Win-Win for Obama, House Republicans. Not so good for Nancy Pelosi.
Everybody seems to have an opinion about the President’s appearance in Baltimore last Thursday before the House Republican Conference, and the consensus appears to be that the President won. In the zero-sum game that is Washington politics, the conventional consensus is that, consequently and necessarily, Republicans lost. It’s the way Beltway math works.
That misses the mark, and considerably. The entire western world knows that Barack Obama is going to wax the floor with just about anybody in an environment friendly to public policy analysis. Of course he’s going to look good in that kind of setting, where he doesn’t feel he has to hold back for fear of making a needed supporter look bad and he can put his eloquence, his intelligence, and his command over the substance of policy on display. Only a backboard on the wall, a net, and a basketball could have made it more to his liking.
But Americans who watched the debate got to see something they had no reason to expect from prior press coverage and years of attack from Congressional Democrats. They saw Republicans who were respectful and civil, with ideas that Obama respected enough to take seriously. They weren’t the party of no, they weren’t angry tea partiers who tried to storm the stage. On policy they held firm, but the conversations with the President were civil and substantive. Nobody yelled “You lie!” and then sent out a fundraising flyer. They talked about national problems and talked about ideas to solve those problems.
In short, Americans who watched the exchange got a sense of what Washington might look like if Republicans won back the House in 2010 — civility and respect but also a healthy level of skepticism and restraint. Much good might come out of that, as much good came out of 1996-2000 after the Clinton White House learned its lesson in 1994 (America is a center-right nation after all) and Congressional Republicans learned theirs in 1996 (don’t shut down the federal government).
With approval ratings of the Democratic Congress in free fall, Americans are clearly looking for a viable alternative, and the Democratic strategy for the next several months will clearly be to pummel Republicans with negative advertising and carefully scripted votes. The Obama-Republicans meeting makes that more complicated, particularly when Congressional Democrats themselves can’t seem to shake themselves from bad habits and blatant partisanship. If Republicans take the House back in 9 months, I suspect last Thursday will be one reason why.
Cash and Carbon at the BBC
One reason it’s interesting to track the BBC is its exposure to different kinds of pressure. It’s funded by the state through a license fee on every television in the United Kingdom, so to license-payers it has to prove its worth — it has to put on programming which truly engages a broad majority of the viewing public (different audiences at different times). But it’s also directly regulated by the British government, so it has to stay mindful of political controversy. In America, ratings and demographics are king, but it’s much more complicated in the UK, and much more revealing because those different pressures force choices between often competing dynamics.
BBC controversies can come from strange places — or at least, strange to those of us on the western side of the pond. In 2002 the Beeb was rocked with scandal when its chief newsreader failed to put on a black necktie before announcing that the Queen Mum had died. Stars Jonathan Ross and bad-boy comic Russell Brand were suspended and fired, respectively, for lewd prank phone calls to the home of Andrew Sachs, most famous for playing the incompetent waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers. Political correctness is a fact of life, with nearly every possible interest group imaginable pressing the Beeb to bend to its own particular view of the world. With Britain’s economy in deep trouble, the salaries of BBC talent and leading executives have also become fair game.
Which leads us to the aforementioned Ross, whose Friday night talk show is enormously popular, and Top Gear. Ross is truly iconic and might have been born to host a talk show — only David Letterman seems to fit the form better. He’s equally good on radio, where he hosts two shows, and on television. Ross can manage the trick of being self-deprecating while holding his own with the biggest stars in the land; he’s hip without being self-conscious, ironic yet sincere, and relentlessly energetic and edgy. In 2006 the BBC signed him to host his three shows for £18 million pounds over three years, and almost immediately the criticism started, then intensified after the Sachs phone calls. When the executives who had signed the deal left, Ross’s protection within the BBC was gone, and even though he let it be known he’d accept a hefty paycut to stay with the BBC, by then he was toxic. He seemed to get the message and a few weeks ago he announced that after 23 years at the Beeb, he would not seek to renew his contract.
Top Gear’s presenters are highly paid as well, particularly the show’s chief-among-equals, Jeremy Clarkson, whose salary is somewhere between £1.5 and £2 million annually. But salary isn’t what the show’s critics gravitate to — instead, it’s TG’s extraordinary disdain for the agenda of the environmental movement, particularly global warming and carbon emissions. On a weekly basis, TG’s very existence frustrates environmentalists, with its unabashed ardor for fast, expensive, and thirsty supercars. Just as routinely it never seems to miss a chance to mock the green movement; presenters Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May have taken pickup trucks to the North Pole, stripped-down sedans through the pristine salts flats of Botswana, and SUVs tearing through acres of green fields and woodlands in a Top Gear version of a fox hunt. Every few episodes TG stages a race between a supercar and a form of public transport; inevitably and gleefully, the supercar wins with better speed, comfort, and style.
All of which has earned the seething enmity of environmentalists. A few years ago Clarkson’s face was on the receiving end of a pie thrown by protestors as he was about to receive an honorary degree from an engineering school (his first reaction was “good shot!”). And the chief spokesman for Britain’s Green Party has called for an international environmental court to punish Clarkson for “crimes against the planet.”
