Selling A Bill

If you are in the executive office, whether it be a mayor, governor, or even president, you can not sell a bill based on its specifics. Why? Because you are letting the legislature write the bill. Lets use an example.

You want to get health care passed, so how do you sell it to the American public? You can't sell the specifics because people will get bored and you also don't know the specifics, the bill isn't written by you. So what do you do? You sell its merits instead.

You connect the bill to a better America. Instead of going through subsection c of the fourth proposal for a bill from a fifth committee, you sell your vision of an America without high costs and exemptions for pre-existing conditions. Often you tell horror stories of the current system to connect the bad with the current, and the good with the future. Don't slip up and lie about the horror stories though, or you'll lose your support and never gain it back.

Sometimes when a bill seems certain to be the one coming to your desk, you can sell some general improvements that are very shiny, say, a health insurance exchange. Something bad in the specifics? You can try to sell the bad, but you'll lose more support. So what do you do? Connect it to the very shiny improvement and make the public connect the bad as an acceptable side effect of the good. Don't promote the bad too much, or you'll be lying again. And never, ever deny saying something when it is recorded on video tape or you'll lose more points.

You can slip up and correct yourself on any one of these, but never correct one and you won't sell the bill. If you have all but one making you lose support and never change that one thing, you'll never sell the bill.

This all of course only applies if your the standard generic politician. From the current health care issue, to the Iraq War, to the Mogadishu "Black Hawk Down" Incident when you are a standard politician you need to sell its merits and focus on the merits because the details are not going to sell. Sometimes you can sell it even with the bad, but you'll never have an easy time doing anything else ever again.

So what do you do to avoid this struggle of the standard politician? You could slow down and get something done right, such as the Reagan Tax Cuts, which took a year to write and pass. However, the careful monitoring of a bill to make sure it reaches that perfect blend of good details and good merits can take time. If you need something fast for an emergency or want to get things done quickly just to say you did it, what can you do? Break the cycle.

Allow the legislature to do the regular stuff, but take the time yourself to draft a bill on your own that is short, to the point, has the merits, and gets the job you need done quickly. Then, make the bill public, let the legislature look it over and see if they'll pass it. If you wrote a good bill, you'll have no trouble at all.

Now I know you're thinking that can't be done. However, anyone can write a bill, and any senator or representative can bring it to vote. As evidence, it already has.

Now you know the slow and steady approach by Reagan, but the fast and quick approach was taken by FDR. The bill that gave the government massive powers to remove us from the Great Depression? Eight pages written by the Roosevelt administration. Imagine, eight pages. We have thousand page bills for TARP, health care, the budget and on and on and on and we still have massive problems.

So if you want to break the Washington cycle, either take it slow and let the legislature make baby steps to get something done right, or do it yourself and let them run with it.