The NYT article outlines Obama’s analysis of why the election didn’t go the Dems’ way:
No shit? For six years, advisors and pundits have been complaining, cajoling and pleading with his administration to sell what he’s been doing, instead of relying on some sort of osmosis to make it sink in with the everyday citizen. Instead, he’s allowed the yammering dogs of the right to hound his every action with little in the way of rebuttal, and then, I’m sure, wonders why his approval rating is so low and people want some sort of change. They GOT change, and most of it good, but the message doesn’t get out. So he waits until the horses are gone and decides that NOW is the perfect time to try to lock up the barn? The American people may be naive and easily swayed, but now they’ve seen his party abandon him, have been thoroughly indoctrinated and lied to by Noise TV, and I’m pretty sure it’s TOO FUCKING LATE. :mad:
It’s very difficult to sell something that most people did not want and most people did not have a chance to affect democratically.
Obamacare sealed the Democrats’ fates. Going out and shouting “we gave you Obamacare yay!!!” is not going to magically convince Americans it was a good idea worth passing in a completely one-sided, partisan manner.
And, yes, Americans are stupid, don’t know what’s good for them, blah blah blah, but an unpopular measure is going to cost you votes. So live with it.
Except most Americans do like the ACA when described. They just don’t like Obamacare because it’s been trashed so much. And yes Americans are very uninformed about politics – their own and even worse informed about world politics.
You mean besides voting for the guy who ran on reforming health care?
The fact that it was needed and it is working makes it a good idea worth passing. The fact that the Republicans were willing to put their party ahead of the lives of Americans in order to sabotage Obama made it necessary to do it in a one sided partisan manner.
That’s what we are getting at, Obamacare is unpopular but everything it does is popular. That’s a horrible messaging job by the Democrats.
It’s not just the ACA. The administration has had a communication problem with policy right from the get-go. Whenever Obama is in front of a microphone and trying to explain policies and agendas, he turns all professorial instead of just explaining what it is he’s trying to accomplish and why it’s of benefit to the nation. There doesn’t seem to be any rational counter to the volume, lies and noise from the opposition. Rather than ramping up the effort, everybody has been left to wonder WTF he’s doing. Yes, I know that’s what the Internet is for, but most people are too lazy to find things out for themselves. It’s very frustrating, as I believe he’s done a lot of good things for the country.
I’ve seen him in person and he’s very good with crowds. He comes across as likable and folksy. But put him in front of a camera and he becomes pedantic and stiff.
There’s lots of blame to go around, but a simple fact is that the young elect in on-years,* the old* elect in off-years. Things should improve as the aging poorly-informed die off.
That was back when he could be the Rorschach inkblot, and run on “hope and change” instead of a record.
Granted, it was an off-year election, but now he is the lamest of lame ducks. He isn’t going to achieve anything if he turns into the best communnicator on earth.
I think he half gets it. He’s either deluding himself or just lying if he thinks his administration hasn’t been political enough or obsessed with messaging enough, but has instead worked on “building a better mousetrap”. Given the failure of so many departments he oversees, it’s hard to believe he’s worried about effective governance. Even in the ebola case he even admitted he appointed Ron Klain primarily for his messaging talents.
But he’s right that the message has been wrong. The OBama administration does have real accomplishments. And we’ve got lower deficits, lower spending, a better economy. Except the single focus of this White House’s spin efforts has been “Those damn Republicans!” That’s the message you put out when things are bad and you want voters to blame the other guy. When things are good, you say how much more awesome things are and you pound that into America’s collective consciousness.
I think that up till now though, the President has been singularly focused on getting legislative achievements, and his inability to do that has made him rather grumpy. So his public statements over the last four years have been almost uniformly grumpy and all about how Republicans are stopping him from doing awesome stuff. So the message voters got was, “Things suck, it’s Republicans fault for stopping me” and voters decided they liked Republicans stopping him.
A feel good message probably would have worked a lot better. Mr. Positivity he’s not.