So, starting its 13th series this summer in the UK (just broadcast last Monday in the U.S. on BBC America), and acknowledging at the top of the show the harsh economic and political climate the show was operating in, how did TG respond?
By sticking to its guns, or gears, as the case may be, and staging a race between a gas-guzzling 1949 Jaguar, the supercar of its time, a smoke-belching steam locomotive, and a vintage 1949 Black Shadow motorcycle that Steve McQueen would be proud of. As always, the race was suspenseful, authentic — Clarkson really was shoveling coal into the engine’s furnace, and Hammond really was groaning with pain after several hours on the Shadow — and funny. As always, the show refused to gloss over the vehicles’ extraordinary consumption of fuel, and as always, the show didn’t seem to really care.
But it did operate within one critical limitation: affordability. Both the Jag and the Black Shadow were borrowed, and the locomotive brought with it a full load of 200 ticket-buying passengers, who were only told they’d be on the fastest steam locomotive run from London to Edinburgh since the 1960s (the show casually mentioned borrowing the car and motorcycle but was silent on the train). As always, the show looked expensive, with breathtaking helicopter shots and sleek, glossy editing. Its producers were clearly willing to accept politically-driven restraints of cost, but, as always, any other restraints went out the window.
All of which was so in-your-face and so politically incorrect that it was the most watched show of its night in the UK, taking in 30% of the UK audience, three times BBC2’s average viewership. And what does this all say beyond the context of talk shows and fast cars?
It says that the environmental movement’s momentum might, just might, be stalling when the public face broader challenges. Ross’s TV talk show and Top Gear get comparable ratings — about 30% of the viewing audience. The chief publically-owned broadcaster of a very politically correct nation decided that it wasn’t willing to pay a political price for Ross because of public resentment over his salary. But it decided it was willing to continue to take huge amounts of political criticism from the environmental community over Top Gear, as long as TG accepted new budgetary realities.
It might be that maybe, just maybe, that the public has decided that it’s tired of the arguments that the anti-carbon emissions community has been making. They — we — want comfort, they want excitement, they want delight in their/ our lives, and they/we find Jeremy Clarkson in all his man-childish and obsession with massive horsepower to be much more sympathetic than Al Gore and his dire warnings of flood and catastrophe. They/we are sensitive to cost and to economic realities, particularly to those who make a lot of money from government-written checks. But the call to sacrifice quality of life to save the planet may have seen its day.
Bad Choices, Bad Predictions
It’s tempting to look back on all the promises, almost all now unfulfilled, that the President made a year ago, and to say that he never had a chance, that Congress is so broken that nothing of any great scope will escape it without having been compromised into mush, that the Beltway is the Bermuda Triangle of big ideas, and that Obama was doomed from the start.
Tempting, and lazy, and wrong.
Obama’s agenda is where it is not because of destiny but because of choices. He and his team decided — in a stunningly narcissistic bit of analysis — that the election was truly about him and not George Bush, that it was a validation of the liberal base of the Democratic party, and that it was more important to keep Congressional Democrats mollified than to keep Republicans included. They’d start with a big stimulus bill that no Republican in a marginal seat would dare vote against, then steadily build momentum sufficient to steamroll Republicans into submission on cap-and-trade and health care. Victory would beget victory, and the base would cheer.
What they failed to appreciate was how good the Republican leadership was at keeping their Members together and how much more conservative the House Republican Conference became after losing more marginal and moderate seats in 2008. There was evidence of the first to draw from. In 2007 and 2008, a key Democratic priority was to extend and expand the Child Health Insurance Program well beyond just covering children, and they aggressively pushed legislation as a way to burnish their own new standing as a Congressional majority and to put Republicans on the defensive; ultimately they hoped to pass the bill with big enough margins to force the Bush Administration to sign it.
It was an insanely hard vote for Republicans who had just been thumped in 2006, particularly with George Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the mid-30s. But the leadership was able to hold enough of their Members together to sustain a veto — which was all it had to do — and actually recovered some momentum by finding that they could stay even with Democrats in the message war.
And there was evidence of the second trend as well. The 43 Republicans who voted for the CHIPs bill, as it was called, represented its least conservative Members and was probably the high-water mark for Republican support of key Democratic initiatives in the last Congress. Of those 43, 16 are no longer in the House, and Republicans went from 200 seats last year to 177 now, a smaller number with a higher concentration of conservatives.
But Obama and other Democrats assumed that the recession would render ridiculous the Republican belief in free markets and limited government, that the significant number of Republicans still with marginal districts would break from their leadership to support their initiatives, and that maintaining unity with the Democratic Congressional Leadership (especially the Speaker, who believes Congress should be the first among equals among the three branches) was more important than the kind of transparent, post-partisan process he had promised throughout 2008.
And that was the critical blunder. Rejecting Republican inclusion in the stimulus bill gave Republicans a point to rally around, and nary a Republican voted for that stimulus bill. Instead of correcting course, Obama continued to defer to Democrats in the House, who continued to freeze Republicans out of the process, which unified Republicans. Every big legislative initiative, it seemed, became a game of poker, but with declining poll numbers and an unrepentant Democratic caucus, on every hand Obama’s cards got worse and Republicans got better.
