health care astroturf

Doug Pinkham, president for the Public Affairs Council has a new post up at the Public Affairs Perspective blog (emphasis mine):

Grassroots campaigns to protect rainforests, oppose gun laws or fund AIDS research have become commonplace. So have campaigns to expand U.S. manufacturing, reform immigration laws or rewrite financial industry regulations. These campaigns, and thousands like them, have grown increasingly sophisticated; they go way beyond calls-to-action encouraging supporters to send an email or call a congressional office.

They often involve Facebook sites, blog postings, issue advertising, media outreach, town hall meetings, YouTube videos, online petitions, rallies, issue forums and a host of other tactics. Some are organized by advocacy groups, associations, unions or companies; others are organized purely by volunteers.

In terms of grassroots strategy, the healthcare debate fell into the category marked "all of the above." As the Washington Post noted in February, everyone from the National Right to Life Committee to MoveOn.org to PhRMA to AARP to health insurance companies got into the act. (For those who want a peek inside one such campaign, the Columbia Journalism Review deconstructed WellPoint's sophisticated Health Action Network in its March 22 "Campaign Desk" column.)

It's easy to dismiss these efforts as special interests unfairly exerting their influence on the political process. The reality is that people are joining groups they trust to help them speak with a louder voice.

Pinkham seems to be suggesting that the keys to 21st century advocacy are a) build trust, and b) make noise. But before anyone rushes off to register for 10 new platforms a day, they should check out Jon Henke's post over at the CRAFTdc blog earlier this year on the diversification of a campaign's social media portfolio:

If you don’t have a specific purpose for using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or a blog...then don’t use them.

Which gets us back to the subject of this post.  CRAFT sells communications strategy, tactics and execution across all channels.  So, when the question, “Should we have a Facebook Fan Page?” came up for discussion, there were two lines of thought:

• We don’t currently have a strategic or tactical need to create and maintain a Facebook Fan Page for CRAFT.
• How can CRAFT sell something that we don’t use for CRAFT?  Shouldn’t we eat our own dog food?

My own conclusion was this: If we do not have a strategic or tactical need to create and maintain a Facebook Fan Page, then we should not have one.  When we decide a Facebook presence is justified, we will create one.  Until then, not using a tool we don’t have a specific purpose to use is eating our own dog food.

Henke is right. Campaigns' uses of social media should be context-sensitive, just like approaches to cyber security should be risk-based. How, then, is Pinkham's post instructive? He continues (again, emphasis mine):

Eighty-four percent of those who contacted Congress in the 2008 CMF survey were asked to do so by a third party, such as an interest group. What's more, respondents - whether they had contacted Congress or not - found information from interest groups to be more credible than information from Congress.

Yes, that's surprising, but it says something important about the inability of Washington politicians to cope with the rise in citizen engagement. Many politicians call sympathetic grassroots campaigns "unprecedented outpourings of support" while dismissing campaigns organized by opponents as "Astroturf." They condemn the influence of some special interests, while encouraging other groups to ramp up letter-writing efforts to provide "cover" for controversial votes.

Worst of all, many refuse to acknowledge that high levels of engagement are a good thing in a democracy. The CMF study pointed out that congressional offices are understaffed, under-funded and often lack the technology or training to respond effectively to constituents.

These are pretty staggering precentages that are difficult to ignore, and when taken with resource issues in Congressional offices (which are every bit as stringent on the campaign trail), it's no surprise that both parties rely so heavily on leveraging interest group support. Acknowledging the utility of interest groups could prove catastrophic to the Right, if not altogether suicidal, especially when populism is surging like nothing we've seen in 50 years.

On the other hand, candidates and causes on the Right can try to capture some of the utility provided by interest groups to voters and brand it. Pinkham concludes:

...Congress should assure constituents that their opinions matter and invite them to become more engaged in policy-making.  When members take positions on energy legislation, they can contact citizens who weigh in on climate change issues. People who complain about high taxes should receive updates on efforts to cut federal spending. In short, grassroots communications should signal the need for dialogue, not the need to build a stronger fence around the border.

