CREATING AN IMPRESSION WITH THE PUBLIC

Few Americans ever meet the President, or even his staff; therefore, the impression they have of the President depends almost completely on the images and words that reach them through the media. These impressions are conveyed through the technology available--from still photographs in FDR's day, to multiple television channels and the Internet in Clinton's. The impression a President conveys can affect the public's attitude toward his ideas. The experiences of recent Presidents indicate some of the critical elements of public relations to ensure that the American people form a favorable view of the new President and his policies.

The Role of Speeches

It is important to recognize the vital importance of presidential speeches in the process of creating a strong impression in the public's mind about a President and his agenda. Landon Parvin, who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, says that the presidential speech, if designed to capture the imagination, is a powerful tool to shape opinion:

Have something big to sell. Advocate big things that will define a presidency, not incremental things that will diminish it.

Since I do a lot of corporate work, I am constantly reading the business press, and I have noticed something interesting. When they ask CEOs who have successfully turned around major corporations what they would have done differently, almost without fail they say that they wish they had taken larger, more dramatic actions sooner.

I would argue that the same lesson holds for a President and his programs. Overlooking the fact that President Clinton's original health care plan would have been a disaster, the President did exactly the right thing in proposing something big, and I am sure the Clinton speechwriters felt good selling something so substantial.

Carol Gelderman, Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, has studied the way in which Presidents use speeches to communicate their ideas to the public. She adds that in addition to capturing the imagination, successful Presidents also use speeches to educate the public:

That was certainly the essence of what Franklin Roosevelt thought he was doing, which was teaching. He said the greatest duty of a statesman was to teach, and he called his budget his textbook. He called the place where he had his press conferences his schoolroom. He called his fireside chats his "seminars." I was quite surprised when I learned that he had only given 27 of these fireside chats.

The President should view the speechwriting team not just as hired wordsmiths, adds Parvin, but also as a valuable sounding board in the development of the initiatives the President intends to propose:

I would urge a President to fill his White House not only with the tactful, pleasant people you need for jobs like congressional or public liaison, but with crusaders, ideologues, pragmatists, contrarians, reformers, and interesting intellectuals, because without these people, who in the White House will debate and advocate and fight and cause change?

In the Reagan White House, the speechwriters saw themselves as the keepers of the Reagan flame. Although I was no longer on staff, this was especially true in Reagan's second term.

Michael Waldman, Bill Clinton's former chief speechwriter, agrees on the importance of this:

The strongest thing that I can argue to any administration, is the vital importance of linking speeches and speechwriting on the one hand and policy on the other, with the President in the middle of it. The gravest mistake that any White House can make is to view speeches as merely the way you sell a program, as distinct from and divorced from the formation of the program: speechwriting as, in effect, the advertising copywriters off in a different room, and we will let them know what they are supposed to write about, and they will pretty up the words.

By understanding this, adds Waldman, a President can use the combination of policy and key words to change the politics of an issue. He cites Social Security as an example:

The best example that I can think of to show the power of that is in the 1998 State of the Union, which, as you may recall, was a time of great drama for reasons having nothing to do with the budget of that year. There were brand new numbers indicating a budget surplus for the first time, and the President got up and said, "What should we do with our new surplus? I have a simple, straightforward answer: Save Social Security first."

The Democrats jumped up and applauded during the State of the Union, and they were applauding just about anything by that point. Speaker [Newt] Gingrich mulled it over for a moment, and then he stood up and applauded. The Republicans in Congress looked at each other and stood up and applauded, and at that moment a trillion dollars shifted in the budget silently from tax cuts to Social Security.

Gelderman adds that many Presidents have understood well the importance of the close relationship between a policymaker and his speechwriter, and speeches tend to go badly when this kind of close cooperation does not exist:

Eisenhower believed there also had to be a chief of staff of the speech, whatever the speech was about. He felt there had to be one person who is the conduit for everything .... When he wrote the Atoms for Peace speech, the drafting of that speech lasted seven and a half months and went through 33 drafts, and all kinds of people were consulted in the Atomic Energy Commission, in the State Department, in the Pentagon, and in the White House .... This whole process never would have worked had he not appointed one person to be in charge of this whole thing.

