The Measure of Success: Bush's State of the Union
How do you know if you’ve been successful in communicating your message? The results you see. If you walk into a department store and ask for a refund on merchandise when you don’t have a receipt and walk out with the refund, then you’ve been successful. The purpose of the State of the Union address each year is two-fold: both to inform and to persuade—to inform the citizens on how their country is faring and to persuade them that the administration is handling things well. Last night’s address was no different.
Bush’s speech, therefore, took a two-prong approach: a laundry-list structure to inform about issues like health care, immigration, social security reform, education, and energy policy, and then a thematic structure on the primary issue of Iraq.
For the laundry-list part of his speech, he informed. Bullet, bullet, bullet. Here’s what I’m going to do. Something old. Something new. Something borrowed. Something blue. A little to like. A little to love. A little to hate.
For the thematic part, he changed his tone from information to persuasion, and that’s certainly what he needed to do, given the mood of the country. He got full applause from both sides of the house as he opened that section of his speech with the comment, "To win the war on terror, we must take the fight to the enemy." He added his over-riding theme, "Our success in this war is measured by the things that did not happen." Then he talked about the whole of the events in the last five years, acknowledging that 2006 had not gone well and had indeed been a year when the terrorists had fought back in protest of earlier successes in the establishment of free governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, he laid out the consequences of losing the war in Iraq.
Did the President succeed in his address? If you flip through the TV channels and listen to the various networks’ after-the-show pundits, you can be sure of one thing: They always end up where they started. That is, if they supported Bush and his policies before the speech, they liked the speech and thought he did a fine job. If they disliked Bush and his policies before the speech, they disliked the speech and thought he failed to say anything new or worthwhile.
But back to my opening question: The measure of success in communicating a persuasive message is the results you see—attitudes expressed among the real people, rather than the political pundits prophesying about what the American people do or don’t want.
Did Bush’s speech change any minds? In the minds of people truly seeking answers and still wondering, "Are we on the right course?" "What is really happening in Iraq?" "Is this a worthy mission?" "Is a victory in Iraq necessary to our national security?" "How best do we fight terrorism and keep our own citizens safe at home?" Did Bush convince them to give him more time to demonstrate that he is on the right course? Time will tell as you talk to people around your office, in your community, and in your family.
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