In politics, you’re either on message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.

This week… Two for One.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic released the monthly jobs report last week showing the national economy added 379-thousand jobs while the unemployment rate held steady at 6.2 percent.

As you would expect, the White House touted the numbers… but they way they went about it was different than you might have expected.

White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain tweeted “If you think today’s jobs report is ‘good enough,’ then know that at this pace it would take until April 2023 to get back to where we were in February 2020.

For a reference point, the unemployment rate one year ago, before the pandemic, was 3.5 percent.

The tweet itself is interesting because it fits perfectly with the overall ethos of the Biden Administration’s message. It doesn’t lead out with a boast about how great the numbers are, it downplays the progress and highlight’s that it’s not good enough.

White House Press Secretary Jenn Psaki echoed the same message in the daily press briefing saying the jobs report, “shows some progress,” while highlighting “there are 9.5 million fewer jobs than at this time last year.”

What’s the Lesson?

The Biden Administration is doing some nice communication slight-of-hand. They are in fact showing you the good jobs numbers before quickly pivoting to the road ahead and the significant amount of work still to do.

No one is going to remain oblivious to your role in the positive news and they’ll either mentally or verbally tout your role in it.

When it is evident you have done some good work, you get the opportunity to supplement the positive by showing you are less focused on receiving praise than you are about producing the next round of results.

That’s a better outcome than just showing good results and expecting a gold sticker for your efforts.

In the end, you get to drive home two positive messages instead of one.

Also, notice that neither the White House Chief of Staff in his tweet nor the White House Press Secretary in her opening remarks even mentioned the president by name.

The Biden White House is determined to establish – and so far has been very disciplined to maintain – the perception that order has been restored to the nation’s highest office and that its work is now about the people and not the president.

One final note…

Monday was International Women’s Day and that means every business posted some message praising women for their contributions to the economy, their communities or society at large – or highlighting the need for further evolution in those same areas.

But one company took a different approach.

Burger King (more specifically Burger King UK, as you can see in their handle) tweeted:

“Women belong in the kitchen.”

As you can imagine, that raised a few eyebrows.

The tweet was followed in a thread by the rest of the message, which was originally an ad campaign highlighting the lack of women who are chefs and Burger King’s commitment to address that inequality by providing scholarships to culinary schools.

I think most of us would agree that’s a laudable goal.

The point of a headline or one-line tweet is to grab the reader’s attention and they’re great if they tell your full message succinctly.

If not, they can get you in a lot of hot water.

But I also wonder if this was exactly what Burger King wanted.

After all, out of all the thousands of businesses that tweeted something on International Women’s Day… which one got all the free media?

And how many people are really less likely to eat a Whopper because of the tweet?

It could very well be that Burger King knew exactly what it was doing and it played on Twitter’s proclivity for outrage to its marketing advantage.

*Food for thought.*

That’s it for this week.

More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.

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