[Y]ou could make the same case for Lyndon Johnson when he made that speech on March 31, 1968 ... that was his speech that completely turned around his Vietnam policy. It was a 180-degree turn. That speech started because he had a need to respond to this Tet offensive. He said the end was in sight just before this horrible Tet offensive. That speech took two and a half months, went through many drafts, and, again, he had a person appointed, Harry McPherson, who was the conduit through whom everybody passed everything.

Kennedy did the same thing in the Cuban missile crisis. He had 14 people he appointed, his inner circle--he called them "ex-com"--just for the 13 days that they worked on this. He put Ted Sorensen in charge of all that, and Sorensen said at the end that it was the writing of the speech and the fact that somebody is taking notes, somebody is paying attention at the end of every meeting, so that you can see that there is some kind of progress.

The Problem of media Coverage

Michael Deaver designed Ronald Reagan's highly effective communications strategy. But, as he points out, significant differences exist between the media industry Reagan dealt with and the industry a President faces today:

We had, as we used to say, three "nets" and CNN at that time. It was really four networks, but we were still trying to get used to CNN being considered a network.

How that's changed. We had two news cycles we worked from, the noon news cycle and the evening news cycle. Today, everybody is on the Net. Instead of a bevy of Lily Tomlins plugging in calls at the White House, they have a bevy of people who are on computers, directly getting into reporters who are writing stories to give their second graph of each story. There are not two news cycles today, but a 24-hour news cycle. And there are not three nets or four nets; there are 50 news channels running, some of them 24 hours a day.

Toiv points out the difference this made for Bill Clinton:

When the Reagan White House wanted to communicate to the American people about the important vote coming up in the Congress on his economic program or a tax program, a tax bill, they were able to call the networks and say, "We want to do an Oval Office address in prime time." I'm sure it wasn't as easy then as it seems to us to have been now, but President Reagan was able to do that at key moments in the legislative debate and have a major impact.

No more. It won't happen. I don't have a list of the times that President Clinton was able to do it, but believe me, if there's just a vote coming up in the Congress on a question that's important to him, he's not going to be able to get on the air on the broadcast networks. The cable networks, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Except in a real crisis, they just won't do it.

But while getting national media attention may be difficult for a President, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's press secretary, Tony Blankley, reminds us that the President still has a built-in advantage over his possible critics on Capitol Hill:

While it's true that every Congressman and every Senator has a press secretary, and some have a few, almost all of them don't work on national issues. They're working their hometown press, bragging about bringing home a bridge bill or whatever it is. They don't focus on the national issues. They don't focus on the national press. And you have a very big mismatch to the White House's advantage between about a third of the White House, which either through press, communications, advance, press advance, is focused on communicating the message to the media, through the media to the public, and on the congressional side, about a half a dozen press secretaries to leadership officials in the House and the Senate of each party who spend most of their time focusing on dealing with the national press.

I think you're going to see a slow balancing, or a closing of the imbalance, over the coming years as Congress builds up a bigger staff to deal with the press, particularly because you have the existence of the White House team, which simply inundates you with manpower, and because of the tapeworm, as you say, the need to feed the ever-expanding media.

The difficulty today of commanding press attention for an important policy proposal does limit the President's ability to build support for his agenda. But, says Deaver, the President can still get national press attention on his terms when he is proposing a major initiative:

If the President of the United States has news, it's going to be covered. Now, whether it's going to blanket the three nets, which now have, what, 28 percent of the audience--no wonder they're worried about giving the President of the United States some time--part of it has to do with ... building the interest from a news standpoint--and, secondly, having an issue that's a concern, real concern, to all Americans.

I think, frankly, with the Clinton Administration, after the health care debates, there never was a big domestic issue. If you're going to talk about school uniforms and commuter traffic every day instead of proposing major changes like Social Security or changing the IRS--I still think those are two issues that, if you worked it right and built it and were committed to that instead of a long list during an hour-and-a-half State of the Union every year, you could generate a television interest in covering a speech.

Veteran journalist Robert Novak, however, argues that a President can no longer plan on major media coverage for even major announcements:

I guarantee you, if the President of the United States said, "We're coming up to a vote on Social Security, and we're going to have an Oval Office speech on Social Security because the bill is coming up," he would have a strikeout. It would have to be a Monica Lewinsky story or a bombing of Iraq story or something of that nature.

