One way to lose a midterm election

Related
to the problem of the bewildering highways signs is President Obama’s
insistence on using the word “infrastructure.” Wouldn’t talking about the need
to repair and rebuild “highways and bridges” be better understood and its
meaning more readily grasped than a term best understood by engineers and
planners?

The
most tragic and costly mistake made by the Obama Administration’s
communications wizards was the failure to explain the health insurance reform
in a timely fashion. In an interview with NPR, Drew Altman, President of the
Kaiser Foundation, said that the White House needed to explain in plain language what
was in the bill well before the bill passed, back when the administration was
trying to decide whether to portray the bill as cutting costs, expanding
coverage, or protecting patients. “And the consequence,” said Altman, “was that
when health reform was not defined in terms that people could understand, it
was left open to be defined by its opposition in more scary terms.”

The
White House staff member charged with the responsibility for selling the
legislation, Stephanie Cutter, in the same NPR piece, argued that the priority
of the administration was on implementing the law, not explaining it first.
Following that logic, would be like buying a piece of complicated electronic
equipment that didn’t include operating instructions and expecting to get it
to work.

Some
have begun to sense in all of this the aroma of elitism, but there is no reason
why even the Ivy League-intensive Obama Administration couldn’t come to the
very simple realization that not everyone is as smart as they are. It is an
administration consisting of too many people who revel in the accusation that
they do not suffer fools easily. The problem with this conceit is that the
definition of “fool” includes a lot of bright people who are not policy experts
and just need to have complicated programs explained in the clear. These
officials are like the IT people who cannot, in a simple English sentence, explain to you the difference between a router and a modem.

Ultimately,
this problem is fatal and when the autopsy is conducted on the many
congressional Democrats who failed to make it through November 2, the coroner
ought to note the cause of death as a chronic deficiency of plain speaking.

Ross K. Baker is a professor in the political science
department at Rutgers University.