Author: Jim Eltringham

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

Obama’s Bad News Power Rankings, 5.31.2013

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President Obama’s approval rating remains high despite all the bad news.  Good for him.  It’s not a bad thing for conservatives and Republicans that Obama is getting a pass – it focuses the discussion on government overreach, rather than trying to hang these scandals on one person.  It makes for a better policy discussion in the long term.

  1. Department of Justice vs. the First Amendment.  (Last week: 3)  Eric Holder is not so lucky as his boss: 42% of Americans think he ought to pack up and leave.  After word surfaced that the DOJ zeroed in on Fox News’s James Rosen, Holder flirted with perjury charges.  His ham-fisted attempt at reconciling with the fourth estate and demonstrating transparency was an off the record meeting, because nothing says “I love free speech” better than “Shh!”  Sidebar: It would have been hilarious if some press outlet had gone and then reported on the events verbatim.  Most of the media opted for the high road (stop laughing) and opted not to go.
  2. Entitlements.  (NEW!) Call this a dark horse.  Social Security isn’t doing well, and neither is Medicare.  California health insurance premiums are rising due to Obamacare.  This represents a huge messaging opportunity for the GOP.
  3. Benghazi.  (Last week: 2)  The drumbeat of bad news is starting to take its toll on Hilary Clinton.  She’s not a particularly scary or formidable figure in 2014 or 2016, but if you’re scoring at home that’s the second current or former member of Obama’s cabinet that the American people have soured on.
  4. The IRS vs. the Tea Party, et al. (Last week: 1)  There are so many pieces of bad news that inevitably, one of the big scandals fades to the background in any given week.  This one would have dropped off, but for another “dark horse” wrinkle – that the agency may have targeted adoptive families and small businesses unfairly.  This development would move the IRS’s actions from the realm of patently unfair to heavy-handed and just plain mean.
  5. Campaign developments.  (NEW!) left-wing SuperPACs must have been salivating to use Michele Bachmann as the poster child for the Republican candidate class of 2014; when she bowed out of her race her Democrat challenger did as well.  Ed Markey in Massachusetts is sinking into a dead heat with Gabriel Gomez.  In New Mexico, Susana Martinez well-positioned against potential challengers.  Bad campaign news tends to snowball, and that portends a big chilling effect on the Presidential agenda.

Bye bye, Bachmann

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The activists of the left won’t have Michele Bachmann to push around anymore.  From Politico’s requiem:

She was a bomb thrower, a master performer, a flashy politician with an appetite for combat and perhaps the strongest TV presence of any Republican in Washington. 

Maybe they were watching a different Congresswoman.  A “flashy politician” usually doesn’t confuse John Wayne with a serial killer.  Google “strong TV presence” and you won’t find media training classes based around looking off into space when receiving the gift of national media coverage.

Bachmann was not a model of the modern politician.  She lost.  Her messaging was incendiary enough for mainstream media attention but devoid of ideas – so while some folks on the right went along for a short ride based on the mainstream media’s shock and vitriol, Bachmann couldn’t carry a movement.  Her staff churned throughout the years.  The allegations that still hang around her campaigns reek more of absolute disorganization than intentional malfeasance; Team Bachmann doesn’t seem smart and organized enough to be corrupt.

She was a mess, but never a serious force.  She fed media coverage for a short time, but had no substance.    The heirs to her attention-craving throne (from the left or the right) will flame out quickly, too.

Michele Bachmann was, succinctly, the political equivalent of the girl you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with at a party:

Online video more effective, say online video makers

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This story is making the rounds: ad executives are pimping online video as more effective than TV advertising.

Anecdotally, there are many reasons that theorem makes sense.  With DVR culture firmly entrenched, TV commercials have become almost universally fast-forward-throughable with the exception of news, and sports, and Wheel of Fortune.  Online video viewership is skyrocketing.

On the other hand, there are reasons why an ad executive would want to trend more toward online video ads.  Online videos have a higher likelihood of going viral and creating positive buzz so that the ad execs can use empty phrases like “go viral” and “create buzz.”  Viewership is easily measured, giving agencies something to report to the client.  And if they flop no one notices.  A bad Superbowl commercial gets a hundred million hands hitting a hundred million foreheads, but a bad online video can drift to oblivion (unless it’s REALLY bad).

It also sounds really good to say that online video is the wave of the future.  There’s nothing to back up whether online video advertising actually drives sales more or less; but an agency exec who suggests skepticism will sound like a dinosaur.

This isn’t to say online video isn’t a great medium for message delivery.  I think it’s probably the best, and that’s my opinion.  This study asks marketing executives, and it was done by an outfit called EMarketer.com.  It’s not exactly unbiased.

Gallup-ping away from the right?