No shit? For six years, advisors and pundits have been complaining, cajoling and pleading with his administration to sell what he’s been doing, instead of relying on some sort of osmosis to make it sink in with the everyday citizen. Instead, he’s allowed the yammering dogs of the right to hound his every action with little in the way of rebuttal, and then, I’m sure, wonders why his approval rating is so low and people want some sort of change. They GOT change, and most of it good, but the message doesn’t get out. So he waits until the horses are gone and decides that NOW is the perfect time to try to lock up the barn? The American people may be naive and easily swayed, but now they’ve seen his party abandon him, have been thoroughly indoctrinated and lied to by Noise TV, and I’m pretty sure it’s TOO FUCKING LATE.
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This paragraph is so typical of the war Democrats think. It’s the fault of conservatives. It’s the fault of television. It’s the fault of the American people. It may even, to some slight extent, be the fault of the Democratic Party’s “messaging”.
But it’s not the fault of the laws that the Democrats passed, the appointments they made, or the way that they governed the country. Obviously there’s no legitimate way that any intelligent person could be unhappy about that.
Where Chefguy goes wrong, and really it’s obvious how wrong it is if you just think about it for a second, is that President Obama has been in the public’s face for six years talking and talking and talking. If he doesn’t think Obama’s been rebutting what the right is saying, then he, like many other Americans, has obviously just tuned the President out.
Whether people like or don’t like the ACA is highly dependent on how it’s described. For example, if you describe the penalty as a tax (the way the Supreme Court decided it was), people are probably quite opposed to it. If you describe individual benefits, people are probably in favor of them.
I’m undecided on the ACA, and reasonably well-informed about it. I think that some of its goals were good, and I think that even if the implementation is problematic, it might be worth it just for the fact that it’s much harder to simply end up uninsurable. But I think that the fact that it’s a huge complicated thing that most people don’t really understand, and the implication that the only way to make a big legislative change is to make it so complicated that the voters don’t know what the hell it’s doing, is really problematic for democracy. The ACA is a horrendously kludgy law.
In general, I think that Obama’s statement about needing better messaging is indicative of the divisiveness in our politics and the way our democracy works. For the most part, you don’t win elections by convincing people that you’re right. You win elections by convincing the people who already think you’re right to vote. And with incredibly low turnout, each party can claim that it was a messaging failure (I’ve seen very similar statements from Republicans, particularly about the need to come up with better messaging for women).
Well, now we find that one of the architects of Obamacare lied about it, deliberately, in order to get the stupid people who voted for Obama to fall for it.
That just makes it worse, because that just makes Obama a hypocrite. To complain about divisiveness in politics right after you lost an election even when you got your major domestic policy passed by lying about it - come on.
It depends on what is meant by “better messaging”. Obviously they don’t mean “telling the truth” because Obama only got the ACA passed by lying about it, and currently Pelosi is lying her head off claiming she never heard of the person her office has been citing as a major source.
"We lied to you about some legislation that, now that it is passed, is unpopular and doesn’t do the things we claimed it would. The most recent election was a mandate on Obama, and the Dems got spanked badly.
Obviously it is the fault of those nasty divisive Republicans, and all the folks who couldn’t be bothered to get off their asses and vote support me enthusiastically and we should assume they think like I do. After all, they are stupid!"
That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t think Obama is complaining about divisiveness. He’s saying that his messaging was bad because it didn’t inspire Democratic voters to go vote. I’m saying that that statement says something broader about our system, which is that you don’t win elections by convincing people that you have good ideas, you win them by convincing people who agree with you that they should get off their asses and vote.
I didn’t say anything like that, and I don’t think Obama did either.
If you listen to what the dude said, he’s talking about framing the mandate penalty as not a tax. Because the stupidity he’s talking about is the insane tax-revulsion that RW media has inflicted on a third of the country. It’s politics. Calling it a penalty was necessary because of the stupidity he’s decrying. In a rational world they just could have said it was a, “not having insurance tax.”
The fault is with a cursorily engaged populace. The rightward side has media that is designed to outrage people, and the outraged get out of bed early on voting day. The left aren’t nearly as pissed off, so they sleep in.
