Visitors to my blog will notice that I haven’t had many posts in the last month. The primary reason is that my consulting business is keeping me busier than I ever expected (which is a good thing). But I’ll also confess that it’s not as much fun to criticize President Obama now as it was over a year ago, when I started this blog.
Back then, the conventional wisdom was that President Obama’s election marked something of a realignment in American politics, and that he was blessed with phenomenal communications skills, cozy media relations, and a bold agenda. As I wrote in my first oped for POLITICO, I thought those conclusions were wrong.
Of course, a year later, President Obama’s approval ratings are in the tank, his agenda has been stymied and/or watered-down (with the notable exception of health care), and the media’s relationship with the White House is near a breaking point (as detailed in today’s Washington Post). Even though the President gives marvelous speeches when called upon, it’s now widely recognized that those speeches do little to move public opinion. It’s all but certain that his party will suffer in this fall’s elections.
So rather than kick the White House while they’re down and continue to write regular posts questioning and analyzing their media strategy, I’m going to suspend blogging until President Obama’s approval ratings return to positive territory (if they ever do). Sorry, but it’s just not much fun to run a blog that says what’s already on the front page of the Washington Post.
Thanks to all who have visited and linked to this blog over the past year. I’ve had far more visitors than I ever expected, and learned a lot in the process. (Lesson #1: Sarah Palin really does drive traffic!)
If you don’t already, please follow my Twitter feed (@AlexConant), and we’ll be in touch…
On ABC News Top Line today, I argue that the Democrats’ hopes to win the health care debate after the vote (since they’ve so clearly lost it ahead of the vote) is wishful thinking:
Given all of President Obama’s political problems, there’s a growing sentiment that something must be wrong with his message team. Reports the Hill Newspaper:
The White House fumbled the message on healthcare reform and left President Barack Obama’s administration hanging in the balance, according to Democratic lawmakers and senior aides.
In his first year, Obama failed to use the bully pulpit effectively and rally the public around one proposal early in the debate, despite polls showing strong support for core elements of the Democratic plan, the lawmakers and aides told The Hill.
The piece goes on to quote a Presidential historian who studies White House communications:
Feldstein ranked Obama’s press operation in the bottom half of presidents since Nixon.
“It’s been surprising how weak the Obama message machine has been since he has been elected president,” Feldstein said. “Too often they’ve turned to Obama’s oratory to save the day as a last resort to clean up the message mess.”
In a rather half-hearted defense of Obama’s team, Clinton White House Press Secretary points out that the current media environment is more challenging than any before it:
McCurry argued that the diminishing influence of daily newspapers and network television, combined with the raw, chaotic power of cable news, talk radio and the Internet, has made it very difficult for White House advisers to manage the message.
“They’re adjusting to the new history they’re in,” McCurry said of Obama’s press team. “They’re utterly encumbered by the historic transformation of the media itself.”
McCurry noted that when Clinton served as president, two-thirds of Americans got their news from nightly television broadcasts. A 2008 Pew Research Center poll showed that only 32 percent of the public regularly learned of political news from nightly network broadcasts.
I’ve obviously wondered about some of the White House press team’s tactics over the last year, but this sort of finger-pointing seems off-base. I would submit that the larger problems at the White House is legislative team’s repeated failure to whip enough votes in support of the President’s agenda, the political team’s failure to win major elections since 2008, the policy team’s uninspiring health care proposals, and the strategic team’s arguable miscalculation to push health care rather than jobs. Given all those problems, the message team’s job is much, much harder.
