Memorandum

 

To:	Friends of ABC
From:	John Endean
Date:	February 25, 2004

RE: Voices for Choices

Our oldest son's middle school bus comes every morning at sunrise. Although I am not sure quite how this happened, I drew the duty of getting him up, making his breakfast, and squaring him away.

As our son performs his morning ablutions upstairs, I watch television downstairs. It turns out that the early morning is prime time for advocacy advertisements. There's something about being half-conscious that makes me involuntarily attentive to these messages.

The latest example to catch my bleary eye is from an organization called "Voices for Choices." I'm told "Voices for Choices" has been around for a while. In any case, I've just become aware of its existence during my early morning cable grazing.

The Voices for Choices spots have something to do with telecommunications law. The group is cheesed off at the "giant phone companies." Voices for Choices wants me, and you, and anyone else watching to decide, in the words of the ad, "whose side are you on," which is a play on the old union song, "Which Side Are You On," that came out of Harlan County in the thirties.

How to choose? The commercial points the way. One side consists of sixty-eight million Americans - the Voices for Choices. They can't all be miners from Harlan County, of course, but a group of them are pictured in the ad as an uplifting rainbow coalition of smiling Americans.

The other side - representing the "giant phone companies" - consists of four men, even whiter, paunchier, and older than I am, if you can believe it. These toffs are seated around a table, which is hovered over by a brass chandelier worthy of the Chicken Ranch. They are smoking cigars. One of them is carving a goose. They are having a great time. They have "CEO" written all over them. Give them each a top hat and a moustache, and they'd be ready to take a ride on the Reading Railroad or pocket a bank error in their favor.

So it's easy to choose. Who wouldn't be with the People, and against those stogie-smoking, cholesterol-clogged oinkers battening and fattening themselves by manipulating telecommunications policy so as to deny Harlan County call waiting or whatever it is they are trying to do?

Now it happens that Voices for Choices has a website. I clicked on a link entitled "Who We Are." Sure enough, the group comprises little people seeking to hammer out injustice all over this land. The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are members along with the Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom. So is Truth about Trade and Technology. My friends from the Small Business Survival Committee are down with it and the New Jersey Concrete & Aggregate Association has joined up - you gotta problem with that?

But, as is always the case of these grassroots coalitions, there are some pretty big names as well - Covad, Cable & Wireless, Winstar, and the biggest of all, AT&T. The website does not provide financial data, but I assume that these companies are underwriting the Voices for Choices advertising campaign.

The purpose here is not to the blow the lid off of Voices for Choices, revealing it as an organization probably conceived and financed by big business. Perhaps because ABC has been a member of more than a few similar "grassroots" coalitions, I don't have a problem with Voices for Choices as an organization. It discloses its membership roster on its website, after all, and I assume that the Shoshone-Bancock Tribes or Truth about Trade and Technology are sincerely concerned participants in the group, even if they don't have deep pockets.

Nor do I oppose the aims of Voices for Choices. But that is a default position because I do not know what its aims are. In terms of content, the commercials the group runs are almost a perfect vacuum.

I do wonder, though, about the view of CEOs that the Voices for Choices commercials present. Can it really be in the long-term public relations interest of AT&T to depict its phone company competitors in a way suggestive of the Daily Worker? Is this not a stereotype that can someday, if it hasn't already, turn around and bite the corporate patrons of Voices for Choices on their collective fundament?

I'm sure the temptation to stereotype is overwhelming. The Voices for Choices ads, precisely because they are intellectually void, "grassroots" broadsides, need cartoon villains to complete the picture - hence the fat Mr. Bigs carving up the goose.

But, with all due respect to Voices of Choices and its ad agency, the last thing corporate America needs is more cartoonish depictions of itself. We already have one Presidential candidate labeling CEOs as "Benedict Arnolds." And in a recent public opinion survey of Americans in regard to their views of big business, three-quarters of respondents said the "image" of business was either "not good" or "terrible."¹  

I'm not paid to worry about big business. But there is a spillover to midsize and smaller firms I do worry about. I cannot think of a time over the last several decades when the public, the press, and political types have had a greater disdain for business in general. I can tell you from experience that it is not gratifying, as a business representative, to go to Capital Hill to talk with members about the taxation of foreign-source income, free trade, legal reform, stock options accounting, corporate governance reform, or any other matter of concern to business. I get the feeling that the views I'm advocating are seen as an indirect way to enrich CEOs at the expense of, to coin a phrase, the People.

I don't expect you to cry bitter tears over my job frustrations. And I would be the first to concede that the disdain with which business is regarded is wholly merited in some cases. Dennis Kozlowski really does look like Daddy Warbucks's evil twin, after all.

What might give you pause, though, is the thought that economic growth in this country depends upon the health of business enterprise. To the extent that the people running companies are reflexively regarded as pigs, to the extent that their views are dismissed out-of-hand as self-interested lies, economic confidence is unquestionably dampened and public policy is inevitably distorted. A small example of the impact of this: John Kerry used to be enthusiastic about ending the double taxation of dividends - not any more.

Is it too much to ask of businesses, when they go public with their policy battles, to avoid the sort of anti-business pandering so prevalent elsewhere? If AT&T and its allies really do have the better of the argument against the phone companies - and for all I know they do - why not make substantive arguments to the public or avoid advocacy advertisements entirely?

The alternative is simply to flow with the zeitgeist. That means accepting and playing to the public's misconceptions and prejudices in the hope of fooling them into giving you what you want. There's a term for this: "Uncle Tomming." The people who initially resorted to this technique did so because, tragically, they had no choice. What's AT&T's excuse?

Notes

¹  I'm referring here to reporting about a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and the Reputation Institute. "Corporate Scandals Hit Home," The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2004, p. B1.

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