Mixed messaging

by: Adam Bink

Thu Jul 08, 2010 at 13:00


This isn't a criticism so much as a bewilderment at how the White House sometimes says two different things in its messaging. To me, from a purely communications and observational point of view, one problem with the White House's handling of BP has been the message that is "we're in charge here, we will stop this" on one day, then "only BP can clean up the spill, they have the technology, we're powerless to stop it, no we're not going to nationalize them".

Well, here's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on The Kudlow Report last night:

Sec. GEITHNER: We have a pro-growth agenda. Part of the agenda is growing exports. They're central to our future. What the president today is to say, that is important to the United States, we're going to be committed to making sure we're that we're expanding opportunities for American business everywhere. Now, this president understands deeply that governments don't create jobs, businesses create jobs. And our job as government is try to make sure we're creating the conditions that allow businesses to prosper so they can hire people back, get this economy going again.

This echoes President Obama, as quoted in a piece by TAP's Tim Fernholz:

"Now, government can't create jobs, but it can help create the conditions for small businesses to grow and thrive and hire more workers," President Barack Obama said yesterday as he urged Congress to take up new jobs legislation at an event honoring Small Business Owners of the Year. "Government can't guarantee a company's success, but it can knock down the barriers that prevent small-business owners from getting loans or investing in the future."

The president was right, except for one little clause: the idea that government can't create jobs. Of course the government can create jobs, unless you rank police officers and teachers, or in a less Norman Rockwell-mode, DMV employees and meter readers, among the unemployed. Which, to be clear, you should not.

Aside from being (a) false, as Tim points out, and (b) a conservative talking point that encourages the "if we want to create jobs, we have to lower corporate taxes and loosen regulations" line of thinking, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that this Administration has been saying for a year and a half "our Administration's stimulus package has either saved or created x number of jobs" over and over and over again, but then stomps on its own message in a quick effort to appeal to business and Wall Street.

And they wonder why no one in the public thinks the stimulus worked. Just a thought.

Adam Bink :: Mixed messaging

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Mixed messaging | 28 comments
God, man (4.00 / 3)
Government can't create jobs? Government can't create jobs!?

Is Washington, DC just some sort of mind warp field or something? You go there and suddenly you believe insane, manifestly absurd extreme right wing shit?

How could Obama be so cogent when he was speaking as a candidate, and so muddled now that he's in the White House?

He needs to get a clue (4.00 / 8)
Hey, Mr. President, look outside your office at the person sitting at the desk next door. That's your secretary. The government created his job.

Ask Shaun Donovan to give you a tour of HUD. Guess what? All those jobs were created by the government!

Ask one of your interns how they got to work this morning. The conductor for the train she rode? His job was created by the government!

The policemen who drive in your motorcade? The people who are redoing the sidewalk on 1st Street? The guy who empties your garbage every day? All government!

[ Parent ]
Comment of the month (0.00 / 0)
Extremely well put, especially the first line. Heh.


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[ Parent ]
We shouldn't romanticize Candidate Obama, who (0.00 / 0)
said there was a Social Security crisis and that he didn't want to oppose war funding for fear of "playing chicken with our troops" and all sorts of other conservative horse shit.  
[ Parent ]
Horse shit... (0.00 / 0)
I love a website that allows one to use horse shit in the comments section. It is one of the most useful and accurate expressions in the political world.  
[ Parent ]
there were all of those times he rebuked Hillary's loving embrace of mandates (0.00 / 0)
off the top of my head
[ Parent ]
"Government Can't Create Jobs" (4.00 / 1)
Anyone still want to defend Obama?
Want? (4.00 / 6)
Well sure, I want to...
[ Parent ]
Business (4.00 / 2)
The goal of business is to create profits and high incomes for the people at the top of the pyramid.  If that can be accomplished by outsourcing or firing people or automating well ...  The post-Friedman world has eliminated concern about the customer and the community.
Big Business is not Real Business (0.00 / 0)
I believe you're describing the goal of giant global corporations. There are millions of small businesses (e.g. 500 employees or less) where their goals are somewhat mixed. Many (most?) want to create jobs in their communities, if possible, or at least stay viable for decades within their communities.

