Fully 75% of Americans want Congress to pass some version of Obama’s stimulus package in the very near future.
However, the real news may be that President Obama never intended this legislation to be a mechanism to immediately rehabilitate the economy. In fact, a story recently in the Politico reports that the adminstration nver intended the bill to be “purely a fiscal jolt, but rather a far broader economic plan that included everything from investments in alternative energy to supports for those likely to be hit hardest by the economic downturn.”
The article also sheds light on the amount of research conducted to properly brand the President’s economic plan:
Team Obama certainly recognized the import of the language to describe the legislation. They used focus groups to determine which words to employ and carefully crafted the bill’s title: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
What they didn’t count on was that pretty much no one would call it that.
Without a snappy nickname (even the non sequitur TARP, with its unfortunate connotations of shrouds and opacity, has come into more common usage) or an obvious headline phrase (“recovery” can’t stand on its own without “package,” “bill” or “act,” and therefore takes up too much real estate on the page), the media and just about everyone else have continued to cling to the word “stimulus.”
The administration made a common branding mistake of putting cleaverness over simplicity. This allowed Republicans to help re-brand the legislation as a “stimulus,” applying a completely different expectation to the bill. The new expectation has driven public confidence high that Obama can “fix” the economy. The problem for the President is now what to do with the legislation to fulfill public expectations while exploring ways to actually pull the economy out of its current nose-dive in the next several months.
Republicans may have laid the foundation to attack both Obama and the Democrats in the mid-term elections in Nov 2010 for not doing enough to help the economy.
