opinion: presidency
The Theory Behind Obama’s Appearance with the GOP
Just the whole concept and framing were so cool that it almost didn't matter what he said.By Sharon Fisher, 1-29-10
I watched a video of President Barack Obama appearing at the GOP House Issues Conference for an hour-long Q&A session, and it just made my little wonkish heart go pitty-pat.
For a few years last decade, I went to graduate school for public administration at Boise State University. Remember high school English, with all the man’s-inhumanity-to-man, Hester-represents-the-Church-of-England symbology stuff? Graduate school is full of that kind of thing, and when you’re done, you swear you’re never going to use it again.
But watching the Obama-GOP interaction today, my fingers were itching to write some sort of turgid, footnoted, Org Theory-heavy, academic paper with all that stuff in it that nobody but wonks would appreciate, because it was just so cool. And, you know, I’m barely going to talk about the content. That hardly mattered to me.
Let’s start with the symbology of the event itself. Daniel entering the lion’s den. He accepted an invitation to come on their turf and, reportedly, were “itching to quiz the president and present their policy ideas.” And, you know, typically the guy who owns the mike is the guy in charge.
However, Obama did two things that put him in control. First, it was the placement. There he was at the front of the room. People were called on, and he responded to them individually. This wasn’t a Tea Party free-for-all. He listened until they were finished with their questions—he let them vent, he made them feel heard—and then he answered them, one at a time. He maintained control.
Second, Obama had it recorded and aired on television. One of the things we studied in public administration school was when to expand a discussion to other people, and when not to do so. People who are think they’re winning the debate tend to want to keep the discussion in, while people who are losing, who think they’ll get more support outside, want to expand it. Obama asked to expand it, the GOP went along. Many of the commenters on the event talked about what a great job Obama had done, to the extent that some Republicans reportedly regretted their decision. “It was a mistake that we allowed the cameras to roll like that. We should not have done that,” Luke Russert reported one of them as saying.
The appearance was also a good idea on a communications theory level. Democrats and Republicans both have been addressing each other in the media, but addressing each other as icons or symbols, not as people. And there Obama was, “Mr. President,” in the room with them, and natural decorum took over, as well as people’s inhibitions about saying something to somebody’s face that they’d say to a camera or to a reporter. This was no longer cardboard cutouts of The President and The Opposition, but actual people talking to each other—and, in some cases, opposition or no, delighted by getting his autograph.
Both sides also went to some effort to establish rapport by talking about things they had in common. Obama had something personal to say about nearly every questioner, such as pointing out that he knew one Congressman from Illinois, or another Congressman pointing out that both he and Obama had young children. Pointing out what two people have in common is a great way to establish rapport and make it more likely that the other person will see the value in the first person’s argument. Obama also criticized the media, building rapport with the GOP through use of a common enemy. (It’s okay, Mr. President. I won’t take it personally.)
After that, the content almost didn’t matter, though Obama did a good job there too. He looked for points of agreement, and made them, showing his willingness to hear them. He went meta, pointing out that the way one question was phrased made it not really a question for discussion, but a campaign talking point. He showed that he had been paying attention to their proposals (and, incidentally, blew away the contention that he needed a TelePrompTer to speak in public). And he used fact-based responses to their questions, continuing his call for bipartisan work.
“Again and again, Obama turned the Republicans questions against them — accusing them of obstructing legislation for political purposes and offering solutions that won’t work,” reported Politico.
While there was some pushback from Republicans on the substance of Obama’s remarks, the majority of the media accounts, including some comments by Republicans, praised Obama’s handling of the event.
It will be interesting to see how the mano-a-mano (and womano-a-mano) event changes the tone of the dialogue—and whether it will be repeated.
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i thought the exchange went great. neither obama or the repubs were insolent. the discourse was as it should be, pointed, and real. i believe this kind of meeting should occur every couple of weeks. but no need to spend megadollars going to baltimore, i think we have suitable meeting places in DC.
if prez obama couldnt take that little bit of heat then he should of stayed in the illinois statehouse. we will leave all of the softball questions for the mainstream media.
maybe you should relax now and read a couple of chapters of your fave romance novel.
I liked reading your take on the event. I am very much in agreement with you.