One of the reasons is you have this small percentage of the share by the broadcast networks compared to the old days, and they know that this is going to be broadcast on Fox; it's going to be broadcast on MSNBC; it's going to be broadcast on CNN. They know it's going to be done. So you're taking a small share of people who would really pass up basketball and the smarmy prime-time programs on the broadcast network to watch the Social Security speech. That's going to be further divided up among the cable networks.

On the other hand, says Martha Kumar, the State of the Union Address offers a unique opportunity for a major policy statement to command media attention. She notes that the Clinton Administration has shown how to exploit that opportunity fully by presenting the speech as part of a carefully orchestrated communications strategy:

What the Clinton Administration has done is, the State of the Union they treat as a different kind of speech in that it's a two-month event. When the Congress leaves town, they take the media for two months, for the month of December and January, and the Congress, with all its press secretaries, has not been able to really get into those stories in the way that they have done it.

They start out with, say, an interview with The New York Times or with the President holding a large press conference, as he did in the State Department, where he talked about his issues for the coming year and governing and his leadership. And then it moved week by week, one issue after another. Education one week, Social Security another.

They were able to take that speech and turn it into a two-month event that truly set out their agenda. So perhaps they don't need that Oval Office address in quite the same way, because they're hitting it over that time period, and the public gets a sense of what they are doing.

Techniques to Gain Favorable Coverage

Recent Presidents who have been successful in using the press, like Clinton, have recognized that although the media is more chaotic and less in awe of the presidency than ever before, a President still has techniques and innovations available to him that he can use to build public support through the press. The experts point to several approaches.

Using the "Gaggle"
The morning gaggle occurs when the press secretary brings the White House press corps into his office, usually around 9:30 a.m., for an informal 20-minute question-and-answer session. This early meeting with journalists, says Barry Toiv, can be helpful to the President's staff:

The gaggle helps you to prepare for the briefing, because you know what's on the minds of the press, and if the press is having an event, the President is going to be exposed to the press that day, it allows you to alert the President to what questions he might get.

Novak agrees that the gaggle is a useful device for the President:

I really believe that the gaggle is a great advantage for the Clinton White House. I think it's going to be used by either the Bush White House or the Gore White House, because they put out the message every morning, and reporters all over town who don't go to the gaggle are watching the news, the cable networks, to find out what it is.

The Clinton White House, says Kumar, has skillfully combined the creation of its own news with the use of the gaggle and the regular press briefing:

Considering the changes [inherent in] a 24-hour news day ... the briefing has a somewhat different nature than what it had earlier. The way the Clinton communications operation works, they give out news over a period of time. They really try to go back to the model that you all had and get a story running and have it running for several days, so that a story will be dropped as an exclusive early on. For example, if there's a computer story, a technology story, a medical health story, that often will appear as an exclusive in USA Today.

Then there's a discussion of it in the gaggle in the morning, and then, by the time the briefing comes, what happens in the briefing is rather than announcing policy, as so often happened in the past, it's a discussion of the politics of the particular policy. And that has a very different kind of tone to it, because it ends up being a contentious kind of event rather than one where maybe the straight substance is given. But it has been a trade-off that's worked for them, because they've been able to get a longer attention span on a story than would normally be the case.

Because the briefing is televised, the gaggle gives an opportunity not only to give a story earlier, but also to work out some of the kinds of issues that might exist between the White House and the press in an informal kind of environment. Those are exchanges that need to take place, such as when the press secretary announces the schedule.

"Bouncing Off" the News
Bill Clinton is a master at turning the news cycle to his advantage and using it to reinforce his key legislative goals. For example, he shaped his responses to school shootings to emphasize gun control, and he linked various HMO news stories to his demand for "patient bill of rights" legislation. As Barry Toiv notes:

The networks do not cover the President as much as they used to, but they still follow a good story. The networks ... are doing a huge number of stories on health care. That's what people care about. The White House does a lot of events on health care, and the connection works sometimes.

They still love to follow conflict, to follow a good story. The war of words that's been going on between the President and the NRA [National Rifle Association], that's a pretty good story, and they're covering it like crazy. The President did--I think he's done three events in the last week or so on gun control, and they'll just keep right on doing it, and hopefully we'll have accomplished something from the White House point of view, actually move legislation or make Republicans pay pretty badly for not moving legislation. That's something that the press will continue to cover.

