What Would Ari Fleischer Have Done?

It's a question I ask of myself every morning, and it's the question that keeps coming back to me after Tiger's whirlwind, out-of-the-blue, totally bizarre Sunday interview hits with ESPN and Golf Channel.

Remember that Fleischer client Mark McGuire sat down for a long, tough interview with Bob Costas along with several other Q&A's. The New York Times' Richard Sandomir called it a "how to" strategy that, while not perfect, allowed McGuire to return to baseball as Cardinal hitting coach:

In his repeated confessions Monday, he had no defiance or anger, just sadness and tears.

“I like the door-to-door strategy, in that he is telling his story in long form and in less confrontational settings,” said Kevin Sullivan, a former White House communications director who runs a strategic-communications company. “He needed to rip the Band-Aid off before heading to spring training.”

With that in mind, it's hard to fathom that Fleischer would have concocted today's first step, which was poorly timed on many levels. It took away from what little attention a regular tour event would have received, it arrived on the first weekend of the NCAA tournament and on the day of the health care bill vote.

Then there was an enormously strange arrangement (5 minutes?) that exerted too much control over the media agencies for the interviews to have any lasting credibility (except with the Golf Channel studio analysts).

It makes me wonder if Fleischer really did leave the Woods advisory team because he had become a distraction?