Ezra Klein: Failure to Communicate
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In his blog at American Prospect, Ezra Klein criticizes everyone involved in the bailout process for completely flubbing the way the proposals were packaged and sold to the American people.
Was Karl Rove busy? Why wasn’t George Lakoff, Progressive master of framing consulted?
Here’s a little tip from Klein: Want taxpayers to bite? For God’s sake, don’t call it a bailout!
Here’s a question: Where the $*%*^ is Karl Rove? Or anyone who knows how to package anything? When all is said and done, the inept process by which the bailout plan was constructed will be considered a grave sin. The insane language with which it was sold will be considered a possibly fatal failing. A few examples:
$700 BILLION.: Andrew Sullivan worries that “we don’t know for sure how much the bailout would cost.” True. But we know how much it won’t cost: $700 billion. Yet that’s the only number anyone can name that’s attached to the bill. These are the guys who threatened to fire a Medicare actuary if he gave accurate numbers. Yet they didn’t even bother coming up with some halfway plausible model or scenario or totally concocted press release saying it would, in the end, cost $50 billion, or make us $25 billion, or be budget neutral. Hell, when we bailed out Mexico, we made money. But Paulson didn’t think to mention that. Instead, the only specific figure everyone knows is the only specific figure that all experts agree is wrong by a couple orders of magnitude.
“THE BAILOUT.”: When you call the plan a “bailout,” or a “rescue,” the public overwhelmingly opposes it. When you call it a market “stabilization,” or “investment,” they overwhelmingly support it. This is the administration that chopped down trees under the rubric of the Healthy Forests act and polluted through the Clear Skies act. They invaded a Shiite country by connecting it to a Sunni terrorist group and sold tax cuts as a way to increase revenues. And then they called this the “Enrich Bankers and Hand Your Hard Earned Money to Undeserving Plutocrats Bill of 2008.”