Cheers,
Mike
And, you know, I think a lot of us could take a lesson from this. Don't demonize our opponents. Talk to them like grownups. Find points where we can agree. Assume the positive, that they *do* want a solution and bipartisan support, and point out actions they're doing that make that harder. Admit areas where we could have acted better. Etc.
(As far as romance novels, I'm reading a novel by Marilyn French, but it's more like a dysromance novel. The closest I come to romance novels is Diana Gabaldon.)
Glad you liked it, Mike.
it was good debate all around. from both sides. your comment in ridiculous.
Par for the course from a President who couldn't imagine an action that did not have a political reason.
The GOP talking points were refuted decisively and swiftly. 1 manversus 140, and they got spanked.
People tend to live up to the expectations you have for them. I look forward to seeing how it works out.
Mickey, you mention China and US competing. That was brought up by our President Obama.
Par for the course from a President who couldn't imagine an action that did not have a political reason."
No!
Americans want transparency! We, the people, need to see exactly what both sides are doing! No matter if you are a republican, independant or democrat, this live session was absolutely good for America.
W's swagger lead us from a surplus to 1.3b in debt! Don't forget that!
That's Pied Pipper Swagger.
Oh I havent forgotten, in fact we were reminded just last week by BO in his state of the union... He "inherited it". But two wrongs dont make a right! Lets see where the chosen one leaves us at the end of just one term, and we'll see who goes down in history with the pied piper swagger award. Enjoy the kool-aid hopers and changers.
Yeah I saw them... Now that the otherside doesnt have the super-majority "the one side" will atleast have the opportunity to join in and make some progress. We'll see... Enjoy the kool-aid.
Don't forget that dividend payments received for all TARP participants are about $4.5 billion to date, according to US department of Treasury. Don't forget that the Treasury Department has approved 10 of the nation's largest banks to repay $68 billion in government bailout money. That means half the money will be paid back, "not including interest", by Summer 2010!
It's obvious we are on the verge of total Collapse! The "BLUE" sky is falling.
BO shouldn't say he "inherited" this huge deficit. What a coward. He should "adopt" the deficit as his own, like Bush adopted the surplus as his own. You never heard the Bush administration complaining about all the cash they had to blow through! Yeeeehaaa! Wooohoooo!!!
Obama should be commended for his willingness to discuss these issues openly with Republicans. I just wish the concept of open discussion had been practiced more freely when the Democrat majority decided to draft major health care reform behind closed doors.
Health care is about money. Having the government that can't control illegal immigration foot the bill for universal health care is a budget breaker. Congress and ObamaNation know that. Their answer was to tax insurance companies more, people who had insurance, and cut Medicare payouts. You don't go forward by slamming the transmission in reverse and stomping on the gas peddle. Just that deal alone elected a Republican with baggage to the Kennedy Senate seat.
As to Garcia's claim that Repubiclands are obstructive, I have to assume his television was out, he got no newspaper, nor did he have computer access to the internet for the whole of Nancy Pelosi's time as a minority leader, and then Speaker. The whole of the Democrat party has been about obstructionism since they lost the House and Senate, and while the R's held the Presidency. Ya gotta quit lookin' outta yer left eye only. Newt was a good teacher for her. He, like Nancy, had his problems when he gained the majority. Her first year with a Democrat President has been an unmitigated disaster, and mostly due to her not being able to herd the cats of the outer left fringe of the Demoncrap party. The Democrats blew 2010. Pissed it away. And don't blame the Repulsicans. Pelosi, Reid, and the Obammer did it on their own......
If the Obammer can save them, I don't know. I just hope he does not go off on some referee who calls the fouls that put his daughter out of a game. A Harry and Margaret moment. And I do wonder what Hairy Ass Truman would do if he were making the decisions. Me thinks Karzai would be wearing his green dress somewhere else other than Kabul. And the Taliban would be at the table in Kandahar suing for peace. I guess we just don't make Demoncraps like we used to. Wobbly, knobbly Repulsicans we do. And when we do get one who is tough enough, we let a Chevy Chase define them in comedy, and then elect a personable nerd like Carter, who managed to put us in the last real recession. The Repulsican Reagan managed to drag us out of that deal. Do we think success will come from an entirely different track from an entirely different philosophy? Or is this just more of the same, and we get whatever Milo Minderbinder and his business partners allow us to have?
