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Health care reform: Blaming bad communications doesn't fix bad attitudes

In the spin following the GOP’s game-changing Senate win in Massachusetts, the White House defended its beleaguered health care legislation with an old standard: What we have here is a failure to communicate.

"We lost some of that sense,” President Obama told ABC News, “…of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.”

That talking point has been played down since then.  Good thing, too.  Because it’s terrible PR.

Think of health care reform as a high-profile but controversial consumer product being introduced into a marketplace of extreme fans and critics (like New Coke or Windows Vista).  Blaming a flat-out rejection on poor communications might seem a safe strategy. You hold yourself accountable but without faulting your intentions.

It’s not that your product’s bad. It’s the stupid packaging.

Except a lot of people will instead think you’re saying, “It’s the packaging, stupid.”

Your competitors will do everything they can to promote that interpretation.  As MSNBC points out, administration opponents are literally institutionalizing the word “arrogance” in reference to what Massachusetts voters were complaining about and how the White House has responded to it.

At the core of almost every public’s fear and loathing are legitimate issues.  You may think your smarts in creating a value-added product trumps all that.  They don’t. 

You can’t win people who think you’re dismissing them.  Even if you suspect they don’t have a clue what you’re really selling.
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Here's the full version of the health care reform bill.

For your informed consent, here are all 1,990 pages of the House health care bill with the seemingly impossible but possibly amazing promise, “To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.” 

Or the shorter, more immediately achievable title, “To give Americans a good reason not to watch St. Louis play Detroit this weekend.”
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So is the president anti-business?

Freelancer Susan Morgan quotes American Standard editor Fred Barnes and others regarding the administration’s alleged disconnect with American business.

Previously in Scatterbox: Obama anti-business rhetoric puts strain on forced bond between government and corporate community.
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The most media-driven White House in history

“The Obama administration has started with 14 professionals working in the office of the press secretary—and an astounding 47 more devoted to other aspects of media and message—which is significantly more than the communications staffs of many Fortune 500 corporations. But the media operation goes deeper than that. It’s more central than in any previous administration, and run more knowledgeably.”

-- Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff in The Power and the Story, on the administration’s seemingly total control of the press.

Rhetoric strains forced bond between government and corporate community

The nation's media reports that the corporate world is peeved about what it considers President Obama's devisive anti-corporate rhetoric. As U.S. News and World Report observes, "Another week, another assault on business-as-usual by President Obama. Or is it, as some critics are starting to wonder, an assault on business, as usual?"

Reports Associated Press:

"Relations between President Barack Obama and U.S. corporate leaders have grown tense in recent weeks, with business groups bristling over his sharp rebukes of lenders and multinational companies in particular.

Executives and trade groups that praised Obama's outreach during his post-election transition period say they have felt less welcome since he took office in January. More troubling, they say, are his populist-tinged, sometimes acid critiques of certain sectors, including large companies that keep some profits overseas to reduce their U.S. tax burden."

A U.S. Chamber spokesman called the President's talking points "an oversimplification of the real world." Another trade lobbyist called it the same old cynical, political class warfare.

The White House is throwing out its own doublespeak, explaining that the business community is just freaked out by how shockingly supportive the President really is. Said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke in the U.S. News report:

"President Obama has a very good relationship with the business community. He's working extra hard on creating more jobs and stabilizing the financial crisis.... In many ways, he's perhaps surprised the business community with just how moderate he has been and how much he is willing to work with them."

The posturing between Obama and corporate America has always been convoluted. As a candidate, Obama ran anti-corporate campaign ads criticizing CEO compensation. Yet he still raised enormous sums of money from corporate backers including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, National Amusements and Google.

A few months before the election, a Chief Executive poll found that more than 70 percent of all CEOs thought an Obama presidency would be a "disaster."  Yet Business Week reported that corporate leaders gave President Obama "relatively good grades" after his first 100 days. People were still wary on the details, but as the Business Roundtable's president told the magazine: "We're happy with the general outlines of what he's done; things are starting to take hold."

Today's ambivalence between government and business represents tensions that exist within a shotgun marrage unlike anything in history. Taxpayers are now direct stakeholders in the financial and auto industries, and are rapidly becoming the safety net by which the nation's housing, healthcare, energy and even news media industries will be supported while they are transformed. That makes the President of the United States both Commander in Chief and CEO.

We're at the point now, writes Wall Street Journal columnist Gerland Seib, that "it seems almost anachronistic to talk about a divide between government and business."

