reflectivepundit

Deceptive Propaganda and Health Care Reform

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The images of mostly old Americans in chaotic townhall meetings this fall are unforgettable as are the untrue arguments against meaningful health care reform made in those gatherings. Although enjoying the benefits of their government-run Medicare entitlements, the elderly in particular ranted and raved against a public alternative to private health insurance.

The deceptive propaganda campaigns (just think of death panels) by conservative ideologues and a greedy insurance industry have misled rather than educate certain segments of society. Thus the outcry against the alleged horror of government bureaucrats making decisions about health care needs—although bureaucrats in insurance companies decide day-in and day-out what medical treatments will be paid for--or not.

When a propaganda of fear warns of socialism and communism taking hold and replacing good, old capitalism, such nonsense tends to scare the hell out of those who fear to be the losers of reforms.

It is a disgrace that a rapidly growing number of Americans do not have any health insurance. But not only Republicans but also several Democrats in the U.S. Senate do not embrace meaningful health care reform that must include a public option. Therefore, MSNBC’s talk show hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow called for setting up temporary free clinics for the uninsured to shame those conservative Democrats--Lincoln and Mark Pryor (both D-Ark.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.)—into joining the majority of Democrats and prevent a filibuster against health care reform in the Senate.
 
Until last night, when I happened to look at Larry King Live, I had never heard of “The Dr. Oz Show” and its host Dr. Mehmet Oz. But this physician’s account of his involvement in such a clinic in Houston drove home the plight of many, many millions of men, women, and children without health insurance.

There was the gripping account of a little girl that was recently examined in one of those temporary clinics in Houston. Although working, her mother has not been able to afford health insurance. As it turned out, the little girl had a hole in her heart. One wonders how many treatable health problems are not discovered for lack of insurance.

And that in the United States—not some third world country!

Presidential Power, Health Care Reform, and President Obama

By Brigitte L. Nacos
When it comes to ranking the greatest communicators in the White House, Ronald Reagan and the two Roosevelts, Franklin and Theodore, deserve top billing as does the current president. But even in the age of communication presidents cannot rely solely or mostly on what Samuel Kernell has explained as the need to “go public” and win popular support for presidential policies.

Barack Obama’s personal and his campaign camp’s communication skills were instrumental in winning first his party’s nomination and ultimately the presidency. Once in the White House, however, a president’s power to get his enacted does not derive from public support only.    

To be sure, public support is very important. The idea here is that popular backing of presidential policies will help to persuade members of congress and other influential actors to follow presidential leadership. Yet, bargaining with and convincing Washingtonians at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that it is in everyone’s interest to follow the president’s lead remains very much part of presidential power as it was in the past and as Richard Neustadt described it so well fifty years ago.

More recently, as presidential scholar Richard Rose recognized, post-modern presidents face three imperatives: going public, going Washington, and going international in the sense of communicating with and persuading the general public and fellow-decision-makers at home as well as foreign governments and publics. 

Going public and going Washington effectively is imperative especially with respect to a domestic policy goal that aims at fundamental changes. Meaningful health care reform is such a policy objective.

But, strangely and inexplicitly, President Obama was late on both counts. It was only after the opposition had gone public and eroded public support for a meaningful health care reform that candidate Obama promised during the campaign that the White House decided in favor of direct presidential appeals to the American people. And to this day, there is no intensive “going Washington” campaign.

To persuade members of Congress it is not enough to invite a bunch of representatives and senators to the White House for a group session with the president. As Lyndon Johnson demonstrated, when he pressed for key civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, support for highly controversial policies can be won by one-on-one contacts with as many individual law-makers as possible. The great communicator Ronald Reagan, too, worked the phones to push members of congress to support his first budget and major tax cuts—although he was recovering at the time from the injuries suffered during an assassination attempt.

Perhaps it would be too late now to make a difference in the outcome of the health care reform but White House aides should read or reread some basic literature on presidential power—starting with Neustadt, Kernell, and Rose.