Adopting Novel Approaches to Cultivate the Media
During his first campaign for President, Bill Clinton recognized that he needed to find new ways to reach key audiences. Playing the saxophone and appearing on MTV were among his more startling gambits. But, as Kumar points out, Clinton also has demonstrated that there are more mundane but highly effective ways of cultivating important journalists:

Clinton, in a session that he had with weather forecasters in 1997, talked about what his role as President was today and how difficult it is to create a consensus. He said that it's important in the case of global warming, that we need to get a sense among the people, and he used the weather forecasters, brought them in to have them have a sense of it so they could talk on their news programs or talk on their weather programs, "Because our country always gets it right. We always get it right once we focus on it. But right now, while the scientists see the train coming down the tunnel, most Americans don't hear the whistle blowing. They don't sense that it's out there, that it's an issue. I really believe as President, one of my most important jobs is to tell the American people what the big issues are that we have to deal with. If we understand what the issues are, if we start with a certain set of principles, we always come out to the right place."

Using Press Conferences. Another way a President can gain an upper hand, says Robert Novak, is to make greater use of press conferences:

One of the do's, I think, is regular press conferences. I can't understand why people as smart as Nixon, as Clinton, even Reagan, had such infrequent press conferences. One of the arguments is, "It takes so much to prepare for them." Well, it does when you have one every six months, but if you have a regular press conference, it's not that big a deal, and the President almost always comes out on top. So I would say regular press conferences would be a very helpful thing.

Still, not everyone thinks that it is wise for the President to play the 24-hour-a-day news cycle game. For example, veteran journalist Sander Vanocur says:

I happen to be a believer in the presidency being a slightly distant place, to invoke awe and respect and a little bit of mysticism, so the advice I have to the next President of the United States is, he should set the rules. Call in the heads of the networks, the news services, major newspapers, magazines, and say, "This is what I'm going to do." It could be a weekly news conference. It could be a monthly news conference. It could be a conference every two months. But set the rules and stick with them.

I know the Clinton Administration has been very good at dealing with the media, rapid-fire response and everything, but I would urge the next President of the United States to go back to square one. Set the rules. Say "I'm not going to be a recluse, but I'm not going to be on call 24 hours a day to answer your demands, because they'll never end." I think, in so doing, he'll have the respect and admiration of the American people, who don't much admire the media.

COMMUNICATING THE MESSAGE TO KEY GROUPS

In addition to appealing to the public as a whole, to be successful the President must also appeal to key groups and constituencies, and garner their support. Presidents rely on groups that generally support them to build public and press support for their programs. The staffs of the White House Office of Public Liaison and the Office of Political Liaison energize grassroots supporters and build support among other constituencies.

Lyn Nofziger headed the Office of Political Liaison for Ronald Reagan. He says, however, that Richard Nixon had a better model for the office, since Reagan's unique personal popularity meant the office had an unusual advantage. Under Nixon, the Office's machinery had to be more systematic:

President Nixon understood that he was not a popular person, that he was not a lovable person, and that he would have to work to get the American people to accept him and to accept the things he wanted to do. So he brought in Chuck Colson. I suppose that would be the first public liaison office, or one of the early ones. Chuck's job was to deal with all the organizations out in the country, the various special groups such as the Chambers of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the cotton growers, the automobile manufacturers, and so forth, and work with them to get them to understand what it was the President was trying to do and to support him in doing those things.

Chuck, before he got religion, was pretty rough about these things. He utilized the Cabinet officers to make sure that those organizations out in the country knew what they could expect from this administration if they cooperated--and knew what they could expect from this administration if they did not cooperate.

Under Reagan, the Office of Political Liaison's duty was more to fan support among the faithful, according to Nofziger:

In the Reagan White House, we concentrated primarily--my shop did--on making sure that the political people out in the country were aware of what the President wanted and moved to support him through various ways, through issuing their own press releases, making their own speeches, so that you had an ongoing drumbeat from the political people, or from the Republican Party, out to the country so that it was just not the President speaking alone.

Anne Wexler, who headed the Office of Public Liaison for Jimmy Carter, echoes Nofziger in emphasizing that the liaison offices must not be seen as a White House equivalent of congressional caseworkers. Instead, she says, they should be part of an integrated team that develops and advocates the President's policies:

From my point of view, and from the point of view of the Carter White House, the Office of Public Liaison is put together to essentially support the priority issues of the President, to build public support for those issues, and that ... makes it a coordination job. The Office of Public Liaison is the place where all the people who work in the White House have to come together as a team, essentially, to try to work together to formulate and then sell the priority issues of the President.

