BARACK OBAMA ENTERED THE PRESIDENCY with an impressive record of political success, at the center of which were his rhetorical skills. In college, he concluded that words had the power to transform: “with the right words everything could change—South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”1 It is no surprise, then, that Obama followed the pattern of presidents seeking public support for themselves and their policies that they can leverage to obtain backing for their proposals in Congress.
Moreover, it was commonplace at the beginning of his term for commentators to suggest that the president could exploit the capacity for social networking to reach people directly in a way that television and radio could not and harness this potential to overcome obstacles to legislative success. In theory, the new president could mobilize his legions of supporters and use their support to transform public policy.
In this chapter, I examine the Obama White House’s efforts to lead the public. I focus on its press relations and other aspects of going public and pay particular attention to the classic challenges that every administration faces in focusing the public’s attention, reaching the public with its messages, framing issues to its advantage, and mobilizing supporters.
The White House was aggressive in its public advocacy. The president-elect requested a communications strategy right after the election,2 and the White House communications staff swelled from forty-seven members under Bill Clinton and fifty-two under George W. Bush to sixty-nine under Barack Obama.3 Even during the transition, the president began a full-scale marketing blitz to pass his massive stimulus package, including delivering a major speech at George Mason University. The president delivered 989 speeches, comments, and remarks in his first two years in office.4 He also conducted twenty-three town hall meetings (including one in Strasbourg, France, and another in Shanghai, China) in his first year.5 He was the first sitting president to appear on the Jay Leno and David Letterman shows, and he talked to ESPN and People magazine.
When he was sworn in, Obama told friends he was eager to tackle the rigors of the Oval Office without the drudgery of shuttling to a different part of the country every other day during his two-year campaign for the presidency. In addition, the president was reluctant to be too far away from Washington, aides said, because he was juggling economic proposals, meeting with military commanders, trying to fill his cabinet, and meeting with a series of agencies for an early look at his administration. After three weeks in office, however, the president found the public’s support for his economic recovery package was eroding as Republicans intensified their criticism of the plan. So his advisors told him he had no choice but to use Air Force One and take his case to the public.6
The president pledged to leave Washington every week. On February 9, 2009, he visited Indiana. The next day he was in Florida, and then on to Virginia and Illinois in the next two days. He has never let up his travel schedule.7
Often the travel provided helpful backdrops for making his case. When Obama announced a plan to slow mortgage foreclosures by reducing troubled homeowners’ monthly payments, he traveled to Mesa, Arizona, a community hit hard by the subprime crisis, where median home prices had fallen 35 percent over the past year. In signing the economic stimulus package, he dispensed with customary settings like the Oval Office or Rose Garden and held the ceremony in Denver so he could be out West in an area that had been hit hard economically, away from the politics of Washington.
The same principles applied to foreign policy. When it came time for the president to offer a time line for withdrawing troops from Iraq, he journeyed to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to deliver the news before thousands of U.S. Marines. When he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, he did so in a prime-time speech to the cadets at West Point.
The primary intermediary between the president and the public is the press, and the White House has been attentive to servicing the press. Obama appointed Robert Gibbs, a close associate who had his ear, as press secretary. Being in the inner circle of the White House gave Gibbs high credibility as a White House spokesman. (There were some complaints from reporters, however, that Gibbs spent so much time with the president that he did not have enough time to talk to reporters.)8
The president hosted lunches and dinners for TV anchors and columnists; held off-the-record sessions with liberal columnists and historians; and ate dinner with conservative writers at columnist George Will’s house. In addition, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was unusually active in working the media, cajoling, lobbing, berating, and trading information with reporters. The White House pays particular attention to the New York Times, which Gibbs believes has the ability to drive the news.9
Equally important, Obama made a concerted effort to tap into alternatives to the mainstream national media, including Spanish-language magazines, newspapers, and television and radio stations and those oriented to African Americans.10 As we will see, the White House is also oriented toward blogs, Internet videos, Facebook, and Twitter. The press pool that takes turns covering the president up close now includes Web-only publications like Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Caller. The president also submits to interviews with regional newspapers.
At the same time, the president has tried to deal with the press in a different way from that of his predecessors. Obama held forty-six news conferences in his first two years, of which eleven were formal, solo White House question-and-answer sessions. Four were in prime time. He went for seven months before holding a full-scale press conference on February 9, 2010.11 When he did hold his formal press conferences, the White House decided the day before each one who the president would call on, and sometimes notified the reporters in advance. This procedure miffed some reporters, who felt they were being reduced to the role of mere extras. Past presidents have generally worked their way around the room, starting with the wire services, networks, and major newspapers.12
In his first daytime news conference, held on June 23, 2009, the president declared, “I know Nico Pitney is here from the Huffington Post.” Obama knew this because White House aides had called Pitney the day before to invite him, and they had escorted him into the room. The aides told him the president was likely to call on him, with the understanding that he would ask a question about Iran. Pitney said that although the White House was not aware of the question’s wording, it asked him to come up with a question about Iran proposed by an Iranian. Later, Obama passed over representatives from major U.S. news outlets to call on Macarena Vidal of the Spanish-language EFE news agency. The White House called Vidal in advance to see whether she was coming and arranged a seat for her. She asked about Chile and Colombia.13
In addition, the president has chosen not to answer reporters’ questions at most day-to-day events, such as those with foreign leaders, as other presidents have done. During his first two years in office, Obama took questions in such venues 75 times, compared with the 243 times George W. Bush and 390 times for Bill Clinton did in the comparable periods. Instead of open-ended sessions with multiple reporters, he prefers one-on-one interviews, particularly on television.14
The president sits for far more interviews than his two most recent predecessors did, reflecting the fact that he feels the interview format is a more effective means for getting his message through. In his first two years, he gave 269 interviews, compared with 83 by Bush and 136 by Clinton in comparable periods. One hundred and forty of the sessions were TV interviews, and forty-four were for radio. Another sixty-nine were for print organizations, fourteen were for mixed media, and two were for solely online organizations.15 Among the attractions of television interviews for Obama are that they tend to be played in full and serve as a useful vehicle for reaching a large number of people.
The White House has displayed some skill in using the press to serve its purposes. After the protracted decision-making process that climaxed with the president’s December 1, 2009, announcement of sending an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, the White House briefed the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times on the policy discussions. In early December, each newspaper carried behind-the-scenes stories on the process, all reflecting Obama as a deliberative and tough-minded manager.16
When the president faced strong Democratic opposition to the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts during the 2010 lame-duck session of Congress, the White House launched a public relations blitz. Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs instructed his staff to send out an e-mail every time a prominent politician backed the deal—even those of governors, mayors, and state legislators who had no power to directly influence the outcome. Obama even escorted former President Bill Clinton into the White House briefing room on December 10, where the former president praised the deal as the best compromise possible during a memorable thirty-minute exchange with reporters.17
The White House has also shown some deftness at catering to a nonstop, Internet- and cable-television-driven news cycle. For example, the White House went to great lengths to project an image of competence in U.S. relief efforts in Haiti, in implicit contrast to the way the Bush administration mishandled Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The administration and the military set up a busy communications operation with twenty-five people at the American Embassy and in a cinder-block warehouse at the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. The White House released a torrent of news releases, briefings, fact sheets, and statements, including “ticktock” (a newspaper term of art for a minute-by-minute reconstruction of how momentous events unfolded), a link to a Flickr photo of a meeting on Haiti in the Situation Room, presided over by the president, a video of American search teams rescuing a Haitian woman from a collapsed building, and a list of foreign leaders he had telephoned.18
The administration has been less successful when wielding the stick. It soon grew weary of Fox News’s unrelenting and often vitriolic criticism and limited the appearances of some top officials on some Fox News shows. More visibly, it excluded Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace—which it had previously treated as distinct from the network—from a round of presidential interviews with Sunday morning news programs in mid-September 2009. In late October, the White House tried to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg. When Fox’s television news competitors refused to go along, the White House relented.19 Fox’s access soon returned to normal.20
The first step in the president’s efforts to lead the public is focusing its attention. The president is unlikely to influence people who are not attentive to the issues on which he wishes to lead. If the president’s messages are to meet his coalition-building needs, the public must sort through the profusion of communications in its environment, overcome its limited interest in government and politics, and concentrate on the president’s priority concerns. Even within the domain of politics, political communications bombard Americans every day (many of which originate in the White House). The sheer volume of these communications far exceeds the attentive capacity of any individual.
In recent decades, presidents have had the goal of a disciplined communications strategy, at the core of which is a consistent message of the day. Shortened news cycles have made such strategies obsolete, however. Obama wanted to focus on winning the week rather than the day,21 but achieving even this goal was to prove a major challenge.
Obama’s team earned a reputation for skill and discipline in dominating the communications wars with his opponents on the road to winning the White House. Governing is considerably more difficult, however. Campaigns are tightly focused on one goal: winning elections. Governing requires attention to multiple goals, many of which are thrust upon the White House. Thus, the president must speak on many issues and to many audiences simultaneously. As White House senior advisor David Axelrod put it, the challenge of managing and controlling messages in a campaign and in the White House is “the difference between tick-tack-toe and three-dimensional tick-tack-toe. It’s vastly more complicated.”22
Presidents must cope with an elaborate agenda established by their predecessors.23 The president’s choices of priorities usually fall within parameters set by prior commitments of the government that obligate it to spend money, defend allies, maintain services, or protect rights.24 As Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen observed, “Presidents rarely, if ever make decisions . . . in the sense of writing their conclusions largely on a clean slate.”25
Moreover, every administration must respond to unanticipated or simply overlooked problems, including international crises. These issues affect simultaneously the attention of the public and the priorities of Congress and thus the White House’s success in focusing attention on its priority issues.26 Administration officials also cannot ignore events, as campaigns often do. “You can pick and choose what you want to discuss and what you don’t want to discuss,” said Axelrod. “When you’re president of the United States, you have a responsibility to deal with the problems as they come.” Communications director Daniel Pfeiffer added: “In the White House, you have the myriad of challenges on any given day and are generally being forced to communicate a number of complex subjects at the same time.”27 Thus, according to Axelrod, the sheer volume of crises overwhelmed the message.28
In September 2009, the president was engaged in a major public relations effort to turn around public opinion on health care reform. The effort to sustain a focus on health care came to a screeching halt after September 21, however. In the period of September 22–25, 2009, Obama addressed the UN General Assembly, chaired a meeting of the UN Security Council, and spoke at a UN Climate Change Summit and former President Clinton’s Global Initiative conference. He also attended multiple meetings of the G-20 countries, a Friends of Pakistan meeting, and a meeting of countries contributing peace-keeping troops, and held bilateral meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama, President Medvedev of Russia, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Abbas, and Chinese President Hu. In addition, the president hosted a reception for heads of state and government and a lunch for Sub-Saharan African heads of state and held a news conference focused on foreign affairs. It is not surprising, then, that Pew found that international issues and events dominated news coverage in the week of September 21–27, with health care coverage constituting only 9 percent of the news hole.29
At the beginning of May 2010, the president’s top advisors thought they had a public relations plan for the week: a focus on jobs and the White House’s efforts to boost the economic recovery.30 That agenda lost focus, however, when three unanticipated events with which Obama had to deal dominated the news. First, the BP oil spill and possible environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico required a presidential visit to the area and regular commentary from the White House. Then, a terrorist’s bomb found in New York’s Times Square provided yet another distraction. There was no way the president could not comment on such an event, and there was no way it would not dominate the news. Finally, Arizona passed a controversial immigration law, focusing attention on yet another issue.
