|
Keith, in my
readings I go from the high brow to the low brow with regularity. There are pundits whose columns have not
appeared yet since Tuesday’s speech who will no doubt reference it but my sense
is that it was disappointing enough on several levels (audience size as well) that
most of the conservative media will downplay it and hope it’s soon forgotten in
the pending news cycle that is likely to see a Supreme Court resignation, end
of the work session of Congress and economic volatility with higher energy
prices. But we’re
seeing more reported in the mainstream media (MSM) about the process of
spinning policy that the Bush administration has used with increasingly
industrial-strength doses. The ‘Teflon’
is scratched and there is less reluctance to paint the emperor without clothes
among those who bent over backwards avoiding that after 9/11. Here is a bit
of verification of how they marketed war, or “selling the package”. I’m referring to it for now as The Beauty
Pageant sales approach: make it as pretty as possible, whether it’s real or
fake, and display with such enthusiasm and conviction that doubters seem like grotesque
negativists instead of skeptics, people who don’t believe in the dream. That’s not a blanket condemnation of
beauty pageant contestants, it’s my statement that if you’ve got more
production than substance you’re not selling a product, you’re selling a brand.
Tom Englehardt
writes about this on his website TomDispatch, labeling the NeoCons and Bushies Immoral Relativists: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=4027. Today, he’s suggesting the credibility
gap is widening into a credibility gulch. KwC A Peek Under the PR
Mask
By Dan
Froomkin, Special to washingtonpost.com, Thursday, June 30, 2005; 2:39 PM Once in a blue moon, we actually get a peek under the White
House's public-relations mask, and this morning it comes courtesy of Peter Baker and Dan Balz , whose front-pager in The Washington
Post suggests that Bush's unflagging public confidence about his Iraq policy
reflects the work of public opinion researchers. Yes, the very same White House that outwardly exudes
contempt for polls has in fact recently hired a prominent academic pollster
onto the National Security Council staff and has concluded that the key to
public support for the war is not the number of casualties in Iraq, nor whether
the war was right or wrong -- but whether people feel like we're going to win. Baker and Balz write:
"When President Bush confidently predicts victory in Iraq and admits no
mistakes, admirers see steely resolve and critics see exasperating
stubbornness. But the president's full-speed-ahead message articulated in this
week's prime-time address also reflects a purposeful strategy based on
extensive study of public opinion about how to maintain support for a costly
and problem-plagued military mission. "The White House
recently brought onto its staff one of the nation's top academic experts on
public opinion during wartime, whose studies are now helping Bush craft his
message two years into a war with no easy end in sight. Behind the president's speech is a
conviction among White House officials that the battle for public opinion on
Iraq hinges on their success in convincing Americans that, whatever their views
of going to war in the first place, the conflict there must and can be won. . . . "In shaping their
message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter
D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on
Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National
Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the
Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and
institutional reform." In his academic life,
Feaver wasn't media shy. And his colleague Gelpi, still an academic, isn't
operating under White House messaging protocol. Gelpi told Baker and Balz, for instance, that he thinks the
president did not truly achieve what he needed to with Tuesday's speech. "What's important
for him now to keep the public with him is to look forward and say we're going
to make progress and this is what progress looks like," Gelpi said.
"He may have stemmed the flow for a little bit, but I don't think he's
given the public a framework for showing how we're making progress." And Feaver and Gelpi
both have quite a paper trail. There was, for instance, the controversial 1999 article in The Post's Outlook
section
, in which they described poll results showing that the public would consider
up to 30,000 deaths in Iraq to be an acceptable number. Feaver and Gelpi
co-authored this article, published just a few weeks ago:
"We find that -- while the public is rightly averse to suffering
casualties -- the level of popular sensitivity to US military casualties depends critically on the context in which
those losses occur.
Our core argument is that the public's tolerance for the human costs of war is
primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial attitudes: beliefs about the
rightness or wrongness of the war in the first place, and beliefs about the
war's likely success. Both attitudes are important, and the impact of each
depends upon the other. However, we find that beliefs about the likelihood of
success matter most
in determining the public's willingness to tolerate American military deaths in
combat . . . "The Iraq case suggests that under the right
conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when
they come with a relatively high human cost." Several months into
the war, Thomas E. Ricks wrote in The Washington Post that Feaver
had just briefed White House and other administration officials: "'First,
worry less about persuading the American people he really did the right thing,
and more about ensuring that the mission is going to be successful -- and
persuading the American people of that,' he said. Also, he said, the
administration needs to develop valid and convincing measures of success in
Iraq, 'so he himself knows whether he is winning.' "Finally, Feaver
said, the administration should worry less about communicating the strength of
its resolve and more about 'how their behind-the-scenes actions undercut their
rhetoric.' " So how much of that
advice is the White House taking? Only a little part of it, really. Feaver and Gelpi were Live Online on washingtonpost.com in 2003, shortly
before the war began, and Feaver speculated on Bush's possible Achilles Heel: "President Bush subscribes to the momentum
theory of politics: that success breeds success, and political capital accrues
to the one who spends political capital. So far, this has worked remarkably
well . . ."But the danger is that it can lead to over-reach -- if
President Bush misjudges popular sentiment while pursuing this strategy he is
likely to fall much further/faster than a more cautious politician who
triangulated every issue and never tried to lead public opinion anywhere. "For that reason,
public sentiment is probably more important for President Bush than for other
presidents -- he is trying to do more and is willing to get out in front of the
public more than other Presidents and this makes him more exposed." And here are Feaver and Gelpi 's home pages at Duke, if you want to
read more. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html For those reading in text only, here’s the link to the Baker/Balz
piece: Bush Words Reflect Public Opinion Strategy http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/29/AR2005062902792.html |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
