• The point is that a fully functioning White House would have had a fully developed plan that would have been put into action at 9:30 Friday morning to crow about the job numbers forcing the cable nets to cover them.
• Every person in the Executive Branch from the Secretary of the Treasury on down, would have been booked onto every TV and radio program available.
• Friendly economists would have been pushing out blogs and Tweets. Every outlet from Facebook to Snapchat would have been switched on.
• Friendly CEOs would have been booked on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg and anything else with a cable channel number crowing about their part in the million new jobs.
• There would have been op-eds prepared and pitched to the major daily papers for Sunday’s editions. Other essays would have been pitched to business-oriented web sites. Still others, focusing on the politics, to the Conservative sites giving their readers talking points for the weekend.
• An agreed set of talking points would have been distributed on the Hill – for transmission to the House and Senate members who are back in their home states and their home districts – complete with state-by-state numbers of jobs in July 2017 compared with July 2016 or previous.
• In that way the message gets to actual voters from the men and women they have voted for.
• But.
• None of that – or little of that – happened.
Bessette/Pitney’s AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: DELIBERATION, DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP reviews the idea of "deliberative democracy." Building on the book, this blog offers insights, analysis, and facts about recent events.
Monday, August 7, 2017
What a Comms Director Does
At Mullings, Rich Galen explains what a communications director does by telling what the Trump administration failed to do when it had good employment news last week.