It could easily have been different: Obama telling Pelosi that he would take the lead on the initiatives he had run on, meetings at the White House with senior Republicans as well as Democrats, and the kind of incremental success which would have resisted partisan pigeonholing and would probably have led to consolidation of the marginal Democrats who give Pelosi her margin in the House.
This is not a lament — substantively I think much of the Obama agenda is wrong-headed and simplistic. The bigger point is about forecasting policy. If you had predicted a year ago that health care, cap-and-trade, and financial regulation would fail and were doomed from the start because Congressional culture will fight major change, you’d be right for the wrong reason — that is, you’d have been lucky, and your prediction wouldn’t have been worth the napkin you wrote it on. If you predicted a year ago that they’d fail because the Obama team wasn’t sufficiently skilled at managing legislation, you’d have been right for the right reason, and worth betting on. That’s the difference between cynicism and analysis.
Top Gear Rides Again — Conan Goes Solo
Could you possibly screw anything up as badly as Jeff Zucker and the suits at NBC Universal — whom GE is jettisoning after 23 years — screwed up the Jay Leno/ Conan O’Brien non-transition? And those same suits are still employed, while O’Brien is gone from the network he’s called home for over 16 years. To understand why, it would have been helpful to tune in this past Monday night to perhaps the most popular show in the English-speaking world. All the answers, however indirect, were there, for anyone to see.
I’m referring to the U.S. season debut (for its 13th series) of Top Gear, which can be described as accurately as a show about cars as Disney World can be described as a theme park whose host is a mouse. Top Gear is watched by — according to most counts — about 375 million people the world over, and this doesn’t account for knock-off shows in Australia, Germany, and Russia. The show is fundamentally not so much about Ferraris or Bugatti Veyrons as it is about adventure, delight, and the friendships that can form around deep shared passions, and its secret is that it holds nothing back. Its hosts (or presenters, in BBC-speak) have taken a Toyota to the North Pole, cheap used cars through the largest salt flat in the world, third-hand motorcycles (or worse) though Viet Nam, and have even tried to send a Robin Reliant into outer space as a mini-space shuttle. They’ve crossed the English Channel in a retrofitted pickup truck, put a Ford Fiesta front-and-center in a beach assault with the Royal Marines, and, for the sheer fun of it, played a very large game of darts with used cars as the darts and motor homes as targets. Wherever the imagination can take anything with wheels and a motor, Top Gear has followed.
And to kick off its latest series it went back to 1949, with a race among the three fastest land-based forms of transportation of the day: the Jaguar HK120 (driven by presenter James May), the Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle (by Richard Hammond), and the Tornado 60163 locomotive, where Jeremy Clarkson donned a fireman’s overalls to shovel coal into a steam engine. Races are a favorite of Top Gear, and this one went from London to Edinburgh along the routes that would have been available in 1949. As with other Top Gear races, it was funny, suspenseful, and stunningly photographed — a climax of planning, artistry, and serendipity — and above all, authenticity. This one ended at the bar of the Balmoral Hotel, with a soot-covered Clarkson and a typically disheveled May finding themselves in the middle of a wedding reception — from which came the picture above.
Meanwhile, O’Brien was out of a job, having failed at the first thing that he’d probably every failed at and leaving the network rather than compromise what to him was the greatest franchise in all of television, the Tonight Show. Why? Bad construction, it seemed, and a weak foundation. His Late Night program did well because Leno’s Tonight Show delivered him a healthy audience, and Leno did well because the 10pm NBC shows were at least in the ballpark with their competition at other networks. Leno’s 10pm show wasn’t, which meant fewer residual viewers for the local affiliate’s news (a big moneymaker for them) and Conan’s Tonight Show at 11:30.
This kind of construction is important because… well, let’s face it. It’s because the shows are crap. Leno’s Everyman schtick hasn’t changed in years, any more than Conan’s Goofy Nerd schtick has changed in years. Every night they bravely face the impossible challenge of having to fill 40 minutes, which will include at least 15 minutes of painfully dull interviews of celebrities pitching their latest work (made worse by the fact that neither Leno nor O’Brien seem capable of an interesting two-person conversation). With all that’s available on cable, on TiVo or DVR, on NetFlix, or on the Internet, the only reason you would watch these shows is if you couldn’t find your remote, your spouse had forbidden you from channel surfing, or you forgot to send your last DVD back in the mail.
Which is not the case with Top Gear, voted last month as the best British television show of the last decade. Unless BBC News America has suddenly scaled the ratings heights, Top Gear has no lead-in. It’s simply an unconnected dot in the television landscape, and unless you know where to look for it, you won’t find it. But people do, because each show has something special and delightful about it that makes you want to relive the experience of seeing it again or for the first time.
And this is something Jeff Zucker and his fellow suits at NBC Universal seem to understand, as well as his bosses-to-be at Comcast. They’ve hitched their stars not to NBC prime time programming, based on 22 episodes a year running from fall through spring, but to a steady stream of smaller shows that more powerfully target narrower audiences with shorter and more frequent seasons. They seem to understand that the concept of a network, with the power to control a schedule, is dead, or close to it. If I can watch Top Gear on channel 189 at 8pm on Mondays instead of whatever NBC has on the air (I don’t know because I’m not watching it), there’s no real value in being a network.
