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:
Posts Tagged ‘health care’
Debating health care
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010Blaming the White House’s messengers
Thursday, February 25th, 2010Given 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.
Transparently broken promises
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009Lynn Sweet today turns in a must-read piece detailing President Obama’s broken promise to make negotiations on health care transparent. Writes Lynn:
When candidate Barack Obama was criss-crossing the country in his two year presidential campaign, a standard part of his stump speech — lines that always won him applause — had to do with his promise to negotiate health care reform in public, on C-SPAN, for all to see. As the wrangling over health overhaul legislation heads into its final stretch, it’s clear that was a promise President Obama did not keep. The deal making remained behind closed doors.
There’s no arguing that this is among President Obama’s most blatant broken promises. He did not hedge his commitment on the campaign trail – it was a riff he repeated at virtually every campaign stop. As Lynn writes:
Obama said variations of that at scores of stops. At a Jan. 31, 2008, debate in Los Angeles, he said he would deal in the open, “not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties ogether, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process.”
To explain the switch, Lynn presumes that the Obama team simply calculated that passing a bill negotiated in secrecy was better than not passing a bill negotiated publicly. But this is far from the first process-oriented promise that the Obama Team has unapologetically dropped: For example, he’s also nominated lobbyists to senior Administration spots, failed to wait 72-hours to sign bills, and hedged on his commitments to limit signing statements and government secrecy.
In truth, I suspect that the Obama Team never intended to keep his good-government promises – that they were useful rhetorical tools on the campaign trail, but not serious governing priorities. And, so far, they seem right — the public-backlash has been minimal. But these sort of flip-flops nevertheless hurt the President’s credibility, and will make voters more skeptical of his promises when he seeks re-election in 2012.
