Bending to Nonpartisanship: A Partisan Issue?

What do you do when your nonpartisan organization's message becomes the rallying cry of a major political campaign?

Last week, Public Agenda kicked off a campaign to promote its nonpartisan Voter's Survival Kit election guides with a plea to both of the major presidential campaigns to focus on the basic policy issues that the American people say they care about most: issues such as the economy, foreign policy, health care, taxes and debt, immigration and climate change. Public Agenda has presented citizen issue guides focused on key election topics in every presidential campaign season since 1996.

After the party conventions, we were just about to start the big promotion push on our nonpartisan voter guides and put out press statement on the wires with the headline, "Public Agenda Calls on Candidates to Focus on Issues in Crucial Last 50 Days of Campaign." Then, the Barack Obama campaign began attacking the Republican convention for not addressing "real" issues that sounded very much like the language we planned to use in the communications on our nonpartisan issue guides.

Our press materials were saying things like, "Elections are too important to be about anything other than how the candidates plan to tackle the big issues that Americans say they care about most, issues like the economy, foreign policy and healthcare" and "We call on the candidates to focus on real issues, in substantive ways in these last, most important days of the election season."

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign was saying that the Republican convention had all but ignored the economy and proposing any real solutions to the major problems that confront the United States. They were saying, essentially, that the Democrats were the ones with fresh ideas and the ones taking on the big issues. The Obama campaign employed similar language to ours in saying that this election is too important to not focus on the issues that most greatly affect the American people, but Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe added: "We still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies."

Obama himself said: "If you don't have any issues to run on, you want it all to be about personality. If you have got George Bush's track record, and John McCain voting 90 percent of the time in agreement with George Bush, then you probably don't want to talk about issues either."

The similarity of our "This election is too important not to focus on the big issues like the economy, health care and foreign policy" message to that of the Obama campaign sent chills up the spines of some in our organization, who rightly treasure our nonpartisan status and our reputation for evenhandedly addressing controversial issues. Some were concerned that our "focus on issues" message makes us look like we're in the Obama camp.

Public Agenda has, for our organization's entire history, consistently advocated for the principle that political campaigns should focus on core issues of concern to the American public. If one of the candidates is calling for campaign debate focusing on the issues, and our message is saying very close to the same thing, the fact that our message might bolster that campaign should be of no relevance. We are not bending our message to support a candidate. Rather, our message of "issues first" appears to be spreading, and that's a great thing. We must not soften our message to avoid seeming partisan. To do so would actually be an intentional assist to the other party and that would, in fact, be the partisan action.

In the end, we decided we should be uncompromisingly strong in our call to focus on issues, no matter which candidate that message may favor at any particular point in time.