This might not have been clear five years ago, when NBC put in place the Leno/ O’Brien succession plan and locked both late-night mainstays down for years to come. But it’s certainly clear now, and the $44 million check that NBC gave to O’Brien can probably best be seen as a final payment on an insurance policy, just in case the network model still had some life in it.
If this is bad news for O’Brien, it should be good news for the rest of us. It means more channels and more opportunities for people on the creative side of television, it means a greater appetite for risk among those who can fund television production, and it means more variety and more choice for viewers. And Max Weinberg can go back to being Bruce Springsteen’s drummer. How bad can all of that be?
Democrats Doing and Saying Stupid Things, Part…
Let’s start with the fact that independent voters make up at least 40 percent of the electorate, by most polls (party identification polling can be very controversial), with Democrats at no higher than about a third of voters. Meaning: two-thirds of voters, given every available opportunity — as well as considerable pressure from the mainstream media, who spent almost 18 months glorifying Barack Obama — don’t like or trust the Democratic party sufficient to affiliate themselves with it.
Let’s also consider the idea that one of the reasons that independent voters are independent is that the political process itself alienates them. Sure, there will be the ultra-liberals and the ultra-conservatives who say that neither party is quite, um, extreme enough for them, but they are, by definition, the fringe. Most Americans believe in fundamental values of fairness, responsibility, and honesty, and most Americans believe that adults should be able to make reasonable compromises to solve important problems.
So what’s been the Democrats’ chorus since Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley?
“We’ve lost our filibuster-proof majority! We’ve lost our filibuster-proof majority!”
Which, to independent voters already skeptical of Washington and partisan politics, roughly translates as: “We’ve lost our ability to ram our agenda down the throats of the 66%-plus of Americans who don’t agree with us! We will have to compromise with the dreaded Republicans! We have to act like adults! Disaster is nigh!”
Which, just possibly, is making Democrats in Washington seem even more out of touch, even more narcissistic, even less concerned with the significant problems facing this country, and even less sincere than voters thought when Scott Brown won two-thirds of the independents who voted in the special Massachusetts senate race last week.
So keep complaining about the filibuster-proof majority, Congressional Democrats. It’s not the stupidest thing you’ve done, but it’s the most recent stupid thing you’ve done.
Obama, Branding, and Bad Choices
I talked yesterday about the collapse of the Obama/ Democratic brand of change and competence, but left out a discussion of what that means for Obama moving forward. Today I’ll take a crack at that.
Imagine what would happen if Starbucks — whose brand emphasizes the quality and depth of the experience its customers have when they visit a Starbucks store — decided to scrap the sofas and the baristas, call the sizes medium, large and extra large (this is America, after all), and replace its own proprietary music with piped-in FM radio.
Step one: current customers, noticing that their local Starbucks now looks an awful lot like their local Dunkin’ Donuts, would leave for current Starbucks competitors or local coffeeshops which offer the same or better levels of experience.
Step two: Dunkin’ Donuts customers would notice that the local Starbucks now looks an awful lot like where they go for their daily cup of joe, and might even give it a try. Then they’d find that Dunkin’ Donuts is better at being itself than Starbucks is at imitating it, and head back.
Step three: Starbucks implodes.
It’s very, very, very hard to change brands, because brands reflect not just how companies want to define themselves but how consumers define them. The rare rebranding efforts that are successful depend on a company’s complete commitment to the new identity. When Target went from a clone of KMart to its current emphasis on affordable high design, everything about Target had to change, from what it sold to the look and layout of its stores. If it had simply started selling Michael Graves teapots without this fundamental overhaul, it would have failed — it would have been just a cheap retailer where you could get Michael Graves teapots. Politically only George W. Bush was able to rebrand himself — and that was after 9/11 allowed him to transition from “Uniter, Not a Divider” to protector-in-chief, and after Bush had personally redefined himself as a wartime President.
And so too with Obama. His brand was competently managed change, based on a rejection of traditional, partisan politics. If Democrats had wanted experience, they would have nominated Hillary Clinton. If they’d wanted populism, they would have picked John Edwards (or at least kept him around longer than they did). If they wanted someone to charge headfirst into Washington special interests (whatever that might be), they could have voted for John McCain. But they didn’t. They picked Obama because of what he promised them, and it’s based on this expectation that they are judging him on now. He can’t change those expectations unless voters let him, and the Scott Brown win tells us that they won’t.
Which means his options are limited. Going populist won’t work because voters didn’t want populism — they wanted change. And it carries enormous risks because if he offers policy ideas which are inherently populist but can’t follow through on them, he looks even less competent. Ramming through health care on a partisan track might give him a legislative win but even more deeply undercuts his brand of change and post-partisan politics. Coming up with new policy ideas won’t work because no one believes he’s capable of actually doing anything with them. Hoping for political rescue from an economic recovery won’t work because he hasn’t done enough to claim credit for it, and because sooner or later the Fed will have to bleed the hundreds of billions of dollars it injected into the economy.
Which leaves, as far as I can tell, two choices.
