OMG! No! No! No! How will I live? How will I feed my puppy, my parakeet, my pet rock? Not that I would elevate parochial interest above the greater good. Speechwriters are not a lobbyists, at least not until someone shouts fire us.
That said, I am closer to Vinca on this than to Matt. Despite what Matt recounts, the Bush White House had a bias to non-communication on key issues. Not that they saw it that way. But their insistence on over-the-top message control and for finding formulas they liked and sticking rigidly to them too often left the writers with little of substance to say and the president addressing too many events where he had no prospect of moving the debate. This was one reason they lost control of the Washington agenda early in the second term.
The Obama White House has a different problem. The president is a pleasure to listen to. The proliferation of web-based communications platforms just about calls for numerous appearances tailored to specific media. The president’s problem is not the frequency of his appearances but the substance of his message.
Look closely at the polls (I have been following Rasmussen with particular care). Since Inauguration Day, Mr. Obama has taken two drops in proportion of likely voters who strongly approve of him. The first came during the bailouts, take over of GM and multiple announcements of new trillion-dollar-plus spending. The second and more pronounced began when he started to lean into health care overhaul.
I am not going to get into my views of the health overhaul package or of the alternatives I see to it. I have done that at length numerous times elsewhere (most recently here: http://tiny.cc/fRznK). I will simply say that the White House’s problem is not its communication strategy but its policy strategy. Well before Wednesday night’s speech to the Joint Session of Congress, Mr. Obama had conveyed clearly and effectively the outlines of the health package he was seeking. The public heard, understood, and, at least to date, has said “no.”
If the president loses, it will be the third time an attempt to pass this model of health overhaul has failed in a little over half a century. The president and his allies should ask themselves if there is a message for them in these failures.
My advice? Send the president out all you want. Vinca is right. It would be helpful to be judicious about where you go and when. But most of all, make sure you have got the policy right.
