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Our colleagues at Parker & Partner, Ogilvy PR’s Australian Public Affairs affiliate, sent out this piece to clients after the weekend’s deadlocked election.    Enjoy.

The age of uncertainty

Uncertainty. It’s not something we’re accustomed to in the outcome of Federal elections but given where the numbers last night we will have quite a few days and maybe weeks of it. What the campaign lacked in policy differences was made up for in drama. And so the drama continues.

As the polls predicted Australia was amazingly divided. Queensland saw a significant anti-Labor sentiment translate into a 9.4 per cent swing away from the Government (split between the LNP and Greens) and the loss of up to nine seats. New South Wales wasn’t far behind with a 7 per cent swing, while Victoria and Tasmania said “no thanks” to Tony Abbott, with gains to the Government of 2 per cent and 1.2 per cent respectively. South Australia saw swings away from both Labor and the Coalition to the Greens who gained 3.2 per cent, while the West continued to be a stronghold for the Coalition with a state-wide 3.2 per cent gain.

Officially the ALP and Coalition sit on 71 seats each with four seats in doubt. We will definitely have three independents (Rob Oakeshott in Lyne, Tony Windsor in New England, and Bob Katter in Kennedy) and one green (Adam Bandt in Melbourne). The three independents have quickly come to a consensus to negotiate as a bloc –  so at this stage can be counted as three “country independent” seats to go to whichever party can give them the best outcome.

The best that either side can do is 75 seats –  just short of the magic number of 76. But it looks likely both sides will end up in a stalemate on 73 seats each, or a split of 73-72 if Denison falls to the Independent Andre Wilkie (see below).

Both sides are formulating what they are prepared to put on the table for negotiations and will soon put them forward for consideration. For the next week or so — and maybe longer – the centre of Australian political power shifts from Canberra to Mt Isa, Tamworth and Port Macquarie.

Four or five seats remain in doubt today, and it is the outcomes of these competitions that will decide who forms the next Government. The Australian Electoral Commission says both major parties have 71 seats each. While neither Labor nor the Coalition can get to the magic 76 seats to govern in their own right, if one party ends up with more seats than the other they will be given the opportunity, and will have a greater chance, of forming the next Government.

(The AEC is counting Dennison in Tasmania on the Labor side of the ledger. There is an outside chance, if preferences fall the right way and in the right order, that Dennison will go to independent Andrew Wilkie, former Office of National Assessments whistle-blower and the man who stood for the Greens against John Howard in Bennelong in 2004.)

The four remaining seats in doubt are Brisbane (Queensland), Lindsay (NSW), Corangamite (Victoria) and Hasluck (Western Australia). In all but Brisbane the ALP is ahead by narrow margins. In ordinary circumstances postal votes and pre-polls would be expected to favour the incumbent MP (Labor in all of these cases), but as OTR has previously noted, this election is anything other than ordinary.

It is inevitable there will be mutterings of a “constitutional crisis: as a result – or rather lack of result – from yesterday’s poll. While it is 70 years since Australia had a minority federal government, there have been at least ten examples of minority administrations in Australian states and territories over the last two decades.

There are no formal rules associated with forming minority government following a hung election other than an expectation that the party and leader best able to form a stable majority in the Lower House should be appointed. Experience in Australia through the last 21 years shows that in several instances minority governments have been formed on the basis of agreements with the major party holding the most seats in the Lower House, but this has not occurred not in every case.

Notwithstanding the lack of procedural law and explicit conventions, minority governments are generally based on a formal accord, charter or parliamentary agreement, setting out:

(Griffiths ,G. Parliament of NSW Discussion paper 2010).

So the key term is “conditional”, and the ability of the ALP or Coalition to obtain agreement from independents and Greens to secure support to ensure the fundamentals of stable government — parliamentary confidence in the Prime Minister and government and passage of monetary supply.

The principle of responsible government dictates that within caretaker arrangements, the Governor-General will continue to receive advice from the incumbent Prime Minister. This includes Julia Gillard’s advice on her Party’s ability to form and sustain a stable government.

It is the G-G’s reserve powers, however, that may well play the deciding card in the wash up from yesterday’s election.

The reserve powers of the Governor-General include:

The power to appoint a Prime Minister if an election results in a hung Parliament

The power to dismiss a Prime Minister in circumstances where the House of Representatives has passed a “no confidence” motion against the PM

The power to refuse to dissolve the House of Representatives contrary to ministerial advice. The refusal by a Governor-General to dissolve House on ministerial advice has been the most frequently used of the reserved powers in Australia.

