Analyzing the President's State of the Union Address with Martha Joynt Kumar

Join Professor Martha Joynt Kumar (Columbia GSAS) at the Charles Sumner School as she discusses her recent book Managing the President’s Message just before President Bush makes his final State of the Union Address.

After the program, head over to Nathans Restaurant in Georgetown to watch the speech live with Martha and other Washington pundits and insiders. Nathans, a favorite of newsmakers and journalists is owned by Carol Joynt, Martha’s sister-in-law.

Both venues are small so register online and make your dinner reservation early.

From the Columbia Journalism Review November / December 2007:

“Not everybody may realize that during the seven years that "the West Wing" ran on network television, there was another, nonfictional White House operating in Washington. It is portrayed in Managing the President's Message by Martha Joynt Kumar, who is a professor political science at Towson University and a part-time fly-on-the-wall at the White House where she has observed and evaluated presidential communications since 1995. Although she apparently had access to almost any White House staffer, she was closest to the press operation and found a home inn the basement of the press room. She interestingly describes how controversies in the news looked from the inside, vividly recounting the travails of recent presidential press secretaries in dealing with increasingly recalcitrant reporters. In White House terms, for example, the I. Lewis Libby controversy played out less as a legal action than as a crisis of truth-telling for Scott McClellan, who, she asserts, lost his job because of it.