The problem is with monopolies, these giant companies like Comcast that have billions in cash to buy up NBC and any other company they want instead of giving the money back to their workers, their investors, and their customers. They need to be broken up and re-focused on their investors, employees, and the communities they serve.

My take is that Obama is a Republican tool. He's a DINO. Obama knows he is a government employee and that everyone else in government is a government employee. He simply does not care. He cares more that government policies continue to benefit monopolies at the expense of working people and small businesses. If he believed otherwise, we'd have seen very different policies.

The sooner we get a more progressive, non Republican, leadership in the Democratic party the better.

[ Parent ]
Boy Howdy! (0.00 / 0)
They're actually saying that Michael ("government never created one job, even though I used to have one") Steele was right.

It just doesn't get any stupider than that.

Oh, wait... There's always Glenn Beck:

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do hate white people.  But in a pro-Wall Street, "Drill, baby drill!" kind of way!


"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
stupid (0.00 / 0)
Stupid stupid stupid.
Or maybe (0.00 / 0)
Maybe he's not stupid, but simply doing what the class by which he was long ago co-opted wants him to do. I think this explanation fits the observed facts a lot better.
[ Parent ]
It' takes a special kind of hubris... (4.00 / 1)
... to ignore 150+ years of economic history and still manage to blurt out this kind of rhetorical detritus. Truly, these people have learned nothing beyond who their respective Sugar Daddies are. Still worse, they expect people to believe it?

Are Geithner and Obama drawing paychecks, or are they charity workers?

The Trickle Down Doctrine has now morphed into Golden Shower Doctrine.

Welcome to Dystopia, courtesy one Barack Hoover Obama, LLC.

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

Brad DeLong also has an opinion of this admin: (4.00 / 8)
It is remarkable. I had expected that we economists would have to fight Democratic political advisors who would be pushing for policies that were bad in the long run but that gained votes in the short run. I had never expected to be fighting Democratic political advisors who are pushing policies that are:

* bad in the long run.
* bad in the short run.
* lose votes too.

Kind of hard to argue with that, isn't it?

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

Er, what DeLong said... (0.00 / 0)
more succinctly than I.
[ Parent ]
What happened to Obama? (4.00 / 1)
I was never a doe-eyed believer in the guy.  But during the campaign, he seemed like a smart politician.

But I knew there were problems back when Obama pushed for a watered-down stimulus package.

Look, let's forget ideal policy for a second.  Wouldn't a savvy politician push for the largest stimulus package possible, knowing that in 4 years he would be judged on the economic recovery?  Even if he believed that it might lead to inflation, isn't the risk of possible inflation EXACTLY the type of risk that a cynical politician would invite?

What is so bizarre about Obama is that he doesn't set aside good policy for rational political reasons.  He sets aside good policy and good politics on principle!  Unfortunately Obama's principles are easily discredited Third-Way economic dogma.

Largest Stimulus Possible (0.00 / 0)
It was always my assumption that they did, in their minds, push for the largest stimulus possible.  They believed if they asked for more they wouldn't get anything at all.

While I'm less sure of this than I used to be, it remains true they seem to be driven by fear of Republican rhetoric more than anything else.

[ Parent ]
Based on the New Yorker (4.00 / 2)
on the fall, they didn't think they needed one.  Christine Rohmer suggested a stimulus package of at least 1.2 Trillion.  Larry Summers did not include that option when he discussed the package with the President.

Here is the key passage from the most important article I have read on the Obama Administration.  


The most important question facing Obama that day was how large the stimulus should be. Since the election, as the economy continued to worsen, the consensus among economists kept rising. A hundred-billion-dollar stimulus had seemed prudent earlier in the year. Congress now appeared receptive to something on the order of five hundred billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, was calling for a trillion. Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn't require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer's analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure." At the meeting, according to one participant, "there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars."

My view is they largely got what the they asked for.  The problem is they misjudged the size of the package needed.

This miscalculation may doom Democrats for a generation.  

