Lanny Davis Manages Crises, and Also Imus

Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to President Bill Clinton, presently fancies himself a crisis manager, and one who recently wound up in a pickle of his own. “He would have been with us yesterday,” Imus said, introducing Davis. “But he was busy signing up new clients Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong-Il.”
 
In a New York Times article last week, a reporter highlighted Davis’s tendency to take on controversial clients. like coup supporters in Honduras, a dictator in Equatorial Guinea, and, most recently, the self-proclaimed President of the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, who recently claimed he won an election that everybody else says he lost.
 
“I took it on, consulted with the State Department, and behind the scenes, tried to figure out a way to give them a peaceful outcome without another bloody civil war, which cost half-a-million lives,” Davis said of the Ivory Coast case. He did not, he insisted, lobby or plan on lobbying on Gbagbo or the Ivory Coast’s behalf in Washington, DC.
 
Within ten days of announcing that his intention was not to defend Gbagbo, but to seek the most diplomatic solution to the dispute, Davis resigned the account when it became clear that having the State Department’s approval was not going to absolve him from negative press.
 
“I said to them when they hired me, ‘I’m not going to defend you at all,’” Davis said, referring to the Gbagbo. Though he also stated so publicly, and had the blessing of the State Department, “in this world of slime and innuendo that’s otherwise known as journalism, the facts don’t seem to matter.”
 
As for whether Gbagbo himself is guilty of violating human rights, as he has been accused of doing, Davis said, “I don’t know what the facts are, but I know I wasn’t hired to defend him, and I didn’t.” In today’s media environment, he said, oftentimes “the headlines damn you, and the facts come very much later, in little fine print.”
 
Davis’s advice to his clients is always the same: “Get your facts out!” In his case, however, the facts took a bit longer than expected, and garnered a lot less attention than a flashy New York Times headline reading, “Lobbyist’s Client List Puts Him on the Defensive.” 
 
On the subject of sticky situations, Imus wondered whether Davis, during his employ in the White House, had been part of the team that tried to break into Monica Lewinsky’s apartment to steal the infamous blue dress, or if they had simply hired a set of plumbers to do the dirty work.
 
Davis’s reply? “No.”
 
Crisis managed.
 
-Julie Kanfer