Disapproval of Obama’s job as president has now reached a majority. As a Democrat, that disappoints me. But I also find myself frustrated with the American public. Through my admitted Koolaid-tinted lens, I see in Obama a president who has fulfilled his campaign promised to a degree unprecedented in my lifetime. The stimulus legislation, healthcare reform, financial services reform, etc., etc. were all policies he promised to enact in the campaign and he did it. In today’s Washington post Eugene Robinson outlines some recent accomplished that have gone all but unnoticed.   During the campaign, he was considered a great communicator, the second coming of Ronald Reagan.   But he doesn’t seem to be able to communicate effectively as president, as evidenced by the chart above.

Of course, the real reason he’s suffering in the polls is the economy, pure and simple.  One enormous blunder his administration committed at the outset was to dramatically underestemate the depths of the recession.  He gave his opponents a powerful talking point when his people promised that the stimulus would bring unemployment under 8%, a goal that some suggest will not beached in his entire first term.  Even without that blunder, however, people’s opinions are formed by the reality they confront.  It is clear, that no accomplishment by a president can overcome a persistent 9% unemployment rate.  So, it’s not about communication and its not about legislative accomplishments, it’s about results.  I guess that’s the way it should be.

I took some comfort from a biography that I’m reading about Lyndon Johnson by Charles Peters. It describes the election of 1946, the one right after a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress presided over victory in World War II.  In that election, Republicans took majorities in both Houses.  It was around that time that the British voters ousted Winston Churchill.

In the end, frustrated as I might be, if the people rule, the people rule, for better or for worse.  To cite an overused quote from the aforementioned Winston Churchill (probably uttered after his defeat), “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”

August 20th, 2010 by Bill Black | Comment on this.
Tags: Churchill · Lyndon Johnson · Obama · Polls

Republicans scored a victory last night by slowing Democrat’s momentum after passing healthcare reform this week.

As reported by POLITICO:

Senate Republicans have succeeded in forcing Democrats to send the health reform reconciliation bill back to the House for another vote, after Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin ruled early Thursday morning that two minor provisions violated the chamber’s rules and couldn’t be included in the final bill.

The reconciliation bill included negotiated amendments to the healthcare bill that House and Senate Democrats demanded in exchange for their vote on the broader healthcare reform legislation.

Democratic leadership seems unfazed by this result. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) said he was “confident the House will quickly pass the bill with these minor changes.”

More later.

March 25th, 2010 by Craig Paridy | Comment on this.
Tags: healthcare reform · House of Representatives · Reconciliation

Just to reinforce the point I made in my last post about how digital communications tools are powering public affairs campaigns, check out this item that ran last week on Marketplace, the public-radio program on business. It’s focused on how political and public affairs campaigns are increasingly using search engine marketing — that is, those sponsored links you see on Google and besides articles that subscribe to Google’s ad tools.

For public affairs practitioners, this is not news, but many of our clients are learning for the first time how effective and efficient it is to buy search terms on Google and other search engines.

[Read more →]

March 24th, 2010 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.

This is a slightly belated, but nonetheless proud, recognition that a couple of weeks ago Fleishman-Hillard won the prestigious PR Week Award for Best Public Affairs Campaign for 2010 for the Fix Housing First Coalition. Our public affairs team in Washington built and mobilized a network of thousands from around the country who called on Congress to provide a tax credit last year for qualified home buyers. Here’s a more detailed description of the campaign, which appeared last year on this blog.

It’s not only a great validation of the great performance of our team, which took the campaign from nothing to extraordinary success in a matter of only a few months. It’s also acknowledgment of how digital communications tools — such as Twitter and Facebook — are becoming powerful and indispensable components of public affairs. This is how public affairs gets done these days.

Let’s hear it for the team.

March 24th, 2010 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.

For months now, we’ve been hearing that the Conservative Party is on track to defeat the ruling Labour Party in the United Kingdom’s coming elections this spring. With that in mind, Fleishman-Hillard’s London office has created “Conservative Insight,” a handy Web site that provides everything you want to know (and probably more about the Tory leadership and their positions on a range of issues. Whether you know a lot or a little about what may soon be the governing party in the U.K., this is a great resource.

March 24th, 2010 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.

After more than a year of hostile debate, Congress passed a healthcare reform bill. This morning, President Barack Obama signed H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, into law.

While Democrats and Republicans continue their contentious debate on the legislative merits of the legislation – especially as the Senate considers the reconciliation legislation of negotiated fixes - elements of the bill are being implemented. However, it will take almost a decade for full implementation of the bill’s elements.

The Wall Street Journal developed a timeline of the various provisions of the bill:

[Read more →]

March 23rd, 2010 by Craig Paridy | Comment on this.
Tags: healthcare reform · Nancy Pelosi · Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act · President Obama

Fleishman Hillard senior strategist Dan Baxter recently completed his assignment in our Beijing office to return to Brussels. In a sort of valedictory, he offers very useful guidance in the online publication PublicAffairsAsia on how to be an effective public affairs advocate in China.  While the Chinese government may seem opaque to Westerners, Dan shows us that the fundamentals of dealing with political leaders have some verities the world over:

It is also important to understand that, like all governments, Chinese officials need reliable information by which to inform the policy-making process. Much of this can come from an individual’s own views and those of recognised stakeholders, but decision-makers also rely increasingly on blogs and social networks to measure the public ‘temperature’. Major policy initiatives, such as food safety, can be subject to lengthy public consultations. As with any other market, the specific mix of tools will be different for each situation.

