Last year, as Jake Tapper reminds us, Hillary Clinton ran her 3 a.m. phone call ads. The first such call came not at 3 a.m. but at 4:30 a.m. when the North Korean missile was launched. It also turned out to be Robert Gibbs and not Hillary Clinton who woke up Barack Obama with the news. Michael Crowley argues that they should have let Obama sleep:
It’s a small thing but did Robert Gibbs really need to wake Obama at 4:30 am with news of the North Korean missile launch? We knew the launch was coming and Obama had no imminent decision to make. Waking the president to tell him things so he can return to a troubled sleep that leaves him less sharp the next morning strikes me as a PR-oriented tradition we can do without.
Most likely they could have allowed Obama to sleep through this but were concerned about criticism if people thought that Obama was sleeping through a potential crisis. There is one danger with the idea that the president could have been allowed to sleep unless he had some decisions to make at the time. There is a considerable gray area where perhaps the president wouldn’t make a decision at the time but staffers might not know this until after they checked whether the president wanted to do anything.