Note to Pres. Obama: Public Diplomacy Must Aim at Largest Audience

By Brigitte L. Nacos
That President Barack Obama is sticking to his campaign promise of changing America’s foreign policy approach was obvious, when he granted his first formal White House interview to the Arab TV-network  al-Arabiya and used the occasion as a platform to address the Arab and Muslim street. As Karen DeYoung reports in the Washington Post, the responses to the president’s outreach “have been largely positive.” But her assessment is not based on polls of or interviews with regular Arabs and Muslims but rather on the reactions of various government officials. While there is no doubt that leaders of governments and of non-governmental groups took notice of Obama’s promise for a new start in America’s relations with the Muslim and Arab world, one wonders how many members of general public in these countries watched the actual interview.

Unfortunately, by selecting the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya network rather than the Qatar-owned al-Jazeera, the White House selected a moderate medium with a rather modest viewership over a more Arab-centric network with the by far largest audience in Arab countries.

This, then, was a missed opportunity in public diplomacy in that it did not aim for and did not get the attention of the largest segment of the targeted audience. As the 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll of the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland found by surveying representative samples of the public in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, taken together al-Jazeera has 53% of the audience whereas al-Arabiya has only 9%. Similarly, a December 2008 survey found that more than 50% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza al-Jazeera was the most watched satellite television compared to 10% for al-Arabiya.

Unlike traditional diplomacy or government-to-government communications—often during person-to-person contacts--, public diplomacy is directed to foreign publics and therefore must aim at reaching the largest number of people. You do not have to agree with the medium of communication as long as you are assured that an interview, a speech, and messages in whatever form are aired in their original form. In other words, al-Jazeera, not al-Arabiya, is the by far best platform for public diplomacy with Arabs and Muslims.

Hillary Clinton: “Two-for-One” Perception is Too Risky

By Brigitte L. Nacos
I read the other day that John Edwards endorsed the prominent roles that spouses play and should be entitled to play during presidential campaigns. Growing up in Western Europe, I did not witness anything close to the American tradition of spouses and other family members weighing in quite heavily during campaigns. Mostly, this is explained by the distinctly different candidate selection processes in parliamentary systems. In the current battle for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination there is a widely shared perception (part of it fueled by competitors’ campaigns and part of it by media reporting and comments) that former President Bill Clinton has been too outspoken and aggressive and divisive in his wife’s campaign efforts—especially, after her win in New Hampshire and before her poor showing in South Carolina.
    Senator Obama’s wife and former Senator Edwards’ wife have been blunt in their support of their husbands and critical of their husbands’ rivals. But they, unlike Bill Clinton, are not ex-presidents who are persistently in the limelight and have credits and liabilities accrued before and during presidential terms.
    While one would expect any man or woman in the American political context to go to bat for his or her spouse during campaigns for the highest public offices, in this year’s extraordinary and so far unique case, one of the spouses is a former president.

Hillary Clinton: Victim of Persistent Gender Prejudices?

Brigitte L. Nacos
During one of Hillary Clinton’s last campaign appearances before the primary in New Hampshire, two men screamed, “iron my shirt!” in an obvious effort to tell Hillary supporters that a woman’s role is that of a house-wife and her place the kitchen and laundry room—not in the White House. If you think that these two guys were rare chauvinist nuts among otherwise enlightened people without gender prejudices, you are living in a make-believe world. Males, white males, are still holding the power in America—including in the media corporations and the news rooms—and they are in excellent positions to influence the public climate—for better and for worse. Which is not to say that women in influential positions, especially those in the media, are free of these traditional prejudices or have chosen to embrace them, if only to prove that they are not weak sisters but as tough or tougher than the boys on the bus and in the news room. Just read the columns of Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins in the New York Times and you get the general picture. According to Reuters, Noami Wolf rejects the idea that “gender will determine whether the U.S. senator from New York and wife of former President Bill Clinton stands or falls… None of the polling or the focus groups indicate that people are ... (snubbing) her because she is a woman but because of a deficit in how she is projecting leadership.” I believe that Wolf is wrong. Neither the shapers of public’s perceptions nor voters will openly display gender bias. But the unbalanced reporting of the last several months and weeks undoubtedly worked on the Democratic side in favor of Barack Obama and against Hillary Clinton. 
As Gloria Steinem wrote in an op-ed article in the New York Times, the early stage of this candidate selection process has followed “our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter)."

Since Senator Clinton’s qualifications for the highest job in the land are difficult to attack, gender stereotypes have been used to trample her personal traits, her character, her sincerity. She has been characterized as robotic machine, shrill, tough, ruthless. In comments below articles on Clinton’s changing fortunes on the Washington Post web site, she was called a bitch, cold-hearted, an “so obsessed with getting the nomination she has lost focus on the issues and her cause.” After a campaign-tired Clinton teared up during a conversation with women in New Hampshire, reporters asked witnesses of the incident whether it was a purposely produced display of her human side. Like Geraldine Ferraro as candidate for the vice-presidency and other female candidates for executive offices before her, Hillary Clinton’s news coverage is different than that of male candidates and affects public perceptions of her and her rivals.

Marketing the American Brand: The Limits of Public Diplomacy

By Brigitte L. Nacos
When Karen Hughes, President Bush’s long-time confidant, resigned as head of the State Department’s public diplomacy section, America’s image abroad and especially in the Arab and Muslim world was still on the downward slide that she had hoped to halt and even reverse when she took the job two years earlier. Just like advertising executive Charlotte Beers and former ambassador Margaret Tutweiler before her, Hughes failed to replace the image of “the ugly American” with a positive brand. While astute in domestic politics, Hughes lacked knowledge of the Middle East, the particular target region of the administration’s efforts in public diplomacy. This showed during her first “listening tour” during several Arab countries, where she was perceived as clueless and patronizing. But even if the job at the Department of State were to be filled with someone familiar with the premier target region of
Washington’s efforts to market the “good America,” it would be next to impossible to succeed. While attractive branding and packaging matters in the marketing of products, it is the content of the box of cereal or wash detergent or whatever that ultimately determines success and failure. Similarly, while so-called strategic communication initiatives, such as Washington officials granting interviews to al-Jazeera and other Arab media, receive attention in the region, ultimately it is U.S. policy that matters, not the rhetoric of public diplomacy vendors.
In other words, as long as U.S. policy in the region remains the same, any successor of Karen Hughes will face a next to impossible task. This is wonderfully expressed in a Slate V animated editorial cartoon by Mark Fiore that depicts the daunting job description for the position vacated by Hughes. Click the following link to watch the clip:

All of this is not to say that the U.S. should forget about public diplomacy. But the same strategies and tactics that were very successful during the Cold War do no longer suffice in the age of instant global communication and world-wide television networks and other global media.

The Bush Administration's Rich History of Fake News

By Brigitte L. Nacos
At the heights of the California wildfires last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staged a news conference with Vice Admiral Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, presiding. But instead of facing real reporters’ real questions, FEMA staged a fake news conference during which FEMA bureaucrats masqueraded as reporters and threw softball questions at Mr. Johnson so that he could praise the agency that failed so terribly before, during, and after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. FEMA invited news organizations just 15 minutes before the fake news briefing began and thus made sure that no real reporter was present during the bogus event. Some cable networks, among them MSNBC and Fox News carried part of “news conference” as breaking news live from FEMA. The visuals were of Mr. Johnson only, while the fake reporters were heard and not seen--for obvious reasons. Neither newsroom personnel at the all news networks nor their audiences had reason to suspect that this was a sham event staged in order to resurrect the agency’s damaged reputation.

When the truth came out, the White House seemed not at all disturbed. Press secretary Dana Perino assured in her mild response that "it is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House. We certainly don't condone it. We didn't know about it beforehand. . . . They, I'm sure, will not do it again."

Not do it again? Perhaps not in the same agency and in the same form. But this is not the first instance in which the Bush administration has done more than put its spin on the news. Indeed, as the New York Times reported in early 2005, 
“Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.”