I recommend reading the entire piece as it is a truly useful brief tutorial from someone who has actually “walked the talk.”

January 31st, 2010 by Bill Black | 1 Comment
Tags: China · Public Affairs

Here’s a dispatch from Bill Black, who oversees Fleishman-Hillard’s global public affairs practice (and who is traveling as I write this), on what the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday on Citizens United v. FEC might mean for companies’ and unions’ public affairs activities. He writes:

I am just returning from the annual National Grassroots Conference of the Public Affairs Council, at which I delivered a presentation on social media.  The Citizens United case was, as you might imagine, a major topic of discussion at this meeting.

First, a disclaimer.  I am not a lawyer and was follows is not a legal analysis of the case.  It is simply a report on what other, presumably more-informed, people are saying about its implications.

There were essentially two schools of thought on the consequences of this case.  Among public affairs practitioners, the early assumption was that this would bring about massive change in how public affairs advocacy is conducted.  Companies, associations and labor unions will now have the ability to try to directly influence the election or defeat of members of congress or candidates.  Therefore, the assumption was that large amounts of new money will be devoted to political communications in election years.  Organizations will now wield either the implicit or  explicit threat of huge independent advocacy campaigns in the states or districts of their targets among elected officials.  These campaigns can include all manner of advertising, grassroots activity and/or voter registration.  And the voter registration can be conducted with the explicit intent of the election or defeat of a candidate.  Thus, this view holds that vast quantities of new money will be entering the public affairs arena.

The other school of thought, advanced by a legal expert on lobbying and political regulation, is that the impact will be much more modest.  While associations might step up their activities to some degree, corporations are unlikely to markedly change their behavior, due to the potential reputational damage among customers, investors or other stakeholders of partisan political activities with corporate funds.   He was also of the view that there is no current bottleneck holding back significant amounts of political spending by special interests.

But here’s the biggest obstacle.  The political activity that this ruling allows must be independent of the beneficiary of the spending.  There can be no “coordination” between the corporation, association or labor union and the current or prospective elected official.  This lawyer asserted that “coordination” remains a vaguely defined term, so he advises his clients to be totally “antiseptic” in this area, meaning no communications, whatsoever.  Under this advice, a corporation conducting this sort of campaign would need to cease communicating with targeted members of congress, meaning no lobbying.  By definition, targeted members would key members and corporations would be loathe to end any communication with them.

This lawyer acknowledged that the situation could be different among industry groups or labor unions.  They might be willing to test the limits of the definition of the word “coordination,” and endure the litigation on behalf of their constituents.  So, if “coordination” is tightly defined to the point where some communications would amount to a “safe harbor,” allowing lobbying at the same time an organization is conducting an independent issue campaign, the money might flow,  as the PA practitioners expect (and hope).

This is just a first take and there remains quite a bit of  dust in the air.  But I thought this  might be useful to the other inquiring minds.  If there are any lawyers out there with a more educated view, please feel free to weigh in.

January 22nd, 2010 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.
Tags: Citizens United v. FEC · U.S. Supreme Court

Over the past few years, Congress has begun to embrace the power of social media to communicate with the public. Twitter, the microblogging service, has been one of the main platform used by members of Congress.

FHDC’s Mark Senak, proprietor of Eye on FDA, recently analyzed the growth of Twitter on Capitol Hill in a new white paper, entitled “Twongress – the Power of Twitter in Congress.”

Click here to view and download the white paper.

In his analysis, Mark found a few interesting trends:

• There are 89 Republicans using Twitter and 32 Democrats.
• House Republicans are particularly active on Twitter, sending out 29,162 Tweets through January 3, 2010
• Over the same time period, House Democrats sent out 5,503

While some members of Congress have harnessed the power of Twitter, most have not. As Mark points out:

“There has been little effort to develop the resource to engage communities by classifying their tweets by topic for their constituencies through the use of hashtags. For example, one could organize one’s tweets under hashtags for “taxes” or even by party – such as”DEMHCR” for Democratic member views on health care reform. Those tweets could be aggregated at Web sites, and twitter could drive traffic to those Web sites. Without such strategic efforts by either individuals in Congress or by the parties, the primary use of Twitter by Congress is merely as a message platform to push out points direct to waiting constituencies.”

For more analysis, make sure to download the full report. Also, check out the New York Times’ Bernie Becker’s article on the report, posted to The Caucus blog.

More later.

January 14th, 2010 by Craig Paridy | Comment on this.
Tags: Capitol Hill · Congress · Eye on FDA · Mark Senak · Twitter · Twongress

I came across an interesting article that examined online advertisement spending levels for both candidates in the recent New Jersey gubernatorial election, and the results are somewhat surprising. Neither candidate spent a significant portion of their budget on online advertisement, even though both ran online ads on state political Web sites for the bulk on the campaign. Republican candidate Chris Christie only spent 2 percent of his budget online, while Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine spent less than 5 percent of his budget online (online was combined with cable television advertising).

This raises an interesting question: in a low-turnout election year, did these two candidates miss the boat with an electorate that was overwhelmingly courted via the Internet in the 2009 Presidential election? Christie had difficulty securing the Republican base vote until shortly before the election, and Corzine lost in large part because the Democratic base vote stayed home.

With hundreds of targeted federal and state level elections in play this November, and financial resources constrained, it will be interesting to see how the pattern of online spending plays out in 2010.

January 12th, 2010 by Silvio Marcacci | Comment on this.
Tags: 2010 Elections · Electoral turnout · New Jersey · Online advrtising