There are limits to what a great communicator can accomplish if he is communicating the wrong message. In the last few weeks, Barack Obama has been receiving a lesson in this truth and learning, perhaps, too, that he, in the words of his less audibly gifted predecessor, \u201cmisunderestimated\u201d why he won the presidency.<\/p>\n
On Sunday the prolific and (over the last two presidential elections) the nation\u2019s most accurate pollster, Scott Rasmussen, reported that 40 percent of likely voters now \u201cstrongly disapprove\u201d of President Obama.\u00a0 On Inauguration Day that number stood around 15 percent, with \u201cstrong approval\u201d ratings over 40 percent (today \u201cstrong approvals are down to 29 percent).\u00a0 This is a big and in some respects unprecedented change in a very short time.\u00a0 What is going on?<\/p>\n
Certainly the President\u2019s health care reform push is part of it.\u00a0 A glance at the trend lines shows a big drop in presidential approval ratings beginning in mid-June, about when the White House started to drive health reform hard.\u00a0 This snake oil is not selling.\u00a0 Even before last Wednesday\u2019s misconceived press conference \u2013 one of the worst in presidential history \u2013 it was becoming evident from the polling that the more the president talked about this reform, the less credible and popular he became.<\/p>\n
But the trend started much earlier, sometime between late-February and mid-March.\u00a0 Looking back, the most revealing moment of the Obama presidency to date was when Rahm Emanuel famously said of the financial downturn, \u201cNever let a good crisis go to waste.\u201d<\/p>\n
He meant that, thanks to the financial upheaval the Obama people inherited, the President had a free hand to drive as far and as fast as he could.\u00a0 The election vindicated of the old liberal social democratic agenda, with health care as just one of many big-ticket items.\u00a0 Ronald Reagan was out.\u00a0 Franklin Roosevelt was back in.\u00a0 What a mistake.<\/p>\n
What the Obama people failed to understand was that the election of Mr. Obama in 2008 began in 2005.\u00a0 That was when pollsters started picking up that a big segment of George W. Bush\u2019s 2004 vote was becoming disaffected, not over Iraq (as many Democrats later imagined) but over spending.\u00a0 This group was enraged by the growing deficits, saw passage of the Medicare prescription drug benefit in the first Bush term as a minus, not a plus, and later in the second term was repulsed by the emblematic Alaskan bridge to nowhere.\u00a0 So they abandoned the GOP in 2006.\u00a0 In 2008, they remained disaffected.\u00a0 Many were attracted to Mr. Obama personally and embraced the historic change he seemed to epitomize regarding race.\u00a0 The result was that again they voted Democrat.<\/p>\n
Since Inauguration Day, the President and his advisors have acted as if they were determined to drive this group back into Republican arms.\u00a0 A trillion dollar stimulus package followed by a budget with a trillion dollar deficit followed by a trillion dollar health care package: next to this crowd, the big-spending Republican Congresses have begun to look parsimonious.<\/p>\n
Here is the White House\u2019s dilemma, though probably not one they have yet recognized: They are excellent communicators, so when they speak, people understand.\u00a0 But the people \u2013 the people who have been swinging between the two parties over the last half-decade \u2013 do not like what the White House is telling them about its plans for the nation.<\/p>\n
All the communications in the world won\u2019t help.\u00a0 Unless the President and his advisors correct their \u201cmisunderestimation\u201d of why they are in office and of those that put them there, their troubles will continue.\u00a0 Who knows?\u00a0 We might even see a Republican House if not Senate elected in 2010.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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