In addition, as the annals of Australian political history well document, these also include the power to dismiss a Prime Minister in circumstances where the Government cannot obtain supply and the Prime Minister refuses to resign or to call an election. The decision by the independent and Greens MPs in determining the level of stability has more riding on it than many may initially appreciate. Undoubtedly their interests are best served by ensuring the longest possible term until the next election. One can be certain that Quentin Bryce AC (a Queenslander appointed by Prime Minister Rudd) will be swotting up on Constitutional Law over the next few days.

There are currently four MPs who look set to hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives (with the possibility of a fifth from Tasmania joining them on the cross benches).

Although their previous associations with the Nationals may signal a natural sympathy with the conservative side of politics, it must be remembered that Katter, Windsor and Oakeshott are consciously not Nationals MPs, having left in circumstances which have given rise to difficult relationships between them and their former Party. There is no love lost between Katter and Windsor and Nationals leaders Warren Truss and Barnaby Joyce.

Bob Katter has held the seat of Kennedy in outback northern Queensland since 1993. Originally elected as a National Party MP, he resigned and become an Independent in 2001 due to an increasing disagreement with the Coalition on economic and social policies. He is a former member of the Queensland Parliament and calls himself a climate change sceptic.

Former farmer Tony Windsor has held the seat of New England in New South Wales since 2001, when he took the seat away from the Nationals. He is experienced in holding the balance of power after doing so at a State level in the NSW Lower House in the mid-90s.

Rob Oakeshott is the newest member of the trio, elected to the seat of Lyne in NSW in a 2008 by-election following the resignation of former National’s Leader Mark Vaile. Like the others, Oakeshott is also a former State MP, as the Nationals and then independent member for the NSW state seat of Port Macquarie.

Adam Bandt is a former industrial lawyer with Julia Gillard’s old law firm Slater and Gordon. He has taken two campaigns to win Melbourne from Labor, allowing him to create a strong profile locally and nationally.

Sitting in an unprecedented position of power, cross-bench members will want to negotiate a stable power-sharing deal that will allow their position to endure for a three-year parliamentary term, rather than merely shoring up the government before a quick return to the polls. In addition to Katter, Windsor, Oakeshott and Bandt, the Nationals’ Tony Crook, who took the West Australian wheat-belt seat of O’Connor from the Liberals’ Wilson Tuckey, is signalling he will sit on the cross-benches.

Several issues will be pivotal for the three “country independent” members in negotiating with the two major parties. Katter, Windsor and Oakeshott, all of whom are experienced parliamentarians, will agree on a common set of principles for negotiating with the major parties, a pact they made prior to the election. The three have broadly similar interests in negotiating a better deal for their regional and rural constituencies, including better health care, ensuring a sustainable population, and upgraded broadband services, bringing the broadband policy debate strongly into play.

Katter advocates for an eclectic mix of changes, including the reintroduction of trade protection to benefit the banana, beef and dairy industries, breaking the major supermarket duopoly and cutting down on a range of taxes he sees as imposing on individual liberties. Although he has already indicated he would support an ALP government, Adam Bandtâ€s support has the potential to be recognised through key policy undertakings. Together with his Greens colleagues he is expected to fight for outcomes on climate change policy, dental care to be included on Medicare, same-sex marriage and more generous treatment of asylum seekers.

Although Tony Crook is yet to outline his position in detail, the fact he is a Western Australian Nationals MP suggests he is likely to be well versed in the “Royalties for Regions”-style regional funding deal that his State leader Brendan Grylls negotiated with West Australian Premier Colin Barnett.

An intense and complex few days of negotiation await us.

Even at this early stage of counting there are two certainties from last night’s half Senate election results.

First, the current Senate composition and voting dynamics remain in play until July 2011 with Liberal Senator Gary Humphries retaining his ACT Senate seat. In the case of a returned Gillard Government and assuming Party unity, there are two options for legislative passage through the Senate; either with the support of the Coalition or with the block vote of the Greens plus Steve Fielding and Nick Xenophon. A minority Coalition Government would be presented with four options to secure its legislation through the Senate as the Greens, Fielding, Xenophon or the ALP, could all individually provide enough support to secure an absolute Seante majority.

Second, is that the Australian Greens will hold the balance of power in its own right post-July 2011. It is anticipated the Greens will extend its Senate representation from five to possibly nine seats. At this early stage of the count it appears the Greens’ gains have come at the expense of the Coalition, which has lost two to five Senate seats. Family First Senator Steve Fielding has also lost his Victorian seat, but could possibly be replaced by a Democratic Labor Party candidate.

