I’ve been littering other stories and diaries with comments whenever a discussion of the White House’s messaging problem on health care comes up. So I wanted to state this argument in a diary for the record.
A lot of very good Kossacks and political analysts like Nate Silver look at the direction of the media coverage of health care, the preponderance of right wing misinformation, and downward trending poll numbers and naturally conclude that the White House and health care reformers are losing the message war.
This diagnosis logically gives rise to arguments about how better “messaging” from the White House is needed in order to either blunt the opposition or boost public opinion health care reform.
Our problem, however, is not “messaging.” Our problem is a lack of a bill and an August recess.
Using a favorite phrase of one former Alaskan governor, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
There’s a common misconception about what power “messaging” and marketing have to change perceptions of a policy that is bad. In the Bush years, we deployed three new Undersecretaries of State for Public Diplomacy, one of whom was actually a marketing executive, to try and improve the US “brand” overseas. The trouble, of course, was that you can’t sugar coat a US brand in Arab countries when you’re launching preventive wars in the Middle East, and you can’t sway populations in allied countries when you keep spurning your friends and international institutions.
The same principle applies in domestic politics: sometimes it’s not the message, it’s the policy, stupid.
In the case of health care, however, our trouble comes from a lack of a policy as opposed to a bad policy.
The original White House strategy was to fast track a bill through the House and Senate before the August recess, then reconciling the bills over the summer. Until then, we were confined to talking about abstractions and generalities to avoid tainting negotiations, provoking a congressional backlash, or painting the WH into a corner where changes or challenges to his specific proposals would be spun as a legislative defeat. And so on...
Our troubles on this front really began when Baucus started missing his deadlines. Obama’s “beer summit” prime time news conference was timed to be able to discuss what was in the bills. When Baucus failed to deliver the Senate Finance Committee vote before that news conference for the fifth time, we missed an opportunity for that prime time TV audience. Obama was left to restate what he had generally been saying for weeks, and we’ve essentially been in a holding pattern ever since.
In short, our message deficit stems from a lack of a bill to defend and a slow August news month that leaves journalists and bloggers alike to stew for weeks without new developments. Nothing has changed about the state of the bill (provided we haven’t loss thin-skinned votes from congressmen spooked at town halls) since July, but we’ve been left with nothing new to talk about. Hence every change of phrase or inflection of Obama’s voice when referring to any of the provisions of the health care bills, like a public option for instance, gets treating as breaking news. And every clarification after the fact gets amplified as a major backtrack.
One could argue that Obama should be getting out of the wonky specifics and start making the moral case for health care as he’s starting to do.
George Lakoff is essentially making that argument.
But such rhetoric inevitably will be drawn into policy specifics when the media will repeat falsehoods that need to be refuted, and such message offensives will have a harder time to get traction without a policy to undergird them.
Remember, Team Obama messaged the hell out of health care during the campaign and won on the issue. But they had a plan they could promote, defend, and own. That’s not the case now, and it won’t be until we get a bill through the Senate.
There’s a tendency among us political types, especially those of us who live here in a world of words, to believe that there’s some killer sound bite or argument that will turn a debate on its head. And when we feel that our backs are up against it or our opponents are gaining the upper hand, that it’s somehow a “messaging” problem.
I submit to all of you that we are dealing with a legislative deficit, not a message deficit. When our friends are getting drowned out and intimidated at town halls, that’s once again not a message deficit, but an organizing deficit.
I’ll also add one more note about writing about the premature death of health care reform. I saw Howard Fineman do this on Countdown last night, going through a litany of things the White House coulda/woulda/shoulda done. Fineman says they should’ve been more aggressive and specific. They could’ve avoided all these headaches had they drawn a line in the sand and taken ownership of the proposal. All of this is a post-hoc narrative that fits an exceptionally dire assessment of the state of health care reform and then Monday-morning quarterbacks it. Fineman and others are just engaging in speculation and most often don’t really know what they’re talking about.
Truth is that much of the hand-wringing about how Obama has handled or is handling Congress boils down to tactical questions, and not philosophical or substantive policy. I happen to agree that waving a veto pen, like Clinton did in 1993, or pushing Congress too overtly and publicly would have spelled disaster. I may be wrong and Rahm Emanuel could’ve made a mistake in this respect, but such a tactical disagreement does not equate to Obama becoming a moral failure when he doesn’t draw a bright line around the public option.
I’d apply this post-hoc criticism to Cenk Uygur. I love ya, man. But these post-hoc hypotheticals are not productive at the moment when we have a battle to fight in the here and now.
The state of health care reform is fundamentally where it was when Congress adjourned. The bill is very much alive. The negotiations are still in motion. We don’t know the outcome yet, but the endgame is only beginning when Congress comes back from recess.
Let’s focus our energy on getting this done. Get the bill out of Senate Finance. Get the bill off the floor. Get the bill to conference. Yes we can.
Update: I should've anticipated this from the comments, but there's often an objection raised to how Obama handles Congress by way of comparison to Bush. Bush got everything he wanted, including tax cuts and Medicare Part D, by steamrolling his party in the legislative branch. Why can't we, right? Well for starters, tax cuts and insurance company subsidies are a lot easier to sell: they're giveaways to the rich. It's always harder to build something up than just to give the goodies away in DC. Once again, it's a difference in policy and interest alignments, not message and tactics.