Apparently, as part of their year-end review, the administration’s communications team concluded that they had not been aggressive enough in fighting the daily battles and had not used the president effectively. I think a lot of people, especially in the context of the health care debate, will respond to this news with a ‘no der.’ People were begging the president to provide more defined leadership on health care from August until the Senate finally passed their version of the bill on Christmas Eve. I heard a lot of people saying that the president didn’t care what was in the bill because he wouldn’t insist on the public option. But, my view was always that their main focus was on passing something in the face of united opposition, and that the administration was consistently taking the long-view on what it would take to get 60 votes when the time came. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the public option, it’s that he wasn’t going to get bogged down on that issue. He got the public option in the House bill, and he got the Senate to pass a bill with all 60 Democratic senators and no Republicans. That was an amazing feat. And it would have produced a middling health care bill if not for the Massachusetts special election. In any case, it appears the White House recognizes that you have to manage the short-term message even if you are pursuing a long-term strategy.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs said the White House team struggled in 2009 to adapt to a political environment that demanded daily communication battles. “We have to adjust in many ways to the fact that in the campaign we always took the long view,” he said. “This is an environment that calls for sharper communication.”
And that communication needs to be sharper with progressives, too. I don’t disagree with Rahm Emanuel’s assessment that during the health care debate a lot of progressives were acting like “effing retards,” but a big part of the reason for that was a lack of mutual trust. Let’s put it in context:
Stephen J. Farnsworth, an assistant professor of communication at George Mason University and author of “Spinner in Chief: How Presidents Sell Their Policies and Themselves,” said: “A diffident Obama PR strategy in the first year gave the Republicans an opening they have exploited.” Farnsworth added of White House officials, “They simply have to play offense to try to win back the public support that they enjoyed during the campaign.”
It’s hard to get people to trust you when you’re using a ‘diffident PR strategy.’ So, yes, the White House needs to be more aggressive with Republicans on the short-term stuff, but they need to share more with their allies about their long-term strategy and the points of resistance they are fighting. I know it’s difficult to negotiate with Ben Nelson and the progressive base at the same time. Remember that Joe Lieberman spiked the expansion of Medicare simply because progressives thought it was a good idea. More communication would create its own problems. But, if you are a communications team, you should know that it’s not good to have progressive online opinion leaders bashing the administration day after day. Fighting back against Republicans aggressively pleases the base. Explaining the complexities and strategic challenges better to the base will result in more sympathetic coverage when things don’t go as planned or tough compromises need to be made.
During the first year, the administration was too passive in fighting the daily fight and their lack of communication with the progressive blogosphere resulted in a breakdown in trust which then turned a natural ally that fights the daily fight into an opponent that fought daily against them.
No disagreement from me.
” During the first year, the administration was too passive in fighting the daily fight and their lack of communication with the progressive blogosphere resulted in a breakdown in trust which then turned a natural ally that fights the daily fight into an opponent that fought daily against them. “
As I’ve said over and over again, Obama who by all appearances believes the post-partisan stuff, sees the blogs as contributing to the partisan problem because they engaged those fights, see Republicans as enemies to be overcome instead of worked with and so on. You can tell in the interaction to the pair of diaries he wrote at DKos. He then had nothing to do with the site ever again. I’m no slamming him for that, but it shows that Obama’s initial style was very different and perhaps mutually exclusive to a degree. The blogs by nature thrive and fight the daily (hourly) news cycle outrage.
I’ve also said over and over again that Obama was slowly beginning to lose the election because he lost almost each news cycle. McCain’s people were succeeding in turning the campaign into the standard trivial farce and Obama was not responding to it and so his lead got chipped away and he actually fell behind–and then the financial crisis exploded. That forced people to take notice and in the clutch Obama out performed McCain by a mile. There-after Obama engaged in VOWEs to sustain his support every few weeks culminating in his 30 minute infomercial. But it was only in the face of imminent crisis that people moved beyond the trivial. Right now, there is no imminent crisis and so the shallow deceptive news cycle one again reigns supreme.
If he’s looking to engage in that way he will find allies in the blogosphere and probably do better than he has been. What’s disappointing is that it took him so long to figure him out or perhaps to realize that he isn’t going to be able to get Americans, media or Republicans to grow up.
I agree that Obama sees blogs as part of the problem, but his communications team doesn’t share view. And they have some latitude to improve communications. They haven’t been bad, but they should have done better on the health care debate and part of that is getting Sebelius and DeParle more involved.
They haven’t been bad, but they should have done better on the health care debate and part of that is getting Sebelius and DeParle more involved.
To sell a watered down sell out of a health reform bill? We all know why Obama never reappeared at TGOS. It’s because people were calling out the BS. Do you think HCR would have been any less successful if he engaged the base(and OFA) then he did cutting back room deals?