- Annabel Crabb on Twitter

- Opposition Leader Tony Abbott

- Prime Minister Julia Gillard

Given the various Ogilvy Exchanges in recent months regarding the U.S. government’s use of social media in regard to promoting our nation’s foreign policy goals, the following Snapshot article from Foreign Affairs is a good read on what the U.S. government has done right, and where it has gone wrong, in the use of technology to promote development.

It took all of about 45 seconds for the finger pointing to start.  Since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced last week that the Senate would not take up a comprehensive climate change bill this year, the accusations have been flying fast, furious and often over the top (see Paul Krugman’s diatribe in the New York Times this morning).

For a quick read on the post-game analysis, Politico has a good article that outlines five different reasons why the bill failed:

1. The environmental movement was ineffective (the administration’s point of view).

2. The Obama administration didn’t give the issue enough attention or show enough leadership (the environmentalists’ point of view)

3. Key Senate Republicans, including Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.),  Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) changed their minds after the 2008 election and didn’t work with Democrats to get to a bill that would get 60 votes.

4. Key moderate Senate Democrats, such as Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), were never enthusiastic about the bill and didn’t engage.

5. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) misplayed their hand by insisting on a economy-wide solution that couldn’t get 60 votes until it was too late.

In the end, all are correct.  No one group was responsible for the end of the legislation.  But, it has been interesting to note some of the reactions from some leading bloggers on the topic.

On The New Republic’s environment blog, The Vine, Bradford Plummer asks four “what ifs?” that outline how the climate debate could have been different.  After examining these four scenarios, Plummer comes to the conclusion that, in the end, the Democrats in the Senate pursued the wrong strategy and should have more quickly changed course and embraced a more limited bill.

Plummer points to a story in Rolling Stone as a good example as any as to the arguments environmental groups are making (all of which coalesce around the  point Politico made above regarding the failure of the Obama administration to push sufficiently hard for the bill).  While Plummer thinks think that getting the Senate to 60 votes may have never been something President Obama could have made happen, he does believe that the criticisms being lobbed against the administration have merit.

In fact, the Rolling Stone article places the blame at the feet of both the Senate Democratic leadership, especially Majority Leader Reid, and the Obama administration.  It argues that both played into opponents’ hands by inviting business to sit at the backroom negotiating table and not pushing hard enough.  One key paragraph:

Indeed, the president has made no concrete demands of the Senate, preferring to let Majority Leader Harry Reid direct the bill – a hands-off approach that is unlikely to produce a measure of any substance. “You have two camps right now in the Senate,” says a top congressional source. “One is the camp of ‘Let’s put something together, put it out there, whip it really hard and get to 60.’ And then you have the Harry Reid model, which is ‘Let’s wait until we know we have 60 votes.’ ” Climate advocates are furious at the least-common-denominator approach, saying it takes victory off the table. “You can’t run up the white flag,” Sen. Jeff Merkeley of Oregon said in June, “until you have the fight.”

And another…

But the Obama administration let the opportunity [the BP oil spill] slip away. On June 15th, the president – a communicator whom even top Republican operatives rank above Reagan – sat at his desk to deliver his first address to the nation from the Oval Office. It was a terrible, teachable moment, one in which he could have connected the dots between the oil spewing into the Gulf and the planet-killing CO2 we spew every day into the atmosphere. But Obama never even mentioned the words “carbon” or “emissions” or “greenhouse” – not even the word “pollution.” The president’s sole mention of “climate” came in a glancing description of the “comprehensive energy and climate bill” that the House passed. In a moment that cried out for direction-setting from the nation’s chief executive, Obama brought no concrete ideas to the table. Restating the need to break our addiction to fossil fuels, he stared at the camera and confessed that “we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there.” He didn’t challenge Americans to examine their own energy habits. He didn’t rally his fellow Democrats into a fight with the Republican Party of “Smokey” Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who later apologized to BP. Far from offering a clarion call for action, Obama said, meekly, that he would listen to give senators from both parties a “fair hearing in the months ahead.” Then he asked us to pray.

Finally, it is interesting to look at the comments of Tom Friedman’s favorite climate blogger, Joe Romm at Climate Progress (that’s not a slam, more professional jealousy).  Romm, in his July 23 post  title “The White House lamely blames environmentalists for climate bill failure,” lays the blame at the feat of moderate Democrats (separate from the leadership) and the Obama administration. His two key paragraphs:

On the  political front, the White House  deserves most of the blame for not getting Republicans.  Why?  Because  the White House never tried to keep moderate Democrats in line, never made  it clear that there was definitely gonna be a vote on this bill and the moderates should figure out what they needed to support the bill (as in the case of healthcare reform).