First, he can start over with Republicans, getting them involved early in a policy initiative they will find attractive. He could have done this on his own terms a year ago, when his approval levels were in the stratosphere. Now their price will be higher, and — with extremely partisan figures leading the House and Senate Democrats — much more painful to pay.
Second, he can actually do what he said he would do — change the culture of Washington — by aggressively attacking campaign finance laws, which do more than anything else to lock in partisanship. He would face enormous opposition from the constituencies which benefit from the current system, and many of these are strongly Democratic constituencies (truth be told, corporate donors tend to be more transactional than ideological). But it would resonate deeply with independents, put both Republicans and Democrats in Congress on the defensive, and would allow him to represent himself again as an agent of change who is willing to hold his own party accountable as well as Republicans.
Both are incredibly painful. But they’re the consequence of hubris and lousy risk analysis. A year ago Obama’s brain trust had sketched out the glowing future they’d be able to grasp once health care reform had succeeded — a new willingness to take on difficult problems, momentum, credibility, and seriousness. But they didn’t seem to think about what would happen if health care failed, or if it was pursued as heavy-handedly as it was. Now they’re left with that badly thought-through choice, and have no one to blame but themselves.
Branding, Redux
Cottage industries are emerging to explain the reasons for and the consequences of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts Senate victory last week. But it all really boils down to one word: branding.
Branding is essentially a strategy for articulating and meeting a series of consumer expectations which, taken together, create a competitive advantage for the producer in the marketplace. Starbucks’ brand is tied to the experience it provides while you buy and drink their product, and they are successful (still) because that experience is enriching enough for people to pay $3 for a half-caf, half-decaf venti. Apple stands for beautifully designed, intuitively useful, cutting-edge computer products, and because it meets expectations which it has defined but which are compelling for consumers, it can charge two or three times the price as its competitors for a similar product. And no political campaign was ever managed with such a deep commitment to branding as the Obama campaign in 2008.
The Obama ’08 brand stood for change — obviously — but more than that as well. It also stood for competence, for success even in the face of overwhelming obstacles. The candidate himself was “No Drama Obama,” cool and resilient even in the worst of crises. His team was methodical and mistake-free, marching slowly but unstoppably toward a nomination he was given no chance to win. When the economy cratered, his rival, John McCain, called for a halt to campaigning, but Obama insisted that he — competence oozing out of every pore of his operation — could focus on the campaign and the economy at the same time. Democrats latched onto that brand of change, and they won a lot of seats in districts they’d never been competitive in. They now benefited from the Obama brand.
What we saw in Massachusetts was the complete evaporation of this brand. Nobody, even those who philosophically support Democratic principles, believes that Democrats stand for change and competence anymore, and these were things that voters showed in 2008 they desperately wanted. Martha Coakley’s votes came out of party loyalty and habit, but that’s about it. The Obama/Democrat brand did nothing for her.
We also saw that as bad as the national Republican brand continues to be, it’s not so bad that it can drag down an otherwise compelling candidate. No Republican should think that Brown’s win means that the environment for Republicans has actually improved or that the national Republican brand has regained any of its luster; they haven’t. If Brown had run as an unrepentant Club-for-Growther, he’d have lost, and big. Instead he ran as a practical New Englander who’d resist Washington’s inherently polarizing pressures. He didn’t breathe fire, he was respectful even in disagreement, and he was authentic down to the hundreds of thousands of miles on his truck and his goofy, parental adoration of his daughters. In 2006 and 2008, the Republican brand was so toxic that it would have drowned Brown’s candidacy before he could start it. This year, it wasn’t — but it didn’t help him, either.
The message here is that every candidate in 2010 is on their own. Democrats aren’t safe because they’re incumbents, and that swishing sound you here may be Democrats throwing out their “Change” talking points from 2008. But challengers won’t simply be able to ride a wave of anger to win in November. Authenticity will mean much, much more than soaring platitudes or divisive populism (keep in mind that even in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the most populist candidate, John Edwards, flamed out by April). We’ll be seeing an awful lot of candidates driving trucks, but they’d better have a lot of miles on the odometer.
Good News for Congressional Democrats?
The tricky thing about making decisions at the Congressional leadership level is that real, honest-to-God recognition points come very, very rarely, and usually too late to respond to. Recognition points are events that let you assess your strategy and strategic assumptions with enough precision to make corrections and enough significance to get buy-in for those corrections. And Massachusetts’ election of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate was a huge recognition point.
This may turn out to be a blessing for Democrats. For Congressional Republicans, the only real recognition point over the last several years was the plunge in Republican job approval ratings after Hurricane Katrina; almost overnight, 10-point advantages over Congressional Democrats were reversed. But it wasn’t precise, which made it difficult to come up with a new strategy, and it wasn’t significant enough to get Members to open up to new ideas and new approaches. The information was unfocused enough to allow multiple people to interpret it in multiple ways, usually in a way that reinforced existing tendencies. Just as important, the attrition over the years of Republicans from marginal districts, many in the Northeast, meant that the decisionmaking process was skewed toward those with the least to risk.