Not to sell a watered down health care bill. To explain how they planned to get the best bill possible, what the obstacles were, to reassure people that the goal was to get as much of the president’s proposed plan included as feasible, and to give some sense of what they were fighting for beyond the vague parameters.
It wasn’t just Republican intransigence that made HCR increasingly unpopular, but progressives unhappiness and mistrust, too.
Well the response would have been “Ask for single payer so you can be bargained down to public option.” But that was ruled out by everyone involved before the process began.
It wasn’t just Republican intransigence that made HCR increasingly unpopular, but progressives unhappiness and mistrust, too.
Do you remember how Dubya basically forced Democrats to vote for all his stupid shit? Dubya would hold appearances in districts(or states) of Blue Dogs .. he took the fight to those weak Democrats .. put them on the defensive … Bush would have come out for single payer .. knowing he’d settle for the public option .. that’s something Obama doesn’t seem to get yet .. and something which Digby(among others) have been saying for a long time now
I think Gibbs is part of the problem. I personally love the guy, his parents live a couple of miles away from me. But I think his demeanor at the podium is shaky, uncertain, halting. Maybe it’s just me.
I love the comment over on another blog by hells littles angel, “If you don’t shoot the talking points in the head and then burn them they come back to life in just a few minutes”
“their lack of communication with the progressive blogosphere resulted in a breakdown in trust which then turned a natural ally that fights the daily fight into an opponent that fought daily against them.”
So, this is a hissy fit because they didn’t get the care and feeding they needed? For real?
I could understand some hesitency on the part of the WH to engage a blogosphere that was already bashing Obama as a wanker before inauguration, or appearing on the cover of national magazines ‘filled with dispair’, or that admits they have no power to move any voters when it suits them because their readerships are so tiny.
So I remain confused.
you don’t understand. I’m not complaining about the administration; I’m just giving advice.
I wasn’t among those who decided to attack the administration before they could even be inaugurated, to tell me readers that they’re all a bunch of whores, and that they were out to screw us. And, I agree, the Obama team should keep a little distance between themselves and folks like that. But they could have saved themselves a lot of heartache if they’d fed the beast better. Not because anyone deserves it, but because they’d get better coverage.
It’s like forgetting to provide food and drinks to the traveling press.
I wasn’t accusing you Booman. One of the reasons I read you daily, and gave up so many others, is the level of sanity here.
But the level of vitriole else where that I’ve seen is so outrageous, I’ve often wondered if it was personal. Which is very scary to me, because I count on level-headed people to be above that, or at least not be so petty.
Maybe some food and drinks might have helped, but to me, that’s pretty damn depressing. It makes the LWB as petty and small as the MSM, and the politicians they often go after for the same thing.
But people in general are like that. And the bloggers have been right more than any other group, the consultants, the office holder, the dead-tree media, that it’s easy to see yourself as the only light in the darkness so to speak.
Maybe so, but I don’t think you should bitch about the corrupt tire swing and demand one of your own, and then when you don’t get it turn into a churlish twit.
But few people were pushing for a corrupt tire swing. The rage mounted because there was clearly no access for progressive voices that were clearly right not because people wanted to be wined and dined. To the extant that people wanted Obama to pay attention it wasn’t to ego-stroke it was because the policies he was pursuing were not going to fix things and there was a sense that no one had ever told him that. It’s one thing to have people listen to your ideas and dismiss them, but it’s another for people to simply ignore your ideas as radical.
If Obama had listened and then said “no because xyz” there would have been a lot less anger. The impression was “no because you are dirty fucking hippies.”
Please. I get so tired of the whining of oppression from ‘the hippies’.
I get so tired of being right all the damn time but having no one listen.
=D
That’s ridiculous. He had morons yelling at him for negotiating with Senator Snowe at a time when we didn’t even have 60 votes. He had to face the fact that Ben Nelson feels like he can’t vote with the Democrats unless 5 Republicans do so first. He had do worry about Lieberman’s backstabbing ways, and Conrad’s giant ego, and Lincoln and Landrieu’s spinelessness, and Bayh’s constant sniping.
And he had to keep every last one of them on board to have any chance, and none of them were signaling a willingness to vote for public option in the Senate bill. So, Obama tried to keep it alive by making sure it passed the House and to keep the Senate moving by not insisting on it.
Reality isn’t that hard to discern if you’re not chained to a fake literalism.
The negotiations with Snowe only backfired. It wasted time the GOP used to trash the bill, and the longer bills go on in general the more the public gets angry. Talking to Snowe seriously was a fool’s game, she wasn’t going to vote for the bill no matter what.
