Category: Politics and Grassroots
A Great Week for Team Obama?
Megan McArdle might be onto something:
In finance, there’s an art known as “Big Bath Accounting” which is used to manage earnings expectations. Here’s how it works: if you know you’re going to have a bad quarter, you look around for anything else that might go wrong in the future, and you decide to “recognize” that bad news now. Inventory looking a little stale? Write it down, man! Customers getting a little slow to pay? Now would be a good time to write off their accounts as bad debt… The theory is that there is only so much bad news people can take in all at once, so you might as well cram all the bad stuff into one action-packed earnings call.
This is a couple days old, but the more you think about it – and the more news cycles turn since ScandalFest 2013 dropped – the more sense it makes that having all this hit at once is a good thing for the White House.
None of the controversies has been what any serious commentator would call impeachable, but each serves to damage credibility. Imagine if they were spaced out a little more. If the IRS scandal broke after two weeks of talking about the Benghazi hearings, and was subsequently followed by the AP/DOJ dust-up breaking a week or two after that, it would be far worse for all the President’s men. Each scandal would be discussed in its own spotlight for a little while, but the timing would still maintain that “Groundhog Day” feeling.
In order for the current blitzkrieg to be as damaging, new information will have to come out fairly regularly over the course of several months. That’s a lot of new stuff that would have to break, like the President said, there may not be that much “there” there. Meanwhile, a public with a short attention span and a media looking for fresh news will find new stuff to talk about. Democrats who are looking for fundraising and grassroots support in the mid-term elections will be slow to criticize the President.
On top of that, scandal discussion sucks up a lot of oxygen that could be used on other issues. Higher taxes are shrinking paychecks, and Obamacare is making American health care more expensive and complex. The policy environment is ripe for Republican criticism, but the line that connects a big government that taxes too much and overreaches on programs with a big government that swipes reporters’ phone records and harasses its opponents is not starkly obvious to casual observers. And there’s always the chance for a Republican politician trying to overplay his or her party’s hand.
The last couple of weeks may have been tough to get through. There’s still plenty of time for the scandals to fade into the background and there will be opportunities for the President to go back on offense. If all this bad news was going to hit anyway, having it hit at once was the best possible outcome for the White House.
Sometimes a crummy week makes for a better year.
Scandals! The Bad News Power Rankings
Jay Carney faced the press today, and… Yikes! That was rough!
On some level, you have to respect Carney. He could have woken up, faxed in a resignation Pat Riley style, rented an office near Farragut Square and started counting money. Instead, he chose to answer questions in the face of Scandalpalooza. And even if he had a rough day, none of the scandals are impeachable.
They are damaging, though. In fact, the last week and a half has heaped layer after layer of bad news on the White House doorstep. The mid-term elections are now 18 months away, and the window for putting up any meaningful legislative wins is maybe 10-12 months. President will have a tougher time advancing his agenda while responding to all the bad news. Ranked below are the President’s top speed bumps (that we know about so far today), with 1 being the most disruptive to the President’s agenda and 5 the least:
- DOJ vs. AP - People appreciate unfairness, so the IRS scandal will have legs. But no reporter will have any trouble understanding the First Amendment threats posed by the Justice Department skimming reporters’ phone records.
- IRS vs. Tea Party Groups – Political players wielding government power against their enemies is easy to understand, and makes for a simple story to write.
- Benghazi – Really, what’s the worst part? The administration’s keystone response to the embassy attack? The lies about what caused the attack? The fact that it looks like the President and his underlings were less than forthcoming due to the impending election? This is pretty complex – for scandals looking to catch on, complex is bad.
- Gosnell - During the election cycle, progressive groups tried (largely successfully) to reframe the abortion debate by talking about narrow hypotheticals. From the White House’s perspective, the silver lining of the week’s tri-scandals is that it takes mainstream attention away from the Gosnell verdict. It will help motivate pro-life advocates, but its broader messaging implications will be muted.
- Obamacare - Small business owners are already feeling the pinch. Kathleen Sebelius has been doing her “Secretary BoJangles” routine trying to fund advertising and encourage signups (like it’s some kind of high school club).
