On the day after President Obama’s appearance before them, the House Republicans invited my radio colleague Dennis Prager, the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund and me to address their retreat.
I chose to open my remarks with a brief seminar on effective communications because the GOP is almost genetically disposed to blurred messages and garbled points. Here’s the summary of my remarks:
Effective communication requires clarity and repetition, enhanced by brevity, energy and good humor. Thus, if Republicans want to establish benchmarks against which the president and congressional Democrats should be judged in November, they need to begin now to spell them out, and then do so again and again in concise and memorable fashion.
Examples:
» If the president is serious about jobs, he will order water delivered to California’s Central Valley in the amount needed to put the tens of thousands of farm workers laid off because of the fear that water deliveries from the Sacramento Delta are hurting the Delta Smelt, and he will demand that House Democrats back up his order in the appropriations bill funding the Department of the Interior.
» If the president is serious about national security, he will order the attorney general to remand the underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, into the custody of the Department of Defense for transfer to Guantanamo Bay for as much interrogation as is necessary to gain every scrap of information the terrorist possesses that could prevent attacks on Americans and other civilians.
» If the president is serious about helping small businesses and growing the economy, he will demand of his appointees to the Consumer Product Safety Commission that they take immediate steps to stop the crushing and absurd overkill of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, hastily written and passed in 2008, and he will insist that congressional Democrats move immediately to modify the ridiculous standards of this act that operate to, for example, ban the sale of children’s all-terrain vehicles because of trace levels of lead in the pedals.
» If the president is serious about health care reform, he will demand comprehensive tort reform as part of any legislation on the subject, regardless of the cries from his special interest allies in the plaintiffs’ bar.
This sort of messaging doesn’t come easily to Republicans, who have long wrongfully assumed that voters are interested in long speeches and detailed platforms. They need to remember that Scott Brown won because of three words, “the people’s seat,” and not three months of position papers and conferences.
They have to understand that in communications, everything matters, including setting. Instead of convening in Hawaii, for example, the Republican National Committee should have met in Fresno, Calif., where the withering farms of the country’s most productive agricultural region are being ruined because the president and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar are posturing instead of invoking the necessary provision of the Endangered Species Act to restore a full water supply to farms and ranches there.
Repetition matters most of all. The budget deficit was $161 billion in 2007. It is $1.35 trillion today. Those two numbers have to be hammered on again and again and again.
The mainstream media will not help, but new media and talk radio will, if used the right way and not as an afterthought. Rush and Sean, Bennett, Medved, Prager, Gallagher, Levin and Ingraham are vast highways leading straight to the public, as is every local radio host in America.
“Have you ever had a meal with a local host in your district?” I asked the congressmen, confident that very few, if any, had. “Yet every day they talk to your voters for three or four hours.”
“Do you use Twitter?” I asked, and not via some staffer who pretends to be you, and not to tell people what you had for lunch, but to invite the public to tell you what it thinks. There’s a reason I established the hashtag #hhrs (short for the “Hugh Hewitt Radio Show”), and it is to increase audience participation with the program. How can any “representative” in 2010 not be using every social media platform available to establish connections with voters?
All of this and more took less than 10 minutes, and I repeated myself on every point. Clarity and repetition. Brevity, energy and good humor.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
