When President-elect Barack Obama was asked if he had spoken to many presidents before, he replied this way.

“I have spoken to all of them who are living,” he says. “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances,” he says.

Obama was making a reference to Nancy Reagan’s well-known reliance on astrologers during her husband’s terms in office.

Obama’s statement was true, fair, and honest, but…it wasn’t very politically astute.

Obama did a great job during a 22 month campaign of keeping his foot out of his mouth by avoiding smart-ass remarks—now isn’t the time to start. Nancy Reagan is a 90-something wisdom in failing health, so she is now above the political fray and should be seen as off-limits by current political actors.

I don’t think Obama was being mean-spirited with is remarks about Nancy, but his enemies will soon try to spin it that way. Obama will be better off not making any cutting remarks about former first ladies, especially of a certain age.

Tags: Barack Obama, Nancy Reagan

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Government, Humor, Media Training, Public Speaking Skills, Speaking to Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.