obama

           

The Twittering Machine

The Twittering Machine (1922)-Paul Klee

The news has been covering the testy exchange between Obama and CNN’s Ed Henry.  Henry asked a series of questions, including one of why the Obama himself wasn’t immediately outraged about the AIG bonuses.  Barack responded by saying he likes to know what he’s talking about before he speaks.  Sure, the press is covering it, but the press is also covering how Twitterers are reacting to these stories and video clips.

 

You can see for yourself by searching on Twitter: Obama Ed Henry.  On Wednesday, March 25, as of 11:44 EDT, the responses were trending towards Obama, with many tweets using the term “smackdown.”

There are nuances of communication that are more in the open now more than ever.  The ability for Web 2.0 multimedia to be shared quickly can help to provide context for these exchanges, as well as providing users with a fora for getting their views out there.  I would even argue that these technologies can even gauge the American zeitgeist to a certain extent.

Last night on CNN on Anderson Cooper, Ed Henry gave his side of the exchange on the AIG outrage matter:

I thought it was funny that at the end AC quipped, “you can nurse your wounds tonight, Ed.”

Will these 2.0 technologies (like Twitter) create both challenges and opportunities in future PR battles?  Undoubtedly.  (Will PR turn into pwn relations in certain circles?)  It will be interesting to see how the use of these technologies evolves over time.

On the eve of the president’s second news conference, he might want to take a look at John Kingdon’s classic Agendas, Alterantives and Public Policy.  Along with setting the record for most mixed-metaphors in a book (garbage cans, primeval soup, policy streams, policy windows), the study provides a key insight for understanding policy change.  In a nutshell, Kingdon argues that if you can merge policy problems, the decision-making agenda, and policy solutions brought forth by policy entrepreneurs, a policy window opens up (I know, the high school English teacher in you is cringing), that allows you to realize a policy agenda.

Kingdon’s streams imply an order to the policy process…only a handful of problems and solutions can garner the attention of policy makers at any given point in time and only a certain set of solutions are acceptable to decision makers and the public. By contrast, the Obama administration’s new budget seems to be part of a “shock and awe” approach to the policy process…flood the public agenda with a number of simultaneous problems and solutions (health care, education, climate change, etc.) in the hope that the deluge will overwhelm members and result in mass policy change.

It’s an interesting and maybe unprecedented public policy strategy. If it works, it may signal a new approach to policy change, albeit one at which the framers would cringe. Personally, I’m skeptical that we’ll get a budget that looks anything like it currently does. The Senate is already putting the brakes on the process.

What do you think of a “shock and awe” approach to policy change?

This decision was inevitable. For an Obama administration that professes to favor transparency in governance, lifting the ban on media images of soldiers’ coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base from Iraq and Afghanistan was a no-brainer.Soldiers' Coffins But even for the Bush administration, the ban was the most apparent example of two deeply conflicted modes of media management: secrecy at home and guided exposure abroad.

Of course, like many of the media management tactics that administration employed, the policy itself pre-dates George W. Bush’s arrival in D.C. The ban was put into place during his father’s tenure in the White House, but was never fully enforced until the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. For journalists already accustomed to the notoriously secretive ways of the second Bush administration, it was no surprise that they would deny access to such politically powerful images. Many of Bush’s advisors, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, felt strongly that images of soldiers’ coffins had turned public opinion against the Vietnam War and hoped to avoid a similar result in the current conflicts. Less than a year into Bush’s first term and already known for their ability to shape media storylines with a vice-like grip on information (starkly contrasting the leaky Clinton White House), the administration officials surprised no one by restricting access.

Nonetheless, from the Pentagon’s perspective, the increased enforcement of the ban on such images marked a reversal of a larger trend. I have written elsewhere about the history of media-military relations, but, in short, military officials felt that journalists had far too much free reign in the conflicts of Vietnam and, much more recently, Somalia. Such independence, they believed, had led to largely negative coverage. In an impulsive leap to the other extreme, the Pentagon stowed journalists in pressrooms in Kuwait during the first Gulf War – an arrangement reporters and media outlets bitterly decried. For the 2003 invasion of Iraq (and to a limited extent in Afghanistan), the Pentagon introduced its controversial media embedding program, allowing journalists to attach themselves to units.

