Nicholas Kristof: Mr. Obama, It’s Time for Some Poetry

[highplainsdem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/opinion/04kristof.html

Mr. Obama, It’s Time for Some Poetry
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 3, 2010


-snip-

If Mr. Obama is going to connect with voters, he must confront the economic crisis emotionally as well as intellectually. He’ll need to focus not only on optimal policies but also on pithy messages. It does no good to have a great product if no one buys it.

Bill Clinton would make a terrific tutor. Despite his current wealth, he came across on the stump as virtually another victim of the recession while arguing lucidly for Democrats as the best redress for that pain. Mr. Clinton is as much a policy wonk as Mr. Obama, but he devotes far more energy to marketing.

Still, don’t write off Mr. Obama too soon. After the 1994 midterm elections repudiated Mr. Clinton, we in the news media wrote ridiculous commentary about how Mr. Clinton might now be “irrelevant.” As Mr. Clinton wrote in his memoir, “After the 1994 elections, I had been ridiculed as an irrelevant figure, destined for defeat in 1996.”

-snip-

Mr. Obama has a far better product to sell than Tea Partiers like Mr. DeMint. But Mr. Obama needs to connect better with American voters. He needs to lose the cool and start sweating — and slugging.

-snip-

[hfojvt]

1. funny I was just reading about that

http://www.dailyhowler.com/

"When Kristof seeks to humanize himself, he cites Yamhill, his humble home town. Returning there in some fashion, he finds a friend who is “indignant at Obama”—“partly because of incorrect scare stories he has heard about the health reform.” But from whom has this friend heard these incorrect stories? Kristof isn’t enough of a mensch to say. Same old Kristof! At no point in this morning’s column does he name the names of the actual people who have told his friend these false, scary tales. Kristof knows who these people are, of course—but he also knows that they are aggressive and powerful. People like Kristof never name the names of powerful people who will lash out in reply."


....


"It’s a happy ending! Along the way, Kristof advises Obama to sweat a bit—and to come out slugging. (He also pleases liberal readers by helping them see, at some length, that he isn’t a southern conservative.) But he forgets to tell you why it’s hard for liberals or Democrats to “improve messaging” in this new world, which is so full of so much disinformation. And he doesn’t name the powerful players who keep disinforming his friend in Yamhill, and tens of millions of others just like him. He opposes DeMint on a tangential matter—and pretends that Obama gets to slug and sweat in a basically rational world.

Kristof favors Obama’s success. But New Elites put New Elites first—and gods like Kristof play it safe in the face of aggressive power. We’re allowed to hear that Jim DeMint has weird views about sexual matters. We aren’t told why tens of millions of people are “indignant at Mr. Obama,” even though they “will benefit hugely from Mr. Obama’s health plan.”"

[highplainsdem]

4. Well, no. What you're reading, and especially what you're quoting there,

is Bob Somerby's ongoing complaint against Kristof for not launching a direct attack on Sean Hannity. And whatever the merits of Somerby's argument, it's irrelevant to the gist of what Kristof is saying, which matches up with what Marshall Ganz, a former Obama campaign adviser, has said about Obama's messaging problem.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9477208

Out of curiosity, I searched Somerby's site for any complaints about Ganz, and did find him mentioning Ganz in a blog entry where Somerby was complaining himself, at length, over a year ago, about just how bad Democrats have been at messaging:

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh090409.shtml

He objected to Ganz, among others, wanting Obama to do better at messaging, because we don't have decades of better messaging for Obama to stand on. According to Somerby:

Frankly, it’s too late for Obama to make such appeals in any serious manner. Narratives develop over stretches of time; you can’t ask Obama to show up in the year 2009 and magically make up for decades of Democratic and liberal lethargy. The other side has been aggressively building its messaging—its frameworks—over the past forty-five years. People have heard these claims again and again, and many more times after that:

Big government never did anything right.
Liberal elites think they’re better than you are.

You can’t expect Obama to compensate for the lack of a strong, well-established counter-narrative. But if we ever do build such a narrative, it would probably turn on these points:

He even takes a swipe at Teddy Kennedy there, for supposedly not being effective enough at messaging.

But Somerby completely misses the point Ganz made in his more recent critique, about Obama's leadership style having changed from the transformational mode that made his campaign so successful to a transactional style that isn't getting the important messages out.

Somerby can complain all he wants about other Democrats' failures at effective messaging having made things harder for Obama, but he can't get around the fact that Obama managed to motivate many more voters, especially young voters, in 2008 than in 2010.

By the way, that Washington Post essay by Peter Dreier and Marshall Ganz in August 2009 actually seems even more perceptive now:

In the past few weeks, Obama has hinted that he might settle for reform without a public option, thus assuaging the Baucus caucus and the insurance industry but angering many of his progressive supporters.

At the same time, Obama's readiness to compromise hasn't mollified members of the small but vocal right-wing Republican network who, egged on by the conservative echo chamber, have disrupted town hall meetings across the country, warning of "socialized medicine" and other impending catastrophes. This has made it harder for Obama to argue for his proposals and has hurt his standing in public opinion polls.

If the unholy alliance of insurance industry muscle, conservative Democrats' obfuscation and right-wing mob tactics is able to defeat Obama's health-care proposal, it will write the conservative playbook for blocking other key components of the president's agenda -- including action on climate change, immigration reform and updates to the nation's labor laws.

[hfojvt]

5. What about the need for Kristoff do do better messaging?

First, I read the complaint that Obama has gone from "yes we can" to "yes I can" and now it seems like everything is all on Obama. That Obama needs to fight. That Obama needs to use the bully pulpit (like he doesn't now, somehow). It's all up to Obama, and our own progressive blogosphere message of "Obama sucks, Reid sucks, Pelosi sucks" have nothing to do with the problem.

You quote Ganz from August saying "If they are able to defeat Obama's health care proposal ..." Except the proposal was NOT defeated. It was passed. But healthcare seems to be the fourth rail. Clinton's failure got us hammered in 1994 and Obama's 'success' got us hammered in 2010. Yet Republicans have been more than willing to hammer Democrats on cap and trade. That may be what cost Skelton the election in Mizzou.

Obama cannot do all of the fighting himself, any more than Boehner can. Boehner has an army on Fox, in the papers, on CNN, on NBC, and so on. Obama has the blogosphere which does almost nothing in the way of educating even their own members. Do we learn very much about single payer here? Or do we just learn that "Obama and Pelosi suck because they are not supporting single payer"? Too often what we want to talk about, what Rachel and Keith and Ed want to talk about fits right into the Rightwing message - about how much greater WE are than the mass of racist and ignorant voters.

[Jim Sagle]

2. Actually it's time for some Democratic policy.

[pscot]

3. Here are a few lines to get him started

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our bluedog dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; ....
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest Liberals.
......
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in the U.S.A, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'hairy thunderer for Barak, America and FDR!'