[ Parent ]
Yeah, They Thought "What's A Little Extreme Suffering Among Friends?" (4.00 / 2)
"Particularly when the suffering is done by someone else?"

Good ole Larry "Africa is under-polluted" Summer.  He's such a solid guy!

Never put his thumb on the scale when his elbow will do.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I agree with your comment (0.00 / 0)
except for:
for a generation.

When Republicans won in 2004, it was a conservative majority that was supposed to last a generation. When Democrats won in 2006, their congressional majority was supposed to last a generation. When Obama won in 2008, it was supposed to signal a generatiotional realignment.

We just seem to be in a really volatile period, possibly going back as far as 1992 (with a brief post-Sept. 11 interregnum) where the voters just want to throw out whoever's in power.

Democrats may well be doomed for 2010. Beyond that, who the hell knows.

[ Parent ]
But the numbers were completely arbitrary (0.00 / 0)
as far as average Americans are concerned.  $500B, $750B, $1T,  $1.5T?  What's the difference?  The question was always "Should the government 'prime the pump' in Keynesian fashion or not?"  Once you come down on the side of "yes" it is idiotic to make the stimulus too small and risk it being insufficiently stimulative.

Remember, this was right after Obama had stomped McCain to the curb and the country was in a post-Bush euphoria for Democratic leadership.  There is no way that, after driving the economy to the brink of collapse, that the GOP could have sustained a filibuster of a much larger stimulus package.  If Obama had come down on Collins, Snowe and Spector with both feet to allow an "up or down vote", even if those Republicans had voted against the bill, they would not have maintained the filibuster.

I'm not sure which is worse, that Obama was afraid of the GOP when he was at the apex of his popularity and they were at their nadir, or that Obama bought into a discredited economic philosophy and sabotaged his own opportunity for recovery.

[ Parent ]
Each Was Worse (0.00 / 0)
in its own way.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
And Also... (4.00 / 2)
I don't entirely buy the Obama was afraid argument.

At the very least, the stimulus policy the Republicans would plump for was also a policy that made Obama comfortable. I have not heard a single thing that suggests Obama wanted any more than he got. Rahm, Timmy, and Larry all seem to be on exactly the same page as the corporate Republicans.

To me, that's the root of my disappointment with the President at the policy level: he's essentially a Republican when the country desperately needs a Democrat who at least leans progressive. Someone who believes in their gut that the best antidote to decades of coddling big business and the wealthy is a comparable dose of coddling the working and middle classes.

[ Parent ]
smart (0.00 / 0)
I agree, he did seem a lot smarter during the campaign.  Maybe he suffered a brain injury since then.  "There's only 100-200 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan?  Better send 30,000 more troops!"  "I know--let's have more offshore drilling!  That won't come back to haunt us."  And so on, and so on.
[ Parent ]
Framing (4.00 / 1)
Adam's diary reminds me of a fairly long Lakoff piece I just read at HuffPost and which I'd recommend.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
One way of looking at the "mixed messaging" is that it reflects a buy-in of Republican/right conceptual frames that seem to hang over DC like a dark heavy cloud that filters virtually all communications emerging from DC elites.

As Lakoff once again explains (bolding is mine):

Frames are the cognitive structures we think with. They are physical, embodied in neural circuitry. Frames come in systems. Their circuitry is strengthened and often made permanent through use: the more the circuits are used, the stronger they get. Effective frames are not isolated. They build on, and extend, other frames already established.
All words are defined in terms of conceptual frames. When the words are heard, the frames are strengthened -- not just the immediate frames, but the whole system...

Framing can be done by long-term careful political messaging, or through education (say, by controlling school textbooks)...An important part of framing is the establishment of prototypes: social stereotypes, prototypes (typical case, ideals, nightmares, salient exemplars). Stereotypes are used in automatic reasoning and decision-making...

In politics, the high-level frames are the moral systems that define what is "right" for a conservative or progressive...Your goal, with bi-conceptual voters, is to activate your system of political frames and inhibit the other side's system of political frames. Your message should therefore fit your high-level frame system, and it should not fit the other side's high-level frame system. If it fits the other side's high-level frame system, your message will be helping the other side, because it will tend to make voters think using their frame system...