In addition to prior commitments and unanticipated events, there are competitors for the public’s attention. Successful campaigns maintain control of their message most of the time. Once in office, the president communicates with the public in a congested communications environment clogged with competing messages from a wide variety of sources, through a wide range of media, and on a staggering array of subjects.31 A year into the president’s term, communications direction Dan Pfeiffer declared, “It was clear that too often we didn’t have the ball—Congress had the ball in terms of driving the message.”32
To be effective in leading the public, the president must focus the public’s attention on his policies for a sustained period of time. This requires more than a single speech, no matter how eloquent or dramatic it may be. The Reagan White House was successful in maintaining a focus on its top-priority economic policies in 1981. It molded its communication strategy around its legislative priorities and focused the administration’s agenda and statements on economic policy to ensure that discussing a wide range of topics did not diffuse the president’s message.33 Sustaining such a focus is difficult to do, however. After 1981, President Reagan had to deal with a wide range of noneconomic policies. Other administrations have encountered similar problems.
Focusing attention is more difficult as an administration proceeds. The White House can put off dealing with the full spectrum of national issues for several months at the beginning of a new president’s term, but it cannot do so for four years; eventually it must make decisions. By the second year, the agenda is full and more policies are in the pipeline as the administration attempts to satisfy its constituencies and responds to problems it has overlooked or that arose after the president’s inauguration.
Focusing attention on priorities is considerably easier for a president with a short legislative agenda, such as Ronald Reagan, than it is for one with a more ambitious agenda, such as Barack Obama’s. Obama began proposing his large agenda immediately after taking office. Moreover, Democrats had a laundry list of initiatives that George W. Bush had blocked, ranging from gender pay equity and children’s health insurance to tougher tobacco regulations and a new public service initiative. In addition, there were recession-related efforts to provide mortgage relief and curb predatory banking practices to complement the president’s economic stimulus measure.
The president and his fellow partisans believed in activist government and were predisposed toward doing “good” and against husbanding leadership resources. But no good deed goes unpunished. The more the White House tried to do, the more difficult it was to focus the country’s attention on priority issues. Once the administration had put in place policies to deal with the worst of the crises Obama inherited, it moved on to health care, climate change, Afghanistan, and other major initiatives. The result was a perception in the public about a loss of focus on unemployment, prompting a shift back to the economy at the beginning of the president’s second year in office.
Former White House communications director Anita Dunn said the administration had always seen health care reform as a central part of its economic message. “Our lack of success at doing that . . . is one of the reasons that people feel there wasn’t the focus” on the economy, she said. Another White House official asserted that on the economy, “We’ve got a better story to tell than we’ve told.”34
There were many challenges to the Obama White House focusing on its priorities. One challenge was not being distracted by peripheral issues. When the Republicans began characterizing the president’s economic stimulus bill as wasteful “pork” spending, the president launched a media blitz to counteract this image. Wary of selecting one favored network and alienating the others, the White House arranged for interviews with NBC’s Brian Williams, CBS’s Katie Couric, ABC’s Charles Gibson, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Fox’s Chris Wallace, and on ABC’s Nightline on February 3.
There was a problem with this strategy, however, because the interviews took place only hours after former senator Tom Daschle withdrew as Obama’s nominee to become secretary of Health and Human Resources over his belated payment of back taxes. This embarrassing situation became the dominant story in the interviews, with the president telling one anchor after another that he had “screwed up.” Although by admitting what he called “self-inflicted wounds,” the president preempted days of stories about whether the administration was playing down the magnitude of the mess, the issue distracted from the White House’s principal purpose in granting the interviews.
In May, the president’s commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, and his choice of a candidate to replace Justice David H. Souter raised the issue of abortion to higher levels of visibility. This prominence counteracted Obama’s effort to “tamp down some of the anger” over abortion, as he said in a news conference in April, and to distract from his other domestic priorities, like health care.35
On July 16, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. returned to his Cambridge, Massachusetts home to find the door stuck. A neighbor reported that someone might be trying to break into the house, and the police responded. Although the arresting police officer, Sgt. James Crowley, became aware that Professor Gates was in his own home, the police said Gates was belligerent and arrested him for disorderly conduct. (The charge was later dropped.)
A reporter asked Obama for his reaction to the incident as the last question in his July 22 prime-time press conference, a session that was otherwise largely devoted to health care reform. The president replied that the police had “acted stupidly” in hauling Professor Gates from his home in handcuffs. Obama’s choice of words generated angry responses from the Cambridge police. Worse, media attention spiked in response to the president’s comments. Thirty percent of the public reported that they followed the story very closely, and 17 percent said it was the story they followed most closely. The media devoted 12 percent of the news hole to the incident, tying it for the second-most covered story of the week. More significantly, the story filled only 4 percent of the news hole on Wednesday, before the president’s press conference that evening, but the figure rose to 19 percent on Thursday and 31 percent on Friday.36 The president had become a distraction from his high-priority policy initiative and his attempt to focus attention on it with a televised prime-time press conference.
In an attempt to move beyond the controversy that had dominated the previous two days of press coverage, the president made a surprise visit to the White House Briefing Room on July 24. He admitted that he “could have calibrated” his words more carefully in his press conference response, and told the press of his phone call that afternoon to Officer Crowley, whom he complimented as an outstanding police officer. The controversy, Obama acknowledged, overshadowed his attempt to explain the effort to overhaul the nation’s health care system. As he put it, “over the last two days as we’ve discussed this issue . . . nobody has been paying much attention to health care.”37
The Gates issue still had legs, however. The president invited the professor and Crowley for a beer at the White House on July 30, producing yet another round of stories. The controversy composed 8 percent of the news hole the week of July 27.38
Yet another distraction for the president were protests organized by a loose-knit coalition of conservative voters and advocacy groups at meetings held by congressional Democrats and administration officials to discuss health care. The conservative groups, including FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, Right Principles, and Americans for Limited Government, harnessed social networking Web sites to organize and encourage their supporters to flood events and heckle and generally disrupt discussion.39
The eruption of anger at town hall meetings on health care became a cause célèbre on television. The louder the voices and the fiercer the confrontation, the more coverage the controversy received, obscuring the substantive arguments in favor of what producers love most: conflict. As Fox News broke away from the president’s town meeting in New Hampshire, for example, anchor Trace Gallagher promised his audience, “Any contentious questions, anybody yelling, we’ll bring it to you.”40 When those who became known as the Tea Partyers marched on Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington three days after the president’s address on health care reform to a joint session of Congress on September 9, 2009, they displaced the image of Obama addressing Congress with one of marchers, placards, and populist rage.
Interestingly, anger about the legislative proposals under consideration was not especially widespread. Only 18 percent of the public reported they would be “angry” if health care legislation proposed by the president and Congress was to pass; only half as many (9 percent) said they would be angry if it did not pass. Conservative Republicans were paying more attention than those with other ideological or partisan leanings, and they had the most intense reactions. Thirty-eight percent said they would be “angry” if Congress enacted the Democrats’ reform proposals, while just 13 percent of Democrats said they would be angry if the legislation did not become law. While 19 percent of Independents said they would be angry if the health care bills passed, just 8 percent said they would be angry if the bills did not pass.41
The White House recognized its problems with distractions. In February 2010, aides said the administration was returning to the message discipline that marked the 2008 campaign. It had to filter out unhelpful topics in favor of those that advanced the president’s goals. For example, the plan was for a tighter focus on Obama’s commitment to the economy and jobs for average Americans.42 The administration created a “White House to Main Street” tour, giving Obama a forum to see and feel America’s pain, and offer his plan for relief. Yet because the president refused to give up on health care, a policy not popular with voters, it kept dominating the news and undermining his broader public relations strategy.43
On August 13, 2010, the president entered the fray over the issue of a mosque being built in the vicinity of Ground Zero in New York City, which should have been a local issue. In remarks at a White House Iftar dinner (marking the beginning of the Moslem holy month of Ramadan Kareem), Obama made a strong statement about religious freedom. The next day he appeared to backtrack on the issue, saying he was not advocating a location for the mosque. The day after that, he reaffirmed his original point. These statements were grist for the talk show and cable television mill. Republicans seized upon the issue of the unpopular mosque, increasing the prominence of the president’s words. Many Democrats openly wondered why the White House was wasting news cycles on unimportant skirmishes when it should have been focusing on the economy and jobs in the run-up to midterm elections.
The White House did know how to minimize the president’s media exposure when the topic was one he would rather avoid or that would distract from his media strategy. When Obama lifted travel, gift, and telecommunication restrictions on Cuba on April 13, 2009, the White House deftly limited the visibility of the announcement by leaving the president in the Oval Office and having a mid-level official from the National Security Council make the announcement in the briefing room—in Spanish.
In his first week in office, the president was promoting his economic stimulus package. The White House wanted to discourage coverage of a divisive issue, which ran counter to the week’s message of bipartisanship. Thus, on Friday afternoon, Obama quietly signed an order repealing restrictions on federal money for international organizations that encourage or provide abortions overseas. He acted a day after the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion, rather than on the day, which would have attracted considerable attention. He held the signing away from reporters and cameras, issued his comments only in writing, and released the order after 7 p.m. Friday.44 His strategy worked, as the order received little attention.