Congressional Democrats, on the other hand, got chapter and verse this Tuesday about what they’re doing wrong, and they got it in a way that makes it impossible for them to ignore in their own races. Politically, they know they have a huge problem with independents, they know that they can’t depend on the White House’s political operation to bail them out, they know that turnout will be high (usually off-year elections focus on mobilizing the base because turnout is low), and they know that a huge fundraising advantage isn’t enough. Substantively, they know that the economy, the level of partisanship in Washington, and everything else is now theirs — if blaming the Bush Administration didn’t work a year after Obama took office, it’s certainly not going to work in another 10 months. And they know that their health care bill, the priority that it’s been given, and the backroom dealing it reflects, are all deeply, deeply unpopular. Massachusetts voters not only lean toward the left but are as well-informed as voters anywhere, and if you can’t sell the Obama health care plan there, you won’t be able to sell it in Ohio, or New Jersey, or Michigan, or the South.
And critically, their base has to have learned the same. Democratic constituencies tend to be more practical than Republican constituencies, and their most important institutions — labor unions, trial lawyers, environmental groups, feminist organizations — have long-lasting and deep relationships with the Democratic party. Brown’s election will help the Democratic base understand that greed or intransigence on their part will jeopardize the many, many fruits of a Congressional majority, and this in turn will help the Leadership manage their most liberal Members.
The question remaining, of course, is what to do now. There’s very little evidence to suggest that unemployment will improve quickly, so Democrats will have to help themselves, and if they had any magic policy bullets to address the economy they would have already used them. In figuring out next steps, they’ll have two central challenges. The first is finding a balance on partisanship. In an election year like this, any incumbent is at risk, and Democrats will want to use their control of process to give their Members as many message-friendly votes as possible and Republicans as many hard votes as possible. At the same time, they’ll have to show they can work with Republicans to solve problems cooperatively, and this — at the very, very least — requires trust. The more Democrats exploit procedural controls for partisan gain, the less likely Republicans will work with them, and at the end of the day, this won’t be good for Democrats.
The second is finding a balanced relationship with the White House. Obama made major commitments to statewide races in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts and lost each one. His stock among independents is plummeting. It will be very tempting for Congressional Democrats to cut him loose and do what they can to take care of themselves and their districts. But he’s still their standardbearer, and his own political health will still be very, very important to how they’re seen in their own races. They will need to find a way to nurse him back to political health while at the same time demonstrating independence from Washington, the national party, and the Congressional leadership.
The important thing is that they have a chance to correct themselves, which Republicans shouldn’t take lightly. It will be tempting for Republicans to look at the Brown race as a roadmap for their own challengers in 2010 by running on voter anger and attacking incumbent Democrats as entitled, wasteful, and out of touch. The problem is that by November, Democrats will have raised their game. Republicans have an opportunity that in many ways they don’t deserve — only two years after a trouncing — to reassert themselves as a responsible, principled party that can be trusted with governance. If they don’t raise their own game, they may well lose that opportunity.
One last aside: could there have been a clearer, more in-your-face symbol of values in the campaign than Scott Brown’s GMC Canyon pickup truck? I’m not Al Gore, the President, or any other of the smarter-than-thou people in Washington who can’t get their own jobs done well but want you to drive a Toyota Prius and buy lightbulbs that give you headaches it seemed to be saying; I’m a regular guy who rolls up his sleeves and will drive my car into the ground before getting a new one. It was authentic and it was powerful, and seemed to annoy Obama as much as Brown’s position on any given issue.
Change is Hard, Part….
In the Nation’s Capitol, change is in the air. Old patterns of failure will no longer be tolerated; tough decisions no longer deferred; old limitations no longer recognized. Boldness is no longer a choice but a necessity, and our future success lies in putting aside old differences and finding new ways to work together. Yes, We Can.
I’m referring, of course, to the impending announcement that two-time Super Bowl-winning coach Mike Shanahan has signed on to take charge of the Washington Redskins, a team with a proud heritage in the 70s, 80s and 90s but which for the last 10 years has taught Washington how it feels to be a Chicago Cubs fan. The outgoing coach, Jim Zorn, suffered from inexperience (he only got the job because no one else would take it), terrible personnel choices by his front office, and dysfunctional leadership from the team’s owner, Daniel Snyder, who had (and may still have) a habit of paying top dollar for over-the-hill talent and undermining his coaches. Things got especially hot for Snyder this year when the Redskins faithful figured out that the problem wasn’t the coach, of whom there have been six since Snyder bought the team in 2000. It was him — his micromanagement, his bad personnel decisions, his inept but loyal-to-the-death general manager. In a town full of unpopular people, he topped the local list.
And so Snyder at least seemed to learn some new tricks. He fired his general manager, hired a new one highly regarded within the league, and leaked to just about everybody he could that he had his sights set on Shanahan, one of the most respected head coaches and tacticians in football. Fans will be excited about the Shanahan hiring, but the question everybody’s asking is different: will Shanahan, or any other head coach, really have the authority to run the team correctly? Has The Daniel (as he is known in these parts) really learned his lesson?
And that’s the big question for Shanahan. The key to nearly every successful team in the NFL is sound, knowledgeable long-term management, and Shanahan must know that he’ll only be successful in Washington if Snyder does not control the team’s football decisionmaking process. Previous coaches have been promised Snyder would let them do their jobs, and previous coaches have found those promises forgotten. The question for Shanahan is how he manages the process to make sure he keeps the authority he’s been promised.
