Of all the day-after analysis of the 2014 mid-term elections, the one offered by Kevin Foley for O’Dwyer’s PR is least persuasive.
In his view, “the bony finger of blame falls on Jennifer Palmieri, the current White House communications director and her predecessors, Daniel Pfeiffer and David Plouffe; the mastermind behind the Obama PR curtain, Valerie Jarrett, is likewise culpable.”
His point: bad PR is to blame. Let us all shoot those messengers. The anger is misdirected. In fact, it may be impossible to direct at all. That’s because Foley overlooks the complex nature of why we, as voters, pull the levers we do or stay away from the polls altogether. It is a supply chain of players and events.
Governing is the same. You can argue that President Obama was wrong from the start or wrong along the way but the bad electoral news had origins too complex to place at the feet of PR. From his perspective, he was elected to do a specific job, to affect a specific set of issues. But leading is a highly competitive team sport.
I am sure Obama feels a lot like the sheriff in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” who gathers a crowd of people who elected him but can’t convince any to join his posse. The voter turnout numbers prove this. In the movie, the sheriff is then pushed off the stage by a salesman who shouts, “The horse is dead” and begins a sales pitch for bicycles.
Obama’s own missteps, emphasized by competing voices making promises that appeal to us individually, made it hard to organize collectively. What might have been seen as thoughtfulness came to be viewed as weakness and we refused to form that posse in pursuit of the bad guys. This is not a PRproblem unless you measure it as too much PR.
More proof of the modern President’s inability to bend public perception came just a couple months ago when polling indicated that more Republicans in Louisiana blame Obama for the slow federal response to Katrina than they single out former President Bush who, as should be noted, was in office at the time. How does PR fix that?
There are ways in which the President could have been better served by his advisors. But to say there was “no creativity, no energy or excitement, no spontaneity, no chutzpah” is to minimize not just the supply chain, but the chain of events that play out across the globe to suppress the value of extravagant action.
Whether threatening Syria militarily over its weapons of mass destruction, then letting Russia broker a deal was a political masterstroke, becomes lost in the Ukraine with social media shouting, “I’d rather have Putin as President because he has a pair of balls.”
Whether giving Congress a first crack at healthcare legislation was a legitimate offer of bi-partisanship, becomes lost in the clamor over the President’s birth certificate – in long form.
Whether standing up against the ISIS terrorists was a rallying cry for multi-national action, becomes lost in the fashion criticism of wearing a tan suit while doing it.
It is clear the election results are the product of a stew of actions, events, opposition and misunderstanding. And it is true that PR can be brought to bear on each. But to suggest that the stew only needed more of that particular salt leaves a bad taste.
NOTE: This first appeared at www.odwyerpr.com