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Gallup charts a declining percentage of Americans self-identifying as conservative, which suggests bad things ahead for the GOP.  Just 41% of Americans consider themselves economic conservatives, and 33% identify as social conservatives.  Both of those figures are down from 2010 numbers, and the results seem to give weight to comments like those of Olympia Snowe about the Republican Party’s narrow appeal.

While this is a speed bump for the GOP, it really measures failure of the conservative movement.  The constellation of groups churning out candidates and activists has not done a good enough job preparing them to appeal to non-conservatives.  The most effective leaders are those who can talk to the middle from the edge – it’s what makes President Obama such a great politician.  Going a step further: There’s no such thing as “too conservative to win” (or “too liberal to win”) a general election.  There’s such a thing as “too crazy to win,” and there’s definitely such a thing as “too stupid to win.”

If fewer people self-identify as “conservative,” then Republican politicians will have to stop using it as a buzzword.  That’s a smart thing to do, anyway.  Then it’s up to the conservative movement to articulate policy positions in a way that sounds reasonable to non-conservatives.

It would be more illuminating to see the specifics.  For instance, Gallup says that Americans remain suspect of government; the IRS suffering a predictable and precipitous dip.  Those are both “economic conservative” positions, but that doesn’t mean the respondents would self-identify as such.  And that could fuel exactly the type of issue-specific messaging that conservatives and Republicans can use to expand their influence – even if they don’t expand their brand.

 

Unnecessary Language Criticism

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Check out this sentence from Politico’s story on Virginia dealing with gay stuff:

In the 2013 off-year elections, a state that once leaned solidly to the center-right has become the newest focal point in the national debate over same-sex relationships.

When people talk about needing more writing education in our schools, this is why.  Somehow, a national publication let this sentence go through.

If a state “leans” one way or another, by definition it is not “solid.”  Further, a state cannot “lean” to the center, making the phrase “center-right” incorrect.  Leaning implies a direction, being solid implies a lack of mobility.

The reporter should have written something like this: Virginia was solidly conservative, but is now a swing state that leans Republican.

(The premise of the article is pretty flimsy, too, but it’s a slow news day so they get some slack for that.)

Obama’s Bad News Power Rankings, 5.23.2013

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If you participate in social media, you’ve probably heard talk of the Obama scandals.  TargetPoint released this graphic showing  what people are talking about, and how they’re taking it.  The news is not good for the current administration:

NDMs-ObamaWatch-5.15-5.16

Thus, this week’s Bad News Power Rankings practically write themselves:

  1. IRS vs. Tea Partiers.  (Last week: 2) The parade of Administration officials who either change their story or won’t tell it moved this one up the list.  Rasmussen reports 60% of Americans feel it’s pretty likely that other agencies also targeted conservative groups, meaning that people don’t view the IRS’s actions as a one-off.
  2. Benghazi.  (Last week: 3) Amazingly, independents believe in an Obama Administration cover-up more than Republicans.
  3. DOJ vs. AP.  (Last week: 1) This one has been relatively quiet this week, but still makes reporters sympathetic.
  4. Fast and Furious.  Of course, it would be nice to say that the current scandals have raised the voting public’s awareness of this previous scandal.  But let’s be honest: it’s probably the upcoming movie, “6 Fast, 6 Furious.”
  5. Keystone XL.  Pundits love to trash Republicans for “playing to the base,” but Congress may force the Administration’s hand on this wedge issue for Democrats’ extreme environmentalist supporters.

Oklahoma

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This morning, Mike and Mike talked sports on ESPN Radio.  That’s usually no surprise.  But they weren’t talking sports on the morning of April 16, choosing instead to talk about the Boston Marathon bombing.  While that was marginally a sports story, that’s not the type of coverage they lent to the subject.

This morning, the news in DC tells us to expect up to 91 fatalities in Oklahoma after yesterday’s tornadoes, and half of those may be children.   And then it moves on to the next story, about the IRS or the Department of Justice or whichever scandal is having its turn.

This isn’t meant to compare events, or claim East Coast bias, or anything like that.  Realities like the tornadoes in Oklahoma are difficult for our head to process and almost impossible for our hearts to handle.  Events like the Boston bombing – and like September 11, or the shooting sprees in Newtown, Blacksburg, and Aurora – are, in a way, easier to deal with.  In those situations, there is a defined bad guy – a terrorist or a lunatic – so the pain can be focused as outrage and anger.  On one side is our concept of normalcy, on the other side are motives driven by evil.  Very simple.

But what motive does a tornado have?  Or a hurricane?  Or a meteor the size of Texas?

Ours is a dangerous world – a fact which makes our lives, and those around us, very fragile.

 

A Great Week for Team Obama?

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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

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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

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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:

  1. The Administration messed up in Benghazi – and ABC news showed they directly lied to the American people about the root cause of the attack.
  2. The IRS specifically and deliberately targeted the President’s political foes during the 2012 election cycle.
  3. The Obama Justice Department snagged phone records – both professional and personal – for AP reporters.  They didn’t say why.