A quick lesson in media relations from the office of Vice President Joe Biden: try to be nice to reporters whenever possible–and if you do decide to be difficult, make sure you’re justified or you might embarrass yourself.

Today the VP’s office issued an official apology for “bullying” (not our word of choice) a student reporter at a press event. In summary: Biden, attorney general Eric Holder and Maryland Senator Ben Cardin called a press conference to announce a new domestic violence prevention initiative. A reporter for Capital Press, who also happens to be a student at the University of Maryland, accidentally sat in a section of the room that was not reserved for media and took photos of Biden as he spoke.

After the event, a member of Biden’s press staff spoke to the reporter and demanded to watch as he deleted the (supposedly) forbidden photos. Scandal!

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Today in This Guy Has a Pretty Cool Job News: on Monday we reviewed Newark Mayor Cory Booker‘s suggestion that politicians should act more like PR pros with the ultimate goal of engaging their constituents via social media and interactive town hall meetings rather than just hiding behind lecterns and tired press releases.

In addition to having a nice beard, Justin Herman runs social media at the U.S. General Services Administration’s Center for Excellence in Digital Government. This moniker may read as a joke to cynics, but Herman, like Booker, clearly believes that a more engaged government is a more effective and efficient government–and that politicians and administrators are mistaken if they see Twitter and Facebook as mere “announcement platform[s].”

Sound familiar?

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Well that was fast: one day before Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s contentious “soda ban” was set to begin, The New York State Supreme Court called a kibbosh on the whole undertaking with a strongly worded decision.

The incredibly named Judge Milton Tingling declared in his opinion that New York City is “permanently restrained from implementing or enforcing the new regulations”. Why? Because the ban’s official language was confusing and its “arbitrary and capricious consequences” difficult to enforce. According to the judge, “the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the stated purpose of the rule”. Oh, and something about Big Brother getting too heavy for his britches…

“The Rule would not only violate the separation of powers doctrine, it would eviscerate it. Such an evisceration has the potential to be more troubling than sugar sweetened beverages.”

We’d like to think that those PSAs and protests and weird calls for racial equality had something to do with this decision, but they didn’t. Not at all. And now for a challenge: the first person to create a social media campaign for a major soda brand that makes light of Bloomberg’s crushing defeat without being too smug about it wins our respect for a lifetime. This might be hard!

We plan to appeal the sugary drinks decision as soon as possible, and we are confident the measure will ultimately be upheld.

— NYC Mayor’s Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) March 11, 2013

Oh, and by the way: remember when Bloomberg loved Snapple? Those were they days, weren’t they?

Newark Mayor/oversized political personality Cory Booker has a suggestion for politicians and government officials who want to engage their constituents and build their public profiles: be more like Ashton Kutcher.

No, really: Booker, who remains one of the world’s most popular politicians on Twitter, wasn’t suggesting that the South by Southwest attendees who gathered to hear him speak should produce reality TV shows or promote smartphones. But he did credit Kutcher with bringing him into the social media fold by introducing him to the land of 140 characters–and he implied that the most successful political leaders of the future will be those who follow him headfirst into the digital maelstrom by interacting with real-life people rather than just posting press statements and linking to complimentary op-eds.

See, it’s one thing for an elected representative to have an official account–they pretty much all do at this point. But Booker’s social voice is closer to that of, say, an “influencer” like Richard Branson than Vice President Joe Biden, whose feed consists of fairly rote announcements created by administration communications staffers.

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Anyone who picked up a magazine or watched TV in the early 2000′s probably remembers the shocking images and hard-to-swallow facts of the anti-smoking ‘Truth‘ campaign. Ad spots like the ominously (and appropriately) titled “Body Bags” delivered statistics about the dangers of smoking without an ounce of sugar coating–and with a healthy dose of shock value. Even if you didn’t want to hear it, you were compelled to pay attention (especially when your loving daughter cut out the magazine ads and stuck them to your steering wheel…you’re welcome, Mom!).

Now, champion of all things green and climate-related Al Gore is hoping to elicit the same can’t-look-away public reaction when it comes to not-so-pretty facts about global warming. Gore’s Climate Reality Project has hired Arnold Worldwide, one of the agencies behind “Truth,” to raise awareness about the dangers of climate change and challenge the “fake science” and half-truths being circulated.