The WH thus enabled  nonstop public (and private) criticism and bitching about the bill from  a core group of moderate Democrats, which  not only became a self-fulfilling prophecy — that  getting the Democratic votes needed was impossible — it convinced Republicans that there was no possibility of getting anywhere near 60 and thus  no reason for them to stick their necks out.  That is,  it was always going to be harder for even a moderate Republican to support this bill than it was  for even relatively conservative Democrats.

To be sure, Romm does not believe that it was all the Democrats’ or environmentalists’ fault.  In an earlier post titled “The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part 1,” he blames them for about 10 percent of the problem.  Of the remaining 90 percent of the blame, he gives 60 percent to Republicans and their industry allies and 30 percent to the media for giving them a platform.

So, who was to blame?  If I were a environmentalist, I’d put more of the blame at the feet of Harry Reid than the administration.  His strategy gave opponents of climate change legislation of plenty of room to operate.  However, they can’t blame him too much since they need him to win in November.

This is not the end of the debate.  Next up will likely be new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency to move on the issue now that the Senate has failed to move.  However, this being Washington, those regulations are likely going to be challenged in court by industry or a legal group acting on behalf of industry.  Given the reputation of the court that will hear the case, there is a good change they will be thrown out.

This debate is far from over.  Stay tuned.

Sure, if you talk about any subject in a clumsy fashion you will turn people off — just look at how Obama and major progressive politicians managed to turn a winning political issue, health care reform, into an unpopular one!

Yes, much of the climate language that gets tested is truly lame.  But the fact that poor messaging fails is not an argument for not doing messaging on the subject at all!

What is especially lame I think is that many (but not all) progressives and environmentalists have stopped even talking about any of the basic environmental benefits of clean energy.  Here’s a simple message (to go with the energy independence and clean energy jobs pitch):   Strong action to reduce carbon pollution is crucial to preserving and improving clean air, clean water, and a livable climate for our children [emphasis his].  If you can’t even utter that basic sentence or something like it, you simply aren’t serious about explaining to the public why they need to put a price on carbon pollution.  “Global warming pollution” can also be interchanged with “carbon pollution.”  I tend to use both.  “Carbon” happens to be shorter and punchier, but then I devote a significant fraction of my talks to global warming.

As the pundits finish digesting and reviewing the President’s Oval Office address from last night, the Lexington columnist over at The Economist argues that the American voter will be largely judging congressional Democrats (as the proxy for the President) on issues other than the administration’s response to the situation in the Gulf of Mexico.

Instead, the magazine (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know newspaper is the prefered term) argues that the 2010 election will be determined by how the American voter views responds the Administration’s three signature policies: the stimulus, Afghanistan and healthcare reform.

Indeed, The Economist argues…”He will decide the fate of his presidency. You could in fact argue that he has decided it already, by placing three huge and deliberate bets during his first year and a half in office. What he is mainly doing now is waiting to see whether they come good or not.”

Of the three issues, The Economist believes healthcare may be the most troublesome.  And the administration knows this.

This [healthcare] has already been inscribed in White House lore as a magnificent victory, snatched in the spring of this year from the mouth of defeat by a combination of presidential fortitude and congressional ingenuity (or stubbornness and rule-bending, as Republicans see it). Posterity may indeed one day thank the president for taking America a giant step closer to entrenching the principle of universal health coverage that other rich countries take for granted. But posterity has no vote. And as November’s mid-terms approach, polls suggest that most Americans will not be thanking the president for health reform when they go into the voting booth.

Far from delivering a gain, health reform could well turn out to be a negative, at least for the mid-terms. When the Democrats won a victory last month by holding a white working-class district in a special election in western Pennsylvania, their own candidate felt obliged to assure angry voters that he for one would have opposed Obamacare if he had been in Congress at the time.

By the president’s own account, health reform is his proudest achievement, one that would justify his election on its own. And yet it has attracted criticism from every point of the spectrum. Conservatives denounce a budget-busting government takeover. Many on the left who made a fetish out of the so-called “public option” will not forgive Mr Obama for ditching it. And a lot of voters in the middle have reason to suspect that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as the legislation is known, is not as affordable as the president claims, especially after so many measures to “bend the cost curve” were left on the cutting-room floor as the measure made its tortuous way through Congress.

Is it far-fetched to argue that having cast his main bets Mr Obama can now do nothing except await their result? Of course. He can, for a start, work harder to explain them. The president did not expect health reform to go down like this. Once it was passed, he predicted in the spring, Americans would wise up to the lies of the Republicans and see that “nobody is pulling the plug on granny”. Now that spring has given way to summer, the White House has embarked on yet another campaign to hasten the voters’ understanding. Mr Obama visited an old folks’ centre in Maryland to spell out the excellence of the forthcoming changes. But voters, not being stupid, are not so sure. This is complex legislation whose full costs and benefits will take years to be seen.