Which means Shanahan needs to understand that he is a change agent every bit as much as he is a football coach. He has internal constituencies, he has external constituencies, he has various sources of capital that will help maintain his authority, and he has huge problems with his team that no amount of blackboard wizardry are going to fix overnight. Unless Daniel Snyder has had a personality conversion of Biblical proportion, there is no reason to believe he will stick to his new lessons once the pressure is off. To succeed, Shanahan needs to manage all his resources and his constituencies as any effective change agent would.
What does this mean?
First, he needs to understand that his only organizational support comes from the fan base. It was the fan base that got Snyder’s sycophantic GM fired, and it was the fan base that got Snyder to publicly give decisionmaking authority to the new GM (Bruce Allen, son of legendary Redskins ex-coach George Allen and brother of the former U.S. Senator and Virginia Governor of the same name). To maintain the necessary degree of support from the fan base, Shanahan will have to consciously manage them. He will have to convey to them a clear vision of what kind of football team he will build here (and “winning team” doesn’t cut it). He will have to define realistic expectations, and meet them; the Redskins have been overpromising and underdelivering for years. And he’ll have to deliver specific actions over the next several months that fit his vision without discouraging the fans more than they already are. High-priced, high-profile free agent signings will seem like more of the same, for example. Most importantly, he’ll have to be positive. Laying out a safety net of excuses — talking about what a mess he inherited, for example — will fail, because people already know what the problems are. They expect him to fix them, not complain about them.
And he has to have a communications strategy. Shanahan will need the press on his side because the first year will probably be ugly and Washington’s instinctive response is cynicism. He has to build relationships with reporters so they and the fan base understand how he’s changing the team, even when things go badly — why he’s trading away popular players for draft picks, or why he uses high draft picks on little-known offensive linemen instead of the hot receiver, running back, or quarterback. And — this is the important bit — he needs to be able to use those relationships to send Snyder the occasional message to back off when Snyder reverts to custom (and he has with every single head coach). The leak is an art form in Washington, and Shanahan needs to be able to do it shrewdly and invisibly if he wants to take full advantage of his power base, the fans. A private complaint can easily be talked away; far tougher is a column in the Washington Post citing “Redskins Park sources” to say that Snyder is back to his old ways.
With fully functional NFL teams, a coach wouldn’t have to do this. New England coach Bill Belichick clearly has the full backing and respect of his team’s owner, Robert Kraft, and has been able to make huge and unpopular decisions without losing authority. But for the last decade, the Redskins haven’t been functional; they’ve been a case study in how not to run a football team. Shanahan knows this — before his successful tenure with the Denver Broncos and their very supportive owner, he failed in Oakland under the domineering Al Davis. It’s inconceivable that the subject didn’t come up in his conversations with Snyder that led to his agreement to coach the team. The question is whether he understands what he needs to do to protect that authority. If he can’t, he’ll fail, like all the others.
Tiger Woods: Why Did We Care in the First Place?
Events have a way of forcing reevaluations of opinions so deeply ingrained they seem like laws of science. For example, given the late night car crash, the sanctimonious evasions and half-apologies, and now the text messages and voice mails:
Why was Tiger Woods so popular in the first place?
It’s a legitimate question. He is quite possibly the most boring individual champion of the last half-century in any major sport. Borg at least had foils, Connors and McEnroe, whose raw emotion reminded you that tennis is a game played by humans with creativity and verve. Nicklaus and Palmer always had a knack for drama, and Palmer made his name — and, arguably, the future of televised golf — with daring charges of go-for-broke golf when the tournament seemed lost. Golf wouldn’t seem to be made for TV, which made it rich, but Nicklaus, Palmer, and those who followed them proved that it could be by fleshing out the inherent drama of how individuals, forced into difficult situations, can tap deep inside themselves for courage and the occasional miracle.
But not Tiger. Tiger’s strength is his course analysis, the way he calculates the risks and rewards of every hole and carves up the course with optimum efficiency. If he were in another line of work, he’d be a hedge fund manager, surveying the market for hidden inefficiencies and exploiting them. His game plan is constant: stay with the pack on Thursday, steadily open a lead on Friday and Saturday, and then force players to catch up with him on Sunday, when pin placements and course setups are at their most difficult. Occasionally we see real flair and creativity, but only when necessary. For the most part, Tiger wins golf tournaments not because of the spectacular chips or putts, but by regularly making 8-9 foot putts that allow him to keep par and stay on program. That’s why his strength is the 72 hole tournament, which emphasizes consistency, and why he’s so mediocre in Ryder Cup play, which rewards risk-taking and flash. What he can do on a golf course is impressive, but impressive isn’t always interesting. And when Tiger has a three-shot lead on Sunday, it rarely is.
