Disappointed, Disaffected and Resurgent
You'd think it impossible, but many members of the media appear as stubbornly clueless as is the president about the message of the mid-terms.
On Sunday's 'Meet the Press,' David Gregory stated that Obama has the left disappointed, the independents in the middle disaffected, and the right resurgent. In response The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne talked about how much this president has accomplished, notably passage of health care reform and financial reform, and suggested Obama should compromise with no man and only needs to conquer the communication gap with the public.
I make the lion's share of my living as an advertising and marketing copywriter. In fact, I'm one of the highest paid in the country. Clients often come to me after having tried and failed numerous times to put their product or proposition across themselves or with aid of others in my field. They come desperately seeking the right combination of words that will make consumers see the virtues of their doohickeys and rise up en-masse to buy them.
Sometimes there is just a flaw in the presentation of those doohickeys, and it is finding and fixing those flaws that makes me one of those evil seven-figure earners. (You know, the ones who, in Obama's eyes, are grossly over-paid and need to be taken down a few notches with punishing taxes?)
But often the fatal flaw is in the product or proposition itself. Then I must try telling the client what he does not want to hear: he has built something no one likes and will not buy. Sometimes, because of my expert stature, the disappointed client is willing to listen. Often, though, such truth-telling is angrily rebuffed. These clients go elsewhere and find their way either to incompetent buffoons or panderers, who take their money to create advertising they know in advance cannot work.
In Obama's case, someone the president would believe needs to sit him down and patiently explain that the public is just not as dumb as he arrogantly believes. Large numbers were briefly fooled, seduced, mesmerized by his messiah-at-rock-concert campaign. But that ether effect has long ago worn off.
This advisor needs to counsel the president that, contrary to Mr. Dionne's supposition - common with the elite journalist-pundit crowd - the voters are aware of the president's accomplishments, but have collectively turned their noses up at it all as dog food they do not wish to eat.
The American people have seen what Obama is really all about and reject his ideology and ideas about redistribution of wealth. They see the schemes he accomplished as what they are and as he intended. Obama's achievements, they know, must be undone because they are antithetical to American values, hazardous and harmful to the economy and thus to every citizen and family.
Whoever this advisor is, he needs to explain that the cheering crowds are long gone and won't be coming back. He must tell the president if he insists on proceeding on his chosen path, he'll soon walk alone to disgrace and oblivion.
The left is disappointed: they believed they would rampage but have remained leashed. They realize they were lied to and see the president as a lie. Some weakly rise to his defense only out of reflex, but they are fewer in number by day. The independents are disaffected: their hopes for transformative change in Washington dashed. They now see this president as even more polarizing than the last one - something they thought impossible.
The right is resurgent as voters look for some adult supervision, some sensible and responsible leaders willing to say no to buying everything in the mall on the no payments until 2014 credit plan. They want someone willing to object to, block and unravel sweeping multi-thousand-page legislation and regulatory actions so severely flawed that exceptions are almost instantly issued to one complaining constituency after another (health care reform and airline gape and grope come immediately to mind).
At different times, wise and powerful men who could not be ignored have had to go to the White House and tell a president that he cannot continue on present path. Even that it is time for him to go. LBJ and Nixon come to mind.
If no one who has the ear of this president will so advise him, we must hope the newly elected Republican House of Representatives has a stiff backbone, thick skin and a collective commitment that can't be divided with deals and pork (paid for with yet unspent, hoarded TARP funds given the president under pretense of dire emergency). We can only hope the Republican adults will say 'no' to this spoiled child. We HOPE they'll say "No, you CAN'T!"