This is why I haven't (and can't) come out swinging at platforms like YouCut (which Doug Mataconis at Below the Beltway thinks is nothing more than a gimmick) or AmericaSpeakingOut.com (which Jon Henke thinks is crowding the Internet). Party leadership should have branded tools that aren't tied to campaigns. Republicans are poised to take back control of Congress from the Democrats this November. But they will suffer a fate like November 2008 without a policy agenda - without becoming an alternative party rather than being an opposition party.

YouCut and America Speaking Out are fantastic ways for the Right to leverage the utility of interest groups - collecting and collating voter preferences, while empowering them to participate (building trust and making noise) - and they couldn't really be more timely in their advent, coming right at the launch of primary season. These tools might be the first real online method of voter outreach that channels both libertarian policy preferences and Tea Party activism into a substantive national policy platform for Republicans. What once was diffuse, diverse, and disorganized has now become clear, centralized, and convenient - and Republicans shouldn't be shy about reaching out to the little guy.

As claims people opposing the administration's health care reform plans are being directed by the GOP and/or insurance companies, numbers are showing those claims to be weak and misguided. It actually appears that the condescending tone and belittling remarks made towards those opposing current health care reform measures is only fanning the flames of the debate. As the Washington Times reports Polls undercut scripted protest claims.

A majority, 57 percent, said health care reform should be abandoned if it will "significantly" add to the deficit. Mr. Obama has promised that any reform will not add to the budget imbalance, but 72 percent of the registered voters surveyed by Quinnipiac said they did not think Mr. Obama would be able to deliver on that vow.

A National Public Radio poll of 850 likely voters in late July showed that 48 percent thought the president's policies have increased the federal deficit and done little to slow job loss, while 45 percent said Mr. Obama has blunted the recession and set a foundation for recovery. The poll also showed 47 percent opposition to the Obama health care reforms in Congress, with 42 percent support.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll of 1,011 adults on July 30 showed that 42 percent thought the current health care reforms were a bad idea, while 36 percent thought them a good idea. More surprisingly, Republicans in Congress were more trusted to fix the budget deficit by a 31 percent to 25 percent margin, a drastic turnaround from January, when Democrats held the edge by a margin of 42 percent to 20 percent.

But a July 27 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that 55 percent of 1,506 people surveyed still favored "spending more to make health care more accessible and affordable," compared with the 40 percent who disagreed with that statement. However, that same poll showed 43 percent disapproval of Mr. Obama's handling of the health care debate, 53 percent disapproval on the economy, and said that 44 percent "generally oppose" the health care proposals in Congress, while 38 percent generally favor them and 18 percent said they didn't know.

The White House at first responded to the poll numbers by claiming that Americans were being influenced by "misinformation." At one point in the middle of last week, an anonymous White House official told Politico that "poll numbers now, for health care, are up."

When asked by The Washington Times to verify that latter statement, however, no one in the White House communications office would own up to the quote or defend it.

But as protests erupted a week ago and spilled onto the Internet via YouTube and the Drudge Report, the administration took a new tack. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called the now-visible opposition "manufactured anger."

The Democratic National Committee piled on, calling the protesters "mobs" and even saying they were being "bused in" to events by "by well-funded, highly organized groups run by Republican operatives and funded by the special interests."

Brad Woodhouse, the DNC spokesman who made those accusations, said in an e-mail exchange that the evidence of protesters being bussed in came from "anecdotal reports" along with eyewitness accounts from some at an Aug. 2 forum in Philadelphia. The accounts said people saw buses from North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

On Friday, the White House political arm Organizing for America sent a video to its 13 million or so supporters in which OFA Director Mitch Stewart said that town-hall protesters are "trying to drown out public discourse and legitimate conversation on this issue."

But Mr. Walker, the former comptroller, said the dissatisfaction being expressed was not a minority view but rather a reaction to the government's arrogance, pointing to the polls as quantifiable evidence.

"What's going on is there is increasing concern, which in some cases has turned to outrage, with how far out of touch and out of control Washington has become," Mr. Walker said.

Poll Numbers Discredit Dem Claims That Health Care Anger is Fake