The pundits are in agreement: President Biden and his party have a messaging problem, which is why Biden’s approval ratings have sagged and Democrats look to be headed for defeat in the 2022 midterms.
It’s nonsense. Yet smart and experienced people continue to believe it.
Biden needs to be reminded “how to use the bully pulpit,” says veteran reporter Joe Klein. “The Democratic Party’s entire brand was a wreck,” says Politico breathlessly, reporting on focus groups revealing that many voters can’t say exactly what the party stands for or what they’ve accomplished in Washington.
Meanwhile, Never Trump conservative David Frum calls Biden “the least audible and visible president since maybe Eisenhower’s second term.” That’s completely false, but it feels true because of the contrast with his predecessor.
Here’s the truth: Biden isn’t getting credit for passing legislation because presidents almost never get credit for passing legislation. It just doesn’t register with the average person, whose understanding of Congress seldom goes beyond “Folks are fussing and fighting up there.”
Furthermore, the idea that Democrats suddenly have a brand identity problem is bizarre, since they haven’t had a crisply defined identity for the past 70 years or so. And that has been the case through both success and failure.
I once wrote a book arguing that Democrats should emulate the GOP’s success at distilling their ideology down to simple ideas that they repeat so everyone understands them, and that this was something Democrats had been unable to do. That book came out fifteen years ago.
Two years later we saw the election of the most skilled and successful Democratic politician of my lifetime. But if you asked people in 2008 what Barack Obama stood for, most would have said “Hope and change,” which is almost completely meaningless and free of any relationship to the policies he would pursue as president.
That slogan’s appeal had to do with the fact that he was a new and different political figure, and the fact that the country was in the midst of an economic crisis everyone was desperate to get past. It didn’t explain Obama’s position on health care or labor rights or abortion, just as people are asking Biden to explain things today; it was about personality and the circumstance of the moment.
Journalists and commentators have long ascribed far too much short-term power to “messaging,” as though there are words and phrases that can transform the political landscape and turn political failure into success. People who ought to know better constantly claim that the president can alter his political fortunes by giving a good speech, but presidents give hundreds of speeches, and the last time a politician saved themselves from political disaster with a speech was probably in 1952.
Don’t get me wrong: Rhetoric is important. It has political effects. But those effects play out over the course of years, and the phrases or speeches we remember are those that capture in a moment that much lengthier process, not those that instantaneously change everyone’s mind.
For instance, we remember that Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But millions of people didn’t hear that and say, “Oh my goodness, he’s right! I’m a conservative now!” Reagan and his allies had been promoting that paradigm for years; he then spent eight years in office repeating some form of that idea and putting it into policy, and it colored how Democrats and Republicans approached debates for decades after.
But along the way, Reagan had plenty of setbacks, including major midterm losses in 1982 and 1986. He couldn’t just say, “Don’t forget, folks, government is the problem!” and wipe away his political challenges.
If Republicans are in an advantageous position today, it isn’t because voters think highly of their party; in fact, their approval ratings are lower than Democrats’. If you ran focus groups asking what voters think the GOP stands for, the most common answer would probably be “Trump,” since the party has become a cult of personality, to the point that the Republican National Committee is actually paying Trump’s personal legal bills.
And of course, the Republican Party hates liberals. Which highlights another fundamental truth about contemporary politics: Most of it is based on negative partisanship, people constructing their political identity on what (and who) they oppose. Democrats didn’t win a huge victory in 2018 because they had a great message; they won because they opposed Trump. Republicans will probably win in 2022 because they mobilize their voters through animosity to Biden.
If Biden’s fortunes change, it will be because the pandemic recedes, inflation eases and people realize that things are going well. His policy choices can help bring us to that day. But it won’t be because he found the magic words that will change everyone’s mind.