What the Office of Public Liaison is not is a casework office for constituencies. Sometimes it's perceived as being that, but it is not and should not be. It essentially has two parallel functions. One is advocacy, and I'll talk a little bit about that. The other is, as has been mentioned previously, education.

So on the one hand, the Office of Public Liaison is working very closely with other offices in the White House to build an advocacy program for the President's issues. At the same time, on the other parallel track, it's doing the educating. It's bringing in people for briefings; it's responding to people who ask for briefings; and it's reaching out to constituencies to educate them on those issues.

Routine constituent work is of course important, says Wexler, but keeping it separate from the work of the Public Liaison can be beneficial for everyone:

One of the other things that I think helped the Carter White House in terms of its outreach and advocacy was the fact that there were people who did constituent work in the White House, but they did not report to the Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. We had a group of deputy assistants to the President who did seniors, Hispanics, consumers, ethnics, African-Americans, Jewish Americans. They all had a direct reporting relationship to the President. I don't think that they met with the President that often, but the groups that they reported to and worked with knew that they had a direct reporting relationship, and it made it a lot easier for the Office of Public Liaison to do the job that it was supposed to do.

Most experts agree that the Office of Public Liaison should be fully integrated into the White House operation as part of a unified strategy. In so doing, it should work in tandem with the congressional relations and communications staff. Wexler puts it this way:

Linking policy and the speechwriters is probably one of the most important things that you can do. The speechwriters had to be an integral part, with the policy people, in the teams that we put together to work on these issues. The Office of Intergovernmental Relations, the Cabinet Secretary and the Cabinet, and OMB all were advocates for presidential programs and priorities, and all of them played a role in a coordinated scenario.

We did run these coordinated scenarios for priority issues as task forces. There was one person who was in charge, there was a lot of tracking and accountability, and people learned how to work together. It was a learning curve in the Carter Administration.

Wexler also points out that in the same way that it is important to bring speechwriters into the policy development discussion, because they have a feel for how a proposal will be received, it is important to have a two-way discussion with key groups to gauge their reception to proposals. Wexler convened a regular weekly lunch during the Carter Administration for this purpose:

People from OMB and the Council of Economic Advisers and the policy groups through our office were constantly meeting with groups to try to find out what they were thinking and how they would respond to the things that the policy groups were working on.

I did one thing that I don't think has been done in a regular way since, which I found very useful and I think others, particularly the President, found useful. I had a group of people from the outside who came to the White House every Wednesday for lunch. They had lunch in the Roosevelt Room every Wednesday. They were essentially people who had been White House aides in the Johnson Administration. There were some lobbyists, a couple of people who were heads of trade associations. It was an eclectic group.

We met every Wednesday for three years. There was never a story in the paper about this group. None of the people who came ever talked about what we talked about inside. But they were our window in a very real way to the outside world, and there was a lot of very frank conversation that went on about what was going on in the White House, what people were saying on the street, how they could help.

The meetings were attended, interestingly enough, usually by one person from the policy shop, occasionally by someone from congressional liaison, but always by the speechwriters, who were very interested in hearing the feedback of what was going on. After each lunch, I would write a memo to the President saying, "Here is what they said this week." And after a while, the President would call on Wednesdays and say, "Well, what did they say today?" Sometimes they were helpful and sometimes they were critical, but the information that came in, because it was very frank, was very helpful.

Sichan Siv, who served in the Office of Public Liaison under President Bush, points out that such feedback, when given to the policy or speechwriting staff, can lead to subtle changes that make all the difference to key groups:

I recall a meeting I had with the Japanese-Americans on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I brought in a lot of people, including the members of the 442nd Regiment, who fought in World War II. I also included one speechwriter. We were talking about Japanese-Americans, and one gentleman rose and said, "We are not Japanese-Americans. We are Americans of Japanese ancestry."

I looked at the speechwriter, he put it down, and when Bush went to Pearl Harbor to speak at the 50th anniversary, he said "Americans of Japanese ancestry." That was a very strong point, because they all considered they are Americans first and everything else second.

According to those who have served in the Office of Public Liaison, the office can also accept responsibility when the President is unable to deliver something to a constituency group. If the office is doing its job well, in other words, it can defuse potential problems with key groups.