The Economist is not alone in this thinking.  This week, Time ran a story that further outlined how the legislation will may be a political minus for the Democrats in the mid-terms.   As Kate Pickert points out, millions will be spent on this issue trying to affect public opinion.  In the middle, as usual, are conservative and moderate Democrats in swing districts that are key to helping the Democrats retain majorities in both houses.

It will be fasciniating over the next five months or so to see how the both sides play the public relations game.  As both articles note, the Administraton has tried to go on offense on this issue.  This effort will be supported between now and Election Day by several big-dollar interest groups and, despite the recent schism over Arkansas, organized labor and much of the NetRoots.  The Republican and business groups have already started their campaign to make the legislation a political liability with The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Daily Caller, commentators on Fox News and Fox Business and other members of “the usual suspects” already leading the way.  As the polls show, the oppostition starts out with the advantage.

The Obama administration came into power with experts saying that the Obama campaign had rewritten the rule book on how to conduct a political campaign.  However, as administration staff and their supporters quickly found out, it is much harder to conduct similar campaigns from inside the halls of power.  The question remains, have they learned to adapt?  So far, the answer is largely no.  If they are unable to turn the current situation around, one of the Obama administration’s signature accomplishments may end up being the millstone around the Democratic Party’s political fortune.

As promised, here is the link to C-SPAN’s coverage of the event.

The Associated Press also covered the event and you can read its coverage at this link.

Earlier today, Jared Cohen, a member of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy and Planning staff, spoke at an Ogilvy Exchange presentation on how the State Department is using social media and other Web 2.0 technologies as part of everything it does, ranging from counter-narcotics in Mexico to crisis response in Haiti to advancing social issues in Russia.  C-SPAN covered the speech and we will post a link to the presentation when it becomes available. 

However, in the interim, Jason Miller of Federal News Radio (WFED-AM in Washington) attended the speech and presented a long report on this afternoon’s DorobekInsider program.  The segment runs about 10 minutes.

Yesterday, Ogilvy PR hosted James Miller, the principal deputy under secretary of Defense for Policy as part of our Ogilvy Exchange series of speeches featuring top leaders in government on national security issues.  He spoke about the new U.S. Cyber Command and how it would operate, both in offensive and defensive capacities.  The fact that made me sit up and take notice was that more than 100 foreign intelligence services, along with organized crime, are working to gain to access to U.S. government computer networks everyday.

We will post a video of his entire speech shortly, but we wanted to post some press clips about the speech to give you a taste of what he said.

Here is the Associated Press story.

Here is the Reuters story.

The Government Computer News story is here.

Finally, significant  portions of the speech were excerpted in a story that ran on Federal News Radio (WFED-AM) here in Washington.  You can read a transcript of their story at this link.

Kudos to my colleague, Eric Rosenberg, for putting together another successful program.

It looks like even Lloyd Blankfein has realized that some of Goldman’s PR woes were self-inflicted.  The admission came on Friday’s Charlie Rose. For those of you who don’t want to watch the full hour, PR Newser has a three-paragraph summary that pretty much sums it up….

At Ogilvy PR, we regularly meet with various think tanks and NGOs to talk about the key issues of the day.  Two weeks ago, we met with a representative of an environmental NGO to talk about the possibility that climate change legislation would pass in 2010 (this was before Sen. Lindsey Graham pulled out of the discussions).  While the representative kept to his talking points during the session (it was off the record, so I can’t say who or what organization), he indicated afterward  that even he thought the chances that the legislation would pass during the current Congress were very small in part because of the decline of U.S. public support for global climate change as a political priority.  Since then, the hits to his cause have kept coming.

Today, the InterAcademy Panel announced that it had selected the people who will begin its investigation of the activities of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The InterAcademy Panel is made up of the presidents of 15 academies of science and similar organizations from various countries. The council plans to deliver a peer-reviewed report to the United Nations by August 30 on the activities of the Panel, which won the Nobel Peace Prize along with former Vice President Al Gore for its work on climate change.  According to The Wall Street Journal:

The committee will review various aspects of how the IPCC’s assessment reports are compiled, including the sourcing and quality of data used, the handling of a full range of scientific views, and the procedure for correcting errors after a report has been published.

