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Friday, January 13, 2017

The Myth of Messaging

This coming weekend on Sixty Minutes, president Obama will tell the country that he blames himself for not properly explaining his policies to the American people.  That is why many judge those policies a failure, according to Obama.  It's an amazing thing to behold; the leader of the free world still announcing a completely delusional point of view.

Let's look at just one example, the government oversight of the banking industry.  Prior to Obama taking office, there were, on average, about 130 new banks started each year across America.  These new small local banks focused mainly on consumers and small businesses in their early years.  The new banks were a major source of funds for small businesses which create the majority of new jobs.  Once in office, Obama and the Democrats passed the Dodd-Frank law.  That new law had the announced intention of stopping another financial crisis and ending the problem of banks that were "too big to fail".  Dodd-Frank had many problems, but let's stay with our example.  Dodd-Frank place major regulatory hurdles in front of anyone wishing to start a new bank.  As a result, the number of new banks fell from about 130 per year to a total of ONE in the next five years.  That's right; creation of new banks stopped once the law was passed.

There is no doubt that ending the creation of new banks had a negative effect on the economy.  It hit small businesses, particularly those outside the major urban banking centers extremely hard.  By two years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, this effect was clear; Obama could have come forward with proposed changes to the law to lessen the problem.  Obama did nothing.  Instead, Obama sat in Washington (or on vacation) and watched as the banking problem he and his party created continued on.  Not everyone in America was aware of the ongoing problem, but enough were that people started to question the value of Dodd-Frank.

Obama calls this a messaging problem.  He says that he could have better explained why he supported a law that destroyed the ability of the economy to generate new banks and that people would have then supported the law.  That's a delusion.  The problem is that Obama did not see the problem of ending bank creation.  He did not understand the key role that small banks play in our economy.  He just ignored the problem and made another speech.

For years, the Democrats' go to response to questions about their failing policies has been that the messaging has not been good enough.  That's just a myth.  The problem is what they did (or did not do.)  They will never have a chance to regain the majority until they realize that it was their policies and not their messaging that lost them the support of the American people.

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