Doug Poretz

Government's Failure to Communicate

Sorry, but I disagree with your premise, based on my 40 years or so in the communications business.

First job in communications is to define your job this way: 1) I want to achieve these specific goals; 2) to do that, I need to develop well-crafted messages (researched and tested); 3) to these specific targets; 4) whom I can reach by these distribution channels. Let's take a look at how Obama is doing that.

1. The primary goals (it seems to me) Obama is seeking is enough support for his platform of "change" (which is more philosophical than topical) so that he can continue to experiment with aggressive ideas in the hopes that one or two or more will actually accomplish something. The agenda for Obama is "change" and change translates into "action" and to do that he needs to create the environment and support that will allow him to "act." And he hasn't stopped moving and acting since he won the election.

2. His messages have been crafted, researched, tested, polled, focus-grouped and honed to resonate. I believe that is why his messages remain very broad -- because the mood of his supporters is broad in nature: they dislike certain people and institutions (bankers, financial services companies, certain corporations and corporate executives, and many politicians whom they identify as against them and their interests in favor of their own partisan vested interests). This is an attitude that demands the very agenda of "change" that Obama seeks to promote. The ability of the Obama campaign to develop a message, refine the message while staying consistent, and then to stay on message has been extraordinary and will be studied by communicators as a successful case history long into the future.

3. His targets -- his supporters -- are well-defined. He is the first politician in a very long time who has been able to create passion among the broad economic and political middle. Look into his poll numbers and the singular characteristic that stands out is not his large numbers of support, but the ardor of his supporters. The amazing thing is that such passion is usually associated for single issues (guns, abortion, ERA, environment .... just think of the major campaign issues of previous campaigns) -- but in Obama's case he kept focusing on mood issues: discontent, lack of faith in the government, belief that the nation was going in the wrong direction, etc. Every poll I read (including many proprietary polls taken by the research group within my own firm) showed that the people who possessed that "mood" was very wide and deep. Those were Obama's targets in the primary, the general election and his presidency thus far.

4. Distribution channels. Let's get real. The Obama campaign has put in place a remarkable infrastructure for campaigning (including during his term in office) and he has merged that with incredible communications skills and the ability to do a town hall meeting in any city in the US, in a town in France, and on the Internet. He is on TV every day, using both news opportunities and creating his own, including prime time news conferences and exclusive interviews to TV news hosts.

I think Obama can fine tune his communications campaign, sure. But it is totally baseless to assert: "All the substance of the government’s plans has been released through channels that simply don’t get the attention of most Americans. Op-eds written by unknown government officials in the Wall Street Journal, appearances on news shows by these officials, press releases, and the creation of new websites such as financialstability.gov just won’t cut it." So is the assertion that "The President himself must expend some political capital to get the people on the side of the government."

That just does not make sense to me. If you want a communicator's view of Obama's successes and failures, I've written a bunch on the subject that you can find at my blog, linked above.

More Turmoil - Not International Regulation - Needed

There is a POSSIBILITY that the biggest news from the G20 conference will be the large scale protests to be held there. There is a massive protest movement around the world that the mainstream media has basically missed: Check out this link (fvrom my blog) tinyurl.com/daaua9 -- a narrated self-running PowerPoint that asserts that around the world, in virtually every part of the world, there is a movement that shares three common factors: 1) the middle/working class is taking to the streets to protest their economic situation; 2) the targets of these protests are the ruling (or formerly ruling) government, bankers, the investment community and certain others of the corporate/business world, especially multinationals; and 3) the remedy they seek is for the government to take actions aimed to restore their former standard of living largely by some sort of "bailout" that costs enormous amounts of money that the government doesn't have, and to do that as a priority OVER using funds to help those they deem as responsible for the situation in the first place. Right after London, the action moves to New York for what is being billed as both "The March on Wall Street" and the march to "Bail out the people, not the banks." This will be a multi-city protest in the US. This is a global movement. If this premise is even only "possible" it should be given much more serious attention.