Quin Hillyer devotes a National Review Online column to an examination of congressional Republicans’ poor grasp of strategy.
The problem isn’t necessarily that GOP leaders have insufficient respect for principle (although sometimes a lack of principle is indeed evident); it’s often less a failing of the what of legislating than the how. Our leaders seem to lack the ability to “game out” the process (when the Democrats do x, should we do y or should we do z?). They also seem unable to coordinate the inside game of vote gathering with the outside game of building public support.
I became intimately familiar with the latter while serving in a leadership press post in the first half of the 1990s, when I saw that the leaders, and congressional members in general, usually failed to integrate their press operations into their legislative strategies. First, they tend to hire bright young college graduates to be their press secretaries. They have good personalities or writing skills but lack any real professional experience. And even with the more experienced press people, members usually don’t think to ask whether and how a proposed bill or legislative topic might be successfully sold.
Instead, they first decide questions about a bill’s contents or its legislative calendar, based largely on internal political considerations; they are acutely sensitive in this process to the amount of professional lobbying noise coming their way. Only later, after committing to a course of action and usually quite belatedly, do they bring in their press aides, dumping on those young aides the job of selling something that’s ill designed for public sales.
It’s the political equivalent of producing a nutritious TV dinner that comes out looking like a bowl of tree slugs: No matter how good the marketing experts, a tree-slug dinner just won’t sell.
Content is of course more important than packaging, but if the two are melded together from the start, the same content can take different forms to make it more attractive. A well-cut diamond on a ring will always look better than an uncut stone.
