Author: Jim Eltringham

Political consultant specializing in grassroots mobilization, online media, and public relations.

Obamacare and the NFL

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News broke yesterday that the Department of Health and Human Services hopes to enlist the NFL as a partner in expanding enrollment in health insurance plans through state exchanges.

There’s probably no better, more apt partner for Obamacare than the NFL, a league which is certainly familiar with health care:

Will Obamacare offer a system that will take care of you the way the NFL takes care of its players?  Kathleen Sebelius might want to re-think the optics of that partnership.

How to handle a scandal? Pick on coal.

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President Bill Clinton was “Slick Willy” long before the Lewinsky perjury scandal.  But that one kind of cemented the legacy.  The President lied about an affair with a subordinate to a Grand Jury (who was investigating a sexual harassment claim by a former subordinate), lied about lying about it to the American people, and eventually got to keep his job as if none of it happened.  Famously, Dick Morris’s polling showed that the American people didn’t care about his boss’s poling so long as it was a matter of personal indiscretion and not a government matter.  When Clinton and Co. managed to turn the whole circus into a story about sex, it lost its steam.

President Barack Obama is in plenty of hot water today, and his approval rating is starting to wane.  Even the hard left is less than pleased with the NSA revelations.

How does the President blunt the scandal-based criticism and win back his most ardent supporters?  The same way Santa punishes bad kids: coal.  In a speech on Tuesday, the President has promised bold action through executive fiat on climate change.  Coal plants are expected by be in the crosshairs, as they have been since Obama was a candidate.

The rules don’t have to go into effect for Obama to win.  The best case scenario for the administration plays out like this:

  • Pro-energy groups, who tend to have plenty of allies on the right, react strongly to the rules.  Words and actions from the center-right are focused on the President’s extreme agenda.  Suddenly, the most influential opinion-leading voices drop the discussions about non-impeachable issues like the IRS targeting the Tea Party and the NSA surveillance programs.
  • Environmentally-themed left-wing groups rally to shut down coal plants.  There are teach-ins, rallies, and maybe even a hunger strike or two supporting the President’s crusade rather than defending Edward Snowden.
  • Energy industry companies and trade groups spend money on paid advertising and grassroots activation to mobilize public support opposing the rule changes.  Every computer screen in Washington, D.C. that pulls up Politico sees banner ads about clean coal, and pro-coal TV spots run during the local DC news.

Clinton made it through a scandal by getting people to look at it in a different way and trying to win popular sentiment to his side.  Obama may get through a half dozen scandals by prioritizing a hot button issue to create the type of hyper-political environment he claims to hate.

 

“Just” Meta Data?

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Part of the explanation for the NSA’s acquisition of phone records from Verizon and other carriers has been the assurance that no G-men were listening in on phone calls.  All they got their hands on was metadata – not the content of the calls.

Wired has a great take on why that excuse is bunk:

Metadata is our context. And that can reveal far more about us — both individually and as groups — than the words we speak.

Context yields insights into who we are and the implicit, hidden relationships between us. A complete set of all the calling records for an entire country is therefore a record not just of how the phone is used, but, coupled with powerful software, of our importance to each other, our interests, values, and the various roles we play.

Still not convinced?  Listen, my children, and you shall hear an even better analysis: Had the Redcoats around Boston used metadata analysis in April of 1775, then Paul Revere would have been toast.

Private Issues

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In a recent post on ViralRead, I listed five technology issues that will be hot-buttons in the next six to eight months.  Privacy was at the top of the list.

The NSA/PRISM revelations have exposed that Federal authorities can pull information from technology companies.  For many Americans, the concept of a little surveillance in exchange for thwarted attacks is a fair trade.  Hammering the Obama Administration on the facts of this “scandal” likely won’t be a long-term political winner, and the Administration can’t scale back terrorism investigations while blood still stains the sidewalks in Boston.

And here’s a dose of reality: the “personal” information that the government was getting from the likes of Facebook and Google?  It’s information that people volunteered.  Google doesn’t know anything about you until you search for “Winged Monkeys in Chaps” – even if you’re totally only looking it up for a friend.  Facebook only has pictures of your kids when you upload them.  Your cell phone only triangulates your location via GPS after you buy the phone.  These creature comforts may seem difficult to live without, so we buy the products, use the services, and participate in the networks.  We should understand there are consequences to giving our data to a third party.  It’s not bad that we do it, but we need to be careful.

It is a short jump, though, from “Wow, look at all the stuff the NSA got from Facebook!” to “Hey, why does Facebook have all this stuff in the first place?”  Suddenly, tech companies are the easy bad guys.

This possibility is a likely reason Google is fighting to tell everyone what they forked over to the NSA.

Obama’s Bad News Power Rankings: 6.15.2013

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The Guardian hit the nail on the head this week while analyzing polls this week: The most damaging effects of the current spate of scandals is the erosion of trust in government.  Trusting government is the basis of  the President’s agenda.

  1. NSA Verizon. (New!)  Surveillance is the most serious of these scandals, according to Rasmussen polls, which gives this one the edge.
  2. IRS. (Last week: 2) There hasn’t been much new news this week, but Americans still care.
  3. NSA PRISM. (Last week: 1) Edward Snowden pushes this lower on the list, as does the fact that many reasonable Americans feel like spying on foreigners is an acceptable counter-terrorism measure.
  4. Benghazi.  (Last week: 4)  Americans may not care as much about it, but they do think that there was a cover up surrounding the events in Benghazi.  Worse, they believe the cover up was politically motivated.
  5. DOJ. (Last week: 3)  The Rasmussen poll linked above shows that Americans find this among the least serious scandals, but bet on ongoing media coverage.