The IPCC’s work has been questioned of late, both because of the Climategate e-mails and a number of embarrassing retractions it has been forced to issue.  As a result, support for the panel’s work has slipped — not just in the United States, but around the world.  The German news weekly Der Spiegel ran a good analysis of global reaction to the challenges that the IPCC has faced of late. The magazine’s teaser paragraph:

Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?

As a result, it increasingly looks that the chances that there will be meaningful action on climate change in the near future are remote.  CQ today reported on the ramifications at least in the United States….

Finally, China last week that it was launching its own global 24-hour English language news channel to compete with CNN International and BBC World and to a lesser extent al-Jazeera English and France’s mostly English audience.  It will launch on July 1.  This follows the Chinese government’s launch of an Arab language channel last year.  The goal of the channel is to present global news from a Chinese point-of-view.  According to AP:

“CNC will offer an alternative source of information for a global audience and aims to promote peace and development by interpreting the world in a global perspective,” Xinhua quoted its President Li Congjun as telling a launching ceremony in Beijing.

In recent years, China has announced multibillion-dollar plans to raise the profile of state media abroad by expanding Xinhua, state broadcaster China Central Television and the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily.

Chinese authorities have expressed disapproval of much of the international coverage of sensitive events in China such as human rights. They accuse international media organizations of being biased and focusing on negative news.

Assuming that a U.S. cable system or satellite programmer picks up the channel (remember the problems that al-Jazerra had and continues to have in getting picked up in the United States), it will be interesting to see how the Chinese cover the world and, perhaps more importantly, whether the channel gets any traction here and abroad.

After about six months off from blogging, I’m back.  Don’t worry, I didn’t have a David Schuster moment.  So to cover the time off, some things I think I think.

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I have to admit I was not amazed that The New York Times knew about the Securities and Exchange Commission filing a civil case again Goldman Sachs before many at Goldman Sachs did.  (According to Politico, someone must have tipped off the Times since they were able to get a 1,200 word story up on their Web site minutes after the suit was filed — updated version here.)  On the other hand, some at Goldman Sachs found out when the story appeared on CNBC. I originally thought Goldman’s DC lobbyists would have known something was coming, but I’ve been hearing they are viewed as lepers and treated accordingly.

This has been a bad year for the vaunted Wall Street investment firm. Suspicions about Goldman’s activities in the AIG and Greece collapses, the ongoing talk that it puts its interests over those of its clients, the so-called revolving door between the firm and the government and other real or imagined black eyes have united the left and right  in putting the firm as the centerpiece of their anti-Wall Street, anti-bailout opposition.

But there have been a number of self-inflicted wounds too.  Whether it was Lloyd Blankfein’s comment about the firm doing “God’s work” in The Sunday Times that quickly went viral, the widely mocked announcement from the firm’s charitable foundation about  making a billion dollar donation to small business around the same time that firm reported it has  billions to release as bonuses, or the firm’s increasingly frosty relations with reporters, the firm has made a number of missteps that the firm’s in-house PR team was slow or unable to counter.  (UPDATE: Another example, CNBC’s Erin Burnett on “Morning Joe” Monday morning said that it took Goldman 10 hours to get out any response the federal charges, which esstentially lost the firm one whole news cycle.)  The fact that Goldman hired an outside public relations firm (not Ogilvy PR) showed that some at the firm were not happy with the results the in-house team under Lucas van Praag was producing.  When Charlie Gasparino, who has both defended and attacked the investment firm, went live on Fox Business to report about the infighting by the board over the outside PR firm’s recommendations, you could tell how divided the firm’s leadership was on what steps the firm needed to take to stop the reputational bleeding.

Now, with the SEC suit, the firm has gone from having a PR problem to having a real problem. Look for the firm to circle the wagons even tighter.  The Obama administration will likely use the SEC suit as justification for pushing harder for financial services reform, which will create more headaches for the firm in the short term.  (What, you thought the filing on the law suit and some of the White House’s harshest criticism of Wall Street was coincidental?)

UPDATE 2: President Obama is going to Wall Street on Thursday to make a speech on financial services reform.

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There was a very interesting story in Politico about the views of the Obama administration inside the Beltway and outside the Beltway.  Here are several key paragraphs:

While Washington talks about Obama’s new mojo, polls show voters outside the Beltway are sulking — soured on the president, his party and his program. The Gallup Poll has Obama’s approval rating at an ominous 49 percent, after hitting a record low of 47 percent last weekend. A new poll in Pennsylvania, a bellwether industrial state, shows his numbers sinking, as did recent polls in Ohio and Florida.

So there are two Obamas: Rising in D.C., struggling in the U.S.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell admits that Republicans won the health-care messaging war and says he has been traveling to dinners and fundraisers across the country to implore Democrats to fight back.