(If I missed anything, or if you disagree, leave a comment or yell at me on Twitter.)
Obama’s Commencement Speech Revisited
Last Sunday, President Obama addressed Ohio State’s Class of 2013 thusly:
Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.
Cool speech, wasn’t it? Here’s a quick rundown of some of the big headlines over the last week:
- The Administration messed up in Benghazi – and ABC news showed they directly lied to the American people about the root cause of the attack.
- The IRS specifically and deliberately targeted the President’s political foes during the 2012 election cycle.
- The Obama Justice Department snagged phone records – both professional and personal – for AP reporters. They didn’t say why.
Gosnell, perception, and reality
Before today’s Gosnell verdict, Gallup demonstrated that Americans’ views on abortion were holding steady. Incidentally, “holding steady” means that most Americans believe that abortion is, at least in some cases, wrong.
To hear the election rhetoric last November, you wouldn’t think 72% of Americans feel like abortion should be completely illegal or legal “only in some circumstances.” Remember the Republican “War on Women“? Recall the successful efforts to link Mitt Romney to Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin?
In reality, most Americans – regardless of where they would fall on the issue of abortion – probably think that Kermit Gosnell is a monster and a murderer. His conviction is no reason to crow victoriously. Gallup’s numbers suggest that there is support for the pro-life side; last November suggests that support is generally silent.
People are pro-life, but they don’t identify with the pro-life movement. For a movement that has gained enormous traction over the past four decades, conquering this hurdle is the next obvious step.
Benghazi and Cultural Stickyness
Today the Washington Post pointed out analytics that showed interest in the Benghazi hearings was largely older, whiter men. That may have a bit to do with the demographics of people working inside the Beltway who would be most likely to tune in, but it won’t be the final determination of whether this scandal has legs.
One of the reasons Watergate remains so ubiquitous in American political is that its unique moniker has kept it alive. When political scandals erupt, the suffix “-gate” is immediately added. No one references the Teapot Dome scandal that way.
Linguistically, the Benghazi scandal has that potential. Too many lavish, taxpayer-financed vacations for the President? Travelghazi. Donors receiving special access to the President in exchange for campaign cash? Sounds like a “Donorghazi” program. And you can throw in Cubaghazi for that one couple that raised a bunch of money for the President and then magically got to go to a country that normal schlubs aren’t allowed to go to.)
It won’t be testimony in a stuffy hearing room that gives the administration’s misdirection gravity beyond the halls of Congress.
A Matter of Trust
The catchy headline is that more people trust a guy who talked to an empty chair than the President of the United States, but that’s the Reader’s Digest account of the Reader’s Digest poll on the celebrities we trust the most.
Consider the top five: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and Maya Angelou. This poll is probably fun to report on, but did the respondents really give it that much thought?
If Hanks knocks on your door at 11:00 p.m. dressed in drag and imploring you to help him move Peter Scoleri’s lifeless corpse, that trust would likely wear off pretty quick.
Calling these people trustworthy is a version of the word association game. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, and not necessarily rational. It’s fleeting, but it helps contextualize what we read or ear about them – even the bad stuff – so long as we are distant from it.
On the other hand, 45% seems low for a sitting President, and it seems like a number that could get beaten down – maybe with a steady drumbeat of stories about Benghazi. Not a deluge of Republican arm-waving and histrionics, but a steady drip of stories about inconsistencies in testimony or incompetencies in strategy will keep the idea alive that the President is not 100% forthcoming. The reverberations could extend into his legislative agenda and clip his wings as he tries to foist Speaker Pelosi back onto the country.
Benghazi probably won’t drive him from office, but as long as the story has legs it will whittle away the President’s shrinking cache of trust.
Thank the first responders, then enjoy the SPAM
Everyone has been standing with Boston and Massachusetts over the past week. Finally, according to the Boston Globe, some political folks figured out a way to benefit from it. The Democrats get the dubious honor of finishing first in the race to tastelessness:
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was behind this tasteless tactic, sending out an email and tweet asking people to sign a supposed “thank you note” to the first responders. That would be nice except for the fact that in order to “sign” the note, you have to give the Democratic party your email account and ZIP code.
