The Amateur (28 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
“The American people will have a choice [in 2012] about the direction they want to take the economy,” Plouffe said. “Do they want, basically, a Gordon Gekko economy? Or do they want a president who says, ‘Every decision I make is focused on the middle class?’”
When such populist poppycock didn’t work, Obama looked elsewhere to cast blame. The economy wasn’t responding because of the Japanese tsunami ... or the Greek budget crisis ... or the oil shock caused by the Arab spring... or anything but his administration’s own misguided policies.
Obama’s own views about what he has—and has not—learned during his four years in the White House say a lot about why he has been such a failure as president.
“The area in my presidency where I think my management and understanding of the presidency evolved most,” Obama has said, “and where I think we made the most mistakes, was less on the policy front and more on the communications front.”
The communications front!
How could that be?
Didn’t liberals hail Obama as the greatest communicator since Ronald Reagan?
And didn’t Obama have an exalted opinion of his own oratorical skills? For instance, when Robert Marion Berry, a former Democratic congressman from Arkansas, warned Obama in 2010 that his leftwing policies could cause the Democrats to lose seats in the midterm election, just as such policies had under Clinton in 1994, the cocksure Obama replied, “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.”
Was it possible, then, that Obama was now falling back on the lame excuse: “What we have here is a failure to communicate”?
That was exactly what he was doing—and so were his cheerleaders on the Left. Take Frank Rich, the former columnist of the
New York Times
: “While perhaps no politician can ever duplicate Reagan’s brand of sunny and homespun (if Hollywood-honed) geniality,” Rich wrote, “Obama has his own radiance when he wants to turn it on.... But Obama is less adept at keeping his messages simple, consistent, and crystal-clear.... The pitch-perfect showmanship, timing and salesmanship ... were in Reagan’s résumé and bones. Obama doesn’t have that training, but he was a great communicator when it came to selling his own story in the campaign, heaven knows. He has rarely rekindled that touch in the White House.”
New York Times
: “While perhaps no politician can ever duplicate Reagan’s brand of sunny and homespun (if Hollywood-honed) geniality,” Rich wrote, “Obama has his own radiance when he wants to turn it on.... But Obama is less adept at keeping his messages simple, consistent, and crystal-clear.... The pitch-perfect showmanship, timing and salesmanship ... were in Reagan’s résumé and bones. Obama doesn’t have that training, but he was a great communicator when it came to selling his own story in the campaign, heaven knows. He has rarely rekindled that touch in the White House.”
It was true that Obama, who had campaigned so effectively against Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008, had fumbled badly once he was in the White House. But the reason he lost his personal connection with the American people had little to do with his communication skills. It was not
how
he communicated, but
what
he communicated that lost him the affection of the country. The American people didn’t care a fig about the
style
of Obama’s message; they didn’t like the
substance
of his message. He was just too liberal for America.
how
he communicated, but
what
he communicated that lost him the affection of the country. The American people didn’t care a fig about the
style
of Obama’s message; they didn’t like the
substance
of his message. He was just too liberal for America.
I once asked Ronald Reagan, after he had left the White House, whether he resented the people who charged that much of his public success was due to his skills as “the Great Communicator” rather than to the appeal of his political programs.
“I think there were other reasons for my effectiveness,” Reagan told me. “I believe very deeply in the things I advocated in office. When I came into the White House, the previous administration was telling the people about how they were suffering from a malaise. I had the feeling that the American people were hungering for spiritual revival.”
What’s more, unlike Obama, Reagan enjoyed being president—and his joy was contagious. In fact, Reagan told me that he would have considered running for reelection in 1988, when he was nearly seventy-eight years old, if it hadn’t been for the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, limiting presidents to two terms in office.
“It was my own party, the Republican Party, that passed that amendment out of revenge for Roosevelt’s four terms,” he said. “But what that amendment is is an infringement on the democratic right of the people. The people have a right to vote for whomever they want and for as many times as they want.”
The people also have a right to vote
against
a president who has failed them. The question is: Will they vote against Barack Obama in 2012?
against
a president who has failed them. The question is: Will they vote against Barack Obama in 2012?
CHAPTER 22
THE LOW ROAD
I’m troubled by rhetoric that pits people
against each other.... We have never been a
nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation
of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who
have made it and people who will make it.
And that’s who we need to remain.
T
o hear the candidates who run for president tell it, you’d think every election was an historic watershed. “This is the most important election in which you will ever have a chance to cast your vote,” they tell us every four years. “This election will decide the course of politics for decades.”
o hear the candidates who run for president tell it, you’d think every election was an historic watershed. “This is the most important election in which you will ever have a chance to cast your vote,” they tell us every four years. “This election will decide the course of politics for decades.”
But most presidential elections are not watershed events. In point of fact, there have been only six such political realignments in American history, marking the end of one period and the beginning of another:
• The election of 1800, in which Vice President Thomas Jefferson defeated President John Adams, who represented northern Federalist interests, and ushered in a generation of southern, agrarian-dominated Democratic-Republican Party rule
• The election of 1828, in which Andrew Jackson, the first president not born of privilege, defeated John Quincy Adams and solidified Democratic Party control
• The election of 1860, which brought Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans to the White House and unleashed the forces of the Civil War
• The election of 1896, in which Republican William McKinley defeated the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan and set the United States on a course to become a world industrial power
• The election of 1932, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the coalition that made the Democratic Party the dominant political force for almost fifty years
• The election of 1980, in which Ronald Reagan attracted working-class Democrats to his cause and launched a generation of conservatism
Will the election of 2012 usher in America’s seventh political realignment?