And health care is NOT a right. It is a privilege allowed to us through the prosperity of this great country. Prosperity that was created by people taking risks and turning good ideas and fearless effort into profit. It is also important to understand that our government does not create the wealth or the jobs that will expand our tax base to provide the kind of social programs you want to see.
Health care is not cheap. Quality health care is downright expensive - and somebody has to pay for it. How do you define 'affordable' from one person to the next? How do you determine how much one person should pay over another? Who gets 'affordable' health insurance? How do you keep ‘affordable’ health insurance ‘affordable’?
We are too great a nation to allow US citizens who need medical care to go without. I'm convinced there is a way to achieve this without dismantling our current health care system:
Expand the existing Medicaid/Medicare system to accept those who have been denied conventional health insurance and those whose premiums have increased beyond their ability to pay. You must meet certain criteria to benefit from this system. Premiums (if any) would be set on an ability to pay basis.
This creates a taxpayer-subsidized safety net for those who need it most and provides an alternative to bankruptcy. This also puts the cost out in the open and where it inevitably will lie: with the taxpayers. This will also keep the free market intact for those who can afford it.
One of the issues with government-run health care that you may overlook is that it will inevitably lead to lower-quality care. Case in point: I have a good friend who was in need of a liver transplant. He was also a veteran. Under his government-run VA plan, he would have died before one came available through the VA. Fortunately, with private family funding, he was able to get the care he needed on the free-market. Of course, there were other factors involved in the doctors putting him high on the list – like age and probability of success – but his ability to finance the operation was a key factor. In a government run system, that option doesn’t exist.
The best doctors in the world come here to practice because of the opportunities provided by our free market system. Yes, we have Philippine doctors here because there is more opportunity here. When you spend $250,000 on an education, you are planning on a handsome return for that investment. A government-run health care system will cap salaries and wages for health care workers, reducing the incentive for the world’s best doctors to practice here.
Well, I’ve managed to explain all of this without resorting to name-calling. Do you have any better ideas?
I like your KISS idea, but I don't see how a 2000+ page bill is keeping it simple. Everything you said fit in one sentence. Why do we need 2000+ pages to implement it? There should be a law setting a maximum number of pages for any bill.
Now I will castigate the mining industry.
Meanwhile, the "sportsmen" of the west coast are making a big push to rid the coast of gillnets. In that great lie campaign about selectivity and "walls of death", none mention the vast gillnet fishery in Bristol Bay, which conserves the red salmon of the north Pacific by strict enforcement of law and limited entry permits. From what was once a fishery with zero days of fishing in the late 50s and early 60s, to now never less than 20,000,000 gillnet caught fish a year. In the better return years, that number goes to the high 30 millions. The proposed largest open pit gold mine in the world, the Pebble Mine, is poised to go in at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watersheds. The distinct happenstance of killing the most productive and successful salmon fishing in the world, which produces food like clockwork every year, should not be tolerated. Not matter what, Congress has to change law and NOT allow any mining in that watershed. None. You wonder why the energy of the anti logging army is not mobilized to prevent that mining. I guess it is because there would be a lesser need for an army of attorneys feeding at the overflowing trough of the EAJA...and the NGOs would lose valuable funding. It is, we know, about money and not resource values. For either side. Milo Minderbinder lives on. And since Bristol Bay sockeye are not a sport fishing goal of consequence, those folks are not present at this time. They are still trying to take more halibut, and get all of the harvestable surplus of salmon on the Columbia River. Beat the Indians out of their fish. I guess dipshifts in aluminum boats and big motors are the most bestest people on earth and deserve fish. It is their right..me me me me me me me me me......gets old...
Federal forest management in westside Oregon has some of the most rigorous environmental standards in the world--and I know this as I visit these forests 4 out of every 7 days--and these forests are located on some of the most productive forgiving latitudes on earth. My point is that the environmental community--that I will give credit for some of the environmental improvements-- has to do a better job of addressing, as you point out, other issues like the Alaskan fishery. Our Pacific NW fisheries have pretty much been destroyed and to allow intact fisheries to go down the same toilet is unconscientable.
