[Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Brittany Foster, one of the talented members of the Triad Strategies team. Triad is a preferred Bernstein Crisis Management contractor.]
Senator John Walsh (D-Montana) was already running a losing campaign for re-election, but he may have shored up his retirement with his recent missteps in crisis communications.
Walsh is the junior Senator from the great state of Montana, a seat he has held for a mere four months after replacing Senator Max Baucus, who moved on to an ambassadorship. He is opposed by Republican Representative Steve Daines in the fall. The latest polling showed Daines with a four point lead, and that was before Walsh’s faux pas.
The New York Times revealed earlier this week that Walsh plagiarized portions of a fourteen page paper he wrote while enrolled in the Army War College. Walsh responded quickly, stating that the unintentional mistake was one of missing citations and his campaign issued a “fact sheet.” This is the part where the wheels come off the Walsh-mobile.
The aforementioned fact sheet states that the error was due to PTSD following Walsh’s military service, where he survived “hundreds” of IED attacks. (Doctors have yet to identify “plagiarism” as a common symptom of PTSD.) As it turns out, Walsh survived a singular IED in 2005 when he was deployed in Iraq.
The War College has since opened an investigation into the alleged plagiarism, and the national and local media latched onto the story that seems to get worse for Walsh with his every word.
But it didn’t have to be this bad for him. Historically, plagiarism has been a forgivable crime among politicos (See Joe Biden’s 1998 replica of a Neil Kinnock speech). In Walsh’s case, the bigger failing was the response to the allegation. His reaction resembled the age-old and misguided strategy of “ready, fire, aim” and it may now be too late to salvage the crisis that could’ve merely been one-day story.
So, how could this have been avoided?
First, before his campaign released a fact sheet, they ought to have gathered the facts. No one has ever weathered a crisis by hiding behind a seriously embellished military record. This is even less likely to fly considering that he’s accused of plagiarizing at the Army War College, where his classmates and teachers all boast military records.
This leads us to the second step Walsh should have taken: giving his message a smell test. Had his campaign done so, they would have quickly realized that blaming a serious medical condition for a petty academic crime would be unlikely to assuage the mass media.
However, Senator Walsh chose to skip both of these steps and proceeded with a half-baked strategy, leaving him to defend the plagiarism, the exaggerated military record and the PTSD excuse.
Next time, ready, aim and then fire.
Brittany Foster is part of Triad’s strategic communications team.
This post originally appeared in the Triadvocate, a publication of Triad Strategies, LLC, a bipartisan lobbying, public affairs, strategic communications, grassroots advocacy, issue management consulting firm located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh