How Biden Can Take It to the Republicans
By: Stan Crock
Tags: Biden, Republicans, Communication, Politics

How Democrats Can Take It to the Republicans

By Stan Crock

When it comes to messaging and attack ads, Republicans dominate Democrats. The GOP is better at messaging (see the Willy Horton ads attacking Michael Dukakis). And Republicans benefit from a structural advantage. They don’t believe government should do anything, so they offer fewer legislative actions that can be grist for criticism. Activist Democrats, in contrast, want government to do things, so everything from regulations to giving more people health insurance coverage (really?) gives the GOP targets.

But Democrats don’t have to be impotent in the face of the Republican onslaught. While they have not been particularly adept since President Johnson’s anti-Goldwater daisy and nukes ad, they have two options — and should exercise both.

Option 1: After four years of Trump and the Tea Party experiment in Kansas under Governor Sam Brownback, we know the consequences of GOP governance (actually the lack thereof). Democrats now have ammo for some powerful ads that can resonate with Joe Sixpack.

What kind of images could be part of the campaign?

· Endless lines of cars waiting at food banks

· Closed stores

· Lines of applicants for unemployment benefits

· Homeless encampments

· Flint’s lead in the water, which actually is in 200 communities, according to Erin Brokovich

· Pittsburgh circa 1950 and say Make America Grimy Again

· Collapsing bridges and highways

· Fires burning out of control

· Body bags in refrigerator trucks

· Classrooms with 70 first graders

· The parking garage converted to hospital rooms

· Thalidomide babies

· Increase in food poisoning cases

· Empty police precincts and fire stations

This is an exhausting but hardly an exhaustive list. Examine what failures by every federal agency produce. Let Trump voters see what he — and the notion of less government — have wrought. Let it sink in. They have to come around, and Democrats have to help them do so. Michael Lewis’s frightening book, The Fifth Risk, looks at the effects on a few agencies of Trump appointees’ mismanagement through ignorance, neglect, venality, callousness, and evil intent. But while he does so brilliantly, what the Dems need to do is something visual that relates to everyman. Everyman will not reads Lewis’s book, unfortunately. There’s plenty of ad material for great media and social media campaigns.

Option 2: Option 2 is the flip side of Option 1. Ever since President Jimmy Carter, and especially since Ronald Reagan, vast swaths of the public have viewed the federal government as part of the problem instead of as part of the solution. Reagan’s favorite line was: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

That narrative has to change for a Democratic administration to succeed. In fact, government often is part of the solution. But it is a victim of the prevention conundrum. When the government succeeds in preventing a problem (Ebola, H1N1 virus), the problem doesn’t arise. So there is no story; no visibility for the government activity; alas, no credit; and incensed taxpayers think they’re getting nothing for their tax dollars.

Making matters worse, the notion of the public common, working for the common good, has fallen on hard times. Look no further than wearing a mask. It is a tiny step that can save thousands of lives — and millions of people won’t act to benefit the community. Ditto for pollution. It is in no individual’s or company’s interest to stop polluting, but it is in the public’s interest to keep the earth habitable. Government is the only institution that can solve that problem. The markets and private sector won’t. If they had an incentive to and could, they would have done so before government stepped in.

Changing this narrative requires coming up with stories about every government agency and how they make life better and safer for everyone every day. This will require going back to the Obama Administration because of the backsliding during the Trump years. One example: making 401(k) plan participation an opt-out option instead of an opt-in option. It significantly increased overnight the number of people with retirement savings. What this means is if workers don’t take any action — if they don’t opt-out of a plan, and most people predictably won’t — they will participate in a 401(k) plan. Previously, they had to opt-in — take an action to opt-in to participate — and most people predictably didn’t do that either. This simple change, shrewdly relying on what’s called behavioral economics, is the kind of invisible government action that makes us better off.

Here some other suggestions.

·Look at the finalists for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, known as the Sammies, awarded by the Partnership for Public Service. Most recently they included a federal employee who developed an Ebola virus treatment, one who helped expand telehealth options for veterans, and one who worked on responses to and prevention of mass shootings in schools, workplaces, and public areas.

·The accuracy of the National Weather Service’s five-day weather forecasts today is what the 24-hour accuracy was a decade ago — a critical factor for hurricane evacuations and floods

· The Fed has stepped in to bolster the economy (a power Republicans would like to hamper as a Democrat takes office during a huge recession)

· More Americans have health insurance coverage thanks to the Affordable Care Act

· Improvement in air quality

· Improvement in water quality in waterways

This is a more difficult task than Option 1 in terms of coming up with stories and visuals that resonate. But all government agencies should have success stories. Otherwise, Republicans are right that they should close up shop.

What follows may seem like a digression, but it’s not. The Obama Administration was reluctant to ballyhoo its successes, especially economic progress, partly because it didn’t want to appear tone deaf when so many people were still hurting from the 2008 recession. (Sounding tone deaf is not something that afflicts Republicans.) This was a failure of messaging imagination. You can be empathetic, starting out by saying a lot of people are still hurting, and we are doing all we can, and then discuss the progress.

I concede that sometimes issues are complicated. For example, Republicans had a mantra that the Obama recovery was the slowest post-War recovery. That was true but misleading. Normally there are two kinds of recessions, the common business-cycle recessions and less frequent financial-crisis recessions. Business cycle recessions end fairly quickly. According to the terrific book, This Time Is Different, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the 16 recessions after 1919 averaged about 13 months. They are almost thermostatic and self-correcting.

The 2008 recession was not a business-cycle recession. It was a financial-crisis recession, like the Depression, which freezes the banking and credit system. It takes longer to emerge from these recessions. Reinhart and Rogoff say unemployment rises for almost five years and seven percentage points, and average gross domestic product (GDP) decline is 9.3%. Under President Obama, thanks to his stimulus package, unemployment rose 5.6 percentage points, not seven, and rose for two and a half years, not five. And GDP dropped by 4.3%, not 9.3%. So by the standards of financial-crisis recession, Obama did great. But you never heard that story. This is too complicated for a bumper sticker, and the Obama Administration never got the credit it was due.

This is relevant because President Biden can’t afford to give the Republicans similar carte blanche. We’re in another recession now that is not a business-cycle recession or a financial-crisis recession. It’s a deep pandemic recession, which given the data and context arguably is worse than the others. In fact, after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, regions of the U.S. that didn’t take measures such as social distancing stayed more depressed than those that did for five years. With that benchmark, it could take all of Biden’s first term for the nation as a whole to recover. When Biden has success stories — and he will — he must avoid making the mistake Obama did and shine a light on them while noting it will take a long time to recover from the mess President Trump left.

Biden must outmessage the GOP. He must explain how others can duplicate the success stories. Interview those with new jobs and have them explain what happened. Their success should be a lesson for those who voted for President Trump and for those who voted for Biden. Biden must show what government is doing for Joe Sixpack. You don’t have to say Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell didn’t lift a finger. When the number of unemployed drops from 20 million, and Biden has more people employed than when he was inaugurated (unlike Trump), the newly employed will note the difference.

The bottom line is that there are two parallel paths for Democrats to change — and win — the narrative. Imagination and hard work can get out the story that Washington is not the enemy. It’s a helping hand. The American people need to know this once again. Make the government great again, and we can make America great.