We have to get the message to President Obama, the entire executive branch, and all the Democratic office holders, their staffs, and their volunteers.
Every program you want to promote has to be explained to the voters relentlessly. You have to explain what you want to do and why it is the best thing to do.
The opposition is taking pot shots at your efforts every moment of the day. President Obama once said that while the Republicans were politicking he was governing. That is a very mistaken notion. An essential part of governing is getting the people on board and supportive of what you are trying to do. You must explain every chance you get. Then you have to make chances to explain to make up for the people trying to keep you quiet.
Every time someone says that you are doing the wrong thing, you must explain why what you are doing is the right thing. You do not have to say a word about the person doing the detracting. Just stick to the positive message about why what you are doing is the right thing.
You do not have to say nasty things about the opposition. To do so is counterproductive. If the opposition has a crazy idea, it is counterproductive to call it out as a crazy idea. Just explain again why the right idea is the one that will work. If the opposition’s idea is obviously crazy, then let its craziness work against it. Your explanation of why your way is the workable way will expose the opposite idea as the one that will fail to work.
When I was managing the development of software, I tried very hard to make sure all the features we created were well documented for our users. I used to tell everyone in the group, if you create a feature and don’t document it, it’s as if you never created the feature. There shouldn’t be any pride in an accomplishment of a new feature if the customer is not aware and thus not able to use that feature.
In politics the parallel is that any initiative you work on and even get enacted is useless if you don’t have a lot of support among the voters. The only way to get that support is to explain and then explain again. Remember, your explanation has a very short lifetime, becuase the opposition is working to undercut you.
Explain, and explain again, until you run out of words. Then take a deep breath and explain some more. Until the public is able to make the explanation themselves while they are sleeping, you have not explained enough.
Another good thing comes out of the explain, explain, explain mentality. If you do explain, but fail to convince, then you don’t understand what you are trying to do well enough to communicate it. You need to keep refining what you are trying to do and the message that explains it until most people get it.
As a manager of software development, it was a fair amount of work to get everyone on the documentation band wagon. The next step was to get the team doing what I really promoted (and practiced). Write the documentation first. If the eventual user doesn’t really understand what they are going to get, how are they going to tell you if it is what they really want? Any number of times, I have made significant changes and improvements to what I was planning to do because of what I learned from trying to explain it to prospective customers.