Obama chooses Stephanie Cutter to oversee health overhaul communications strategy

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Apr 24 2010

The Boston Globe: "President Obama has chosen Stephanie Cutter, who served as a top aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy and communications director for Senator John F. Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004, to be in charge of getting out the word about the benefits of the new health care insurance overhaul. 'Stephanie is one of the most respected professionals in public affairs and has an innate understanding of the nexus between policy and communications,' Obama said yesterday in a statement." She will start in the new position next month. "Administration officials said Cutter's job will be more educational than political. But several Democrats said better messaging on health care is crucial to the party's election hopes this year" (4/23).

The Washington Post: "This will be Cutter's second stint, and third role, in the Obama White House. She began as counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and transitioned to run the strategic and communications operation surrounding the selection and confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor as Supreme Court justice last year. Cutter also served as lead spokeswoman for the presidential transition team. During the 2008 general election campaign, she was chief of staff to Michelle Obama." Her tenure is expected to be short-term, and then she will "return to her consulting firm, the Cutter Media Group. A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation released Thursday suggests that Americans remains largely in the dark about the health-care legislation. Fifty-five percent expressed confusion about the law and 56 percent said they didn't know enough about it to assess how it would affect them personally" (Cillizza, 4/23).

This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.