On Tuesday former Sen. Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services. If you haven't kept up with the latest "What's Obama gonna do next" news, Daschle withdrew his nomination because he didn't pay his taxes.
According to news sources like CNN and others, Daschle knew about his tax problems way back in June of last year, and he didn't pay them back until after he was nominated. Now come on, how in the world did he think he was going to pull that off? Clearly, Al Capone was caught on taxes when the authorities couldn't catch him on anything else. Also the Obama team should have known better, but we all make mistakes, right?
One could argue that, but in the world of public relations, it seemed as if they were trying to get over on the system. It seemed as if Sen. Daschle had no intentions whatsoever to pay back his taxes. This breaks one of the codes of ethics: honesty. I guess it's like in the movie Frost/Nixon when Pres. Nixon said, "When the president does it, it's not illegal." WRONG! And it's illegal for senators too. Sorry, Tom.
All though this is a PR no-no, President Obama did the right thing by taking responsibility of the appointees to his administration. Really he had no choice, this was the second person to step down due to unpaid taxes. The first was Nancy Killefer, who was appointed as the chief of performance officer, a new post in administration. The right thing would have been to get that cleared up immediately before it's discovered by anyone else. The moral of the story is you can hide, but you can't run. Whenever one is not honest upfront, the dog will come back to bite you in the behind.As a PR practitioner, what would you have done in order to keep this issue from blowing up in the media.
-Marlon Williams
As a PR practitioner, I would have openly told the media what was going on before they found out any other way. In PR, you need to be completely honest because the truth will get out eventually and you don't want to look like the one who was lying because that will hurt your reputation. And as we know, once your reputation is harmed it's extremely hard to bring it up again. So I would just say be completely honest and answer all questions to the best of your ability.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. It is vital, as PR professionals, that we strive to keep all activities in the light of day. Being honest and upfront is the only way to handle situations that are or could be damaging to one's reputation, because as we all know, once one's reputation is damaged, it's just that much harder to correct the damage that's been done. It's important to be completely honest. Full disclosure; it's the only way to go.
ReplyDeletePorsche
If I were a PR practitioner on Obama's team, I would have done more in-depth research to make sure something as serious as unpaid taxes wasn't an issue BEFORE I announced his cabinet nomination. This negative publicity for both Obama and Dashcle could have been avoided if more research was done. Since it wasn't, and the situation that happened occurred, I would of had Dashcle resign too.
ReplyDelete-samantha savory