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Are these the tools to crack the echo-chamber?

Thursday, September 10, 2009

THOUGH LAST NIGHT'S PRESIDENTIAL address was delivered to both parts of the US Congress, we all know it was in fact a full-dress media opportunity for Barack Obama to convince the general public that he’s grabbing back - or fully grabbing for the first time - his own long-cherished initiative to overhaul health care.

Unlike some Oval Office predecessors, he is wedded to those transparent, semi-hidden Perspex sheets that display (solely to him) his scroll of words. He hasn't seemed too daunted by one predecessor's (Bill Clinton's) scary experience of 13 years ago - with a teleprompter going berserk for a whole nine minutes at the start of his do-or-die healthcare address to a joint Congressional session. Clinton had to shift his gaze, though without his reading glasses, and squint at a back-up paper version in only 12-point type, but stoically struggled through.

 

Obama has become an expert at making the teleprompter speech seem natural, has come to depend upon that technology, and rarely deviates from its electronic text. For last night's vital set-piece, the exact wording was worked on for at least two weeks, and the receptive ground tilled and prepped for it over the past few days.

 

But that prep-work has had a well-worn feel to it. The President’s spokesmen, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and chief political adviser David Axelrod were rolled out in a one-two punch formation for the Sunday morning TV gab-fests, with Gibbs along the way also granting prized individual sit-downs to a national paper’s political writer, and to National Public Radio. (John Harwood of the New York Times was the first fortunate funnel – a rarity on the Washington beat, in that he works not just in old gray print but also on a cable news channel, CNBC.) 

 

The two Obamamen’s prime job was, while acknowledging that the White House might well have lost control of the health bill debate, to repeat in as many ways as they could that Presidential mastery was being regained. One version, from that Times tete-a-tete with Gibbs:

“The President and the team certainly have to do a better job of ensuring … that people understand what’s in the bill for them, deal with the myths that are not in the bill, and make sure that we clearly and in a very concise way explain how this will all happen.”

 

Others joined the effort of course, besides the White House communications deputies heroically manning both phones and keyboards simultaneously, in the newspapers’ somewhat breathless picture of their work this week. The Democratic leadership from both House and Senate made their trips down Pennsylvania Avenue to conclave with the Healer-in-Chief (snarkily reimagined, "doctored" in fact, by the website TruthTalkLive.com, above) and then insisted to cameras and microphones upon the importance - nay the indispensability - of a “public option” as part of the upcoming health legislation. 

 

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were determinedly joining in a Team Obama tactic that’s gained fresh currency during the recent effort at resurgence, which portrays the insurance industry as villains of the piece, and the public option as vital to “keeping the insurance companies honest”.

 

And of course, in a anticipation-building ploy that really must have marginal value, though veteran political managers still swear by it, the star act himself did trailers for his own big night ... at the AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic,  and then on the very morning (during ABC’s Good Morning America) of that big night itself.

 

Such tactics, though tried and tested, also look oddly lame when we consider the problem they’re aimed at overcoming. The hyperactive, vastly amplified opposition to progressive change that gets generated in today’s self-replicating echo-chamber, with its interconnecting ante-rooms of talk-radio, the blogosphere and a rant-hungry cable-news universe, will hardly be muted or effectively countered by this - dare I say - deeply conventional messaging.

   

 

   

 

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HOWEVER WELL-ORCHESTRATED and crisply argued the Administration's endeavor may be (at last, we might also say now, after last night's delivery) it could all turn out to be simply too soft and too late.

 

Even allies who are part of “the movement” credited with propelling Obama into office, even a grass-roots and social media-based force like MoveOn.org, can now appear muffled and constrained. This week, alongside their familiar “vigils” across the nation and the public re-telling of on-point horror-stories exposing current healthcare failures, MoveOn has unconvincingly tried to energize the base ... with a video, aimed at going viral, that features the venerable Michael Stipe and the rest of R.E.M.

 

         

 

The video’s good – but it’s not exactly music to re-take the ramparts by.

 

At the risk of sounding glib as well as dismissive, I think of R.E.M’s first album (dating back to 1983) and fear that the campaign for ObamaCare is turning into an all-too-civilized Murmur, lost among the opposition’s cacophonous yelling.

 

  

SPEAKING OF YELLING, I know the intemperately vocal (and by later last night apologetic) South Carolina Represesentative Joe Wilson claimed he was reacting to the President's assurance that health coverage would not be extended to illegal immigrants.

 

But it's pretty obvious to me that what sparked the angry, combative emotions that he allowed to "get the best of me" - in his words - was an earlier, and obviously deeply unwelcome assertion from Obama: "I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility".

 

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