Barack Obama’s light Christmas reading back in 2010 was Lou Cannon’s biography of Ronald Reagan — 920 pages on the political storyteller Obama admired most, to the profound annoyance of his Maddow-loving base.
Obama’s aides can’t quite remember whether the boss ever finished it. Even if he did, no one would ever mistake Obama — an electrifying speaker with the rare capacity, at times, to spin emotion and intellect into rhetorical gold — for the Great Communicator.
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Harsh circumstance, relentless conservative opposition and, above all, the inconsistency of his own messaging operation have made it difficult for a supremely articulate communicator to articulate the narrative of his own presidency. That leaves Obama’s high likability rating — hardly his central selling point in 2008 — as his campaign’s main bulwark against Mitt Romney and the super PAC onslaught.
Obama gets a message-reset moment on Thursday night when he delivers the convention’s culminating speech, a high-stakes address in which he’s expected to lay out a more specific — yet probably not too specific — vision of what he’d do with four more years.
“I don’t think he’s really made the case for getting the credit he deserves. It’s like he hits one thing and moves on. … Win and move on. That’s his pattern,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, sitting on the convention floor Wednesday afternoon as his former governor, Charlie Crist, was testing the Teleprompters.
“He’s got to do that this week. He’s really got to tell people what he did and why.”
A half-dozen other delegates scattered on the floor waiting for the action to begin echoed that sentiment.
“Just tell the story already,” advised Brayden Portillo, an LGBT activist from Broomfield County, Colo., who organized college students for Obama in 2008.
Craig Shirley, a veteran conservative operative and Reagan biographer, is impressed by Obama’s talent but stumped by his failure to establish a coherent rationale for reelection — or even a cohesive political identity beyond the change agent of 2008.
“He is a terrific public speaker. It’s not his skills that are the problem. It’s what he has to say that hasn’t resonated,” Shirley said. “Quite frankly, I don’t think he’s well served by his speechwriters. … He has the presence that Reagan had, no doubt about it, but I’m not sure he understands the bully pulpit well enough. I think the 2004 speech [at the Democratic National Convention in Boston] was extraordinary. He had me.
“Since then, I just don’t know what happened.”
What happened was the world fell apart and had to be put back together, Obama’s advisers say. The first six to 10 months of his presidency were a terrifying fire drill, a frantic drive to re-animate a dying economy that left little time for salesmanship or even explanation of the mammoth stimulus that acted as a big, ugly national parachute.
“Sue us. We were trying to save the country,” a senior Obama aide said over the summer.
That might be true, but somewhere along the way Obama suffered a communication breakdown.
He has lurched from message to message, blurring voters’ vision of the messenger. He’s ensnared in a tangle of middling slogans — “Winning the Future” for the 2011 State of the Union, “Forward” for the 2012 campaign — and has channeled a succession of presidents from Lincoln to Reagan, culminating with Teddy Roosevelt late last year during an attempt to encapsulate his complicated legacy under TR’s banner of “fairness.”
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/80787.html?hp=t1_3
h/t RUSH Limbaugh
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