You say Ben Nelson needs 5 republicans for cover. Yet he voted for the bill in the senate with 0 for cover. And now he’s even saying he’ll abandon his hostage situation. Lieberman would have backstabbed single payer, then he could have kicked liberals in the teeth as he so wanted (and this is the only reason he opposed the thing) and then gotten his pound of flesh while they moaned and nashed their teeth about losing single payer. Indeed, the way to massage Conrad’s ego is to start with single-payer and then say “You, Kent, you with your North Dakota hair, have convinced me to to go to a public option!”
To Lincoln and Landrieu the same thing applies. And so far Evan Bayh has been nothing but noise, but you could bring him along in the same way. Or if you have to, go from single payer to medicare buy-in then to public option.
These guys signaled opposition to the PO because that’s what was being discussed in the bill. They would have done the same had something better been in there and gotten cover when they took it out. Their opposition is based on self-aggrandizement and pulling stuff right, not on any substantive concessions.
So there you go. The split in the blogosphere in a nutshell encapsulated right here.
I agree with a lot of this, particularly toward the end.
What I disagree with is the idea that progressives were acting like “effing retards” in opposing a bill that contained so many things that progressives despise, mandates for example, because the goal was clearly to just pass some bill, any bill.
I understand this viewpoint, it’s one exemplified on the Democratic side of the blog fence most by John Cole, for example. It’s a view that looks to “winning” over Republicans as the goal, really the only worthy goal, or perhaps put more fairly, not losing to them, which in this view would be the most tragic outcome possible.
It’s a heavily political view in other words, one which says that the Republicans are going to try to “derail” Obama’s Presidency, that’s the word the GOP uses, along with “Waterloo” and all the rest of it, and that stopping them from doing this is of utmost importance.
And of course there’s some validity in that, a weak, broken Presidency could get less done.
However taking this to an extreme, which I think many do, ends up with looking at some watered-down, shadow of its former self bill and saying “Fine. Whatever, just PASS something so they don’t think they won!”
The other way of looking at things, as you point out at the end, is that the administration could actually stand for what the campaign purported to stand for, the public option for example, and not lose the respect and trust of the progressives in the blogosphere and outside of it. Then maybe you go with reconciliation, or come to the point we are now but earlier, with the realization that wasting months chasing Republicans like Olympia Snowe was futile, that going with a stronger bill that didn’t piss the other direction off so much would have actually been better.
That’s long-term strategy, if you ask me. It’s not a question of whether to follow each day’s wiggle with a new PR tactic versus thinking about PR in longer terms. It’s a matter of actually standing behind what you were supposed to believe in, to have a soul someone can actually locate, and then perhaps trust to act the way that they expect you to.
It’s as if we’ve become accustomed to seeing politicians, even once in office, especially once in office, as pure and utter voids, as tabula rasae, just waiting for public opinion and PR experts to scribble onto them the way to be, what to stand for, and so on.
I thought the idea was that we find someone who seems to share our ideals and the way we think, as close as we can get, anyway, and put that person in office and trust that he’ll then act the way that we would, make decisions that we would. That way we don’t have to watch every second, they represent us.
It’s the pandering that kills me. You don’t know who you put in office at that point. You just lose faith, when you see that.
I agree with their change in strategy. However attractive it may have seemed to position Obama as above the fray, the communications climate we now live in doesn’t allow the President to refrain from engaging in the permanent campaign. The right-wing echo chamber is going to spread disinformation and be on the attack regardless of whether the Obama team is pragmatic rather than ideological in its thinking. The administration has to define itself on a daily basis.
The administration didn’t expect scorched earth opposition to all of its initiatives, especially since that opposition is more reactionary and habitual than principled, but that is our current political climate.
The one contingency that the administration should have handled better is how it responded to the economic crisis. It’s not a question of policy so much as recognizing the shift in mood that occurred because of the economic meltdown. Selling health reform in the midst of an economic crisis is a different proposition than the one Obama campaigned on. Obama needed to be more active in elucidating the reasons we needed health care reform and re-frame the issue in light of the changed economic conditions.
I predict Booman will rip you for using the word “framing.”
About the only thing I’ve ever found that I disagree with Booman on is framing, but I still hold hope that he’ll come around to my way of thinking. I don’t see much actual differences in our thinking but there is a nominal difference. IMO, rationality is (often) the reasons that people give once they they’ve made up their minds for emotional reasons. And, as the tea party demonstrates, it’s sometimes tough to find reasoning that could even be called rational. Lippmann’s Public Opinion is still a good treatment of this subject. Curiously, although it dated, it’s become relevant again because of the mob mentality of tea partiers.
Here’s my thinking on framing and associated issues:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24find.html?_r=2
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-political-brain
This is a good Op Ed type of piece for examining the problems with the Obama administration:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/leadership-obama-style-an_b_398813.html