Never let the press see you angry, and never let yourself be caught on camera sputtering an incoherent retreat.
In short, don’t be like Rep. Rod Blum, R-Iowa, who did himself no favors this week when he stormed out on a reporter who asked about his office’s policy of prescreening town hall attendees.
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“So one thing that is a little less typical is you want to see IDs for this. Can I ask why that decision was made,” TV9’s Josh Scheinblum asked the congressman Monday.
Blum, who represents Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, responded, “Because we want people from the 1st district to be at our town halls. We don’t want people from outside of the 1st district. We don’t need people from Chicago there, or Des Moines there or Minneapolis there. Um, I don’t represent them.”
The congressman, flanked by small schoolchildren, continued, saying, “They should go talk to their representatives at their town hall meetings. I don’t know why they would want to be at one of my town hall meetings to start with.”
Blum is one of a handful of representatives who make up the House Freedom Caucus. He is a second-term congressman whose district voted for President Trump in 2016 and former President Barack Obama in 2012.
Scheinblum persisted, saying, “Well I think some would make the case that you represent all Iowans. The decisions that you make impact all Iowans. So shouldn’t all Iowans have a voice at the table or at least have the option to?”
The congressman said, “I don’t represent all Iowans. I represent the 1st district of Iowa. That’d be like saying … even though I live in Dubuque [shouldn’t I] go and vote in Iowa City during the election because I’d like to vote in that district instead.”
The ABC News affiliate reporter then asked, “Would you still take donations from a Republican in Iowa City?”
That was the last straw for a visibly annoyed Blum. The congressman stood up and started quickly to remove his recording equipment.
“We haven’t even – we just started,” Scheinblum protested.
“This is ridiculous! This is ridiculous!” Blum griped. “He’s going to sit here and just badger me. Just badger me.”
“Unbelievable,” the congressman complained as his aides ushered him out of the room.
Ironically enough, just a few hours after storming out of the interview, Blum attended a town hall event in which he was basically screamed at the entire time by his constituents. So much for prescreening.
The optics of this ordeal are so bad for Blum that it’s almost comical. From calling it quits after fielding only a few questions, to the image of small schoolchildren looking confused as Blum angrily tore off his recording equipment, there’s nothing good for the congressman to salvage from this sit-down.
It’s sort of irrelevant whether the reporter’s questions were, shall we say, loaded. Blum can complain all day that the questions were unfair. Doesn’t matter. Reporters often ask difficult, loaded, unfair, etc. questions. That’s the game, and Blum should know better than to have a small meltdown on camera, and in a classroom of all places. It’s a wonder there are elected representatives alive today who still don’t seem to understand how it works. There’s really no defense here for him here, but he can try.
Speaking of which, the biggest losers in all of this are Blum’s poor aides, who will no doubt be called on to defend and explain his tire fire of an interview.
Pray for them.
