One Trick Pony

My Brother made a great observation regarding the Presidents most recent healthcare speech. The president uses a prehistoric sales formula to push his agenda. It’s a technique called problem-agitate-solve. My brother describes it like this; state a problem that the person or group your trying to persuade can identify with. Agitate it a little, pour a little salt on the wound. Solve it, but most importantly, show how what you have will solve the problem and make the pain go away.

My brother is a casual observer to politics, he was just observing the president’s technique, but if you have been following my blog or listening to my talk show, you know I’ve been pointing this out for a while, good sales reps have a variety of tools and techniques in their arsenal, Obama’s problem is that this is his only technique and it's the wrong one for those he really needs to persuade.

The majority of Americans have health insurance, and that same majority is overwhelmingly happy with the coverage they have. Consequently most Americans instinctively know it is impossible to change nothing and change everything at the same time, this is exactly what Obama is selling and why Americans are skeptical.

The president likes to use what I call psycho-semantics, anecdotes designed to get you on board emotionally, like Jimmy Joe Johnson who’s insurance company dropped him in the middle of chemotherapy, but these cases are the exception in this country not the rule, and for every one of these horror stories in the U.S. there are three in countries like the U.K. and Canada, So Although these tactics sound effective but they only really influence the few who have been personally affected by such an event.

Americans are compassionate and generous, The President attempt to exploit this by presenting health insurance as a moral imperative, that it is somehow our righteous duty to provide insurance to those who do not have it. But Americans are not opposed to the uninsured getting insurance, they are opposed to being forced to provide for those who would choose not to provide for themselves and the wealth transfers that would go along with such a policy. They oppose insurance mandates that would force an individual to buy something he feels he does not need. Obama tries to paint anyone who would oppose the absolute immorality of government coercion as somehow being immoral. In this respect he describes the American founding principles as immoral and unjust.

From a policy stand point the President’s speech was much ado about nothing, the setting was more for effect than to convey some new message. The American people have heard this before, this speech is not going to alleviate their doubts because there just where not enough specifics which are what this speech was supposed to be about. So who exactly was the President trying to sell? The answer is that the President used this elaborate forum to try to sure up support in his own party. The president also failed to offer any concrete solutions but that’s just Obama’s nature, he’s not a problem solver he’s a problem seeker. He is not so much concerned with solutions as he is with creating a critical mass against something he sees as an injustice, he then passes it along for someone else to solve, this is why he allows Pelosi and Reid to spearhead all of his legislative initiatives. In the end Obama is just a one trick pony and not a very good salesman.

Anthony D Dolpies