Obama's lack of message discipline
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAt an April 2008 fund-raiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama let loose with his famous "they cling to guns or religion" line. Last Saturday at a West Newton, Mass., fund-raiser, the president said, "facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning . . . because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared."It is hard to have message discipline when nothing you have tried has worked. It is much easier being on the outside saying "Have you noticed that nothing Obama tries works?"
Memo to White House: Calling voters stupid is not a winning strategy.
The economy and jobs are the No. 1 issue in every poll. Yet Mr. Obama of late has talked about immigration reform and weighed in (unprompted) on the Ground Zero mosque. He devoted Labor Day to an ineffective Mideast peace initiative. He demeans large blocs of voters and now is ending his midterm pitch with attacks on nonexistent foreign campaign contributions and weird assertions that "the Empire is striking back."
Meanwhile, Republicans have talked about little else than the economy—drawing attention to lackluster job growth, the failed stimulus, out-of-control spending, escalating deficits and the dangers of ObamaCare.
On Sunday, White House senior adviser David Axelrod promised that the administration's focus next year would be "to generate more growth and jobs" and "on our fiscal situation." That must have left congressional Democrats—battered for months by the GOP's message discipline—wondering why there's been no focus on that up to now.
Much of the blame lies with the president, who has left his party with an incoherent closing argument 12 days before the election.
In a penetrating piece in the New York Times Magazine on Oct. 12, Peter Baker profiles a president who "believes he is the smartest person in any room," according to one prominent Democratic lawmaker. He and his aides think that the core of their difficulties is "a communications problem" and the result of a "miscalculation" that the president could "forge genuine bipartisan coalitions."
Communications? After the president devoted 58 speeches and events to health care over a 51-week period, his bill grew progressively less popular.
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I suspect that one reason Obama and the Democrats did not focus more on jobs is that they thought they had solved the problem with the stimulus bill and they just kept waiting for it to kick in. The closer it got to election day the less they wanted to talk about its failure so they meandered into other subjects that interested them at the moment.
The administration also suffers from an inability to admit mistakes. The health care bill is not unpopular because Obama did not talk about it enough. It is unpopular because it contains a lot of things people did not want at all and only a few things that were important to a few people.
The preexisting condition issue is important to those with preexisting conditions, but they are a pretty small subset of people looking for health care. Keeping kids covered after they should have had their own coverage was never a problem for me, because my kids went out and got jobs that included coverage.
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