Tagged: president obama
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:
Lack of enthusiasm? No problem.
Resurgent Republic posted this infographic last week (which I swiped from an email from Pennsylvania political consultancy ColdSpark Media):
The full-size picture does it more justice. It charts various groups, how strong their turnout was in 2012 versus 2008, and how excited the said they were to vote.
In the last month and a week, it seems like no two Republicans can talk to each other without a discussion of What Went Wrong. It’s a great conversation because there’s no wrong answer. Every person who says, “I’ll tell you what Romney missed out on…” and then fills in a reason is usually right. So the tactical deficiency in that picture is a puzzle piece, but it isn’t the whole problem.
All that said, check out the bluest of the blue groups, staunch Obama demographics like single women, 18-29 year olds, and Hispanic voters. Isn’t it funny that the blue groups that were least excited about voting but voted more than the red groups that were more excited? Part of the vaunted Obama turnout operation was figuring out who needed to vote and doing what it took to drag them to the polls; this sure makes it look like the credit was well-deserved.
Googlizing Campaigns
If you caught the tail end of the Roger Hedgecock show on Friday night, you may have heard me chatting with guest host Matt Lewis about the use of data in campaigns.
Much has been written in the past few weeks about the amazing things the Obama 2012 campaign did in identifying and turning out voters. Just as much has been written about the Romney campaign’s failure to do the same thing, but it isn’t quite as fair. There were many reasons Obama won, but the ability to take advantage of more channels of information to identify voters was a big part of it.
The private sector has been doing this for years. For advertisers like Google and Yahoo! and e-commerce sites like Amazon, knowing what you do and where you click online is their bread and butter. It helps them put products in front of you that you’re more likely to buy, because they don’t make money if you don’t click. Obama’s team was better at adapting those techniques to the campaign world.
What I didn’t get to talk about with Matt do to time constraints was the fact that Republicans can take a great deal of solace in the fact that these aren’t new magical spells being cast by technological wizards. These are old hat tactics that can (and probably will) help Republicans with in the next campaign cycle. For years, the advertising dollars have been moving toward personal advertising (like online ads) which can present content to an audience with much greater precision than mass advertising.
Romney adviser Stuart Stevens was ridiculed for saying that Mitt Romney ran less of a national campaign than Barack Obama, but he’s right, and Obama was right to do it.
Now’s a good time for minority outreach
President Obama is winning the majority of the American people with his rhetoric on the debt ceiling crisis. But polls also show that he’s losing some support among key demographics – namely liberal and black voters, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll reported by Politico.
If you’re looking for clues, stop right here Sherlock: the unemployment rate for black men is twice that of white men. Economic policies intended to elevate the less fortunate are failing, leaving certain demographics behind more than others.
The case for smaller government and personal empowerment has never been more clear. And the polls that show minority voters increasingly distrustful of the President demonstrate that, at least on some level, voters are also in a position to reject the big-government promises they have been sold for generations.
But only if the case is made to those voters, directly and on a person-to-person basis.
With the 2012 elections over a year away, it’s a good time for campaign organizations, party committees, and non-profits on the right to begin trying to make inroads into communities where they haven’t had much success. It may take the form of voter registration or straight party recruitment efforts.
Imagine if a candidate like Michelle Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, or Mitt Romney took the initiative to sat down with community leaders of black and/or Hispanic groups the way Herman Cain is doing with Muslim groups. It would likely be even more productive, since Cain is reaching out only after he seriously frayed his relations with that community. The same outreach by key leaders of the conservative movement would be equally valuable.
It will still be low-yield; the cost per registrant will be high in the early going. That’s the price of ignoring those communities for so long. This wouldn’t be about volumes of new party voters, though. Unlike many of the failing government programs that have been used to buy these communities’ votes in the past decades, this would be a legitimate investment in the future.
Slurpublicans
This week, Tammy Bruce riffed on a line that President Obama has been using to characterize Congressional Republicans as sitting back, “sipping a Slurpee,” while Democrats did the hard work to advance the change we could believe in.
CBS News’s Mark Knoller reported on the recurring imagery earlier this month:
Though he doesn’t mention any Slurpee-sipping Republicans by name, his rhetoric suggests an image of Senate and House Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, dressed casually (perhaps in shorts and sneakers) with a couple of Big Gulp cups in their hands, sipping on 7-Eleven’s sweet and glacial libation… Mr. Obama clearly thinks Republicans are elitist, but the line wouldn’t be as funny if he said they were sipping Chardonnay or a Mint Julep.
For all his faults as a politician, Obama and his team are no slouches when crafting imagery. So as dead-on as Knoller is about the evolution of the talking point, that explanation of it as an accusation of elitism is a little too simplistic. The line wouldn’t just be less funny if Obama subbed in Chardonnay, it would be less effective at delivering the message he wants to get across. There’s actually a much more impressive slur at work here.
Think about 7-Eleven, and think beyond the racial stereotypes that a certain Vice President may harbor. Besides the Slurpees in question, 7-Eleven delicacies include assorted snacks of dubious nutritional value, week-old taquitos, and something that looks like the result of a drunken one-night-stand between a hot dog and a hamburger. (“Hot dog? Yeah, it’s Hamburger. We need to talk…) It isn’t exactly a bastion of elitism.
And the driving-the-car-into-the-ditch metaphor so often used to illustrate the Republican stewardship of the economy doesn’t paint the Republicans as elitist. In fact, it paints them as incompetent – a much better message for President so easily painted as aloof who is talking to a base who gave him their votes in part as a protest of the perceived simplicity of his predecessor.
That insult layered into the President’s pop culture reference like so much cheese on a plastic tray full of stale nachos? He isn’t calling Republicans elitist.
He’s calling them white trash.
