Messaging, The Podesta Proposal and Presidential Power

Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta and The Center for American Progress proposed yesterday that President Obama not sacrifice his important agenda, but rather focus on solutions that can be implemented from entirely within the executive branch.

Concentrating on executive powers presents a real opportunity for the Obama administration to turn its focus away from a divided Congress and the unappetizing process of making legislative sausage. Instead, the administration can focus on the president’s ability to deliver results for the American people on the things that matter most to them:

• Job creation and economic competitiveness
• Educational excellence
• A clean energy future and energy independence
• Quality affordable health care
• Consumer protection
• The home foreclosure crisis
• Accountable government delivering results at lower cost
• Sustainable security for the nation

The CAP proposal then lists a number of policy recommendations that can be implemented directly by the President and executive branch.  For example, to move forward his domestic agenda President Obama could:

• Direct an assessment, strategy, and new policy development to promote U.S. competitiveness.
• Launch the new consumer financial protection bureau with an aggressive agenda to protect and empower consumers.
• Increase the capacity of small businesses to expand hiring and purchases by accelerating the implementation of the Small Business Jobs Act.
• Promote automatic mediation to avoid foreclosure where possible and speed resolution.
• Create a web portal to empower housing counselors, reduce burdens on lenders, and speed up home mortgage modifications.
• Help stabilize home values and communities by turning “shadow REO” housing inventory into “scattered site” rental housing.
• Promote practices that support working families.

I leave a discussion of efficacy surrounding CAP's long list of policy details to those more familiar with policy.  My concerns--as always--are optics, messaging and strategy. As CAP points out themselves, the American public is hungry for an effective government focused on addressing their economic concerns:

The public has made clear its disgust with Washington’s ways—the same sentiment that helped to bring President Obama to office. It would be a welcome relief from watching legislative maneuvering to see the work of a strong executive who is managing the business of the country through troubled times, doing more with less, each day working to create a stronger economy and a more effective government.

As I've argued elsewhere, the most important indicator for Obama's reelection is unemployment; and the most important criterion is success.  Either he will fix the economy, or he won't.  So his best strategy is to aggressively pursue every policy that he believes will make a difference on that front.  But there is also no doubt that the optics for such an approach are extremely good--especially if the Obama Administration can avoid repeating the rhetorical failures of the past two years. 

One of the biggest memes regarding Obama's missteps since taking office is that he and the Democrats "spent too much time talking about Health Care Reform."  While it is true that the HCR debate went on far too long--and Obama himself has conceded the point that the protracted timeline and persistent obstruction likely soured Democratic approval--this meme is simply not borne out by the facts.

The Washington Post has a convenient database of Obama's activity as president.  You can get fun stuff like word clouds, you can sort by topic and you can drill down into specific speeches.  For example, the following is a word-cloud aggregation of Obama's speeches at Economy-focused events:

Read properly, you get extremely accurate high-altitude impressions of how Obama has spent his time and words. I highly recommend the resource and will discuss it in more detail in a future post.  Looking closely at event attendance by the President, we see a story not in alignment with that coming out of the mainstream DC punditry class:

The most obvious point is that, even if the health care debate took longer than expected, Obama spent significantly more time attending to economic concerns than to health care reform.  It's not even close.  But adding some additional texture, we can see the real source of distraction:

This is part and parcel of the Republican strategy.  Half of what they say is not designed to influence the thinking of the American public, but the behavior of the Democratic Party.  Attacks on HCR in particular--and Obama's economic reforms in general--are a clear example of this approach. 

When they diverted American attention to the process used  to pass Obama-Pelosi legislation, Obama and the Democrats fell for the ploy and talked about government process rather than the important legislation under consideration.  This would be a mistake if the US public merely did not care about government process.  But the situation is worse than that. When politicians get defensive about process, then Americans rightly wonder what they are trying to hide about the underlying policy.  In this case, the Democrats had nothing to hide.  But they did a terrible job convincing the America public of that--and fell hook-line-and-sinker for well-worn Republican strategies to distract them from the effort.