All eyes inside the Beltway are on the scramble atop the GOP House leadership ranks. And not just on K Street and within the Republican conference itself, but especially within two very unique audiences.
First, the presidential campaigns are almost all hoping for a quick, seamless and not very noisy transition to a Speaker Kevin McCarthy era. If the not-yet-certain new majority leader and majority whip are as fluent on television and as accessible as soon-to-be Speaker McCarthy has been in the days since Speaker John Boehner’s stunning announcement, all three will prove huge assets to the eventual nominee.
The election of McCarthy and other gifted communicators would allow the campaign strategists to count on crucially needed help in framing the issues of 2016 — to “prepare the political battlefield” via strategic scheduling of House votes and key committee hearings.
If Speaker Boehner ever helped Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012, it was accidental. It seems hard to believe, but coordination between RNC, the 2012 nominee’s campaign and Congressional leadership seemed at best haphazard in 2012 and usually nonexistent.
When a GOP nominee emerges, he or she ought to have their “comms” (communications) team hard-wired into the GOP House and Senate comms teams, planning every week from early summer ’16 forward on how to turn the nominee and the GOP House and Senate caucuses into one messaging machine.
The second audience eagerly awaiting new blood and an actual pulse is the vast talk radio audience out there which, since it is hard to see and touch and schmooze with on a golf course or over cigars and a scotch, never interested John Boehner much. Or at all, to be completely candid.
Boehner seemed positively repulsed by that talk audience in fact, apparently thinking it below him, or the conduits to that audience worthy of contempt rather than careful consideration and cultivation. In an interview on The Golf Channel in August, Boehner said, “you’ve got hundreds of radio talk show hosts all trying to outdo themselves by going further right and further right.”
That’s like saying you have hundreds of generals trying to get promoted. True, but that shouldn’t stop you from identifying the strategic thinkers and most important promotions. Instead you focus on the best and promote them, not abandon the field because it is too complicated to master.
Never has a senior party leader in my 25 years of broadcasting been more disdainful of the media channel most beloved by the grassroots.
Perhaps knowing he wasn’t any good at just having fun on air or at talking substance (and the best radio guests do both) Boehner simply clicked off his connection to talk radio, after he rose to the top leadership job. That disconnect looks about to change and to do so dramatically — and for the good of the conservative cause.
Kevin McCarthy was on my radio show Monday, talking national security and defense issues and in that single appearance as speaker-almost-designate, McCarthy did more communicating with my own audience than Boehner had done since he assumed the gavel nearly five years ago. I hope McCarthy makes regular rounds of all the key programs, treating them as at least the equivalent of the Sunday television shows which, while they do matter, do not matter as much to the base as any one of the big radio talk shows.
That’s hard for D.C. to understand, but it is true. The center-right voters and the small-to-midsize donors listen to radio talk shows. They don’t watch the Sunday shows much if at all (though this may be changing as Sunday show teams begin to understand the ratings value of touching base with the right.)
Both audiences are important, but Beltway elected officials seems incapable of valuing the scale of radio world versus the immediate emotional gratification of a Sunday show “hit.” This is a failure of imagination, a capturing of GOP elites by an often hostile Manhattan-beltway media elite, because the electeds cannot see themselves on a radio show as they can watch the DVR of their Sunday chats or see stories about a quote here or there.
The Sunday Shows do indeed matter — often they drive the Monday news cycle — especially with the rise of the new big three of John Dickerson, Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd and of course the continued run of the new dean of the gang, Chris Wallace.
Think on Boehner’s vanishing act from talk radio for a moment and you will understand part of why the “base” seethed with anger towards the exiting speaker. It isn’t hard to sense contempt and it is usually repaid in spades. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in stark contrast to Boehner, is an occasional if not regular visitor to the airwaves, and his leadership team of John Cornyn and John Thune are able and accessible stand-ins.
Boehner’s team actively discouraged leadership from “running the risk” of talking to conservative thought leaders on air, and only former California Rep. and House Rules Chair David Dreier regularly rejected that counsel to enter the fray. Texas’ Pete Sessions and Oregon’s Greg Walden looked for radio opportunities in the past few years, but they had money to raise as successive chairs of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Get it? The House Leadership was willing to use the base for fundraising, but not talk to it or seek advice from it. The speaker couldn’t be bothered. There were big donors to charm and big courses to play.
Under Speaker McCarthy this radio silence seems set to end. McCarthy seems poised to use every platform and embrace every opportunity to frame the battles in Congress and with the President. His comms team is able and large, already connecting with the hundred different avenues into the thinking of the base, and the base thinks. A lot. It chews over sound bites and it listens closely to elected officials, and it reads, reads, reads. Mostly it listens for the sounds of genuine political combat, and for five years it has heard retreat being sounded when it heard anything at all.
This is McCarthy’s and the new team’s moment to change that, if not by winning the immediate spending battle, then at least by repeatedly and straightforwardly arguing the case for challenging the President at home and abroad and by again and again and again pointing to the blockade by Senate Democrats using the filibuster. McCarthy has already come out swinging against the archaic procedure that is not in the Constitution and by doing so has signaled to the base a new era in communicating with them.
If the GOP House leadership wants the base to support them, they have to ask for that support, repeatedly, and do it during those hours in the car where the base is, every single weekday. If Team McCarthy and the GOP House leadership continues its new found appreciation for these tens of millions, the break with the Boehner years will be real and immediate, and the political payoff immense.
