Crisis Management and President Obama's Health Care Plan
One of the first rules of crisis management, whether in politics or in the private sector, is to close the gap to zero between public perception and the facts.
In the corporate arena, we frequently are retained by clients who have already been the victims of misleading negative headlines and stories that are biased or tilted in the direction of critics. This is frequently the case in litigation. Plaintiffs attorneys know they must be skilled at getting into the media first, because most people perceive pure allegations in a filed complaint as “fact” if a newspaper reports them—and certainly that impression will grow if the response to the allegations in the newspaper stories is, “no comment, we are in litigation” or some vanilla comment such as “this is a baseless claim and we will prevail in the litigation” without any factual rebuttals.
Thus the gap grows between the allegations (which are not fact, but just someone’s allegations of fact) and the reality of what actually happened and why. And corporations receiving bad advice, namely just the legal perspective of “no comment, we will litigate this in court,” will find themselves with depressed share values and a potentially poisoned jury pool—in other words, little option but to “settle” the case, usually for large dollars commensurate with the number of times the lawyers convinced the client that “no comment” or vanilla rhetoric instead of facts was the better strategy.
Now let’s apply these lessons of the need to get the facts out early and often to the current Obama administration difficulties in getting comprehensive health care passed. Most people, and certainly most of the Republican Party and the media, have portrayed public opinion as being overwhelmingly against the Obama health care plan.
But the facts as demonstrated by respected public opinion polls do not support that general public perception. The latest Washington Post –ABC News poll, conducted February 4 to 8, 2010, shows the public essentially split on President Obama’s and the Democratic Congress’s proposal—46 percent for, 49 percent against—essentially a dead heat, since that is within the margin of error of the poll (+/- 3 percent). Even more fascinating are public responses when the three specific aspects of the proposal are spelled out concretely:
· Require businesses to offer insurance – 72 percent to 27 percent in favor
· Require all Americans to purchase insurance (the individual mandate) – 56 percent to 43 percent
· Require insurance companies to sell to all Americans regardless of pre-existing conditions – 80 percent to 19 percent
Note: These results prove that the American people overwhelmingly support a federal government mandate—to employers, to individuals, to insurance companies—to insure virtually all Americans. This is contrary to what most opponents of President Obama and most of the media have written and believe.
So how is it possible the Obama White House has allowed such a gap between public perception (and conventional wisdom) that the Obama health care program is so unpopular and the reality that American public opinion strongly supports the three specific and most important components of the actual program?
The answer is a failure to communicate the facts effectively to the American people by the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. This is why the overall general question draws a virtual dead heat—whether people support the “proposed changes” of President Obama and the Democratic Congress—is so different from the results when concrete, specific, factual proposals are communicated, i.e., a federal mandate to private employers, individuals and insurance companies leading to near universal coverage.
Crisis management Rule 101: get a simple (I like the number “three”) three-point message out as to what the proposal actually is, repeat it over and over again, and set up a war room/rapid response room to challenge every distortion that appears anywhere—on cable TV, on broadcast TV, on talk radio, on the internet, every day, everywhere.
If you don’t get your message out first and repeat it over and over again—containing facts, facts, facts, and not vanilla rhetoric—then the other side will, and in crisis management, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and unfortunately, first impressions count a lot.
