President Ronald Reagan was a master communicator who surrounded himself with staffers able to harness that greatness to achieve policy victories.
The Reagan White House had a message of the day, tied to a detailed communications plan. They used that message to drive efforts across the federal government and to help propel legislation forward on Capitol Hill. They also girded their communications to keep out the process stories that can so easily derail the political agenda.
It worked at its core because the messages had substance. In his final address from the Oval Office, he remarked, “I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content.”
Administrations since Reagan have tried, with middling success, to rekindle some of the Reagan magic. George W. Bush used the tactic to successfully push through “No Child Left Behind,” and then hit a brick wall on Social Security reform.
Trump tried, but he’s not a master communicator. In fact, Trump’s Twitter style may serve as the historical antithesis of Reagan’s style and, yes, substance.
Now we’re experiencing the Biden administration, where different entities – the White House, congressional leaders, and even rank-and-file Democrats in revolt against party leadership – push different policy agendas.
This alone is a problem. Multiple communicators with competing proposals drive an agenda into the ground, not forward. But it gets worse. Their messaging is so clearly an effort to camouflage the lack of substance that the strategy causes even disinterested Americans to look on with head-shaking incredulity.
Did you see the so-called “infrastructure” bill that the Biden team introduced with plans for two trillion dollars in spending? Their official name for it is the “American Jobs Act.”
They must not think infrastructure will “sell,” as they say in the ad biz. Better safe than sorry with the catchphrases. John Q. Voter might criticize two trillion in infrastructure spending, but how could he possibly criticize spending for jobs?
And what of the substance buried underneath the branding? One major slice of the two trillion in new spending is money for seniors to receive in-home health care. Five hundred billion dollars in fact. Twenty-five percent of the total in the “jobs,” or “infrastructure” bill - depending on your buzzword of choice - for health care.
Health care!
We hit the trifecta! If Jennifer P. Voter somehow, inexplicably, opposes jobs and infrastructure, we’ll hit her with health care. People love health care! Meanwhile, Senator Kristen Gillibrand doesn’t think we’ve gone far enough. She claimed on Twitter that paid leave and childcare, in addition to caregiving, are all infrastructure. That’s a bridge – in desperate need of infrastructure repair – too far!
What they’re doing is the legislative version of the activity that led to the 2008 housing crisis. Then, banks would package and re-package groups of good and bad mortgages, selling them off to traders. As the bubble inflated, the percentage of bad mortgages increased, but this lack of substance was covered up by gimmicky marketing.
That’s Infrastructure Week/Jobs Plan/Health Care. Bad policy packaged, re-packaged with gimmicky marketing that the Biden team hopes will cover for the lack of substance.
Not to be outdone by the administration, the House and Senate recently convened “Jim Crow” week. The goal was to paint as racist any Republicans who support election integrity legislation. The Republican-led Georgia law was billed as a racist effort to suppress the black vote and Major League Baseball moved its All-Star game to a new state with similar rules, but more comfortably led by Democrats.
In Iowa, Democrats howled over an election reform bill signed into law. They don’t see any need for reform despite a glaring example where Nancy Pelosi claimed the right, and threatened to use it, to remove a duly elected Republican member of Congress from their own state.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the House are applying pressure to Senators to get their H.R. 1, which would nationalize voting rules, politicize Election Day, and codify the same actions by state and local officials that caused public confidence in elections to hit an all-time low after 2020.
Here’s some branding for you – Mitch McConnell called it the Democrat Politician Protection Act. Reagan would have chortled.
“Jim Crow” week backfired when House Democrats faced a defiant North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Robinson, a black leader who suffers no fools, angered Democrats by demanding that stop using him as their pawn while they seek to inject race into every issue, dividing our country rather than coming together for common sense solutions.
In the wake of “Jim Crow” week, house leadership suggested that instead of waiting for the Senate to break the filibuster on H.R. 1, they’d introduce a new election bill, branded in the name of recently deceased Representative and civil rights icon John Lewis.
In the extremely unlikely case that Jennifer P. and John Q. Voter could withstand the trifecta of infrastructure, jobs, and health care, there’s no way they could oppose the John Lewis Memorial End Jim Crow and Bring the All-Star Game Back to Georgia Election Fairness Act. Right? What a cynical way to govern.
My parents used to tell me that if I spent half as much time doing my chores as I did concocting excuses for not doing them, the work would be already done. That’s Reagan-esque, and it fits here. If Joe, Nancy, and Chuck spent less time on the branding, and more time on the substance, they – and the entire J. Voter Family – would be better served.
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Matt Dole is a communications consultant based in Central Ohio.
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