WASHINGTON - Rep. Tim Griffin will serve as the Republican Party’s point man today when he makes the party’s weekly radio address. It’s the first time during the administration of President Barack Obama that an Arkansas Republican has taken to the airwaves for the party’s weekly spot.
Griffin will be joined by Rep. Todd Young, R-Ind., for the 3 1/2 minute speech.
“It was sort of a tag-team deal,” Griffin said.
The two Republicans chose as their theme two separate bills they sponsored that would delay insurance requirements for both individuals and employers who are under mandates under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Both bills cleared the House on Wednesday.
Hitting the airwaves to respond to the president’s weekly address is an opportunity given to few Arkansans in recent years.
In August 2006, Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, gave the his party’s response to President George W. Bush’s weekly address. Pryor used the talk to call for increased vigilance against domestic terrorist plots and called for 1oo percent screening of all cargo entering the country.
In 2002, with Congress engaged in budget deliberations, former Rep. Mike Ross, then a freshman House Democrat, spoke in defense of Medicare and Social Security.
Speaker of the House John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican National Committee share the responsibility for picking the GOP’s speaker each week.
Boehner’s off ice gave Griffin four days’ notice that he had to give the speech, Griffin said. Boehner’s staff provided some suggestions, but Griffin said he and his staff crafted the talk on their own. On Friday, he and Young taped the address in front of cameras in a room on the first floor of the U.S. Capitol. Both the audio and the video can be viewed at www.gop.gov.
The weekly talks hearken back to the president who popularized them, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Calvin Coolidge was the first president to address the nation on the radio, in 1924, but it was Roosevelt’s periodic “fireside chats” that fully exploited the medium, allowing the president to connect with voters during the Depression.
After Roosevelt, presidents began to switch to television, preferring to use the new technology to interact with the public.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan resuscitated the radio tradition. He used radio to bypass journalists and connect directly each week with the everyday person, said John Jones, a communications professor at Pepperdine University in California.
“He was frustrated,” Jones said. “He didn’t think he was getting a fair assessment from the media.”
After Reagan’s radio addresses became a regular Saturday staple, Democrats responded with their own weekly radio spots. Each week, the Democrats would attempt to guess what Reagan’s topic would be, so they would be ready for an appropriate response.
According to Martha Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University in Maryland and author of Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation, the responses are now used to give politicians, particularly House members without a committee chairmanship like Griffin, a broader audience.
“It’s a good opportunity for the opposition to demonstrate how deep their bench is,” she said. “They can showcase their talent.”
Kumar said Reagan, who was a radio broadcaster for years before his Hollywood career and time in public office, hand-wrote many of his weekly addresses.
“It gave him an opportunity to think through a subject,” she said. “It also set the table for the weekend chat shows,” which includes Sunday morning news programs such as Face the Nation and Meet the Press.
Jones agreed. Though the short radio broadcasts didn’t get a mass audience, Jones said, with the average number of listeners “in the low millions,” Saturday was typically a slow news day. Television stations and newspapers were happy to use material from the addresses for their Saturday evening broadcasts and Sunday newspapers, he said.
Today, congressional committees and individual politicians also do regular radio addresses that target a more narrow audience.
For instance, Rep. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, hosts a weekly radio spot, which is posted on the Web and available for radiostations to use, called The Ag Minute.
This week, Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., and member of the committee, was the featured speaker.
His speech supporting the House-passed farm bill can be found at www.agriculture. house.gov.
And in an apparent nodto Roosevelt, since February, Pryor has hosted a Web-only talk called “Pryor-side Chats,” which are archived on his website at www.pryor. senate.gov.
Griffin said he enjoyed the experience.
“It was a great opportunity to talk about something timely,” Griffin said.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 07/20/2013