“The spin took hold,” Rendell said. “I expected more of a bounce than he got, but again it all goes to 16 months in which the Republicans have dominated the spin on stimulus and health care. … It’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and say, ‘Game on.’ And the more we do that, the better it will be.”

It’s yet another deficit for Obama to tackle: The Republican Party has closed its popularity gap with the Democrats, and people say they’d be at least as happy with the GOP in charge of Capitol Hill. Wall Street sees a recovery, but everyday Americans think their country is still on the wrong track. And health reform is even less popular now in some polls than it was before it passed.

“Everyone in the pressure cooker in Washington got all excited like the millennium had arrived [when health care reform passed], but I don’t think most reasonable people read it that way,” Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen said. Bredesen said people are worried about the cost and “appalled at the process in the Congress that produced it.”

Bredesen said that in the states, it’s not about power politics and who’s up and who’s down, but about the cost — an estimated $1.1 billion for the Volunteer State from 2014 to 2019, with the costs ballooning just as the state was expecting to begin recovering from the trauma of the past three years. “We haven’t given raises to state employees for three years and probably won’t for three more years,” Bredesen said.

Now there are still six months to go until the mid-term elections and plenty could change if the unemployment rate goes down.   But right now the signs are not good for the Democrats.

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Speaking of November, my first post on The Intersection asked if it was time for MoveOn.org to move on.  One of the things I pointed at was threats by it (and other liberal activist groups) to punish Democratic incumbents they viewed as insufficiently liberal by finding candidates to run against them in the primaries.  Even if their candidates didn’t win, they hoped that the incumbent would tack to the left in the future.  That strategy had limited success in 2008.

In 2010, MoveOn.org and others are trying the same strategy by backing Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in a primary challenge against incumbent Blanche Lincoln.  To help Halter the groups helped raise millions to fund his campaign through their grass roots networks.  Now, with less than a month to go before the primary, the most recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll (April 12-14) shows that Lincoln is leading Halter by 12 points (45-33).

Assuming no major changes until the May18 primary, the question becomes what did MoveOn.org get for its effort? It has forced Lincoln to spend money on a primary challenge that she certainly needs for a general election campaign where she currently trails all five potential Republican challengers.  The primary battle has also driven up Lincoln’s negatives, again something she didn’t need.  She was always one of the most vulnerable Democrats incumbents in a state that has been trending increasingly Republican.  If she loses, it would be fair for the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to place some of the blame at MoveOn.org’s feet.  If the Democrats lose control of the Senate, look for MoveOn.org and its allies to be placed in the center of the Democrats’ circular firing squad.

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If there was any issue where public relations setbacks have slowed momentum on another one of President Obama’s  signature goals, it is the environment.  Even before the Copenhagen climate change conference, it became apparent that the widely-hyped talks would go nowhere.  Despite attempts by the President to rally the talks, all Copenhagen really produced were some largely meaningless announcements and an agreement to try to rally in upcoming talks in Cancun.  Attempts to spin them differently were knocked down by pundits and the press not associated with the environmental movement.

Copenhagen was not the only public relations setback. First, the so-called Climategate scandal put climate change advocates on the defensive for several months.  When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the organization that shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore, was forced to retract a study on the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, the environmental movement suffered another set back.  Industry and conservative attacks on cap and trade as “cap and tax” and a job killer largely stuck and Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham were forced to stop using the phrase since it was a seen as a political negative (much like the environmental movement had to stop using global warming since the public no longer “bought” the phrase).  At the same time, President Obama’s green jobs speeches fell largely of deaf ears.

As a result, and in conjunction with high unemployment, the public has soured on environmental issues.  For the first time ever, a Gallup poll showed that Americans preferred developing energy supplies over protecting the environment by a 50-43 margin.  A March CNN poll confirmed something that Gallup noticed last year, the public thought the country should give a higher to improving the economy than protecting the environment. (Interestingly, this is a generational issue with Americans over 50 largely supporting economic growth, while those under 50 still supporting protecting the environment over economic growth.)  The poll also showed that only two percent of voters thought that the environment would be the biggest issue influencing their vote in November.  Finally, a Rasmussen poll from March showed that Americans had flipped on the cause of climate change in a year:

Nearly half of voters (48%) believe global warming is caused primarily by long-term planetary trends, a number that also has held steady since last July. Just 33% blame the problem on human activity, which is one point below the lowest level measured in over a year. Eight percent (8%) attribute global warming to some other cause, and 11% are undecided.

