What a difference a President’s personal involvement can make.
When we left off a few weeks ago, birthers, tea-partiers, grandma-killers and others from the wing-nut fringe had been verbally assaulting their elected representatives with charges that health care reform was the medical equivalent of the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg in Poland. Town hall meetings, a hallowed American ritual of representative democracy harking back to the nation’s founding, had previously stood for the right of the people to engage in reasoned debate with their elected officials back home from Washington. In the steroidal 2009 version, these otherwise frequently boring gatherings had been jacked by extremists armed with vitriol, cameras, made-for-tv signage, pre-printed press releases – and in several cases – exposed handguns.
The intent of the organizers of these protests was to intimidate the cowering politicians, impressionable mainstream media and their fellow voters into rejecting the already badly eviscerated health care legislation Obama had offered as one of his first initiatives, naively thinking his Republican and conservative opponents were still overawed by his November victory. As this page has noted before, the anger on display had less to do with health care than with the growing public awareness that the financiers who had caused the 2008 financial crisis were going to benefit handsomely from the Administration’s financial rescue package while the non-financial economy languished and the nation’s unemployment rate continued to climb. The Obama opponents were simply sailing before the angry populist wind.
Flash forward to mid-October 2009: as numerous reports make clear, the national mood has begun to change – and not in the way the ageing town hall ‘roid ragers imagined. The capital markets have stabilized, Obama’s poll numbers are rising, he won the Nobel Peace Prize (more on that below), various senior Republicans like Schwarzeneggar, Tommy Thompson, Bob Dole, Bill Frist, Bobby Jindal (!) have expressed some support for health reform, the Senate Finance Committee has (FINALLY) reported out a health care bill with a Republican supporter (!) – albeit the last of five congressional committees to do so and two months after the others – and passage of some sort of bill seems assured. Huh?
The bill is pretty much the same, the bankers look to rake in historically huge bonuses based on inside trading with the public’s money and unemployment continues to rise. So what changed?
First and foremost, engagement, leadership and demonstration of a willingness to fight.
The President finally emerged from his self-imposed internal summer exile and involved himself in the health care debate. Lo and behold! The numbers began to move. Something like a gazillion commentators had been predicting this, so it is not exactly a big aha! moment. Why did he wait so long?
Sometimes it is better to be lucky than smart, though this President was a little of both: the ultimate public reaction to the August town hall demonstrations was largely negative. Americans don’t like being bullied and public displays of intemperate behavior, let alone veiled threats of violence tend to backfire. However, the Obama strategy had been set before the town halls occurred. That strategy was to let the Congress battle over the details and then the President would come down from the mountain top (Sinai? Olympus?) to bless the final product. Surprisingly, the WH strategists had not anticipated the Republican resilience or that circumstances linked to the financial service crisis would give them an opening. Once that became apparent, the need for the President to publicly own this issue became urgent and he responded.
Secondly, in addition the unintended consequences of the opposition bullying, the WH became more forceful in calling out opponents and those in the media who were less than scrupulous in their reporting. It is nice to want to offer a commanding consensus, but as this White House may slowly be learning, to do so requires that one demonstrate the ability to cause others political and reputational discomfort if your will is ignored or denigrated.
In sum, those interested in managing reputation or communications in either the public or private sectors will note that having a popular principal take forceful ownership of a contentious issue is frequently the best way of swaying opinion, even if popular support is in doubt; leaders influence perceptions of reputation so a leader with capital must often expend some of it to get their way.
Jon Low is a partner in Predictiv, a consulting firm that measures the financial impact of reputation, brand, communications, intellectual capital, sustainability and other intangibles. He can be reached at jon.low@predictiv.net.
Just in case the tidal wave of stories about the US health care reform debate hasn’t induced narcolepsy—or driven you to the emergency room with high blood pressure—we start off this midsummer posting with a couple of articles from Nate Silver at 538 Blog. Nate’s specialty is quantitative analysis of public policy options and, more to the point, the political implications of the debates around them.
Political Communication is both a field of study and a sport. Rapid media changes and pressing policy concerns are the core of the game, in which writing and verbal communication is the skill, and deciphering the intended message from the actual speech or press release is the talent.
