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Messaging for government, not for campaigning

Thursday, December 3, 2009

GETTING THE FULLEST buy-in possible from the American people is Barack Obama’s challenge now.

The required presentational minuet - squaring away US military commanders, overseas allies and members of Congress for his escalated "AF-PAK" strategy - formed a run-up to the President’s West Point speech to the public at large, made over the massed heads of both cadets and cabinet secretaries.

 

The speech is now being followed just as necessarily by some good old-fashioned media exercises: Op-Ed articles placed strategically in every appropriate newspaper, be it nationally prominent or electorally significant locally … plus Administration members and surrogates appearing in all broadcast formats, and a roll-out of military and civilian officials before Capitol Hill committee hearings to provide yet more TV fodder. To all that, of course, is being added a full-court press across the political blogosphere.

 

But a once-formidable Obamite phalanx of skilled communicators is already conspicuous by its absence in this effort.

 

It's the neatly renamed Organizing for America, which we once knew as Obama for America – same initials, and the same O-based logo - when it comprised the Illinois senator’s grassroots campaign for the Presidency. OFA got renewed marching orders from its Organizer-in-Chief not long ago … but those orders aren’t being fully or enthusiastically followed.

 

Speaking in the summer via an inspirational conference call beamed from Air Force One, the President told the group's members: “You need to stay involved”. But rarely has the difference between campaigning and governing been so poignantly illustrated as by the substantially changed nature of OFA's involvement.

 

Since Obama won the White House, OFA has been given offices at Democratic National Committee headquarters under its Executive Director Mitch Stewart, architect of the Obama Iowa caucus victory, and is expanding its field staff from operations in 30 States, as originally, to a full presence in 50. But all the same, these activists have proven during this demanding time to be cagey in their messaging and underwhelming in their impact.

 

They let themselves get drowned out in the media hullabaloo that accompanied the right-wing “tea-party” protests during Congress’s summer vacation, and they have failed to rally strong vocal support for the Obama-favored healthcare legislation that has at last reached the Senate floor. (Idealistic progressives among them were nonplussed by Democratic legislators' soft-peddling of a public option among insurance plans, and offended by the Faustian deal done over abortion.)

 

On Afghanistan, Obama made no bones – it can be said to his credit – about his strategic intentions back when OFA was his electioneering arm. “Getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield – in Afghanistan and Pakistan” was the repeated stump refrain. And he specifically said he would increase troop numbers in that "right battlefield". But it’s worth a visit to the OFA website now, in the wake of the West Point announcement, to see what it has to say about the war.

 

Well, surprisingly or not, the whole subject seems to have been forgotten. Political intelligence from the domestic electorate remains OFA’s stock-in-trade, of course, and its staffers have attentively registered that the latest CBS News opinion poll found only 17% of Democrats favoring increased troop levels in Afghanistan. That’s half the proportion of Independents who support an increase, and less than a third of Republicans who do so.

 

While in other respects the current OFA site still closely reproduces its presentation during the well-knit campaigning days, it now simply leaves out the Afghanistan part. Under the apparently comprehensive headline “Issues”, all we get is drum-beating for the President’s main domestic issues – the Economy, Education, New Energy and, with as much half-hearted enthusiasm as it can now muster, Healthcare Reform.

 

Obama’s task on Afghanistan and Pakistan is difficult enough, you’d think. But with media-savvy support organizations like this as friends … he’s not going to find it any easier.

 

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