Another aspect of focus is consistency in message. “Campaign speech is all part of one narrative, but now you are making a series of arguments,” said Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes. “An argument is a lot clearer to a listener if there is a structure that they can follow. Structure is what allows you to build a case.”45
When the president nominated Sonia Sotomayor to a position on the Supreme Court, the White House sent word to its allies that the last thing the administration needed was a war with conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich over whether the judge was a racist. Stay on message, the president’s aides counseled, and they would offer a clear case about her credentials and legal experience.46
The administration found it difficult to project a consistent message on health care reform. Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, argued, “you can draw a straight line substantively and rhetorically” through all of Obama’s major speeches on health care. Nevertheless, he added, because of the complexity of the issue, “there have been a number of fronts” in the message war that have required the administration’s engagement.47
The White House sought to sell health care reform as a way to make coverage affordable and accessible to middle-class families. Yet at various times it also presented reform as a cost-containment measure, a restraint on greedy insurance companies, a moral imperative to cover the uninsured, a cornerstone of economic recovery, and, to Democratic lawmakers, an enterprise at which the party could not afford to fail. The president and his aides sent mixed signals on the “public option” as well, voicing support for a government-run plan while signaling their willingness to see it die to get a bill passed. The president also abandoned his opposition to a requirement that everyone have insurance, known as an individual mandate, and signaled a willingness to consider financing schemes, including tax increases, that originally were not on his agenda. Moreover, perhaps to lower expectations, administration officials began speaking of putting the nation on a “glide path” to universal coverage rather than the insurance-for-all trumpeted by many Democrats.48
It is also difficult to coordinate supporters around a message.49 A campaign team has near-total control over its message. A White House does not. “When it’s either legislative strategy or regulatory strategy, you have to cede a considerable amount of control to people who don’t share your interest, even if they’re in your party,” said Dan Bartlett, communications director in George W. Bush’s White House.50
Through most of the summer, opposition to the president’s health care initiative came almost entirely from the right. By mid-August, however, there was a growing concern among Obama’s progressive allies that he was prepared to deal away the public insurance option to win passage of a health care bill. Obama insisted that he still preferred the public option as part of any legislative package, but many on the left doubted his resolve. Liberal commentators, progressive bloggers, and grassroots activists raised their concerns about Obama’s health care policy and the deals he appeared to be striking with the health care industry—as well as on his increased troop commitment in Afghanistan and his stances on detainees and torture policy. The president’s advisors acknowledged that they were unprepared for this intraparty rift. Rather than selling middle-class voters on how insurance reforms would benefit the public, the White House instead found itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.51
There is little the White House can do to limit the overall volume of messages that citizens encounter or to make the public more attentive to politics, and it has limited success in influencing the media’s agenda. Yet it still must try to reach the public with its message and break through the public’s disinterest in politics and the countless distractions from it.
It is likely that reaching the public will require frequent repetition of the president’s views. According to George W. Bush, “In my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”52 Given the protracted nature of the legislative process, and the president’s need for public support at all stages of it, sustaining a message can be equally important as sending it in the first place. As former White House public relations counselor David Gergen put it, “History teaches that almost nothing a leader says is heard if spoken only once.” Administrations attempt to establish a “line of the day” so that many voices echo the same point.53
The lack of interest in politics of most Americans, as evidenced by the low turnouts in elections, compounds the challenge of reaching the public. Policymaking is a complex enterprise, and most voters do not have the time, expertise, or inclination to think extensively about most issues. In fact, people generally have only a few issues that are particularly important to them and to which they pay attention.54 The importance of specific issues to the public varies over time and is closely tied to objective conditions such as unemployment, inflation, international tensions, and racial conflict. In addition, different issues are likely to be salient to different groups in the population at any given time. For example, some groups may be concerned about inflation, others about unemployment, and yet others about a particular aspect of foreign policy or race relations.55
A hallmark of the contemporary presidency is the White House’s failure to draw impressive audiences for nationally televised speeches. Although wide viewership was common during the early decades of television, when presidential speeches routinely attracted more than 80 percent of those watching television, recent presidents have seen their audiences decline to the point where less than half of the public—often substantially less—watch their televised addresses.56 Paradoxically, developments in technology have allowed the president to reach mass audiences, yet further developments have made it easier to for these same audiences to avoid listening to the White House. Cable television57 and news networks provide alternatives that make it easy to tune out the president. The average home received 118 channels in 2009.58
TABLE 2.1.
Audiences for Obama Nationally Televised Speeches and Press Conferences
Table 2.1 shows the audiences for President Obama’s nationally televised prime-time formal events. Although many people did choose to watch the president speak, the great majority of people did not—even for major addresses. Moreover, as the novelty of the new president wore off, the audiences for his prime-time televised addresses (except for his State of the Union messages) and press conferences steadily declined.
Less formal events drew smaller audiences. His March 19, 2009, appearance on the Tonight Show drew 12.8 watchers; and an interview on 60 Minutes drew 16.2 million viewers.59 These were good ratings for the programs, but reached a small fraction of the public. By June 24, 2009, ABC’s Primetime special featuring a town hall discussion about health care with the president attracted just 4.7 million viewers.60 A presidential appearance on the daytime talk show, The View, in July 2010, drew 6.6 million viewers.61 Nevertheless, the president felt he had to exploit a range of venues to reach the public. As he put it in an interview on 60 Minutes, “it used to be a President could call a press conference, and the three major networks would come, and he’d talk to ‘em, and you pretty much reached everybody in America. . . . But there are a whole bunch of folks . . . who watch The Daily Show, or watch The View. And so I’ve got to adapt the presidency to reach as many people as possible in as many settings as possible so that they can hear directly from me.”62
Commentary cascades from the White House. One official estimated that the White House produces as many as five million words a year in the president’s name in outlets such as speeches, written statements, and proclamations.63 Wide audiences hear only a small proportion of the president’s statements, however. Comments about policy proposals at news conferences and question and answer sessions and in most interviews are also usually brief and made in the context of a discussion of many other policies. Written statements and remarks to individual groups may be focused, but the audience for these communications is modest. In addition, as David Gergen puts it, nearly all of the president’s statements “wash over the public. They are dull, gray prose, eminently forgettable.”64
The public can miss the point of even the most colorful rhetoric. In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama declared that as part of their economic recovery, his administration had passed twenty-five different tax cuts. “Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes,” he said. “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.” In his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Katie Couric, he touted the tax cuts in the stimulus package: “we put $300 billion worth of tax cuts into people’s pockets so that there was demand and businesses had customers.” (The only tax increases passed in 2009 were on tobacco.)
Shortly afterward, a major polling organization asked, “In general, do you think the Obama Administration has increased taxes for most Americans, decreased taxes for most Americans or have they kept taxes the same for most Americans?” Twenty-four percent of the public responded that the administration had increased taxes, and 53 percent said it kept taxes the same. Only 12 percent said taxes were decreased.65 In July, that figure dwindled to 7 percent of the public.66 Misperceptions only grew as the midterm elections approached. In September, 33 percent of the public thought that Obama had raised taxes for most Americans.67 By the end of October, 52 percent of likely voters thought taxes had gone up for the middle class.68
On the other hand, only 34 percent of the public knew the unpopular bailout of banking and financial institutions (known as TARP) was passed under George W. Bush. Nearly half (47 percent) thought it passed during Obama’s presidency.69 Even though the White House announced in October 2010 that the federal government would actually turn a profit on these funds, 60 percent of likely voters at the end of the month thought most of the money was lost. Despite the fact that the economy had been growing for over a year, 61 percent thought it had been shrinking.70
David Axelrod lamented, “For me, the question is, why haven’t we broken through more than we have? Why haven’t we broken through?”71 But the problems continued. Perceptions of the president’s religion were closely linked to his job approval, and those who did not know Obama was a Christian were highly unlikely to approve of his job performance. In August 2010, 18 percent of the public thought the president was a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009. Another 43 percent did not know Obama’s religion (an increase from 32 percent in March 2009). Only 34 percent of the public knew he was a Christian, down from 48 percent in March 2009.72
It is important not only to reach the public, but also to reach it in a timely fashion. As Anita Dunn, the first director of communications in the Obama White House, put it, once a story gains traction, the administration needs to respond quickly or “rumors become facts.”
In the summer of 2009, Betsey McCaughey voiced the false claim that the health care legislation in Congress would result in seniors being directed to “end their life sooner.”73 Numerous conservative pundits and Republican members of Congress quickly parroted her claim, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Fred Thompson, Laura Ingraham, the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, and Fox News. The myth reached its peak after Sarah Palin embellished it on her Facebook posting on August 7, 2009, denouncing government “death panels.” Palin’s comments created a media frenzy. In the ten days after her initial statement, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz counted 18 mentions of “death panels” in the Post, 16 in the New York Times, and more than 154 on network and cable news shows.74
The White House did not respond to Palin until four days after her Facebook posting, when Obama addressed the issue in a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. At the same time, the White House established a “Reality Check” blog on which officials challenged assertions they considered to be false. One prominent media observer termed this a “tepid” means of responding.75
In the meantime, the false charge of the fictitious death panels had gained traction in the conservative media and received widespread attention. By mid-August, fully 86 percent of the public reported hearing either a lot (41 percent) or a little (45 percent) about “death panels.” Among those who had heard about death panels, 50 percent said correctly that the claim was not true, but a sizable minority (30 percent) believed that health care legislation would create such organizations (20 said they did not know). Nearly half of Republicans (47 percent) were misinformed, as were 45 percent of those who reported regularly receiving their news from Fox News.76 Another mid-August poll found that 45 percent of those surveyed believed the Democrats’ bill would “allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly,” a figure that rose to 75 percent among Fox News viewers.77
A good example of the problems of reaching the public is health care reform, the president’s highest legislative priority in his first year in office. The White House was aggressive in its public advocacy of reform. The president alone made fifty-two public addresses or statements specifically on his health care proposals during his first year in office.78
SUMMER AWAKENING Mindful of the failures of former President Bill Clinton, who produced an extraordinarily specific plan for health care in 1993, Obama insisted he would leave the details of health care reform to Congress. He set forth broad principles and concentrated on bringing disparate factions—doctors, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, labor unions—to the negotiating table. By June, however, the president grew concerned that he was losing the debate over certain policy prescriptions he favored, like a government-run insurance plan to compete with the private sector. With Congress beginning serious work on the measure, the president concluded that he had to exert greater control over the health care debate.79
Worried about the lack of public support for health care reform, the White House arranged with ABC News for a prime-time program on June 24, 2009, Questions for the President: Prescription for America (with a follow-up session on Nightline) that allowed the president to explain his health care proposal to the public yet again. Only 4.7 million viewers tuned in, however, nearly 3 million fewer than a competing repeat of CBS’s crime series, CSI: New York.80 On July 1, Obama held a town hall–style meeting on health care in Virginia—his second town hall meeting in two weeks.