What else explains his popularity? Cross graciousness off the list. With few exceptions, most champion golf players radiate a sense of almost astounded glee at the fact that they play golf for a living — a very good living — and more than in any other sport, they respect the efforts of those who came before them. But to Tiger, it seems all one great burden. Galleries are a distraction, the press (and the golf press is notoriously polite) is a nuisance, and he seems to have practically nothing to do with his fellow players. I’ve seen Phil Mickelson fist-bump a close competitor after a good shot in the last round; the most Woods will muster is a glare. His caddy, Steve Williams, stares down fans who would dare disturb his boss from behind the ropes. Bad shots are followed — loudly — with f-bombs and the kind of fury that Bobby Jones learned to correct as a teenager. He has a charitable foundation, to be sure, but it’s not clear whether he actually puts skin and sinew into it, or simply treats it as a part of a carefully crafted public identity.
It’s not the gracefulness of his swing — unlike the long, easily-flowing arc of a Sam Snead, a Fred Couples or a Vijay Singh, Woods is all muscle. And it’s certainly not his personality, which at least in interviews is stiff and scripted. To the extent we see any personality peek through at all, it’s obsessive-compulsiveness: nearly everything he says has something to do with his play that day, the mechanics of his swing,
So why, up to the recent revelations, was Tiger Woods so astoundingly popular in the first place? Let me suggest three reasons.
First, he was not offensive. Golfers are not, by nature, an offensive lot, and it doesn’t take much to cause dislike. People hated Nicklaus for years because he dared to beat Arnold Palmer, The King. When he burst onto the scene, Woods was clean-scrubbed and well-behaved and had no universally popular icon to dethrone. He had an audience which was immediately receptive and only occasionally resistant to his talents.
Second, because he’s usually in the hunt in the most televised tournaments he gets lots of television coverage, which in turn makes him enormously attractive to advertisers and sponsors. The sponsors themselves have in turn undertaken the huge marketing effort for the Tiger Woods brand. The ads, particularly Nike’s, humanize him and probably articulate identity and personality for him better than anything else he’s done.
Third, he’s a winner, and we love winners. Michael Jordan was a great, great basketball player but only became a hero when his Chicago Bulls starting racking up championships, and the halo of those championships turned lesser players on those teams into heroes as well, with endorsement deals and book contracts well beyond what they could have expected without the banners. We are willing to forgive an awful lot for people who win consistently, and far less for those who don’t.
The question facing the Woods camp, after (allegedly) buying the silence of the three or five or seven or nine women he’s (allegedly) had affairs with, is what to do next. He has to figure out whether or how to rehabilitate his public image, he has to figure out how he’s going to deal with the media, and he has to figure out what he wants to do about golf.
And the fulcrum of that, I think, will be conversations his representatives are certainly having with Billy Payne, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters. Augusta National’s members like things tidy and under control, dictating the terms under which CBS will cover the tournament (under annual one-year agreements) and spending millions annually to protect the reputation (and brand) of the course, the club, and the tournament. Augusta National’s members don’t care about gate revenues or television ratings — in 2003, they responded to a planned boycott of its corporate sponsors by making its coverage commercial-free. It’s inconceivable that Payne would allow Woods’ presence to turn the tournament into a tabloid frenzy, and I’d be surprised if Payne isn’t diplomatically sharing that warning with Woods’s representation.
Then consider the British Open, to be played this year in St. Andrews, Scotland. Unlike Augusta National, the Old Course at St. Andrews offers no protection from prying eyes. There are no fences, no walls, no gates, and the British tabloids — never known for restraint — will have a field day with him. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews is at least as prestigious and protective of its reputation and tournament as Augusta National, and it’s almost impossible to imagine the R&A wanting its centerpiece overrun with reporters from the Sun, News of the World, and the Daily Mirror any more than their peers in Augusta. Consider the same for the Ryder Cup, to be held in September in Wales. Will the U.S. team captain, Corey Pavin, want to disrupt his team’s chemistry on foreign soil when Ryder Cup team dynamics are inherently difficult in the best of times? Will other players want to answer questions about whether their wives approve of Tiger being on the team?
Which, possibly, leaves the U.S. Open (at Pebble Beach) and the PGA (at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin) as the only major tournaments for the year where pressure from television networks and the PGA itself might be enough to make Woods and the attendant tabloid swirl tolerable. (But consider, also, that GM, a major Woods sponsor, parted with Woods when it went bankrupt). Is that enough for someone who treats all other golf tournaments as warmups for the majors?
So here’s what I think happens, or at least makes most sense for Woods as a professional, economic entity.
Sometime soon, he announces that he is withdrawing from playing professional golf for 2010 so he can focus exclusively on his family and his (alleged) personal problems. He needs to do something this bold and dramatic to show the full depth of remorse that, in the public eye, his (alleged) serial philandering requires, and he needs to show he has values beyond tees, greens, and fairways.
Operationally, this will give him cover from the press, but also allow him to manage his public communications on his own terms. And he’ll have some time to figure out what he actually wants to do without having his decisions driven by short-term pressures. When he makes those decisions, he’ll give the occasional interview with friendly reporters who will ask questions Woods needs to answer but won’t press too much.
The next big question is whether Woods’s void can be filled by some of the exciting young golfers who grew up idolizing him and are now winning tournaments on their own. If so, it might be hard for Woods to come back. The players, television, corporate sponsors (especially Nike, whose image-shaping will be critical for any comeback), and those responsible for putting on the major tournaments may have moved on. But that is the risk he took.
