President George W. Bush announced his Medicare Part D prescription drug plan in his May 6, 2006 weekly radio address. In implementing Medicare Part D, the Republican Congress was all for extending deadlines for health insurance programs until President Barack Obama extended the March 31, 2014 Affordable Care Act signup deadline. But what was perhaps more striking about Bush’s announcement was its almost childlike simplicity of the language and delivery:
The average premium that seniors pay is a third less than had been expected, just $25 per month instead of $37 per month.
Thanks to this new coverage, America’s seniors are now getting the modern medicine they need at prices they can afford.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, Democrats made plenty of fun of Bush’s “Bartles and Jaymes” simplicity of speech. Before that, Democrats mocked the simplicity of presidential candidate and then President Ronald Reagan. But such simplicity often works. Indeed, Reagan became known as “The Great Communicator.” For these reasons, we now list Messaging Maxim #6: Keep it Stupidly Simple.
Too often, Democratic leaders speak in complex paragraphs. President Obama was guilty of turning into Professor Obama many times, especially in his first few years in office. Like it or not, many Americans are too busy, too distracted or too low-information to handle complex, long-winded concepts in politicians’ remarks. Obama and other Democrats should listen closely to Vice President Joe Biden, whose common touch and simple phrasing led to perhaps the best-ever distillation of the Obama presidency in 2012:
If you are looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple: ‘Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.’
It appears that some Democrats have gotten the message to Keep it Stupidly Simple. For example, President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address registered at just an 8th grade reading level, causing some raised eyebrows among Washington Beltway pundits. Months later, however, many of those pundits were equally surprised when President Obama and the Democrats not only won another term in the White House, but made gains in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives too.