Yet the polls kept getting worse for the administration. With skepticism about the president’s health care reform effort mounting on Capitol Hill—even within his own party—the White House moved its public relations effort into high gear in late July. In the words of the Washington Post, it was “all Obama, all the time.” Senior White House aides promised an aggressive public and private schedule for Obama as he pressed his case for reform. “Our strategy has been to allow this process to advance to the point where it made sense for the president to take the baton. Now’s that time,” said senior advisor David Axelrod on July 19, “he’s going to be very, very visible.”81
TABLE 2.2.
Going Public on Health Care: Mid-Summer 2009
We can see in table 2.2 what Axelrod meant. The president traveled, made public statements, gave interviews, held town meetings and a prime-time press conference, delivered a radio address, and released statements and reports on health care. In addition, the White House made heavy use of Internet video to broadcast the president’s message beyond the reach of the traditional media. For example, the administration sponsored a live video chat with Nancy-Ann DeParle, Obama’s health policy czar, on Facebook and on the Web site, WhiteHouse.gov. Meanwhile, Organizing for America, the group run by the Democratic National Committee to rally support for Obama’s agenda, declared this week “Health Care Reform Week of Action” and asked millions of supporters to sign up for events in their neighborhoods.
AUGUST RECALIBRATION Nothing seemed to work, however. Democratic Party officials acknowledged that the growing intensity of the opposition to the president’s health care plans had caught them off guard and forced them to begin an August counteroffensive.82 The president and his proxies launched a blitz of town hall meetings, grassroots lobbying, and television advertising designed to rally public support for quick votes on health plans in the House and Senate following the August congressional recess. The president held town hall meetings in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bozeman, Montana, and Grand Junction, Colorado, and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times.
One aspect of the new strategy was geared toward reenergizing Web-savvy allies who backed Obama in the election. The president appeared in a six-minute video on the WhiteHouse.gov Web site, recounting some of the personal stories of average Americans. On August 20, he held a conference call with grassroots supporters hosted by Organizing for America during which an estimated 280,000 people dialed in.83
The effort by the president to create new momentum came as the Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America encouraged volunteers to fan out across the country to sway reluctant lawmakers to support the proposals moving through Congress. They also enlisted supporters to attend public events with members of Congress to counterbalance the sometimes angry outbursts from opponents.84
Reprising a strategy from the campaign, the White House began responding to attacks in the same medium in real time. Thus, on August 4, the White House reacted quickly with its own three-minute video in response to a Web video that officials said misrepresented the president’s health care plan. The administration’s video did not only appear on the White House Web site (http.whitehouse.gov) but was also promoted on Facebook and Twitter and sent to those on the e-mail list on www.healthreform.gov.
As part of the White House’s rapid-response effort, on August 4, it launched an e-mail tip line where people could report “disinformation about health insurance reform.” The effort quickly sparked concern among Republicans about the government collecting information on private citizens’ political speech, however, and the administration shut it down after two weeks.
On August 10, the White House also launched a new online “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check” on its Web site, featuring administration officials rebutting questionable but potentially damaging charges that President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health care system would inevitably lead to “socialized medicine,” “rationed care,” and even forced euthanasia for the elderly.
As members of Congress left for their August recess, advertisements followed them. Groups saturated the airwaves with tens of millions of dollars in advertisements for and against health care reform. Much of the advertising was focused on wavering members of Congress and members from electorally competitive districts and states. Tellingly, the Campaign Media Analysis Group estimated that most of the advertising by early August had broadly favored overhauling the health care system.85 Nevertheless, the public had become less supportive.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America joined the nonprofit group Families USA to air an updated version of the iconic “Harry and Louise” ads, but this time the couple called for passage of reform. Conservative groups like the Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, and, especially, the Republican National Committee ran ads against reform, while Americans United for Change, organized labor, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (which represents health care workers), MoveOn.org, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Organizing for America, the powerful seniors lobby AARP, the American Nurses Association, and the American Medical Association sponsored advertisements in favor of reform.
By mid-August, health care reform was receiving the most attention in the news and was the story the public was following the most closely. This was not always an advantage for the president, however. Democrats had not anticipated Republicans and their allies hurling incendiary accusations that the Obama plan would empower “death panels,” help illegal immigrants, and raid Medicare.
SEPTEMBER OFFENSIVE Following the Labor Day holiday, Obama renewed his public relations offensive. Given the high stakes of passing health care reform and the downturn in public opinion about it, the president turned to what many considered the most powerful weapon in his arsenal—a nationally televised evening address before a joint session of Congress. As we have seen, Obama’s speech was unusual. Presidents rarely focus such a nationally televised address on an issue before Congress.86
Obama had to reassure progressive activists that he had not lost his passion for reform, so his speech contained tough talk and denunciations of false or misleading claims that opponents had made about the legislation in Congress. The president knew, of course, that there was little possibility of moving Republicans from opposition to support. He had to reach the center of the electorate. It was this segment of the public that had become worried about the scope and nature of the president’s proposal. Thus, much of his rhetoric provided reassurance and reflected an orientation toward compromise and bipartisanship.
TABLE 2.3.
Going Public on Health Care: Mid-September 2009
Obama’s audience was 32.1 million people, a large number to be sure, but only a small portion of the public and down from about 52 million for his February address to a joint session of Congress.87 The Fox broadcast network chose not to televise the president’s speech (although the Fox News channel did).
Obama followed up his speech with a series of speeches, interviews, and television appearances over the next two weeks, culminating in an unprecedented set of appearances on five Sunday interview shows on the same day (see table 2.3).
The president was so active in advocating health care reform in September that some commentators suggested he was in danger of overexposure. The White House disagreed. “The idea of overexposure is based on an old-world view of the media,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House’s deputy communications director. Because the media are now so fragmented, “you would have to do all the Sunday shows, a lot of network news shows and late-night shows” to reach the number of viewers a president could address with one network interview twenty years ago.88 According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of September 17–20, 54 percent of the public said they were seeing and hearing Obama the right amount and only 34 percent (mostly Republicans) said they were seeing and hearing him too much. A majority of Independents, 52 percent, said Obama had the right amount of exposure.
TABLE 2.4.
Evaluations of Impact of Health Care Reform
By mid-October, the president lowered his profile on health care. The White House plan was for Obama to take a breather while Democrats resolved their internal conflicts. Then he was to come back strong with a fresh sales pitch when the legislation moved closer to floor votes.89
CONTINUED SLIPPAGE The trends in evaluation of the overall effects of health care reform continued to worsen. Table 2.4 shows that the percentage of the public concluding that health care reform would make them and their families as well as the country as a whole worse off moved against the president. In the months leading up to the final votes on the health care reform in 2010, only about one-third of the people felt reform would benefit themselves and their families.90 This low level of support added to the burdens of passing non-incremental change.
Perhaps most frustrating to the White House was the inability to clarify mistaken notions about its proposal that were damaging its case. In mid-September, 26 percent of respondents still believed that health care legislation would create organizations to decide when to stop providing medical care to the elderly—the so-called death panels—despite an all-out effort by Obama to debunk the false claim. Similarly, 30 percent said the bill would use taxpayer money to provide health care benefits to illegal immigrants despite the president specifically affirming that it would not.91
The president just could not break through. In early September, 67 percent of the respondents to a national poll said the issue was difficult to understand.92 At the end of an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week on September 20, 2009, the president reflected on his leadership of the public regarding health care.
There have been times where I have said I’ve got to step up my game in terms of talking to the American people about issues like health care. . . . I’ve said to myself, somehow I’m not breaking through. . . . this has been a sufficiently tough, complicated issue with so many moving parts that . . . no matter how much I’ve . . . tried to keep it digestible, . . . it’s very hard for people to get their . . . whole arms around it. And that’s been a case where I have been humbled.93
(In July 2010, 41 percent of the public still believed the law allowed a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare and an additional 16 percent said they did not know.)94
In January 2010, as the debate on health care reform was reaching its final stages, large segments of the public still were unaware of major elements of the Democratic proposal (see table 2.5).95 In addition, only 59 percent of the public understood that most people could keep their employer-provided insurance if health care reform passed.96 Small businesses did not know about subsidies for them, seniors did not know the bill closed the “donut hole” on prescription drugs, and young adults did not know they could stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they were twenty-six.97 Unaware of the benefits of health care reform and concerned about losing the benefits they already had, it is little wonder that many in the public opposed the president.
More than a year after the bill passed, the Kaiser Foundation found in June 2011 that most Americans were unaware that the health care reform law would close the Medicare “doughnut hole” on prescription drugs, eliminate co-pays and deductibles for many preventative services under Medicare, and develop ways to improve health care delivery. On the other hand, 31 percent of the public incorrectly believed the law allowed a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare—and another 20 percent were unsure. Forty-eight percent incorrectly felt the law would cut benefits that were previously provided to all people on Medicare, and another 17 percent were uncertain.98
TABLE 2.5.
Awareness of Health Care Proposals
Although technological change has made it more difficult for the president to attract an audience on television, other changes may have increased the White House’s prospects of reaching the public. Teddy Roosevelt gave prominence to the bully pulpit by exploiting the hunger of modern newspapers for national news. Franklin D. Roosevelt broadened the reach and immediacy of presidential communications with his use of radio. More recently, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan mastered the use of television to speak directly to the American people. Now Barack Obama has positioned himself as the first Internet president.