Anglers buy licenses and tags to support fisheries. They pay for the opportunity to catch 10 salmon or steelhead. What is there about buying a tag from ODFW that also says "we support charitable giving with your license and tag fees"?
The watershed people have directed the spending of tens of millions of tax dollars to create better habitat. However, a century of overfishing, habitat alterations, creation of sewage disposal districts and systems, have eliminated salmon from the streams for such a long time that there is no longer a sufficient food web to support salmon offspring in our coastal streams. The ability of the rain to leach the micronutrients and return them to the ocean, the sandstone bed rock, the paucity of gravel, and structure to hold gravel, was overcome in the past by the numbers of dead salmon in the spawning season. Salmon lay eggs and then die. Their carcasses become the font of life thereafter. You can only raise as many fish as there have been dead salmon in the stream.
So when hundreds of thousands of coho went not to "salting" streams, but to food banks, we just engendered the very same policies your organizations' draconian demands on landowners and resource users deem wrong and sue to stop. You can do all you want to create structure and habitat, bypass instream obstructions, and protect clean water, but none of that is food for fish. Fish need amino acids and nutrients from salmon flesh, and so does a host of instream and riparian species that in turn become food for raising young fish. All those food banked salmon contain the very hope, the exact need, for salmon recovery, and were lost to some altruistic socialist dream from Salem and urban Oregon.
I expect you and the people you work with to address this very issue at the highest levels of Oregon State Government. Those salmon, in streams, dead, having never been allowed to spawn, are the hope for a vigorous and sustainable wild fish population. It takes salmon to have salmon.
A hen salmon will segregate the fines from the steam bedload to the the tune of 1.5 to 7 cubic meters per fish, depending on species and size. One caudal fin will clean that much gravel. The nest or correctly "redd", is a depression followed by a wing shaped rise in the gravel, with the eggs covered by gravels that allow for good water circulation and oxygenation of the developing eggs. The depression upsteam collects fines, and the wing-like shape accelerates the water flow over the redd, and results in deposition of fines downstream from the redd. Tens of millions of years of Darwinian selection have determined the architecture of the salmon redd.
So you do have to wonder how much gravel NOT having been annually "cleaned" by redd building for a century has resulted in less salmon survival and activity. Salmon, if there in sufficient numbers, maintain their spawning gravels. There is evidence now that salmon seek out areas where there is water, as in a spring, coming from under the gravel as preferable spawning sites.
So we have the salmon maintaining habitat by redd construction, then depositing eggs, and then dying with their bodies keeping the nutrient levels in the stream, the riparian zone, and the uplands above levels that will exist without salmon in the stream. Carbon isotopes found only in marine plants show up in ridge top douglas firs and other conifers. Salmon is the only way to get it there. The dead salmon are a part of carbon sequestration. They support their own young. They are important to the whole of the terrestrial habitat of the stream and watershed. And nobody from the Oregon Watersheds Council has written a letter to the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commissioners castigating the ODFW decision (probably from the Governor's office--he is dolt on these issues) to send surplus hatchery fish to feed the poor. A segment of those poor are poor because they lost their jobs due to a paucity of salmon and the requirements of watershed protections. Not having the ocean nutrition that was once available, there now, is a great part of the failure of the rural job market. Hatcheries do work to sustain salmon, and when the ocean is provident, and there is a great surplus of fish, it is incumbent upon Watershed Councils to make sure those surplus fish go back into the riverine ecosystems. And not to food banks. Heartless? Maybe. But realistic? Yes. We cannot return the streams to prior levels of productivity without dead salmon to feed the creeks. Water quality, access and availability, stream structure, all are necessary, but useless without dead salmon in numbers to meet the critical mass needs of the stream for salmon flesh to feed the biota needed to support fingerlings and smolts.
The Watershed Council that I am a member of is funded in part by private & government grants. There are only 3 paid members while the rest of us are volunteers. Members range from private citizens, fishing organizations, industry representatives like timber & electric, county, state & fed folks and anyone else who lives in the watershed that would like to become a member. A very diverse group!!!
Do we have all of the answers, hell no! But we "stumble along" and are always willing to listen, listen, listen. We remove litter, pull weeds, plant vegetation, lobbie land owners, create highschool water monitoring groups, educate others & ourselves. Any instream habitat improvement is done by fed, state or private timber or power companies.