When the Democrats use conservative language, they activate more than the conservative framing on the given issue. They also activate and strengthen the high level, deep conservative moral frames. This tends to make voters more conservative overall -- and leads them to choose the real conservative position on the given issue, rather than the sort of conservative version provided by the democrats...

In the US, conservatives have set up an elaborate messaging system. It starts with an understanding of long-term framing and message experts who know how to use existing their long-term frame systems. Then there are think tanks, with experts who understand the high-level frame system and how it applies to the full range of issues. There are training institutes that teach tens of thousands of conservatives a year to think and talk using these framing systems and their language and argument forms. There are regular gatherings to consolidate messaging and policy around a contemporary issue that fits the conservative moral system. There are booking agencies that book conservative spokespeople on tv, talk radio, etc. There are lecture venues and booking agencies for conservative spokespeople. There are conservative media going on 24/7/365.

As a result, conservative language is heard constantly in many parts of the US. Conservative language automatically and unconsciously activates conservative frames and the high-level framing systems they are part of. As the language is heard over and over, the circuitry linking the language to conservative frames becomes stronger. Because the synapses in the neural circuits are stronger, they are easier to activate. As a result, conservative language tends to become the normal, preferred "mainstream" language for discussing current issues.

Recommendation
Don't move to the right. Start thinking longer term. Build as much of a communications system as possible. Design long-term framing for your own high level, moral system and basic policy domains. Fit your immediate messaging needs to the long-term frames. Carry on both kinds of messaging in parallel.

I hope to post some thoughts in response to Lakoff's recommendation in a diary, and would encourage others to do the same (as Paul and others already have at various times).  

A key, I believe, is a focused effort to build and expand a coherent structure of "high-level frames [that] are the moral systems that define what is 'right.'"  

As Lakoff suggests, this effort should reflect an understanding that "effective frames are not isolated [but] build on, and extend, other frames already established" and that progressive messages must fit a fundamentally progressive "high-level frame system, and...should not fit the other side's high-level frame system."  

The right may have more money, control of much of the airwaves and lobbying resources, and lots of years to develop their framing/messaging infrastucture.  But I'm convinced high-level progressive frames have a stronger and more durable moral core and can lead to policies that clearly offer more effective solutions to our problems, which may grow more acute and unavoidable in the years to come.  But these progressive policies must consistently and clearly build upon underlying progressive frames, not be posed in isolation and with language that buys into right wing conservative frames, an example of which Adam poses in this diary.

Thankfully, today we have access to powerful (and relatively inexpensive and accessible) digital technology and broadband connectivity that can enable a passionately progressive populism to express itself in networked and virally expansive forms.  

All this suggests to me the value of a consistent and coordinated effort to anchor a viral expansion of progressive messaging and mobilization to an integrated mutually-reinforcing set of "high-level [progressive] frames [that] are the moral systems that define what is 'right.'"

I suspect that if we have the high-level framing right, a viral expansion process can and will evolve productively and synergistically. That's just a theory, but I see signs of it already, and would love to see it more fully tested by reality.  

Lakoff is basically correct (0.00 / 0)
However, as a semantic point, I take issue with his use of the phrase "high-level" frame system, specifically because of the relationship between frames and the "low-level" reptilian portion of the human brain.

Fundamentally, framing deals with the "feelings" of the reptilian brain and "ideas" only occur within the context once a frame has already been created.

Republicans understand this much more intuitively.  This is why, even though Lakoff's basic point is correct, the sample op-ed that he proposes is far too cerebral.  He makes an intellectual case for immigration, but his example fails to touch upon sufficient reptilian triggers to make readers NEED to accept his arguments.

[ Parent ]
Why soft-pedal on being critical about this? (4.00 / 3)
Re: "This isn't a criticism so much as a bewilderment...."

Given that we desperately need a new New Deal, and the Obama is (once again) bronzing Reagan's frames and neglecting those in need, shouldn't this be criticized loudly and bluntly?

Mixed messaging | 28 comments
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