On November 18, 2008, about 10 million of Barack Obama’s supporters found an e-mail message from his campaign manager, David Plouffe. Labeled “Where we go from here,” Plouffe asked backers to “help shape the future of this movement” by answering an online survey, which in turn asked them to rank four priorities in order of importance. First on the list was “Helping Barack’s administration pass legislation through grassroots efforts.”99
Plouffe’s e-mail message revealed much about Barack Obama’s initial approach to governing. The new administration was oriented to exploiting advances in technology to communicate more effectively than ever with the public. Bush State Department spokesman Sean McCormack started filing posts from far-flung regions during trips with his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. On October 31, 2008, McCormack unveiled “Briefing 2.0” in the press briefing room of the State Department in which he took questions from the public rather than the press and then put the session on YouTube.100
In 2009, the new occupants of the White House were oriented to exploiting the emerging technology more systematically than their predecessors. Obama announced his intent to seek the presidency via Web video, revealed his vice presidential selection via text message, recruited about 13 million online supporters during the campaign, and used the electronic medium to sidestep mainstream media and speak directly with voters throughout the primaries and general-election campaign. This practice forged a firsthand connection and may have encouraged some supporters to feel they had a greater stake in the campaign’s success. Some Obama videos have become YouTube phenomena: millions of people have viewed his speech on the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and race in America and his victory speech in Grant Park on November 4, 2008.
“It’s really about reaching an extra person or a larger audience of people who wouldn’t normally pay attention to policy,” said Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for Obama’s transition team. “We have to think creatively about how we would do that in the White House, because promoting a speech in front of 100,000 people is certainly different than promoting energy legislation.”101
Even before taking office, the president-elect began making Saturday radio addresses—but with a twist. In addition to beaming his addresses to radio stations nationwide, he recorded them for digital video and audio downloads from YouTube, iTunes, and the like. As a result, people could access it whenever and wherever they wanted. “Turning the weekly radio address from audio to video and making it on-demand has turned the radio address from a blip on the radar to something that can be a major newsmaking event any Saturday we choose,” declared Dan Pfeiffer, the incoming White House deputy communications director. Videos are also easy to produce: a videographer can record Obama delivering the address in fewer than fifteen minutes.102 After his inauguration, the White House put the president’s Saturday videos on both the White House Web site and a White House channel on YouTube. However, between May 2009 and November 2010, no video had more than 100,000 views and most had close to 20,000.103
The Obama White House produces and distributes much more video than any past administration. To do so, it maintains a staff devoted to producing online videos for whitehouse.gov, Obama’s YouTube channel, and other video depots. A search for “Barack Obama” is stacked with videos approved and uploaded by the campaign or the administration (which viewers may not realize). When filming a presidential speech, the production team tailors the video to the site, with titles, omissions, crowd cutaways, highlight footage, and a dozen other manipulations of sound and image that affect the impression they make, including applause that is difficult to edit out.104 The president’s YouTube channel had more than 650 video uploads in its first year. The administration also holds regular question-and-answer Webcasts with policy officials on WhiteHouse.gov.105
In addition, the administration introduced West Wing Week, a video blog consisting of six- to seven-minute compilations that appear each week on the White House’s Web site and on such video-sharing sites as YouTube. They offer what a narrator on each segment calls “your guide to everything that’s happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
The Obama White House wants to flood niche media markets via blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and Flicker photo streams.106 To exploit more fully developments in communications technology, the White House established an Office of New Media. It regularly alerts its 1.7 million Twitter followers of the president’s policy stances.107 When he nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Obama sent a video appealing for support for his candidate to the huge e-mail list accumulated during his campaign and the Democratic Party’s own lists. The e-mail message included a directive from the president to share his views via Facebook, Twitter, and other Web connections.108
Politico.com is the most prominent face of the new media at the White House. It is a bulletin board of the stories on which the media is focused and what is happening in Washington on a given day. The White House starts communicating with Mike Allen, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, at 5 a.m. to try to influence what others will view as important. It also uses Politico as a forum to rebut directly its adversaries in front of the rest of the news media.109
The Internet, which emerged in 2008 as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news. More people now say they rely mostly on the Internet for news rather than newspapers.110 Young people are even more likely to report that they rely on the Internet as a main source of national and international news. Overall, 61 percent of Americans now use the Internet as a daily news source.111
Obama made the case for his economic agenda in a variety of forums, including the Tonight Show, 60 Minutes, and a prime-time news conference. On March 26, 2009, he added a new arrow to his quiver. The president held an “Open for Questions” town hall meeting in the East Room of the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush answered questions over the Internet, but Obama was the first to do so in a live video format, streamed directly onto the White House Web site.
For more than an hour, the president answered questions culled from 104,000 sent over the Internet. Online voters cast more than 3.5 million votes for their favorite questions, some of which were then posed to the president by an economic advisor who served as a moderator. The president took other queries from a live audience of about 100 nurses, teachers, businesspeople, and others assembled at the White House.
The questions covered topics such as health care, education, the economy, the auto industry, and housing. In most cases, Obama used his answers to advocate his policies. Although the questions from the audience in the East Room were mostly from campaign backers, the White House was not in complete control of the session. One of the questions that drew the most votes online was whether legalizing marijuana might stimulate the economy by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug. (The White House listed the question on its Web site under the topics “green jobs and energy” and “budget.” White House officials later indicated that interest groups drove up those numbers.)112
On February 1, 2010, the president sat for a first-of-its-kind group interview with YouTube viewers, who submitted thousands of questions and heard the president answer some in a live Webcast. YouTube viewers voted for their favorite questions, and Steve Grove, the head of news and politics at YouTube, selected the ones to ask in the half-hour session.
In April 2011, Obama sat down with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and answered questions from Zuckerberg and Facebook users. The president next turned to Twitter. On July 6, 2011, he held the first Twitter town hall meeting, live from the East Room of the White House. The hour-long session involved the president answering questions submitted by Twitter users and selected in part by 10 Twitter users around the country picked by Twitter. Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, moderated the session.
When the Obama White House texts its supporters, it is preaching to the choir. There is nothing wrong with that. Perhaps the first rule in the politics of coalition building is solidifying the base. Yet, the base can only take you so far. Obama received about 53 percent of the national vote, and some of that support was certainly a negative response to George W. Bush in general and bad economic times in particular. It would be an exaggeration to conclude that Obama’s base includes even half the public. Moreover, once Obama took office, Bush was gone and the public began reacting to the new president.
Moreover, widespread home broadband and mobile access to the Internet has created the potential for people to communicate easily with each other as well as to receive communications from leaders. Conservatives can exploit this technology to reinforce their opposition to the new administration. Equally important, however, is the potential for liberals to use the new technologies to oppose the president’s evident pragmatism and tendencies toward moderation.
Communications technology users glory in the freedom to dissent that is at the heart of blogging. Even during the transition, there were hints of conflict within the base. Candidate Obama allowed his supporters to wage an online revolt—on his own MyBarackObama.com Web site—over his vote in favor of legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications firms that participated in the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping program. President-elect Obama, however, did not provide a forum for comments on his YouTube radio address, prompting grumbling among some in the netroots crowd that YouTube without comments was no different from radio.113
Internet users are creative, however. The day after Obama announced that the Rev. Rick Warren would deliver the opening prayer at his inauguration, a discussion forum focused on community service instead filled with pages of comments from people opposing the choice. In early January, visitors to Change.gov, the transition Web site, voted a question about whether Obama would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate possible Bush administration war crimes to the top of the questions submitted to the new administration. Progressive Web sites blasted the new administration’s efforts to dodge the issue. Within a day, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann picked up the story. A day later, Obama was compelled to answer the question in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who quoted it and pressed Obama with two follow-ups. Obama’s answer, which prioritized moving “forward” but did not rule out a special prosecutor, made the front page of the January 12 issue of the New York Times.
Dissent among liberals did not end with the transition. For example, Move On.org, one of Obama’s staunchest supporters during the 2008 campaign, called on its members in April 2010 to telephone the White House and demand that Obama reinstate the ban on offshore oil drilling that he had ended.114
Reaching people is useful for political leaders, but mobilizing them is better. Plouffe’s emphasis on helping the Obama administration pass legislation through grassroots efforts indicates a desire to use public backing to move Congress to support the president’s program. According to Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a nonpartisan Web site focused on the intersection of politics and technology, Obama “created his own special interest group because the same people that made phone calls on behalf of him [in the campaign] are now going to be calling or e-mailing their congressman.”115 A Pew study during the transition found that among those who voted for Obama, 62 percent expected to ask others to support at least some of the new administration’s policies.116
Plouffe did not take a formal role in the White House until 2011. He did, however, remain as an advisor and began overseeing the president’s sprawling grass-roots political operation, which at the time boasted 13 million e-mail addresses, 4 million cell phone contacts, and 2 million active volunteers.117 More than 500,000 people completed surveys following the election to express their vision for the administration, and more than 4,200 hosted house parties in their communities. On January 17, 2009, Obama sent a YouTube video to supporters to announce plans to establish Organizing for America (OFA), which was to enlist community organizers around the country to support local candidates, lobby for the president’s agenda, and remain connected with his supporters from the campaign. There was speculation that the organization could have an annual budget of $75 million in privately raised funds and deploy hundreds of paid staff members. It was to operate from the Democratic National Committee headquarters but with an independent structure, budget, and priorities.118 (By 2010, OFA had virtually supplanted the party structure. It sent about 300 paid organizers to the states, several times the number the national party hired for the 2006 midterms.)119
During the transition, the Obama team drew on high-tech organizational tools to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the U.S. health care system. On December 3, 2008, former Democratic Senate majority leader Thomas Daschle, Obama’s designee as secretary of Health and Human Resources and point person on health care, launched an effort to create political momentum when he held a conference call with one thousand invited supporters who had expressed interest in health issues, promising it would be the first of many opportunities for Americans to weigh in. In addition, there were online videos, blogs, and e-mail alerts as well as traditional public forums. Thousands of people posted comments on health on Change.gov, the Obama transition Web site, which encouraged bloggers to share their concerns and offer their solutions regarding health care policy.120
According to Rasiej, “It will be a lot easier to get the American public to adopt any new health-care system if they were a part of the process of crafting it.” Simon Rosenberg, president of the center-left think tank NDN, was more expansive: “This is the beginning of the reinvention of what the presidency in the 21st century could be.” “This will reinvent the relationship of the president to the American people in a way we probably haven’t seen since FDR’s use of radio in the 1930s.”121
Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi took the argument a step further, observing, “Obama will be more directly connected to millions of Americans than any president who has come before him, and he will be able to communicate directly to people using the social networking and Web-based tools such as YouTube that his campaign mastered.” “Obama’s could become the most powerful presidency that we have ever seen,” he declared.122 Republican strategist and the head of White House political operations under Ronald Reagan, Ed Rollins, agreed. “No one’s ever had these kinds of resources. This would be the greatest political organization ever put together, if it works” (italics added).123
Whether it would work was indeed the question. To begin, Obama’s team found it difficult to adapt its technologically advanced presidential campaign to government. The official Web site, WhiteHouse.gov, was to be the primary vehicle for President Obama to communicate with the masses online. Yet the White House lacks the technology to send mass e-mail updates on presidential initiatives. The same is true for text messaging, another campaign staple. The White House must also navigate security and privacy rules regarding the collection of cell phone numbers.124 In addition, there are time-consuming legal strictures such as a requirement in the Presidential Records Act to archive Web pages whenever they are modified, in order to preserve administration communications. Moreover, the White House cannot engage in overt politicking or fundraising on a government Web site.
