Wednesday, August 17, 2011

It's All About the Messaging

From our friend John Aravosis over at AmericaBlog:

Ezra Klein has an interesting piece up, from yesterday, arguing that the White House should take a page from the GOP playbook in pushing for actions on jobs. And Ezra is right, to a degree. The Republicans are ruthless and the President has been somewhat spineless. I think Ezra is incorrect, however, in arguing that Boehner wouldn't have resorted to a PR campaign to get his way.

That's exactly what Republicans do. They grab a message, and beat it to death, again and again and again, until you're sick of it, but suddenly, one day the entire country is parroting the same message.

Democrats, on the other hand, think that issuing a single press release [or sending a single email to an aging email address list] "is" a PR campaign.

So, yes, the GOP does take hostages, and it does all the other high-stakes things needed to pass legislation in this town, but they don't forgo PR as some kind of unnecessary politesse. It's key to their campaign, and always has been (e.g., death panels, Obamacare, the stimulus didn't create any jobs, if the deficit isn't addressed today we're all going to die, etc.) The GOP is great at PR. Our leaders in power need to learn their game.

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