 

Why Microsoft’s Bing Ads Suck

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An ad for Microsoft’s Bing search engine came on TV last night.  The message, obviously, is that Bing is better than Google:

That’s a cute commercial, but it will never allow Microsoft to topple Google’s search dominance.  Neither will the “Bing It On” challenge commercials that demonstrate Bing’s supposed superiority.  Compare Bing’s factual analysis of which search engine is better with this:
Google’s commercial tugs at your heart strings.  Forget about searching for Chinese delivery places or a good deal on hardwood floor installation; Google is there with you while you live your life and save your treasured memories.  It’s an effective emotional appeal, which keeps Google’s TV presence more appealing than Microsoft’s. Microsoft got this back in 1995, when they used the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” to roll out the then-new Windows 95 and its Start Button.  Commercials of the time were low on the facts of the new operating system but heavy on the new frontiers offered by the new generation of computers.

Going multi-screen: #Facebook #adds #hastags

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Cross-posted at ViralRead.

Facebook now allows users to include clickable hashtags in their posts.  The decision seems Twitter-inspired, right?

Sort of, but not completely. Though they are using the tags made popular by Twitter, Facebook’s new feature has just as much to do with an old media dinosaur – namely, live television:

During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook – roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night. The recent “Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones, received over 1.5 million mentions on Facebook, representing a significant portion of the 5.2 million people who watched the show. And this year’s Oscars buzz reached an all-time high on Facebook with over 66.5 million interactions, including likes, comments, and posts.

Speaking of the Big Game, recall that Super Bowl Sunday was a big night for Twitter this year – half of the commercials mentioned Twitter in one way or another.  Watch almost any live programming and you’ll catch hashtags superimposed on the screen almost as ubiquitously as the logo of the channel you’re watching.  All this takes advantage of multi-screen media consumption – the fact that audiences usually mess around on their phones and tablets while zoning out in front of the warming glow of TV.

And if you’re a show, product, or even a politician in a debate you want to own both of those screens.  Facebook wants to be a gateway to the buzz – and the sweet, sweet marketing dollars that follow it.

(Via AllFacebook.)

Biden is kind of right on this one…

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Vice President “Diamond Joe” Biden had plenty of choice comments last night while he was helping Ed Markey raise some scratch in Massachusetts.  One of them isn’t so crazy:

“There’s a big difference in this race,” Biden said, according to the pool report. “Barack Obama’s not at the head of the ticket. And that means those legions of African Americans and Latinos are not automatically going to come out. No one has energized them like Barack Obama. But he’s not on the ticket. So don’t take this one for granted.”

Leaving aside for a moment the unintentional racism of assuming minority groups vote as a bloc for members of other minority groups, Biden is right on one point: much of the Democrats’ success over the previous six years came in large part due to voters excited about President Obama himself.   Yes, the 2012 campaign team made unprecedented use of data to identify supporters, but they did so in the name of an exciting candidate.

Edward Markey doesn’t excite people they way Obama does.  Joe Manchin, Max Baucus, and Tim Johnson probably wouldn’t, either, which is a big reason they aren’t running for re-election in 2014.  Corey Booker might, but outside of him or a similar candidate rising through the ranks, the Democrats won’t have candidates who can duplicate Obama’s success.

That’s not an indictment of the Democrats yet – politicians like Obama don’t come around all that often, and the Republican ranks only have a few political rock stars of their own.  But it will become an indictment if Democrats feel like Obama will carry them to victory again in 2014 and 2016.

Eric Snowden: Today’s hero. Tomorrow’s villain?

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People are passing the hat online to reward Eric Snowden for revealing the NSA’s data collection schemes.  Michael Moore and Glenn Beck both called him a hero, and if those two were both on the Titanic they probably wouldn’t agree to jump into a lifeboat.  He talks about transparency, and he sure seems noble and well-spoken.  The story, which is still unfolding, reads like it was lifted from a movie script: Snowden gave up an apparently fulfilling life, an affluent lifestyle, and a lucrative career to reveal government overreach.

Before booking Eric Snowden Day and throwing a parade, though, it’s worth waiting to see what else is out there about him, or at least what he says next.  When a story seems to come straight out of Hollywood, sometimes it proves too good to be true.

Obama’s Bad News Power Rankings: 6.08.2013

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What’s worse than spending a week rehashing an old scandal? Spending a week rehashing old scandals while dealing with a new one.

  1. NSA targets everybody. (New!)  The President’s explanation that the concept of domestic is critical for national security makes the assumption that America looks at him the way they looked at his predecessor in 2003.  Claiming that broad oversight powers are necessary doesn’t sound so good after the public has spent weeks of hearing about flouting First Amendment rights, picking on political opponents with the IRS, and inconsistent stories about the attack in Benghazi.  Further, the wording of the President’s response – that there must be a choice between rights and safety – won’t help allay the public’s fears.
  2. IRS targets the Tea Party.  (Last week: 4)  The good news for the IRS?  The expensive and idiotic videos, coupled with news about the opulent conferences, give credence to the Administration’s claim that the IRS is not malicious, just incompetent.
  3. DOJ targets the Press.  (Last week: 1)  Senator Joe Manchin suggested that Eric Holder ought to think about resigning.  That someone in his own party would even bring this up demonstrates the bipartisan misgivings about seizing phone records from reporters.
  4. State Department targets the truth about Benghazi.  (Last week: 3)  Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings are sinking.  What difference, at this point, does that make?  It’s evidence that the American public is highly skeptical of the Administration.
  5. Obamacare targets American wallets.  (Last week: 2)  Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi said this week that the Obamacare-induced hikes in insurance rates actually represent reductions in cost.  Yes, she did actually say that.

Wild Card: GOP targets Facebook.  The hiring of new CTO Andy Barkett from Facebook means the RNC may actually have the tools to start organizing around some of these scandals.