The Organizing for America team held several dry runs to test the efficacy of their volunteer apparatus, including a call for supporters to hold “economic recovery house meetings” in February to highlight challenges presented by the recession. The house parties were designed to coincide with the congressional debate over Obama’s stimulus package and had mixed results. Although OFA touted the 30,000 responses the e-mail drew from the volunteer community and the more than 3,000 house parties thrown in support of the stimulus package, a report in McClatchy Newspapers indicated that many events were sparsely attended.125
The first major engagement of OFA in the legislative process began on March 16, 2009. An e-mail message was sent to volunteers, asking them to go door to door on March 21 to urge their neighbors to sign a pledge in support of Obama’s budget plan. A follow-up message to the mailing list a few days later asked volunteers to call the Hill. A new online tool on the DNC/OFA Web site aided constituents in finding their congressional representatives’ contact information so they could call the lawmakers’ offices to voice approval of the proposal.
The OFA reported that its door-to-door canvass netted about 100,000 pledge signatures, while another 114,000 signatures came in through its e-mail network. Republicans scoffed at the effort, arguing that this proved that even the most die-hard Obama supporters were uncertain about the wisdom of the president’s budget plan. Several GOP aides noted that the number of pledges gathered online amounted to fewer than 1 percent of the names on Obama’s vaunted e-mail list. The Washington Post reported that interviews with congressional aides from both parties found the signatures swayed few, if any, members of Congress.126
By June, OFA was the Democratic National Committee’s largest department, with paid staff members in thirty-one states and control of the heavily trafficked campaign Web site. Public discourse on health care reform was focusing on the high costs and uncertain results of various proposals. Remembering the “Harry and Louise” television ads that served as the public face of the successful challenge to Bill Clinton’s health reform efforts, the White House knew it had to regain momentum. Thus, the president e-mailed millions of campaign supporters, asking for donations to help in the White House’s largest-ever issues campaign and for “a coast-to-coast operation ready to knock on doors, deploy volunteers, get out the facts,” and show Congress people wanted change. The DNC deployed dozens of staff members and hundreds of volunteers to thirty-one states to gather personal stories and build support.127
In late June, the DNC reported roughly 750,000 people had signed a pledge in support of the president’s core principles of reducing cost, ensuring quality, and providing choice, including a public insurance option; 500,000 volunteered to help; and several hundred thousand provided their own story for the campaign’s use. OFA posted thousands of personal stories online to humanize the debate and overcome criticism of the president’s plan. It also trained hundreds of summer volunteers and released its first Internet advertisement—a Virginia man explaining that he lost his insurance when he lost his job.128
As the health care debate intensified in August, the president again turned to the OFA for support. Obama sent an e-mail to OFA members: “This is the moment our movement was built for,” he wrote. He also spent an hour providing bullet points for the health care debate during an Internet video. OFA asked its volunteers to visit congressional offices and flood town hall meetings in a massive show of support.129 There is no evidence that this show of strength ever materialized.
By August, Organizing for America reported paid political directors in forty-four states. Nevertheless, it had to moderate its strategy. In response to Democrat complaints to the White House about television commercials on health care, climate change, and other issues broadcast in an effort to pressure moderates to support the president’s proposals, the group started running advertisements of appreciation. It also found that its events around the country were largely filled with party stalwarts rather than the army of volunteers mobilized by the 2008 campaign.130
Despite some success in generating letters, text messages, and phone calls on behalf of health care reform, OFA was not a prominent presence in 2009.131 In response to the lack of action, in 2010 organizers held hundreds of sessions across the nation intended to re-engage the base from 2008.132
In a video to members of OFA in April 2010, Obama delivered an appeal saying that the Democratic majority in Congress—and his agenda—depended on their roles in that year’s midterm elections. The recorded message was part of a new effort by the Democratic National Committee to impress upon Democrats—particularly those occasional voters who were likely to cast ballots only in presidential races—the importance of the midterm elections for the House and Senate.
At the end of 2010, OFA launched a public relations offensive to demonstrate support for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The group ran online advertisements and staged events in the home states of moderate Republican senators inclined to support the repeal bill. OFA volunteers delivered petitions with tens of thousands of signatures to wavering senators in an effort to build momentum for repeal—and to try to show them that they were safe politically if they voted to overturn the ban.133
Overall, however, OFA had to be a disappointment to the White House. In the midterm elections, OFA tried to rally its network of millions of Obama supporters to help Democratic candidates across the country, but the group was not very successful. Aside from a handful of victories, such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s reelection in Nevada, most OFA-backed candidates lost.134
The president also received help from an array of interest groups, such as Health Care for America Now, a progressive coalition that deployed 120 paid organizers to forty-three states, staged events, and launched ads in a number of states.135 Nevertheless, as we will see in the next chapter, public opinion did not move in the president’s direction.
Presidents make a substantial effort to frame issues in ways that will favor their preferred policy options and to place their own performance in a favorable light. A frame is a central organizing idea for making sense of an issue or conflict and suggests what the controversy is about and what is at stake.136 Structuring the choices about policy issues in ways that favor the president’s programs may set the terms of the debate on his proposals and thus the premises on which the public evaluates them. As one leading advisor to Reagan put it, “I’ve always believed that 80 percent of any legislative or political matter is how you frame the debate.”137
In most instances, the president does not have much impact on the values that people hold. Citizens develop these values over many years, starting in early childhood. By the time people focus on the president, their values are for the most part well established. However, people use cues from elites as to the ideological or partisan implications of messages138 (the source of a message is itself an important cue).139
Because individuals typically have at least two, and often more, relevant values for evaluating issue positions, and because they are unlikely to canvass all their values in their evaluations, the president cannot leave to chance the identification of which values are most relevant to the issues he raises. Instead, the White House seeks to influence the values citizens employ in their evaluations.
Portraying policies in terms of criteria on which there is a consensus and playing down divisive issues is often at the core of efforts to structure choices. By articulating widely held values and pointing out their applicability to policy issues, events, or his own performance, the president may increase the salience (and thus the accessibility) of those values to the public’s evaluations of them. In the process, the president attempts to show the public that his position is consistent with their values.140
Instead of trying to persuade the public directly on the merits of a proposal, then, the White House often uses public statements and the press coverage they generate to articulate relatively simple themes. Public opinion research may have identified these themes as favoring the president’s positions. For example, on the eve of the vote in the House on the climate change bill, President Obama shifted his argument for the bill to emphasize its potential economic benefits. “Make no mistake,” he declared, “this is a jobs bill.”141 Climate change is a controversial topic, but everyone is for jobs, especially in a period of high unemployment.
Framing demands less of the public than directly persuading citizens on the merits of a policy proposal. The president does not have to persuade people to change their basic values and preferences. He does not have to convince citizens to develop expertise and acquire and process extensive information about the details of a policy proposal. In addition, framing—because it is relatively simple—is less susceptible to distortion by journalists and opponents than direct persuasion on the merits of a policy proposal.142
Attempts to frame issues are as old as the Republic.143 Each side of a political contest usually attempts to frame the debate to its own advantage. Byron Shafer and William Claggett argue that public opinion is organized around two clusters of issues, both of which are favored by a majority of voters: social welfare, social insurance, and civil rights (associated with Democrats) and cultural values, civil liberties, and foreign relations (associated with Republicans). Each party’s best strategy is to frame the choice for voters by focusing attention on the party’s most successful cluster of issues.144 John Petrocik has found that candidates tend to campaign on issues that favor them in order to prime the salience of these issues in voters’ decision making.145 Similarly, an important aspect of campaigning is activating the latent predispositions of partisans by priming party identification as a crucial consideration in deciding for whom to vote.146
Structuring choice is rarely easy. There is competition to set the terms of debate over issues.147 We know very little about the terms in which the public thinks about policies. Studies that have shown powerful framing effects typically have carefully sequestered citizens and restricted them to hearing only one frame, usually in the context of a controlled experiment.148 These frames tend to be confined to brief fragments of arguments, pale imitations of frames that often occur in the real world. Studies have found that conversations that include conflicting perspectives,149 credible advice from other sources,150 predispositions,151 levels of education,152 and relevant expertise153 condition the impact of framing efforts.