“We’ll collect every note we get and deliver them to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino so they can pass along your sentiments,” Wasserman Schultz writes.
A note to the brave police and firefighters? How sweet. All you have to do to “sign” it is yield enough information that the DNC can figure out who your Member of Congress is and a way to contact you. More important, they can tag you as someone who cares about first responders. Then, if they were so inclined during the next budget crisis and certainly during the next campaign, the Democrats can reach out to you and tell you how voting for their person means safety, while voting for the Republican means a living in a post-apocalyptic war zone where warlords fight each other over guns and gasoline while neo-feudal serfs cower in terror.
That is, if the Democrats were interested in using first responders as political chess pieces, which they would never do.
If nothing changes, everything will stay like this!
Today, Politico opines that immigration reform will give Democrats a big edge in future elections:
The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.
Even Politico admits that this type of projection is “speculative” given that the newly eligible voters wouldn’t be casting President ballots until 2020 or 2028. It doesn’t keep them from speculating, though.
This sounds similar to the countless pundits on the right who have been wringing their hands for the last six months over the Great Question of What Went Wrong in 2012. How, they ask desperately, are we ever to win again? We don’t speak to minority groups! We don’t use Big Data! Our candidates are bad! Our messages are out of touch! Look at all the support for President Obama in 2012!
Republicans who feel bad about this should review the last several candidates for President produced by the Democratic party before they struck gold with Obama:
- John Kerry, an aristocrat out of Massachusetts who couldn’t beat a vulnerable sitting President.
- Al Gore.
- Bill Clinton, who was likable enough to score a second term but not ideological enough to move the ball for liberalism.
- Michael Dukakis.
- Walter Mondale.
- Jimmy Carter.
- George McGovern, an unabashed liberal who was thoroughly crushed.
- Hubert H. Humphrey.
- Lyndon Johnson, whose most liberal policies didn’t come out until he one re-election on the coattails of John F. Kennedy’s legacy.
- JFK, a charismatic and media-friendly candidate who was able to ignite the electorate and win wide popular support.
If you’re scoring at home, that’s 48 years between exciting Democratic candidates. If you want to find another Democratic candidate who helped the party ideologically, you have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt.
You could make a similar list for Republicans, of course. The point is, political environments are fleeting and not static. In eight years, GOP messaging could be very different, and the voices delivering those messages will be different, too – while left-leaning activists may be quoting the Great and Powerful Barack Obama the way today’s conservatives wistfully remember Ronald Reagan.
Obama on Thatcher
The President released a nice statement praising former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher upon the announcement of her passing today. Kudos to him for that.
There hasn’t been a tribute image posted on any White House or Organizing for America channels yet, though. Given his tribute to Neil Armstrong’s passing, expect something like this:
The NRCC’s new digs: Orange you glad it isn’t red and blue?
The National Journal has a sneak peek at the NRCC’s new, Buzzfeed-esque website, set to launch sometime in the next few days. Since the dawn of 2013, the NRCC has been quietly and not-so-quietly doing some good things to get House Republicans (and prospective House Republicans) positioned well for 2014 - rootsHQ has a good write-up of that.
On the design side, though, check out the lack of traditional colors:
Contrast that with any of the other alphabet soup committees on either side. There’s occasional splashes of black and yellow, but mostly red, white, and blue. The NRCC is trying to stand out from those sites, and the early peek suggests they’re doing it right.
This should especially help drive donations and activism on behalf of Republican candidates. The cynical analyst might point out that the only people who will visit a party committee website is someone with a keen interest in politics. The average citizen won’t look to the NRCC as a destination for content, though they might see content in other venues like Pinterest or Facebook. But those with a keen interest in Republican politics want something different from the party after the previous two Presidential elections when old white guys didn’t do so well. They want a different tone, and something they can believe in. By showing a fresh, new look – combined with the more aggressive and pop-culture-influenced messaging strategy they’ve been sharpening for a few months – the NRCC can satisfy the thirst among the activist class for a fresher look and feel.
