Clintonite Fixture Lanny Davis Launches Crisis Management Blog
It’s a dream come true, albeit a little late, for Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) worst behaved: a blog dedicated to serving legal advice for managing corporate, political, or public relations crises. Talking Points Memo has the story on attorney and Clintonite fixture Lanny Davis‘s new project, Legal Crisis Strategies, whose motto, “where litigation, media, and lobbying intersect,” could very well apply to its owner, a veteran of all three disciplines.
Davis and two of the partners at his firm will be updating the blog, which, according to TPM, “will offer clients ‘total solutions’ for handling crises, including ‘litigation skills and fact finding,’ ‘strategic messages and extensive experience in dealing with the media,’ and ‘legislative and lobbying strategies.'”
Davis is no stranger to crisis himself, and unlike some of his peers on the blog, has a closer relationship to politics. He was a member of the DNC for all of the 80s, was involved in the Clinton impeachment hearings while serving as White House Counsel, has lobbied in favor of the military overthrow of the Manuel Zelaya regime in Honduras, and even tried to make America civil once. But to the mainstream cable news consumer, Davis is best known for being the less mercurial of two major Hillary Clinton supporters who found the reality of Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee too difficult to bear on live television, regularly (the other being Terry McAuliffe, so this isn’t saying much). Davis received most of his air time on CNN supporting Hillary’s candidacy against all odds— and much to the entertainment of his colleagues– until finally switching to Fox News for the impending Obama era.
The imploding Clinton campaign is at least one example of a crisis Davis was not able to avert, but considering the speed and frequency with which the type of occasion Davis’ blog is meant to assuage occurs, it’s a shock that no one came up with this idea earlier. How would every major scandal of the past several years played out had there only been an advice blog to help out Bernie Madoff or the Enron crew? Would Tiger Woods be holding a non-press conference to announce his return had he checked out the site beforehand? Would George Bluth, Sr. have not gotten caught building houses in Iraq?
The blog just launched, so there’s not enough material on which to judge exactly whether the advice would veer towards the public figure or shady corporate official direction, though the first post helps problem-solve for the “general counsel of a major corporation.” For the sake of this blog, let’s hope they stick to keeping anonymous corporate bigwigs out of trouble and let the politicians be politicians, all over prime time cable news.