Committed, well-organized, and well-funded opponents inhabit the president’s world. Intense disagreement among elites generates conflicting messages. John Zaller argues that attitudes on major issues change in response to changes in relation to the intensity of competing streams of political communication. When there is elite consensus, and thus only one set of cues offered to the public, opinion change may be substantial. However, when elite discourse is divided, people respond to the issue according to their predispositions, especially their core partisan and ideological views.154 Thus, when Paul Sniderman and Sean Theriault offered people competing frames, as in the real world, they adopted positions consistent with their preexisting values.155
Occasions in which elite commentary is one-sided are rare. Most issues that generate consensual elite discourse arise from external events such as surprise attacks on the United States—for example, the terrorist assaults on September 11, 2001—or its allies—for example, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Consensual issues also tend to be new, with few people having committed themselves to a view about them. In his examination of public opinion regarding the Gulf War, John Zaller argues that the president’s greatest chance of influencing public opinion is in a crisis (which attracts the public’s attention) in which elites articulate a unified message. At other times, most people are too inattentive or too committed to views to be strongly influenced by elite efforts at persuasion.156
In addition, for the president to frame issues for the public, people must perceive accurately the frame offered by the White House. There is reason to believe, however, that different people perceive the same message differently. The media is of little help, as it is unlikely to adopt uniformly or reliably the White House’s framing of issues. Moreover, with all his personal, ideological, and partisan baggage, no president can assume that all citizens hear the same thing when he speaks. Partisanship is especially likely to bias processing perceptions, interpretations, and responses to the political world.157
The new Obama administration was sensitive about the exact wording of its rhetoric. Even during the transition, congressional leaders and incoming officials actively tried to retire that term “stimulus” and use the more marketable “economic recovery program” as the descriptor for the multibillion-dollar economic initiative the president-elect was about to propose.158
Obama and his team also tried to scrub George W. Bush’s national security lexicon. Although they sent 50,000 more troops to Afghanistan, much as George W. Bush did to Iraq, it was not a “surge.” Although they still held people captured on the battlefield at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, they no longer termed them “enemy combatants.” Although they carried the fight to al Qaeda as their predecessors did, they were implementing “overseas contingency operations” instead of waging a “war on terror.” Terrorist attacks became “man-caused disasters.”159
In the battle over health care reform, the forces backing it had spent years polling and using focus groups to find the precise language that would win over voters. For example, when Obama told grassroots organizers in August 2009 that the mandatory purchase of health insurance would “be affordable, based on a sliding scale,” the phrasing precisely mirrored language that had been poll-tested and put before batteries of focus groups by Democratic consultants over the past few years.160
In a presentation to House Republicans on May 6, 2009, consultant Frank Luntz, an expert on the language of politics, advised calling the Democratic plan a big government takeover that would deny care, interfere with the “doctor-patient relationship,” cost too much, and restrict patients’ choices. The next week, senior White House advisor David Axelrod and deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina visited Senate Democrats and presented polling data on what Americans wanted from a health care plan; they also suggested emphasizing that the Democrats’ health care overhaul would bring down costs, give more people access to coverage, and allow people to keep their plan if they want.161
Congressional Democrats were so concerned about the public’s lack of receptivity to their proposals that their House and Senate leaders brought in Drew Westen, a psychologist and neuroscientist, to suggest the language they should use to sell their agenda. According to Westin, Democrats should not talk about “the environment,” “the unemployed,” or “the uninsured.” Instead, they should replace those phrases with ones that have more appeal to voters, such as “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” “people who’ve lost their jobs,” and “people who used to have insurance.” Westen argued that Democrats made a mistake by constantly try to sell policies to voters through reason and facts and ignoring research showing that people respond more to emotional appeals. “You speak to people’s core values and concerns,” he explained.162
Most presidents seek a strong, clear narrative to help them connect with the public and explain the essence of their administrations. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” is perhaps the best known modern example. Although Obama came to office as the embodiment of hope and change, disappointments in the performance of the economy and the president’s response to it, resistance to his major legislative proposals, and irritation at the continuity of some of his national security policies undermined the utility of that narrative.
Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, has an eclectic ideology. This complexity, along with his preference for complex explanations,163 complicated the president’s ability to articulate a clear, simple narrative to frame his presidency in his own terms. In his Inaugural Address, Obama introduced the phrase “new foundation” to encapsulate his ambitious program and then repeated it in a wide range of venues over the next few months.164 The phrase has not yet caught on in the press or the public. Thus, in early 2010, the White House decided it needed to reinvigorate Obama’s most successful message of the 2008 campaign: that he was an agent of change.165
The lack of a positive narrative, of course, invites opponents to craft a less flattering portrayal. In a question and answer session with the House Republicans in Baltimore on January 29, 2010, the president expressed his frustrations at the framing wars.
That’s why I say if we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can’t start off by figuring out A, who’s to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side? And unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now. And that’s how a lot of our discussion works. That’s how we start off—every time somebody speaks in Congress, the first thing they do, they stand up and all the talking points—I see Frank Luntz sitting in the front. He’s already polled it, and he said . . . I’ve done a focus group and the way we’re going to really box in Obama on this one or make Pelosi look bad on that one. . . . It’s all tactics. It’s not solving problems.
So the question is, at what point can we have a serious conversation about Medicare and its long-term liability, or a serious . . . conversation about Social Security, or a serious conversation about budget and debt in which we’re not simply trying to position ourselves politically? That’s what I’m committed to doing. We won’t agree all the time in getting it done, but I’m committed to doing it.166
In its first major proposal, the White House did not want to impose a bill on Republicans or to let them pick apart its own proposal. So it chose to let the House and Senate work their wills on the stimulus bill. One consequence of this strategy was a bill that Republicans and even some Democrats criticized for focusing too heavily on spending that would not provide an economic stimulus. Because the package was sold mostly as a short-term employment boost, the huge sums for long-term investments in health care, energy, education, and infrastructure were vulnerable to the charge that they did not immediately create many jobs.
Working with Congress behind closed doors to deal with the rising opposition, the president left a vacuum on 24-hour cable news that conservative critics eagerly exploited.167 “We are definitely losing the framing of what this thing is,” fretted one veteran Democratic operative.168 Nothing sells news like confrontation with the president.
Over the first two weeks of the Obama presidency, the media’s use of the unflattering term “pork” in association with the stimulus bill increased about 400 percent.169 The White House was losing control of the debate as the Republicans framed discourse on the bill in terms of wasteful spending. Indeed, by the end of the first week in February, 49 percent of the public reported that what it had been hearing about the stimulus plan was “mostly negative,” while only 29 percent replied that what they were hearing was “mostly positive.”170
In response to the unfavorable portrayal of his priority policy, the president launched a media blitz. As the centerpiece of his campaign to reframe the debate on the stimulus proposal on his terms, the president held his first prime-time press conference—in the grand setting of the White House East Room—on February 9, where he adopted a sharper tone in making his case for the bill. Earlier in the day, Obama traveled to one of the most economically distressed corners of the nation, Elkhart, Indiana. The next day, he traveled to Fort Myers, Florida, and then moved on to East Peoria, Illinois.
The stimulus was simply too big and too complex to frame easily. If the administration had split the legislation into several bills, including a big tax increase, infrastructure spending, education, scientific and medical investment, and a clean energy bill, the president would probably have found framing easier.171 The political necessity of bundling the components into one massive bill prohibited such an option, however.
On health care, Obama’s team won early, high marks for diverging from the Clinton approach by emphasizing the need to control costs and improve choices and coverage for those who were already insured instead of making the moral-duty argument about the need to cover the uninsured. He more often cited as potential beneficiaries the working and middle classes rather than the uninsured poor. Indeed, Obama never promised universal coverage except for children. Nevertheless, we have seen that many in the public were concerned about changes in the quality and cost of their health care.
Obama addressed the self-interest argument by emphasizing how rising health care costs affect people with insurance, not just the uninsured. Without an overhaul, he explained, health insurance premiums would eat up bigger chunks of middle-income paychecks and threaten even comfortable Americans with bankruptcy because of the uncovered costs of one major illness. When he spoke of covering the uninsured, Obama argued that doing so would also help the insured because hospitals, doctors, and insurers would no longer have to pass on unpaid expenses in higher premiums and prices to paying patients. Mindful that supporters would not agree on all details, Obama distilled his position to a frame involving three principles: reduce cost, ensure quality, and provide choice, including a public insurance option.172
Yet for all the president’s efforts, the bill’s sticker shock drew taxpayers’ attention to the main expense, which was covering the uninsured. Democrats’ plans would expand Medicaid for the poor and subsidize both low-income workers buying insurance and small businesses seeking coverage for employees. In addition, opponents aggressively portrayed his overhaul plan as a government takeover that could limit Americans’ ability to choose their doctors and course of treatment while also bankrupting the country.
In response, Obama started talking more about health insurance reform instead of health care reform, a change calculated to appeal to the satisfied majority. He spoke often to people’s personal stake in the health care system, assuring them that they would not have to switch doctors or plans if they liked what they had, that their costs would not increase, and bureaucrats would not be making health care decisions.
The president wanted the House and Senate to pass legislation before the August recess, but neither did so. Legislative wrangling, a well-coordinated Republican opposition, the sheer complexity of a policy dealing with a sector that consumes about 17 percent of the nation’s economy, and the public’s general concern that change would diminish the benefits most people were receiving took a toll on the president’s bold ambitions. The White House’s stress on abstract cost controls in order to address the cost of retooling the system also made it difficult to rally support. Obama initially seemed to conclude that because of the recession, he could sell health care reform as an economic fix.173 If so, he was wrong. In addition, the administration was pinning its hopes on bills working their way through Congress that had become the objects of bitter partisan rancor.
With Republicans ridiculing the administration’s effort, portraying it as big government meddling in personal health decisions and a risky experiment, the White House recalibrated its message. Although Obama’s central goals remained expanding coverage to the estimated 47 million Americans who lacked it and controlling the costs of health care, including Medicare and Medicaid, the White House began emphasizing consumer-friendly aspects of health care reform. Guided by polls,174 the administration framed the health care debate as a campaign against insurance companies—prohibiting practices that made buying coverage impossible or excessively expensive for many who are sick, older, or had a prior illness. Democrats, led by Obama, focused on communicating to people who had insurance that reform would bring a degree of security and stability that they lacked. The White House Web site listed eight “Health Insurance Consumer Protections” that would “bring you and your family peace of mind.” Democrats also zeroed in on the health insurance industry’s hefty profits.
In early February 2010, the White House got news from California on which the administration would seize. Anthem Blue Cross had notified policyholders that some would see an increase in premiums of up to 39 percent by March 1. The White House latched onto a story line that might sell their plan: why people with insurance should care about the health care bill and its cost controls.175
At about the same time, the president read a letter from Natoma Canfield aloud in a meeting with insurance executives. In seven poignant paragraphs, she wrote that sixteen years after being treated for cancer, she could no longer afford her health insurance and was terrified she would get sick and lose the house her parents built. Canfield’s story allowed Obama to personalize the debate, reminding Americans that it was not just about numbers, but lives. The White House shared her letter with the news media. Within an hour, camera crews were at Canfield’s door.176
Nevertheless, the challenge remained of on one hand stressing how people’s existing relationships with doctors and health plans would not change if they were satisfied with them, and at the same time emphasizing that it was necessary to change the system to stop the trajectory in health spending. The increasingly harsh rhetoric against the health insurance industry was a departure for the White House, which began its reform campaign by trying to win over constituency groups—doctors, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and insurers among them—to neutralize historically powerful opponents of change. Moreover, insurers said they favored reform, just not a government-run insurance plan to compete against the private sector. The tough talk risked sending them from the negotiating table.
After Republican Scott Brown handily defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, upending Obama’s plans for a health bill by stripping Democrats of their 60-vote super-majority, the White House began to chart a new course in its public posture. The White House interpreted the results as a sign that Americans were angry and frustrated over the economy.