Importantly, this strategy was the exact opposite of their domestic media strategy. Rather than block media access altogether, they gave the press in-depth access to soldiers and military units, while at the same time, successfully steering them away from covering the consequences of the invasion for the civilian population. Though the embedding program was as successful a media management tactic as the secrecy in D.C., it did not breed the same sort of resentment in journalists as it provided them with fascinating (albeit one-sided) coverage. For this reason, it was the better strategy: shape the coverage, but leave them happy.

In some ways, we should question why the Bush administration didn’t reform the soldier coffin ban themselves, employing the lessons of their international media strategy with the domestic press. Rather than blocking images (which only generated more interest from the press), why didn’t the administration encourage the Pentagon to arrange sessions with vetted pro-invasion military families who would speak of the importance of the sacrifice their son or daughter made? Perhaps, they feel the image of dead Americans on U.S. soil would simply unpalatable to the American public. Returning to the current administration, the question for the future will be whether they are ushering in a legitimate age of transparency and broader media access, or if they’ve simply learned a lesson about savvy media management from their predecessors.

obama speech

Gene Koo has an interesting observation about Obama’s rhetorical style:

By using complex constructions that resist distillation, Obama minimizes out-of-context critics, although he cannot mute them (witness the “bitter” comment).

Koo suggests his rhetorical style allows him to bypass traditional media that relies on sound bytes to distill arguments and to speak directly to the American people. Personally, I think the bigger constraint for the media is that Obama’s presentation of self defies easy caricature. Pundits haven’t been able to settle on an salient frame from which to attack him….yet. remember, the McCain campaign struck brief gold with “The One” ads that painted him as a celebrity. Were it not for the economic collapse, that meme might have stuck. It is fun to have a major political figure that flummoxes the mainstream media.

Done with Internet and Politics syllabus, on to Public Policy. Speaking of public policy (what you guys call Social Problems), if you guys aren’t aware of TED, it is an amazing teaching resource. I showed this Hans Rosling talk to my Research Methods class (It would work equally well for social inequality or race, class, gender). I don’t think I’ve ever seen students that excited about data! It wasn’t natural 😉

On to le liens épais I think that’s ThickLinks in French.
Women of the Klan – UC Press Blog

From Andrew – The Obama Effect?

Al Jazeera makes its Gaza coverage available to the public under Creative Commons license via Jo Ito’s blog

Great infographic on international migration in Good Magazine – from our friends at Sociological Images

and please indulge my soccer geekdom:

Landon Donovan with a nice goal in a friendly for Bayern Munich (around 5 minute mark)

Ben Smith at Politico has a fascinating little tidbit about Obama’s release of photos from his daughters’ first day of school.  While Smith suggests that at first glance the release of these photos might seem invasive, he links to Garance Franke-Ruta at the Washington Post who offers up this keen observation:

It may sound counterintuitive, but the best way for Barack Obama to keep any of his life private in this era of cell phone-snaps, Facebook goofs and long-lensed paparazzi is to do exactly this: reliably and regularly release pictures of newsworthy intimate family moments in a manner that he can control.

That’s because online, the only way to control your own image is to drown outsiders’ takes in media stream of your own creation — and there is no news agency or paparazzo in the world with better access to inner workings of Obamaland and the Obama family than Obama himself.

If Obama’s active Flickr account means the end of the paparratzi, then I’m all for it!

Chip Saltsman, a candidate to head the Republican National Committee (RNC), decided to spread holiday cheer by sending an audio CD to members of the RNC that included a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro.” The song a mocks Obama’s appeal to whites in the voice of an Al Sharpton sound-a-like.

As someone who worked in politics (briefly) before going into academia, I find it difficult to wrap my head around boneheaded decisions like this. Why would anyone, no less a candidate for RNC Chairman, think this was a good idea. It isn’t like this is a Congressman without greater ambitions catering to a constituency that might find this amusing (Saltzman was Mike Huckabee’s campaign manager). If that were the case, I could understand using out-group racial mockery to strengthen ties among your brethren. But this guy is running for a national party. Unfortunately for him, he’s running the be operational head of a party in an increasingly diverse country. Tough break, that.

Maybe it because I’m getting older, but I find myself shaking my head at incidents like this rather than indulging in righteous anger. The act seems petty, the behavior of a flailing wing of a political party that would just as soon cast explicit racists out (See current RNC chair Mike Duncan’s response).

For a party that needs to get its bearings quickly if it wants to serve as a useful push back to the majority party, these types of stunts renders it impotent. Those of us who are more left of center can hold this incident up as an example of a backwards, bigoted party. In reality, most of the ideas of the Republican party have a place in American political discourse but this stuff doesn’t help.

