will serve us better even if people get to say mean things, false things about you along the way, even if they're false things about me.
Speaker: I think you want that balance, but the tie should go to speech.
Speaker: I completely agree and I think sometimes in this conversation we forget the fact that some Twitter anon has the right to lie about me means that later I have the right to say something true.
Speaker: Even if it's about a powerful person who doesn't necessarily want me to say that thing.
Speaker: Of course, like anything, there's trade-offs to that but there's also a whole lot of benefits.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I just want to end this interview with a really quick one.
Speaker: What is one thing that you think that anyone who wants to better understand political communications campaigns, the whole thing, what should they read or watch anything?
Speaker: You know, for my students, I tell them they should always watch the White House press briefing.
Speaker: You learn the rhythms and back and forth of reporter and communications operative at the highest level on both sides.
Speaker: And it's like watching a great tennis match.
Speaker: And you see the foot faults and you you learn so much from that.
Speaker: But let's assume you're not quite wanting to go so far in the weeds.
Speaker: I think the most important thing that you can learn first is what is newsworthy.
Speaker: And so something I often start my classes with is if you were the head of, you know, ABC's Evening News tonight, what story would you lead with?
Speaker: And then I have the class debate that.
Speaker: And the best way to start picking up on that is A, to watch the nightly news, the broadcast nightly news, NBC, ABC, CBS.
Speaker: And two, I like Axios' morning newsletter.
Speaker: They pick 10 news stories of the day.
Speaker: And you'll start to see why something is more newsworthy than something else.
Speaker: What do you do on slow news days?
Speaker: What do you do on really busy news days?
Speaker: That is an invaluable skill set for a future communications operative, because when you're pitching stories about your candidate or on the defense, the thing you're always living in is the swirl of the current news cycle.
Speaker: And if you don't understand what that news cycle is, how it's going to work, where it's going to go next, you have no clue how to protect, defend, push your communications messaging for that day.
Speaker: I just want to thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker: We have learned so much and I have learned so much and I really have a new perspective looking at the news when I see attacks and my instinct is to say, oh, that's really unfair.
Speaker: I think there's another side to it.
Speaker: I think you can look at it and say, oh, that's really unfair, but this could be a good opportunity for someone.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker: It was really wonderful to speak to you.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I'm going to have to hop off.
Speaker: Is that cool?
Speaker: Bye-bye.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of CARP Radio.
Speaker: If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave us a five-star rating, and share it with your friends and family.
Speaker: We really appreciate it.
Speaker: Be sure to follow us on carp underscore lab on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter for more updates.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
