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

The last in a continuing series of backgrounders from Fleishman-Hillard’s Brussels office on the Copenhagen Summit. It begins with what many might consider an understatement:

The Copenhagen Climate Conference did not meet most expectations. After two weeks of negotiations, world leaders delivered a three-page non-binding political declaration (‘Copenhagen Accord’) that fails to provide a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, expiring in 2012. The text mentions that global emissions must be reduced ‘so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2°C’ but it fails to clarify the means to achieve this objective. In terms of key players, EU leaders happened to be sidelined, whereas China and the US took a leading role in drafting the final agreement. This is a major lesson drawn from the Conference: the G2 is a reality and the EU was not the driving force it expected to be.

Click here for the rest of the report.

December 21st, 2009 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.
Tags: Copenhagen Accord · Copenhagen Summit · Kyoto Protocol

The Bolivian presidential elections to be held Sunday seems to be bereft of any surprises as to who will win the presidency. All pre-election surveys indicate that Evo Morales will not have any difficulties in winning reelection at the polls on December 6th eclipsing his seven contenders in the first-round and avoiding the need of a runoff election.

It seems a foregone conclusion that the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), the party that catapulted the Aymara cocalero leader to the Palacio Quemado, will once again be close to matching its impressive showing in the 2005 election when it garnered 55 percent total of the direct vote for the Presidency, for all public opinion surveys are currently pointing in that direction.

[Read more →]

December 3rd, 2009 by Rissig Licha | Comment on this.

Last week, we saw the nomination of the men and women who will head the European Union’s Executive arm – the European Commission – for the next five years under European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. This team will now face relevant committees in the European Parliament early in the New Year for questions before the team is subject to a vote of approval in that body on 26 January. Fleishman-Hillard’s Brussels office has assembled this excellent summary of these new leaders.

Why are these people important? As FH Brussels points out, it is the European Commission that retains the sole right of initiative to propose binding legislation that affects business across the European Union’s 27 countries across most of the policy fields that affect a wide range of public policies, including product standards and safety, energy, transport, environment, health and consumer protection, financial services and competition.

Not only will the rules they promulgate have an impact in markets from the UK and Germany to Poland and the Czech Republic, but increasingly in our globally connected world European standards are picked up and used in other jurisdictions and by global companies seeking to simplify their global supply chain.

December 2nd, 2009 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.
Tags: European Commission · European Parliament · European Union · Jose Manuel Barroso

Heres’s the third in a series of background briefs from Fleishman-Hillard’s Brussels office on issues that delegates from around the world will grapple with at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. This brief focuses on reform of the Clean Development Mechanism, which will be negotiated in Copenhagen.

“The CDM is one of three flexible market-based mechanisms introduced under the Kyoto Protocol. This mechanism allows industrialized countries with emissions reduction targets to invest in carbon reduction projects in developing countries in order to get carbon credits, which can be used to meet their compliance obligations. The main rationale behind the CDM is to facilitate industrialized countries to meet their targets and encourage the private sector and developing countries to contribute to emissions reduction efforts.”

“The rationale for reform,” our Brussels colleagues note, “is based around three issues: governance, project integrity and the global distribution of investment.”

Click here for the full analysis.

November 17th, 2009 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.
Tags: Clean Development Mechanism · Copenhagen Climate Conference · Fleishman-Hillard's Brussels office

Sir Christopher Meyer, a member of Fleishman-Hillard’s International Advisory Board and career veteran of the British diplomatic corps (he closed out his career in 2003 as Ambassador to the United States), was here in Washington today to share his views on emerging international trends. We’ve captured some of his thoughts in the following series of video clips.

He touched a variety of issues including the spring 2010 British parliamentary elections; the evolving state of the British media; the role of the E.U. and E.U.-U.S. relations following the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty; and the changing perceptions from Europe of the U.S. since the election of Barack Obama as President. Herewith:

Globalism and its impact on nationalism:

The changing media landscape in the U.K.:

2010 British Parliamentary elections:

E.U.-U.S. relations after enactment of the Lisbon Treaty:

Changing European perceptions of the U.S. :

November 9th, 2009 by Jeff Weintraub | 1 Comment
Tags: British Ambassador to the U.S. · E.U.-U.S. relations · European perceptions of U.S. · Fleishman-Hillard International Advisory Board · globalism · Sir Christopher Meyer · U.K. 2010 Parliamentary elections · U.K. media

A November 4 article in the New England Journal of Medicine compared U.S. public opinion about the health care overhaul effort during the Clinton Administration and the current one that the Obama Administration has championed. The results are that the pattern of public opinion is similiar today to what it was in the early ’90s, probably not a good sign for advocates of the current bill, but not necessarily the end of the world.

The study by Robert J. Blendon, and John M. Benson looks at a galaxy of polls taken during both periods, and it found that while overwhelming majorities of Americans say now and said then that they want health care reform, support for the specific proposals working their ways through the legislative process was (and is) weak. They like the idea of reform but not necessarily the reality of it.

[Read more →]

November 6th, 2009 by Jeff Weintraub | Comment on this.
Tags: Clinton Administration · health care reform · New England Journal of Medicine · public opinion