You live by the Southern strategy, you die by the Southern strategy… I guess. My New Years hope for my Republican friends is that they have the good sense to elect Michael Steele, the sensible, African-American, former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, for RNC chair. A two party system works better with two viable parties, and it would be nice to drown the Southern strategy in the bathtub (not the federal government… Grover Norquist).

I know lots of people are on the Brand Obama bandwaggon, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the implications of Obama’s brand for governing. There is already a book out by Barry Liebert and Rick Faulk called Barack Inc. that promises to share with you the winning business lessons from the Obama campaign. The idea that a political campaign could have any insights for the private sector is pretty paradigm shaking. It’s hard for me to fathom a book detailing the marketing secrets for business from the Kerry campaign or even the Bush campaign.

As any popular book would do, they’ve broken the more complex reality of Obama’s branding success into a pithy sondbyte:

Be Cool, Be Social, Be the Change

I’m not sure what to make of the the “Be cool” or “Be the Change” stuff yet….it doesn’t seem too earthshaking, but I haven’t read the book. But what I am interested in seeing and thinking about for the next few years is how/whether the “be social” parts can translate into political capital. The “be social” part deals with the penetration of the campaign into multiple corners of the on-line social networking world.

What will it take to translate these micro-communities the Obama campaign built on various platforms into leverage that can be used to pressure congress into effecting policy change? Will the Obama campaign get out in front of developments in the Semantic web to create even more narrowly tailored communities? In the public policy literature we talk about epistemic communities of experts and interest groups that produce the ideas that shape policy debates. Will the Obama campaign try to create “super-epistemic” communitiies that can shape policy agendas? can they create targeted “flash” epistiemic communities to deal with pressing crises? We’ll know soon.

In order to take the edge off of my poll watching withdrawal, I’ve gone back to one of my favorite poll-meth (I would be dating myself to call it crack?) dealers… Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight blog has a nice breakdown of Obama’s performance among a range of demographic groups compared to Kerry in 2004.obama 08 vs. kerry 04

Obama outperformed Kerry in every demographic except seniors, gays and lesbians and “other” religions. What’s most astounding is the breadth of his gains. He made gains among liberals, moderates and conservatives. Which begs a question we discussed in our thick culture podcast today (coming soon!) — do campaigns even matter? Did the lousy economy and unpopularity of President Bush preordain a Republican victory this year? If you’re making gains in groups all along the ideological spectrum, does it really matter what you’re saying?

José offered up observations that the Presidential race might tighten up.  I’ve been thinking that the election is likely to be closer than the polls are indicating.  One hunch of mine that explains the discrepancy is that those supporting a candidate losing momentum are less likely to participate in a poll, along the lines of CORFing (cutting off reflected failure), but in this case it’s cutting off impending doom.  I also wonder how many people who didn’t even vote will jump on the bandwagon after the election, claiming to have voted for Obama–Fauxbamamaniacs?

At any rate, I was in New York (Westchester) last week and read an article by John Heilemann in New York magazine on the next steps for Obama (with the assumption that he will win) and what the margins will be in the House and Senate.  Heilemann notes how Bill Clinton’s first 100 days were chaotic and while Bill also had a Democratic House and Senate, he suffered from a lack of legitimacy in Congress.  Obama, on the other hand, is highly strategic and has a transition plan in the works and will be working with Reid and Pelosi who are likely to need him more than the other way around.

This got me thinking about what I think the political landscape will look like in 2009.   I had my marketing students create electoral map predictions, but unfortunately I saw this compilation on PoliticalMaps after class:

My prediction isn’t all that exciting or controversial (Obama 349:McCain 189).  I see Indiana as going for Obama, due to Lake County in the NW outside of Chicago.  I see the undecideds going for McCain in NC and McCain taking Missouri.  The one’s I’ll be watching are Florida, Virginia, and Ohio, representing 56 electorals.  If Obama loses these states, he would still win, but with less of a “mandate.”   I’ll also be looking for the Ron Paul factor in Montana, but I’m dubious.
I don’t see the Democrats getting the 60 Senate seats they would love to have to be filibuster-proof.  I see a +8 pickup with Franken (MN) and Hagan (NC) squeaking by.  The House it currently at 236-199 and I think the Democrats will add 15 to 18 seats to their majority.  The interesting races (to me) are CA-4 and CO-4 , races in fairly rural districts with candidates who have clear ideological differences.