Home › Blogs › Gary Andres's blog ›

Building Support for Obama's Agenda

Submitted by Gary Andres on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 05:38
in

I wrote this piece today in the Weekly Standard Online exploring the value of outside efforts aimed at promoting President Obama's legislative agenda. The raw political value of these activities is obvious -- capturing emails, phone numbers, and keeping partisans engaged. But I also believe there is another less obvious benefit.  I call it "making noise," so that those normally not paying much attention to politics sit up and listen.

We know Democratic partisans strongly support the White House agenda.  But that's only about a third of the electorate. Those with weaker partisan attachments are less engaged, know less about the President's agenda, and are therefore less intense in their support.   I believe groups like Organizing for America    and Unity '09 (the liberal-backed group that includes MoveOn.org Politico's Ben Smith writes about here ) help mobilize partisan Democrats, but also create the kind of political noise necessary to break through the din of other cultural and media messages -- a crtical tactic in reaching certain electoral blocs.

Less politically engaged Americans tend to hear the "loudest voice in the cafeteria." These efforts by liberal organizations and Democrats help project the White House agenda to this often hard to reach, but key constituency.

Some say it's difficult to translate support from a campaign to a legislative agenda.  That may be correct. But I also believe entities like Organizing for America and Unity '09 will have a much bigger impact on political communications than we currently understand.

2.5
Your rating: None Average: 2.5 (2 votes)

Comments

As long as they speak as individuals, not as one...

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 08:27.

...they will not have any significant political impact. Heck! We all can do that. But more than that, organized speakers, speaking as individuals, can even be counter-productive. It's like receiving 13-million emails, all identical to each other. Big deal.

But take those same 13-million emails, give them their own voice. Allow them all to speak and to be accurately heard, and if they all come together to speak as one, then that noise would be deafening, irresistible, unstoppable.

ex animo

davidfarrar

Gosh, where have I heard this before?

Submitted by Joe C. on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 08:33.

"The problem, however, isn't the messenger, or even the message; the problem is that those 'in the middle' that we want to reach are disengaged. They base their voting on popularity and picking the winner. Intellectual arguments are lost on them. Conservatism is an active process, whereas Leftism is passive, therefore a natural draw to these free-rider wannabes. We need to get them engaged by making Conservative cool again..."

 

because mindlesslly chanting

Submitted by RisingTide on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 12:54.

less regulation and less taxes is so very .... active.

yeah. only not really.

real conservatism, the kind that i can respect, is chary of calling liberals as mindless. you can't debate with zombies.

The Problem of the Low Information Voter

Submitted by Mick Stockinger on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 11:27.

I'm not as impressed with liberal-left efforts to "make noise" because there is nothing new about this tactic and no reason to expect different outcomes than we've had before.

The politics of the sonambulant middle is largely a matter of image and simple concepts.  Soldiers being killed in Iraq makes an impact, while the more abstract reasons for why they are dying simply too much work to absorb for the majority of the electorate.  How incredulous were you that Obama managed to get elected on the completely meaningless concepts of hope and change?

Meaningless maybe, but definitely emotionally resonant.

The problem for the liberal-left, for any party really, is that these emotional resonances can only be exploited, not created.  Obama had the right image and the right message for the times--Hillary did not (nor for the matter did McCain, who was running like it was 2004 instead of 2008.

In the Republican primaries, the informed opinion was on Romney, but McCain had decades of "impressions" stored up in the Republican base, many of whom actually thought he opposed illegal immigration and voted for him on that basis.  That same dynamic served Jimmy Carter in 1976, when southern voters could not wrap their head around the idea that "one of theirs" could be in favor of bussing, and voted for him on the basis of his image of a southern (read conservative) Christian.

Bush couldn't overcome a difficult war, and Obama can't overcome a difficult economy--and for the same reason--incompetency.  They can spin all they want, but whether its flag-draped coffins or unemployment numbers, the result is the same--the sonambulent middle is going to go with the emotional context of the environment and lend a deaf ear to the sophistry.

Take the AIG bonus situation.  Like Katrina, there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances, but also like Katrina, the superficial aspects of the situation are the political ammunition--a company 80% owned by the federal government gave away millions in "retention bonuses" and Obama and Congress knew...  That's what people will remember.

One political problem like this isn't enough to sink Obama's battleship, but lots of them have a culmulative effect.  From what we've seen, this isn't an exceptional circumstance--its the product of a culture and process that--as Mitt Romney described it yesterday--focuses on first order effects and ignored second and third order ramifications.

The only tactic Republicans have to worry about when it comes to the Obama administration is if he actually starts governing.  I'd love to have that kind of problem.

Finally!

Submitted by Joe C. on Sun, 03/22/2009 - 06:56.

Someone on this site that gets it; and mostly correctly.