Mar
“No Matter Where You Live, No One Can Escape My Fairness” | Mass Communicating The Recovery Act of 2009
A few months ago, I reconnected with an old friend to catch up. We’ve both lived and worked in Washington, D.C. since the first Obama administration, working in various governmental and non-governmental organizations. As we were driving, I began reminiscing about Recovery.gov. I told her, “I stayed on Recovery.gov! Why didn’t the Biden administration have something like that for the Inflation Reduction Act?” She being more diplomatic than myself, wanted to give her opinion, but couldn’t. After all, when you’re around this town long enough, some things are best left unsaid.
Fortunately, I am not one of those people. While I cannot offer a definitive answer as to why the biggest federal investment in the country’s infrastructure in nearly a generation had such a questionable communications rollout, I can offer some historical knowledge on the last one: The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009.
The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, a.k.a. Recovery Act was a piece of legislation and national investment project. In the wake of the 2008 housing and financial crisis, the U.S. experienced an economic recession not seen since The Great Depression. Barack Obama ran on a campaign promising to pull our nation from the brink, but putting Americans back to work. Having won the electoral college, the popular vote, and super-majority, Obama came into the White House with a mandate to deliver on this promise.
In 2009, communicating with the masses was very different. News was primarily consumed on analog television and radio, and rarely online. Social media basically constituted MySpace, YouTube, and a growing little platform called Facebook. Twitter had just launched in 2007 and no one had ever heard of it. Traditional communication channels were the primary source of communication.
”The country is still the same size now as it was in 2009. As long as there’s a digital divide in this nation, those people still need to be communicated to.
Communication formats essentially fall into three very broad categories: print, digital, and multimedia. Print communications include print ads, brochures, lawn signs, billboards, and highway signs. Digital communications include websites, mobile apps, text messages, and social media. Multimedia includes radio, analog television, and increasingly streaming.
What does this have to do with the Recovery Act?
In 2009, the U.S. government was still operating on the assumption they were responsible for the entire nation and therefore communicated that way. Obama restarted monthly fireside chats and broadcast them on public radio. It experimented with using underutilized YouTube channels for the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy to highlight what they called, Voices of the Recovery Act and Faces of the Recovery Act. Learning the lessons of the effectiveness of branding the Obama campaign, they created an original logo for the Recovery. Designed by Chris Glass, the logo was designed to be a unifying image that could be used on all internal and external communications. Whether you were in Seattle or Altoona, if you saw a construction project in your town, you had The Recovery Act to thank for that.
Below is a sample selection of the kinds of road signs you would see if you were driving anywhere there was a Recovery-sponsored project. Notice how the design system considers the existing visual language of highway and construction signs that signal to the public that this is important because it helps you.
And finally, the Recovery.gov interactive site. A joint effort between the federal government and state governments, imagine a website showing a map of the United States. Select any state or U.S. territory, and you can see what projects are being funded, how much, and an estimated amount of jobs created. You could zoom all the way down to counties. I remember nights coming home late at night from my job and spending time wandering around the site. I saw construction and infrastructure jobs happening in my hometown and throughout the state. I could see what was happening here in my new home of The District where the administration didn’t forget about the city.
Audio Interview | Federal Tech Talk | The evolution of Recovery.gov
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the Post-Obama Democratic Party
This is an explicitly political blog. This part of my site is dedicated to the idea that design is political and must be analyzed in that manner. However, I avoid discussing big “P” politics because there’s a lot of that in this town. Politics here tends to get treated as a spectator sport, schadenfreude (a.k.a. taking joy in the suffering of others), palace intrigue, or just adult middle school. There’s so much more here in Washington, D.C. involving the heart, history, people, and culture that is worthy of coverage. However, I have to explicitly say that the communications rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has been a disaster and largely a problem with the post-Obama Democratic Party.
Here’s how the Biden Administration used visual communications:
Note the overall lack of coherent branding and messaging. Instead of relying on existing government signage that Americans are familiar with, a whole new design was created, but not one that would communicate this is a government-sponsored public project. One-off poster boards are created with bullet points and charts, the favorite visual argument for D.C. wonks everywhere. And there’s very little to suggest that surrogates (people hired by the administration or campaign to speak on behalf of the candidate) were fully prepared to speak to the jobs and infrastructure that the Inflation Reduction Act produced.
”It’s as if the $10,000-a-plate monied crowd and the Tumblr generation combined forces leading to an inability to adequately explain themselves to the masses.
I want to be generous and assume more was done, but so far this was the plan. Why does this have to be so hard? This speaks to a concern I have with the modern Democratic Party without the full presence of the Obama generation.
Before Howard Dean headed the Democratic National Committee in 2005 and shaped what we know as the 50-state strategy (which the Obama campaign benefitted from), Democrats did not knock on doors. They did not ask their actual voter base what they wanted. They didn’t ask us to chip in $5 or $10 to help the campaign. They largely raised money off $10,000-a-plate dinners with wealthy donors. By 2008, that mostly changed. They were still doing expensive dinners with the rich folks. But for the first time, they actually asked their base to get involved. I was asked to volunteer and soon I found myself knocking on doors in Virginia with older progressive white women who hadn’t been this excited about politics in years. All that work made me feel like I was part of something bigger. And seeing the rollout of The Recovery Act delivered on the promise that even people we don’t know in this country are getting help.