A convincing argument can be made that it will. For the election will not only be a referendum on Barack Obama, the most liberal president this country has ever had, but it will also be a plebiscite on the future direction of America. If Obama is defeated, everything the Left stands for—universal healthcare, mandatory union membership, wealth distribution, a bigger and bigger federal government—will be defeated along with him. But if Obama wins, the Left will be entrenched for years to come, and the United States will continue its headlong rush toward a bloated, deficit-ridden entitlement state similar to those in Europe.
The election will present voters with a stark choice between a leftwing president who believes in engineering “the equality of outcome” and a conservative candidate who believes in the “equality of opportunity.” A vote for Obama will be a vote in favor of an ever-larger role for the federal government to ensure so-called “fairness” in the system. A vote for the Republican candidate will be a vote for less government and greater individual freedom. Every indicator suggests that America is balanced between these two philosophies, and that the country could go either way.
“There is a genuinely interesting and important debate of ideas to be had over the size, reach, and role of the federal government in our lives,” writes Peter Wehner. “Honorable people have very different views on this matter; some, like Obama, are drawn to a European-like model of social democracy, one that wants to centralize more and more power with the federal government as a means to eliminate income inequality and ensure greater fairness. Others believe the federal government has dramatically exceeded its constitutional authority, that it is leading us down a path to fiscal ruin, and in the process it is undermining civic character.”
Obama does not want to engage in such a debate because he knows he will lose it. Over the past four years, the American people have become more conservative. According to a Gallup poll:
Democrats have lost their solid political party affiliation advantage in 18 states since 2008, while Republicans have gained a solid advantage in 6 states.... The findings make it clear that U.S. states have undergone a dramatic political transformation since 2008, the year President Obama was elected, moving from a Democratically dominant political environment to one of parity.... Clearly, President Obama faces a much less favorable environment as he seeks a second term in office than he did when he was elected president.
And there is more bad news for Obama from the Gallup organization. According to a February 24, 2012, poll, a majority of Americans, 51 percent, say that Obama’s political views are too liberal. “Americans’ perception of Obama’s ideology,” says Gallup, “has changed significantly since he was elected. Four years ago, when Gallup first asked this question about Obama while he was competing for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, a plurality, 47 percent, thought his views were about right. At that time, 37 percent said his views were too liberal, compared with today’s 51 percent.”
Faced with these poll numbers, David Axelrod, Obama’s political Merlin, has waved his magic wand again and conjured up a new persona for his candidate in 2012. Gone—
poof!
—is the American Messiah of 2008, who promised “hope and change.” Gone—
poof!
—is the self-righteous figure who once proclaimed, “If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” Gone—
poof!
—is Mr. Nice Guy.
poof!
—is the American Messiah of 2008, who promised “hope and change.” Gone—
poof!
—is the self-righteous figure who once proclaimed, “If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” Gone—
poof!
—is Mr. Nice Guy.
Axelrod has ripped a page out of Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook and fashioned a campaign for Obama in which he demonizes his opponents and runs against a “Do-Nothing” Republican Congress and its wealthy supporters. You can hear an echo of “Give ’em Hell Harry” when Obama declares: “This Congress—they are accustomed to doing nothing, and they’re comfortable with doing nothing, and they keep on doing nothing.” Or when he says, “My attitude is, get it done... [but] if they don’t get it done, then we’ll be running against a Congress that’s not doing anything for the American people, and the choice will be very stark and will be very clear.”
Axelrod’s strategy is virtually a copy of a sixty-five-year-old memorandum written by Harry Truman’s political guru, Clark Clifford, and titled “The Politics of 1948.” The gist of Clifford’s memo was the need to divert attention from Truman’s domestic and foreign problems and make the contest a conflict between Congress and the president. In such a battle, Clifford argued, “[t]he presidency is vastly more flexible than Congress.... There is little possibility that [the president] will get much cooperation from the Congress, but we want the president to be in a position to receive the credit for whatever they do accomplish while also being in a position to criticize the Congress for being obstructionists.”
“It is obvious that Team Obama is deliberately following the Clark Clifford strategy,” E. Michael Young wrote in
American Thinker
. “Like Truman, Obama called a special session of Congress to propose his American Jobs Act, knowing in advance that the Republican-controlled House would reject it. Like Truman, Obama used an executive order to effect social change in the military (by allowing gays to openly serve) to prop up his liberal base. And like Truman, Obama is giving speeches all around the country, saying the obstructionist ‘do-nothing’ Republicans in Congress are blocking his jobs bill, hurting the economy, and currying favor with the wealthy elites.”
American Thinker
. “Like Truman, Obama called a special session of Congress to propose his American Jobs Act, knowing in advance that the Republican-controlled House would reject it. Like Truman, Obama used an executive order to effect social change in the military (by allowing gays to openly serve) to prop up his liberal base. And like Truman, Obama is giving speeches all around the country, saying the obstructionist ‘do-nothing’ Republicans in Congress are blocking his jobs bill, hurting the economy, and currying favor with the wealthy elites.”
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