The I’s have it
The Democrats may be knocking Republicans for being a party without new ideas, but the DNC’s strategy for exciting its base seems to be about a cult of personality. A message to activists over President Obama’s signature makes that very clear:
I come into this election with clear eyes.
I am proud of all we have achieved together, but I am mindful of all that remains to be done.
I know some out there are frustrated by the pace of our progress. I want you to know I’m frustrated, too.
But with so much riding on the outcome of this election, I need everyone to get in this game.
If you’re scoring at home, that’s six I’s in the first five sentences. And for a base that, much like George W. Bush’s in 2004, might be frustrated by the administration’s inability to deliver the ideologically pure achievements many had envisioned in the days after the 2008 election.
There’s no public option. Democrats themselves are divided on the Bush tax cuts, so a tax hike on the wealthy job creators is unlikely. There is no card check procedure to make it easier to organize unions. The financial reform bill lost a lot of teeth from where it started, and massive sums of money have been spent on corporate welfare. So what’s left to excite a liberal base that has to be excited if the Democrats are to maintain full control of Congress?
The answer is apparently a couple of pages from W’s playbook: 1) Make the election about resolve rather than results (recall Bush’s 2004 message, “You may not always agree with me, but you know where I stand”?) and 2) Remind your ardent supporters that the other side is much, much worse. In 2004 it inspired enough activists to pull a vulnerable incumbent President over the finish line against a poor opposition candidate, so it will likely resonate in some places. Since the hardcore activist in California is different from the hardcore activist in North Carolina or Virginia, it may not help universally, but at this point Democratic strategy is more about stopping losses than making gains.
The real question, though, is whether the 13 million activists on the Organizing for America list that received this email are still excited enough to volunteer their time for Barack Obama again.
It’s still better than WGN
Looking to keep stories about the White House’s dabbling in primary elections alive, the RNC launched the “Obama Chicago Network” in an email to supporters this afternoon.
The site boasts four “shows” that deal with various negative stories surrounding the Sestak/Romanoff could-have-been-bribery affairs, plus Rod Blagojevich thrown in for fun:
Even if it is somewhat dated in the pop culture references (some of the shows they are spoofing are past their prime or canceled), it’s pretty funny, makes good use of news clips, and has a poll to collect people’s contact information. With Blagojevich in the news, it does a good job of tying the administration As a lead generator, the site is good, but it’s missing something that could make it a really useful tool for Republican messaging: a section where users could “pitch” their own shows. Not only is audience participation a good thing, but it might make for some must-see TV.
Politics, policy, and the President’s speech
Criticism of the President’s speech last night ranged from the lack of specific policy asks to the aggressive tone he took in describing what BP would be forced to do. But those elements are what made the speech a short term winner – and possibly the only viable course of action.
Though it breaks a personal moratorium on referencing Ronald Reagan, the purpose of this speech should have been similar to the 1986 speech after the Challenger disaster. That speech sought to restore confidence in American ingenuity, which had just taken a very dazzling and public hit.
Obama’s speech had a similar goal – channel and focus people’s emotions. In his case, he wanted to empathize with Gulf residents and all Americans who will feel the environmental brunt of a company’s mistake. The policy ideas he put forward are window dressing for the bigger message – he feels your pain, and he’s going to inflict some of it on BP through a relief fund that the oil company will fund but not direct. (Something that would have been a good idea for BP to set up in the first place.)
Could he come out of this swinging and missing? Could BP challenge the seizure of their assets in court – and, conceivably, win? Perhaps, but after waiting 57 days to make this statement, it’s the best message the President has.
Plus, if BP weasels out of the bill some how, the President will still have a chance to make them the bad guy. Just because a James Bond villain jumps in an escape pod and eludes capture doesn’t make Bond’s effort any less heroic. It just means that Obama will have to find new and creative ways to hold BP accountable – something like tax credits for owners of local BP gas stations owners who want to change their affiliation.
It may not be good policy, but it’s good politics. As the old saying goes, when you see a mob coming with pitchforks and torches, either grab a torch and join the crowd or start running in another direction.
What’s spreading faster, oil or failure?
A local television station in Louisiana ran into some problems trying to interview some spill cleanup workers – and in doing so, highlighted one more way BP is not helping itself in its response to the spill:
Cleanup workers might not be media savvy, but they remain the best face that BP could put on their cleanup efforts (certainly better than a clearly foreign CEO). Whether the glorified rent-a-cop in this video (and his backpack-clad sidekick) are following orders that contradict BP’s official statements on press availability or they are carrying out a legit safety function isn’t clear. What is clear is that they are not communications experts.
At least BP can rest easy knowing that, no matter how sophisticated their PR strategy, they weren’t coming out of this oil spill clean. The administration’s inability to escape criticism is particularly fascinating (and means I have to eat a plate of oil-soaked crow).
Most recently, the President compared the oil spill to 9/11. Perhaps that’s his way of getting tougher on BP – as the polls are apparently asking for him to do. The problem of course, is that the President is doing everything he can do – and that just isn’t that much. After coming into office with promises that he could make government work for people again, the spill underscores that government simply isn’t qualified for the job.
Ultimately, that puts the US government and BP on two sides of the same coin. Both wind up despised by the people – BP for wielding too much power; the government for impotence.
Photo finished?
This picture is not good for our President:
Earlier this week, I talked with Matt Lewis about how the lack of a Bush-esque, detached, looking-down-from-an-airplane-at-disaster picture or video would help save President Obama from the derision and scorn his predecessor received after reacting to a Gulf coast crisis.
More likely to hurt Obama is the perception that he is at once corrupt and incompetent. Politico details the frustration many Democrats have with the White House’s failed meddling in Democratic primaries – but it’s the accompanying hilarious picture which cuts the administration’s political shop deepest.