Arnold has answered the call to action by creating a website/social media tool called “Reality Drop,” which finds climate news from all over the Web and compares it with the most relevant science. Articles displayed in red are said to contain myths and denier-science, while those displayed in green contain evidence that climate change is an undeniable scientific fact. Visitors to the site are encouraged to share the green articles on Facebook and Twitter, and also to “drop some reality” on the red articles by posting comments containing copy-and-pasted scientific facts provided on the Reality Drop website.

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The press, which happens to consist of a bunch of nerds, gave President Obama a bit of flack today for supposedly confusing the Star Wars “Jedi Mind Trick” with the Star Trek “Vulcan Mind Meld”, thereby creating the “Jedi Mind Meld” meme during a speech on some extremely important topic that we’d rather not think about right now. But the White House communications team was more than ready:

We must bring balance to the Force. #Sequester #JediMindMeld twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

— The White House (@whitehouse) March 1, 2013

Hey Oreo, looks like the folks in government know a thing or two about “real-time marketing”. And yes, the “mind meld” URL does link to a page detailing the President’s deficit reduction plan. The team may not have been as quick on the draw as Han Solo or the cookie guys, but they did paint their sci-fi critics as “a bunch of stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking Nerf herders.”

Have you been following the latest, dumbest political media scandal? We hope you answered “no”, because this one is a real doozy. It’s a classic case of “hack” vs. “flack” that will feel very familiar to anyone who has spent some time in PR or journalism.

To summarize: Bob Woodward, the veteran reporter who was one-half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation, had a mildly testy exchange with a White House rep over the pending “sequester” drama. Essentially, if the two parties can’t agree on a mix of new revenue and spending cuts, a big rash of cuts that they set up last year precisely to avoid this sort of showdown will go into effect. It’s basically President Obama versus the House of Representatives, so…politics as usual.

Alright, now what’s the “controversy”–and how does it relate to PR? Glad you asked!

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An update in case you don’t follow judicial politics: The United States Supreme Court is about to hear a couple of cases challenging the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA), the 1996 legislation that effectively said “in the eyes of the federal government, marriage and related legal benefits can only occur between a man and a woman.”

Public opinion on the issue has shifted dramatically since that law passed, and now more than 200 of the country’s biggest brands are teaming up to let the Supreme Court know that this isn’t just a cultural or political matter–DoMA is making it harder for businesses to operate.

Brands ranging from techies like Facebook and Apple to consumer biggies like Nike and even financial titans like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs signed on to file what’s called a “supporting brief” or “friend of the court brief”. Their major point: DoMA effectively forces us to discriminate against our employees and makes the process of finding, courting and rewarding the talent we need that much more challenging.

How so, you ask?

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Breaking news: Political spokesmen sometimes bend the truth! Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart devoted six minutes to shooting those messenger(s). Stewart lambasted Barack Obama’s first press secretary Robert Gibbs for the way he came clean, during his new gig as an MSNBC analyst, on his stonewalling two-step over the administration’s use of remote drones to kill suspected terrorists.

Stewart compared the glib Gibbs with the seemingly emotionally damaged Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s second spokesman, concluding that neither are any good at protecting the POTUS in their respective retirements. “Either way, secrets spilled,” Stewart finds. “What you need is a jaded believer. Boom.”

When McClellan came out with his admissions of lying, guess which Bush surrogate went after him? Boom, Ari Fleischer.

For those of you who thankfully don’t know, Dov Hikind is a New York State Assemblyman in our town of Brooklyn who has represented the Borough Park area since 1983 thanks, in large part, to the voters in his district who share his Orthodox faith. Yesterday he hosted a big party for Purim, a holiday derived from a story in the Biblical book of Esther. It was an “open door” party; Hikind encouraged visitors to go a little crazy with their costumes and post the pictures on their Facebook pages.

Today Hikind stands to gain more attention than at any other point in his political career–and the vast majority of it will not be positive. Quite a few people in New York City politics and beyond have expressed their shocked surprise at his decision to attend his own party in blackface, dressed as what he describes as “sort of a black basketball player.”

Hmm…apparently no one told Hikind that blackface was a blatantly racist stage trick used throughout the early 20th century by white performers who embodied cartoonish stereotypes of their black countrymen.

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