The president himself, in an interview with ABC, described a feeling of “remoteness and detachment” that many Americans had toward policymakers in Washington. Furthermore, the president told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos,
If there’s one thing that I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense 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. And that I do think is a mistake of mine.177
Thus, Obama began what his aides termed a “White House to Main Street Tour.” This new public relations effort was designed to reframe the administration as one focused on the economy and reform of the financial services industry and thus to show that Obama was back in touch with ordinary Americans. The president traveled to the Cleveland suburb of Elyria to spread the message that his presidency was now all about jobs, jobs, jobs. He visited companies that made precision metal components, wind turbines, and sporting goods and then held a town hall meeting at Lorain Community College. Everywhere he promoted his economy recovery package.
At the White House and during his tour, the president struck a populist tone to combat perceptions of the administration as being too cozy with Wall Street. From this take, the enemy was big money, not big government. In announcing a plan to impose new restrictions on the nation’s biggest banks, he promised that if Wall Street wanted to fight back, “it’s a fight I’m ready to have.” “Never again, he declared, “will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is ‘too big to fail’.”178 The president also proposed a tax on about fifty of the nation’s biggest banks to recoup any losses from the bailout, and administration officials spread the word that Obama’s proposal to create an independent consumer protection agency was “non-negotiable.”
Health care reform was not to die, however, and after an intense effort on the part of the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (discussed in detail in chapter 5), it passed on a party line vote. Skepticism over the health care overhaul persisted, however, and the president and his allies began orchestrating an elaborate campaign to sell the public on the law. Convinced that his communications effort needed shoring up, Obama personally recruited Stephanie Cutter, an experienced Democratic communications strategist, to run the effort. The core goal was to reassure senior citizens, who were more likely to vote in the midterm elections and were the age cohort most skeptical of the bill.179
On June 8, the president traveled to Wheaton, Maryland, to conduct a nationally televised question-and-answer session with older citizens located in town hall meetings around the country to trumpet one of the law’s most popular features: $250 rebate checks to help Medicare beneficiaries pay for prescription drugs. The timing of this event was no accident—the first checks were mailed two days later.
Supportive private organizations, including an ambitious initiative by Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director, and Andrew Grossman, a top Democratic strategist, began orchestrating campaigns to echo the White House message. In addition, the AARP included an eight-page insert about the law in its newspaper, which reaches 40 million people. Health Care for America Now distributed leaflets at high school and college graduations, and Families USA put on “road shows” in cities around the country, where officials from the federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services conducted presentations on important features of the legislation.180
After health care reform passed, financial regulation became the president’s top legislative priority. Both parties jockeyed for position. Obama and his allies portrayed Republicans as handmaidens of Wall Street and themselves as defenders of average Americans. Republicans, on the other hand, accused Democrats of trying to strangle the market and institutionalize bailouts.
Despite the financial crisis, the president faced challenges in obtaining public support for a new regulatory regime. Americans did not readily translate their anxieties about the economy into concern for regulating big financial institutions.181 Gallup found that the public, and especially Republicans, were considerably more likely to support regulating “Wall Street banks” than “regulating large banks and major financial institutions.”182 As we have seen, the public was also concerned about expanding government.
Obama seemed to recognize this public relations challenge and focused on clarifying the connection between personal financial concerns and regulating Wall Street. In the culmination of a month-long acceleration of his involvement with financial reform, he spoke in New York City on April 22, 2010. The president carefully framed the issue as one in which improving the economy required “addressing some of the underlying problems that led to this turmoil and devastation in the first place.” Fixing these problems meant increased regulation of financial institutions because “What happens on Wall Street has real consequences across the country, across our economy.”183
The president played another populist card when he pointed out that the financial industry had deployed squadrons of lobbyists to try to stop the financial reform bill. “I am sure that some of these lobbyists work for some of you,” he told the Wall Street audience. “I want to urge you to join us, instead of fighting us.”
The next week, Obama embarked on a new phase of his “Wall Street to Main Street” tour. However, in the week of May 3–9, the Times Square bomb plot accounted for 25 percent of the news hole, while the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico filled another 20 percent. The economic crisis in general was only 13 percent, with a focus on the brief 1,000-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the fiscal crisis in Greece.184 Once again, the president encountered challenges to framing a key issue on his agenda.
One of the White House’s biggest challenges in the Internet age is dealing with incendiary criticism that spreads through the population at the speed of light. Sarah Palin’s claim on her Facebook page that the White House was trying to establish “death panels” for the elderly as part of health care reform, and assertions that the president was not born in the United States and thus not a legitimate president, received wide circulation. Worse, these vilifications found many ready to believe them, even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. The insulation of the right in the media echo chamber makes it difficult to reach those predisposed to oppose the president, and the speed of circulation of provocative charges makes it difficult to get ahead of a story.
When critics lashed out at Obama for speaking to public school students at the beginning of the 2009 school year, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his aides reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers, and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience. The controversy escalated, but by the time it was over, White House advisors thought they had emerged with the upper hand. The speech was the most-viewed live video on any government Web site in history, and they were pleased with the media coverage of the event.185
When Bloomberg News ran a headline suggesting that Obama was indifferent to the issue of bonuses for bankers, aides immediately posted a rebuttal on the White House blog. They e-mailed online news sites to change the headline and asked progressive bloggers to convey their interpretation of the president’s remarks.186
White House officials wanted to anticipate conservative attacks and be ready to respond the moment they threatened to balloon into major stories. Yet they acknowledged having limited success. “In a world with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the Drudge Report and everything else that makes up the right-wing noise machine, nothing is clean and nothing is simple,” a senior administration official said. “You don’t stomp a story out. You ride the wave and try to steer it to safe water.”187
One technique for steering the wave is to counter bad news with more news, or at least more information.188 Yet information is not always readily available. In February 2010, Joe Sestak, a candidate for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Pennsylvania, told a local host in an oblique fashion that he had received a job offer from the White House as an incentive to drop his primary bid against Senator Arlen Specter. In a world in which party leaders and campaign operatives routinely try to dissuade potential candidates from running, it would seem like this would not be much of a story.
In highly polarized Washington, however, the opposition takes advantage of every possibility to make points. Reporters repeatedly asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in the intervening months about Sestak’s allegation, but he deflected comment. As the story became more significant in the wake of Sestak’s primary victory, the statements out of the White House grew increasingly opaque. Republicans happily cited the Sestak allegation to undermine the president’s claim to be bringing greater transparency and accountability to Washington. Whether the White House was correct in waiting until it had all the facts to avoid a mistake or inconsistency in its statements, its extended silence on the matter created a public relations problem for a time.
On April 20, 2010, an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig working for the oil company BP on a well one mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, led to the largest oil spill in American history. The president, indeed, the federal government, was all but powerless to resolve the disaster, given the sheer technological challenge of plugging a leak. Nevertheless, Obama had to show that he was engaged and in command of the crisis.
On June 14 and 15, the president made a two-day tour of three Gulf States and then returned to Washington to deliver a 20-minute prime-time, nationally televised speech from the Oval Office. His first use of the solemn setting of the Oval Office escalated his personal engagement to a new level. Moreover, his meeting the next day with BP executives and his pressuring them to create an escrow account to compensate businesses and individuals for their losses from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico telegraphed a decisiveness of action. Famous for his “no drama” style, the president had to take pains to show that he was “furious” at BP and ready to compel it to act.
The White House also had to worry about protecting its credibility, its most precious resource in a time of crisis. For weeks, federal officials stood alongside BP executives at briefings, reinforcing doubts about who was really in charge and putting the government in the position of vouching, by its mere presence, for BP’s veracity. After it became clear that there were gross underestimates of the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf, that BP had not followed industry standards in drilling the well, and that various efforts to cap the well had failed, the White House put an end to the joint appearances in early June.189
In general, it was difficult for the White House to win in such a situation. Some complained that the president was not engaged enough in the details of the response to the oil spill (as in professing not to know about the resignation of Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of the Minerals Management Service), while others criticized him for getting bogged down in them. Some argued that he should spend more time in the Gulf Coast making common cause with its residents, while others viewed his repeated trips there as mere publicity stunts.
Before Obama’s trip to Asia in November 2010, the Drudge Report picked up an article from an unnamed Indian source claiming that the president’s trip would cost the taxpayers $200 million a day, more than the war in Afghanistan. Republican Representative Michele Bachmann repeated this ridiculous figure on CNN, adding, “He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India.” The charge also quickly made its way into conservative talk radio, including shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage. The administration responded forcefully to the story, but not before millions of Americans heard the absurd charge delivered by authoritative sounding commentators who never checked the facts.
The Obama White House was aggressive in its efforts to lead the public. Nevertheless, it faced the frustrations all administrations experience in focusing the public’s attention, reaching the public with its messages, framing issues to its advantage, and mobilizing its supporters.
It is difficult for the president to focus the public’s attention. Despite the fact that rhetoric steadily flows from the White House, chief executives disperse their public remarks over a broad range of policies, and wide audiences hear only a small portion of them. The president faces strong competition for the public’s attention from previous commitments of government, congressional initiatives, opposing elites, and the mass media. Equally important, presidents often compete with themselves as they address a range of issues.
Reaching the public is a continual and sizable challenge for the president. Most of the public is not attuned to listening to the White House, and it is now easier than ever to tune out the president. Many choose to do so. Many people do not accurately receive or perceive the president’s messages. Technology has created new opportunities for reaching the public, and the administration has acted aggressively to exploit them. Nevertheless, most communications over the new media are received by supporters and are of little help in expanding the president’s base.
Mobilizing these supporters has not been easy for President Obama. Technology may reinforce the converted, but it does not seem to ensure their political activity. The enthusiasm of the president’s supporters in the 2008 campaign has not translated into sustained efforts to enact the president’s proposals.
The president cannot depend on framing how the public views his policies and his performance. He faces committed, well-organized, and well-funded opponents who offer alternative frames, and many people do not perceive accurately the frames offered by the White House. In addition, it has been difficult for a president with a broad agenda and an eclectic ideology to create a clear narrative for his presidency.
Coupling the unfavorable context for leading the public we explored in chapter 1 with the difficulties of going public we have found in this chapter, we should not expect the president to have great success in obtaining the public’s support. I examine the White House’s level of success in public leadership in the next chapter.