Belief that human activity is the primary cause of global warming has declined significantly. In April 2008, the numbers were nearly the mirror image of the current findings. At that time, 47% blamed human activity, while only 34% named long-term planetary trends as the reason for climate change.

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has made noises about personally leading the fight to pass a climate bill, the public support for the issue and a cap and trade solution is much lower than it was a year ago.  There is an outside chance that the a less aggressive bill, pushed by Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington could pass, but time is quickly running out on the Senate calendar for action this year.

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Fun post from the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz on Twitter today:

Love that @KeithOlbermann is broadcasting his hate-tweets (kind that would’ve been written in crayon years ago). Very entertaining.

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I understand the need for companies to get their name aligned with a  good cause, some known as corporate social responsibility in PR-speak.  But I pity the ESPN play-by-play announcer who has to  regularly mention the new Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (the old Emerald Bowl  in San Francisco).  Given the number of 250+ pound players on the field, I’m not sure that this is the best use of Kraft  marketing dollars.

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Speaking of sports…college football added an additional game with the new Pinstripe Bowl to be played at the new Yankee Stadium.  The game will feature the number six team from Big 12 and the number three team from Big East.  I’m sorry, but I don’t get it.  I’ve always questioned the need for the Eagle Bank Bowl (Washington in December?) and the Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl (Boise in December?).  I assume the bowl organizers are hoping that local teams Rutgers or UConn make it into the bowl every because — well, have you ever tried to navigate Manhattan or reserve a hotel room in New York on December 30?  Add the potential for lousy weather and I see a lot of empty seats, similar to what we get here in DC for the Eagle Bank Bowl.  Let’s call the game for what it is, another game between two mediocre teams during an increasingly crowded and irrelevant bowl week.

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Finally, it appears that the Nike/Tiger Woods ad backfired on Nike.  According to a poll by HCD Research, the percentage of Americans who had a favorable opinion of the company dropped after the ad ran and went viral.

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In the words of Maury Povich, until next time America….

The New York Times‘ “Green Inc.” blog had a very interesting article this morning on compact fluorescent light bulbs (C.F.L.s) and the public’s apparent disdain for the product.  Several key paragraphs…

In a September 18 letter to C.F.L. industry stakeholders, Richard Karney, Energy Star products manager, said that national sales of the bulbs have declined 25 percent from their peak in 2007, with sales in some regions such as Vermont and parts of Massachusetts declining 35 to 50 percent. Further, he noted, shipments of C.F.L.s — which are supposed to last far longer than traditional incandescents – are down 49 percent in 2009 over 2007 levels….

Despite more than a decade of costly C.F.L. promotions — including giveaways, discounted prices and rebates — the bulbs have failed to capture the hearts (and sockets) of American consumers. Mr. Karney said that in regions where C.F.L. campaigns have been heaviest, 75 percent of screw-based sockets still contain incandescents. Nationally, about 90 percent of residential sockets are still occupied by incandescents, D.O.E. has reported….

“For those who believe The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will make C.F.L.s the default choice for consumer lighting needs,” wrote Mr. Karney, “I again urge caution.”

Obviously, this is not what supporters of this provision of the Act  expected.  After a decade of work, a coalition of environmental groups, labor and some manufacturers finally convinced Congress and President Bush to pass a law that marked the beginning of the end for the old incandescent light bulb.  For the longest time, two of the biggest challenges this coalition faced were price and quality.  The bulbs were significantly more expensive and many consumers found the light put out by the bulbs too harsh (they also didn’t work with dimmer switches).  But technical improvements, advocates argued, combined with cost savings (these bulbs use less electricity than traditional bulbs) and a greener consumer were supposed to make C.F.L.s acceptable to, if not popular with, the public.

Now two years, the technical flaws have begun to go away.  Many low cost bulbs now cost about $2 (still much more expensive than traditional bulbs, but still a lot better than before).  There have also been a lot of advancements in lighting technology so the difference if quality has also gone down. (And some work with dimmers!)

So why is the public not buying?

Obviously, this is a public policy blog, not a marketing one, but I think it is fair to say that cost is still a factor.  But since there have been both subsidies and public education campaigns in support C.F.L. adoption, what happens, as the article states, as we get closer to 2012 and the public can no longer purchase traditional bulbs?  Will governments continue to fund education programs, such as the one in California that the article mentions? Does the U.S. government delay the phase out?  Or will the government essentially tell the American public to “deal with it?”  A couple of snide Wall Street Journal editorials talking about the failure of government to pick winners and losers are guaranteed, but will there be any long-term political implications?

Time will tell, but this will be an interesting subject to watch over the next several years.  What do you think?