Perhaps the publicized angst about Obama being anti-business means the honeymoon that never really was is over.  What certain is that corporate PR is going to be more complicated than when all the talk about public-private partnership was mostly just talk.
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Send comments and links to scatterbox@stevensilvers.com

Get on President Obama's email update list

Drop a note to WhiteHouse.Gov and you'll be added to President Obama's email blast list.

The White House is using official letter-looking emails -- like this one about health care reform -- "as a way to directly communicate about important issues and opportunities." 

The email letters include links to other White House web sites designed to educate and build support for various administration initiatives.

You can get on the official Obama email updates list by clicking here.
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Why you can't spin global warming to be a better consumer product

The New York Times got hold a draft report by a nonprofit "environmental marketing firm" that recommends using better spin to win people over on this whole global warming thing.  The Times reports:

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about "our deteriorating atmosphere."  Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up "moving away from the dirty fuels of the past."  Don't confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like "cap and cash back" or "pollution reduction refund."...

In fact, the group's surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term "the environment" and talk about "the air we breathe, the water our children drink."

I can hear every good PR expert in the world groaning at this. 

Put aside the fact that this calculated euphemism insults Americans who know what "environment" means.  You're still left with several risks.

One: You're taking a bus to get to the same point.  Instead of referring to global warming, you're saying that, no, the real problem is our deteriorating atmosphere, which is the result of greenhouse gas emissions that in turn cause global warming.  Flack rhetoric makes things less clear, not more.

Two:  You're hurting your cause.  Global warming is a literal concept, proven by literal events and research.  "Our deteriorating atmosphere" is bad packaging, like something out of Hollywood's current preoccupation with end-of-the-world movies.  They're great special effects, but everybody knows they're pretend.

Three: You act like your spin exists in a vacuum.  Huge mistake.  If your research shows that people are uncomfortable with the word environment, then your opposition will find ways to say environmentalists twenty times a minute.  Thirty times a minute if they're Rush Limbaugh.

Four:  If you give up "environment," you'll need even more doublespeak to label what you do. 

What... You're going to start referring to people as Our Deteriorating Atmosphere Solutions Providers?
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Former Rocky city editor named Denver communications director

Former Rocky Mountain News city editor Eric Brown will join Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's staff as Director of Communications on April 20.

Eric was one of the many good people who lost their jobs when the Rocky was shut down in late February 2009. 
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America's pundit problem

In the aftermath of Wall Street's collapse, experts are pointing to the negative impact of experts.

An Emery University study, for example, asked students to consider making several personal finance decisions.  When those students were given advice from a recognized expert, the decision-making and calculating parts of their brains simply simply shut down.

What makes this really scary is how experts are so often wrong.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recalls how professor Philip Tetlok spent 20 years tracking 82,000 predictions from 284 experts.  Tetlok found that the pundits were only slightly more correct than random guesses.  It didn't matter if they were doctors, politicians, economists or financial advisers.

"Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame - and it was an inverse relationship," Kristof writes.   "The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones.  That had to do with a fault in the media.  Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites.  People who shouted - like, yes, Jim Cramer!"

Will past mistakes mean fewer experts?  Hardly.

Pundits are to mass media what baseballs are to the major league.  They're cheaper than staff researchers or reporters.  They compete for exposure by being available and quotable.

Most importantly, subject-matter authorities are rarely held accountable by the industry that relies on them for content.  Sometimes they're even celebrated for being so wrong.  A few years ago, the Rocky Mountain News profiled a "controversial" aviation consultant who had become an international media darling by giving "colorful" sound bites insisting that Denver International Airport would go bankrupt.  DIA hasn't lost money since it opened in 1995.

The public brain-freeze over pundits is what makes John Stewart's skewering of Mad Money's Jim Cramer so telling.  Mainstream media is full of experts laying blame for the financial crisis.  But it took a comedy show host to publicly chastise one of Wall Street's biggest media celebrities for his part in it.

Indeed, there are partisan watchdogs like the conservative Business & Media Institute and the liberal Media Matters, which recently launched a new website targeting financial news and opinion.  But these groups are politically biased in their criticisms and don't reach nearly an audience like The Daily Show with John Stewart.

But they're among the closest things we have to Consumer Reports Guide to Pundits.  And right now we need all the critical reviews we can get.

At least, that's my expert opinion.
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Photo courtesy Associated Press

Most popular media sites for bloggers

TechCrunch compiled this list of the 50 media sites that bloggers link to most. The top ten sites:

1. YouTube
2. New York Times
3. BBC News
4. CNN.com
5. MSN
6. guardian.co.uk
7. Washington Post
8. Yahoo! News
9. Reuters
10. Los Angeles Times

(Thanks to The Media Is Dying, a very good media junkie Twitter feed.)
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