Manufacturing the News: Michael Deaver and Karl Rove

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The death of Michael Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan’s premier image maker, and the departure of Karl Rove from the Bush White House highlight the centrality of public relations, propaganda, and manufactured news in modern White Houses and administrations. Power-holders and power-seekers have always tried and often succeeded in manipulating public views about themselves, their politics, and policies, but Michael Deaver opened a new chapter of public relations stagecraft during the Reagan years. While major factors during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and his associates proved the most aggressive and ruthless yet in marketing a president, branding their party, and manufacturing news to sell their policies—most notably the Iraq War. Calling Deaver rightly “the media maestro who shaped President Ronald Reagan’s public image,” the Washington Post’s Patricia Sullivan writes. “As the White House deputy chief of staff during the first term of the Reagan presidency, Deaver orchestrated Reagan's every public appearance, staging announcements with an eye for television and news cameras. From a West Wing office adjacent to the Oval Office, Deaver did more than anyone before him to package and control the presidential image.”

Commenting on Karl Rove’s sudden retirement from his White House job, Frank Rich takes his readers back to the summer of 2002, when “Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. ‘You don't introduce new products in August,’ he said sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.” While Card offered a glimpse of the behind-the-scene marketing tricks in selling the war on terrorism--in Iraq, Karl Rove was, no doubt, the brain behind such political maneuvers.

Democracy, Pelosi’s Iraq Plan, and the Washington Post’s Editorial Page

By Brigitte L. Nacos
In a democracy, citizens’ policy preferences are supposed to influence governmental decision-making. But that fundamental premise of the rules of the game in democratic systems is often ignored by the Washington Post’s editorials when it comes to the Iraq war. The paper’s lead editorial today criticizes sharply House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to force President Bush’s hand in the Iraq mess by controlling funding and setting benchmarks for the withdrawal of American troops as a means to “winning votes in the United States.” In other words, the Post’s editorial page is well aware that the majority of Americans rejects the administration’s Iraq policies and supports the congressional Democrats’ oppositional positions. That is the message of public opinion surveys.

Why, then, is the Pelosi plan so out of bounce for the Washington Post’s editorial page? Because “the only constituency House Speaker Pelosi ignored in her plan for amending President Bush’s supplemental war funding bill are "the people of the country that U.S, troops are fighting to stabilize.” What kind of logic! The editorial condemns the Speaker for listening to the majority of Americans and ignoring Iraqis. For one, decision-makers in a democracy should be guided by their own citizens in the first place. But in this case, Iraqis were not ignored either since most Iraqis have also come to oppose a long-term presence of American-led coalition forces. What the Post editorial conveys is this: Those in charge of the editorial page, just like the Bush administration, know what is best for Americans and Iraqis—never mind what public opinion here and there reveals.Is this the kind of democracy that the Post’s editorial writers and the administration they support so staunchly have in mind for Iraq?

The Limits of Manipulation: U.S. Public Opinion and the War on Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Most Americans are far more realistic than the Bush administration in judging the impact of the Iraqwar on the threat of terrorism. According to a new poll commissioned by The Third Way National Security Project, 55 percent of the public believe that the invasion of Iraq has made the United States less safe and 54 percent think that the Iraq war “is a distraction that diverts resources and attention away from the real war on terror.” I assume, the majority means that the real war on terrorism would concentrate on hunting down Al Qaeda leaders and followers around the world. Moreover, as Washington Post columnist David Broder writes, “Large majorities -- including most Republicans -- reject Vice President Cheney's contention that the absence of a second attack means we are safer. Instead, they say that the threat of terrorism has increased since 2001, and they believe that the war in Iraq has made us less safe, not more.” Indeed, four of five Americans disagree with the Vice President on this count (89 percent Democrats, 87 percent Independents, 67 percent Republicans). Three of four Americans (85 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans, and 75 percent of Independents) believe that “in the last few years, the US has focused too much on lofty ideals. We should focus instead on real threats to our own security.” These attitudes of the majority of Americans are contrary to the administration’s views. Like the President, most Americans believe that terrorism is a very serious threat (in fact, 86 percent consider “terrorism as serious a threat to America and the world today as Nazism and Communism were in the 20^th century), but a majority no longer supports major assumptions and goals of his administration’s counterterrorist policies. Thus, two thirds of Americans want a foreign policy that protects American security regardless of “whether it spreads or ideals or not.” Nearly three of five Americans want the U.S.to consider negotiations with Iran and Syria, if that would be helpful to America’s security interests.