As I (and others) have commented earlier, President Obama has been vague in defining his health-care proposal. No more, apparently:

The White House announced today that the President has scheduled a joint address to Congress for Sept. 9. NPR’s Mara Liasson predicted just this afternoon that he will finally outline specific elements he endorses and wishes to see in a health-care reform bill.

She also predicts that the Administration will be abandoning any pretense of trying to achieve a 70-80 bipartisan vote level in the Senate, and will begin trying to use the 60-vote majority to ram it through.

As I outlined above, sounds like the President is:

1) [re]Focusing the message and his legislative priorities
2) Taking control of the discussion
4) Setting a more-realistic goal
5) Switching to Plan B (using the 60-vote majority)

1) RE: Dangerous numbers…

Continually revised numbers are a defining (and bedeviling) characteristic of federal governance. Economic-trend data arrives in monthly and quarterly waves, while external (Congressional) data might arrive out of the blue (at least for unprepared administration officials) when GAO & committee reports are released. Government communicators therefore have to master the art of drawing lines in the sand, then stepping back to draw, and justify, new ones. Being the White House press secretary has to be one of the most thankless jobs in PR, especially since the individual is purposely kept out of the loop for deniability. Altho’ the press corps is understanding of the limitations inherent in the secretary’s job, frequently the office-holder’s credibility is so damaged by the end of the administration that getting a job in PR would prove difficult. That’s why so many press secretaries go into lobbying (which might–or might not, depending on your perspective–be considered PR) or settle for writing books about their experiences.

2) RE: The obvious may *not* be the most important…

The obvious IS the most important in government (as well in PR); the challenge is in realizing–and identifying–what are the most important (obvious) concerns among stakeholders. The Obama administration is guilty of “drinking their own bathwater” and governing with blinders on, oblivious to the deep concern voters feel about health care, deficits and economic reform. The president still hasn’t transformed his ivory-tower perspective into the nitty gritty necessities of daily political combat; he expects logic to sway stakeholders and overcome irrational emotional responses. The danger in playing to the obvious is that few governmental initiatives ever satisfy all stakeholders, and many nursing their resentment will burst back onto the scene with fresh attempts to reshape the agenda. This is what makes constituent/stakeholder relations so important to government, and why it has devolved almost entirely into legislating in response to polls.

3) As for anticipating the unexpected…

While businesses may be nimble enough to do this very necessary planning function, the federal government is simply too big to even know everything that it’s doing–which is why stories of government inefficiency are so easy to write. The solution is to appoint well-qualified subordinates who can take complete control of their support staff. However, once it achieves critical mass, any bureaucracy’s institutional goals switch to protecting its individual and collective members’ livelihoods. Thus, the key to effective governance for any administration lies not in selecting effective Cabinet officers, but in whom those officers select for their deputies–and whether those deputies can impose their managerial imperatives sufficiently within their own bureaucracies that some of the necessary reform trickles down.

The Obama Administration’s messaging difficulties present some important lessons for professional communicators:

1–Stay focused. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, and tackle only one big problem at a time. The economy is the biggest current concern for voters, and the President’s success with them depends more on whether he fixes it than how. Given how much of the electorate already has health care, voters are willing to wait for health-care reform until after their jobs are restored. The Administration is attempting two simultaneous generational transformations when it barely has the resources to achieve one of them.

PR practitioners will do well to remember that stakeholders often have a single overriding concern that renders other issues less important–until they are brought into the light of public debate by opponents. The temptation to sneak something by amidst all the background environmental noise of a given situation may be great, but the risk–and impact–of it being noticed by adversaries and watchdogs is greater.

2–Take control. Set the parameters of the discussion and do everything you can to keep control of the agenda. This requires competent SWOT planning based on realistic (as opposed to ivory-tower) assessment of stakeholder concerns and responses, as well as detailed competitive intelligence that can predict how opponents will react. The Obama administration assumed his election victory was a mandate and was unprepared for opposition. As a result, the Administration didn’t recover its balance quickly enough to reseize the agenda, and has to play catch-up.

3–Do your homework. I learned long ago that one should never ask a question in group or public discourse that you don’t already know the answer to. Don’t make the mistake of assuming you know how stakeholders will respond. Logic often can be defeated by illogic if repeated continuously, and rational arguments can be trumped by irrational claims and emotional appeals. Propagandists know that the bigger the lie, the more readily it will be accepted, because its targets assume no one would make such a patently incredible statement unless it were true. In advertising, the more a message is repeated, the greater its successful impression will be. Have plenty of research on hand to back up your contentions and policy proposals, and keep sampling to stay in touch with the pulse of the nation.

4–Set realistic goals. Politics has been called the art of the possible, but too often government fixates on attempting to address impossibly large issues. During the campaign, candidate Obama seized upon an emotionally powerful issue–health care–and promised to make it a transformational goal of his administration. Yet the President has failed to make the economic case for health-care reform in the midst of the Great Recession. He clung to his campaign rhetoric and refused to set aside his campaign promise in favor of fully addressing the tremendous economic mess he inherited. Opponents have successfully painted him into a corner by pointing out his health-care plan will dramatically worsen the economic forecast with deficits that will delay the eventual recovery. (The GAO’s confirming analysis didn’t help, either.)

5–Have a Plan B. (And C.) President Obama has resisted using the Democratic & Independent majority in Congress to push through his legislative goals, clinging to his unrealistic dream of trying to achieve bipartisan support. Inevitably, he will soon wake up and smell the coffee. Faced with the prospect of legislative defeat, he’ll do what must be done so he can proclaim victory and move on to his next big initiative.

6–Don’t neglect your base. Given that candidate Obama was so successful with using social media to mobilize supporters, President Obama has noticeably failed to energize his millions of supporters into demanding that their Congresscritters support his agenda. The White House.gov site attracted widespread criticism in its early weeks for poor interactivity–as late as March 2009, blog comments weren’t even allowed–that failed to live up to the standards and expectations generated by candidate Obama’s impressive use of the Internet.

The Administration has fallen into the perpetual D.C. trap of trying to generate voter support through the news media, when it should be using its grass roots base to launch a groundswell of outrage that would mow down opposition.

-Steven Spenser
Principal, Praxis Communication/Seattle
PraxisPR@comcast.net
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenspenser
http://www.box.net/PraxisPR