”I worry that what appears to be the exit of the Obama generation — the generation that connected the analog and digital; the in-person and the virtual experience; the grassroots and the movement — it has left a black hole in the center of the party.
But I think somewhere along the way, as the old guard of the Democratic Party reclaimed the party after Obama’s presidency — the folks who came into politics in the ‘70s, ‘80, and ‘90s — decided they would throw away all those other forms of communication (but keep those donation buttons) while hiring significantly younger staffers to help them with a new era communicating in the social media era. By 2020, the next generation has not only lived entirely at a time during the internet, but a significant amount of time on social media. Now with sites like Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, and even Twitch the expanse of digital communications has grown since 2009.
However, we cannot forget that as social media’s presence has grown, it is still just digital communications. The country is still the same size now as it was in 2009. As long as there’s a digital divide in this nation those people still need to be communicated to. I worry that what appears to be the exit of the Obama generation — the generation that connected the analog and digital; the in-person and the virtual experience; the grassroots and the movement — it has left a black hole in the center of the party. You have Baby Boomers who might be good retail politicians but basically hate having to explain themselves to the general public now tasking younger people to communicate clearly to anyone driving along the highway in Nevada or a rural community in Idaho. It’s as if the $10,000-a-plate monied crowd and the Tumblr generation combined forces leading to an inability to adequately explain themselves to the masses.
Obama for me at this point is like an ex-husband you occasionally let come to the family events because he still looks good and he can charm the pants off you. But the moment you let him give the family toast at the dinner table — full of Black people, mind you — he proceeds to say offensive, condescending things and you’re reminded why you don’t invite him over anymore.
I have to give him credit where credit is due. The Recovery Act had such an effective communication strategy, that almost no one talks about it and instead only talks about the failed rollout of Healthcare.gov.
This blog is not dedicated to policy questions of how much Recovery spending went to corporate tax breaks or any other critiques. It’s not what the bill looked like on paper that matters to 326+ million Americans. What matters is what we see.
While several Democrats lost their seat in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2010, Obama would go on to get re-elected in 2012. Historians have largely determined the loss of the supermajority was a message the voters were sending, not to their congressional rep., but to the president’s agenda. I believe that voters make many decisions when they get their ballot. Whether Obama’s re-election was partially because of the early work of the Recovery Act, I cannot say for certain. But a coherent multi-format communications strategy is always a good idea. I dislike it when people in Washington say, “Well sure that was a good idea, but will it lead to re-elections?” I hate this question because it operates under the assumption that serving the public begins and ends with their vote. You’re supposed to do things for people, regardless if you get rewarded for it. Governing with spite in your heart leads you to…
DOGE, Transparency, and the Importance of Maintaining State Legitimacy
As of the release of this essay Donald Trump has been once again elected to the presidency and just as he had done in the first few days in 2017, is blitzing us with a barrage of chaos. Part of that includes a new government agency DOGE a.k.a., the Department of Government Efficiency headed by overhyped government contractor and failed Iron Man cartoon Elon Musk. As of this release of this essay, entire agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have been shut down and tens of thousands of civil servants have been terminated here in Washington and across this nation. Threats to completely cut Social Security, SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid were derailed for now due to massive public outcry. Their defenders claim all of this is to finally get some transparency in our government. Recovery.gov was the most powerful and impressive piece of transparent public information that had been seen in recent memory. I can guarantee you this administration has no plan to attempt it again.
They can’t because that’s not the point. The point is to destabilize the government so much that we lose all hope in the legitimacy of the state. At a time where it can be tempting to abandon state-building because of lost faith in powerful institutions, we cannot afford to have a stateless society. The less we pressure the state to serve the interests of the masses, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
”Their defenders claim all of this is to finally get some transparency in our government. Recovery.gov was the most powerful and impressive piece of transparent public information that had been seen in recent memory.
The title of this essay comes from a clip of a documentary, Punch 9 For Harold Washington, about the storied run of Chicago’s first Black mayor. Harold was confronted with a number of challenges. After a contentious 1983 campaign, he was still saddled with an all-white council that made it their mission to stop the approval of any funding that would go to their predominantly white districts. It was their mission to ensure he would be a one-term mayor. He became savvy enough to use the public’s interests in the public good to get around the all-white council. As Chicago’s first black mayor, he was expected to only serve the interest of Black residents of the city, when what he really wanted to do was to serve everyone in the city fairly. He appointed more women to his cabinet than any other mayor before him. He served Black, South Asian, Latino, Muslim, and Jewish constituencies. In the face of open homophobia during the rise of the AIDS crisis that specifically harmed gay men, as cisgender straight black man, he set up an advisory committee on gay and lesbian affairs. As one of his former staffers said, “One thing that impressed me about the mayor was that, ‘No matter where you live in the city, no one can escape my fairness.’ ” How you communicate that fairness matters as much as what you materially do with that fairness.