"You can’t win an election without a coherent message... You can’t govern if you can’t tell

[highplainsdem]

the country where you are taking it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07rich.html

Barack Obama, Phone Home
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 6, 2010

-snip-

You can’t win an election without a coherent message. Obama, despite his administration’s genuine achievements, didn’t have one. The good news — for him, if not necessarily a straitened country — is that the G.O.P. doesn’t have one either. This explains the seemingly irrational calculus of Tuesday’s exit polls. Voters gave Democrats and Republicans virtually identical favorability ratings while voting for the G.O.P. They gave Obama a slightly higher approval rating than either political party even as they punished him. This is a snapshot of a whiplashed country that (understandably) doesn’t know whose butt to kick first. It means that Obama can make a comeback, but only if he figures out what he has to come back from and where he has to go.

The president’s travails are not merely a “communications problem.” They’re also a governance problem — which makes them a gift to opponents who prefer no governance at all. You can’t govern if you can’t tell the country where you are taking it. The plot of Obama’s presidency has been harder to follow than “Inception.”

Health care reform remains at the root of this chaos. Obama has never explained why a second-tier priority for him in the 2008 campaign leapt to the top of his must-do list in March 2009. For much of the subsequent year spent fighting over it, he still failed to pick up the narrative thread. He delayed so long in specifying his own priorities for the bill that his opponents filled the vacuum for him, making fictions like “death panels” stick while he waited naïvely for bipartisanship to prevail. In 2010, Obama and most Democrats completed their transformation of a victory into a defeat by running away from their signature achievement altogether.

-snip-

In the 1946 midterms, the unpopular and error-prone rookie president Harry Truman, buffeted by a different set of economic dislocations, watched his party lose both chambers of Congress (including 54 seats in the House) to a G.O.P. that then moved steadily to the right in its determination to cut government spending and rip down the New Deal safety net. Two years after this Democratic wipeout, despite a hostile press and a grievously divided party, Truman roared back, in part by daring the Republican Congress to enact its reactionary plans. He won against all odds, as David McCullough writes in “Truman,” because “there was something in the American character that responded to a fighter.”

-snip-

Emphasis added, since those are points I think are crucial -- the same points Marshall Ganz and others have made recently.

[msongs]

1. bullies know a willing victim when they find one. harry was not willing nt

[ProSense]

2. Interesting piece:

You can’t win an election without a coherent message. Obama, despite his administration’s genuine achievements, didn’t have one. The good news — for him, if not necessarily a straitened country — is that the G.O.P. doesn’t have one either. This explains the seemingly irrational calculus of Tuesday’s exit polls. Voters gave Democrats and Republicans virtually identical favorability ratings while voting for the G.O.P. They gave Obama a slightly higher approval rating than either political party even as they punished him. This is a snapshot of a whiplashed country that (understandably) doesn’t know whose butt to kick first. It means that Obama can make a comeback, but only if he figures out what he has to come back from and where he has to go.

The president’s travails are not merely a “communications problem.” They’re also a governance problem — which makes them a gift to opponents who prefer no governance at all. You can’t govern if you can’t tell the country where you are taking it. The plot of Obama’s presidency has been harder to follow than “Inception.”

Yet Republicans won big.

Still, the end is more interesting:

<...>

In the 1946 midterms, the unpopular and error-prone rookie president Harry Truman, buffeted by a different set of economic dislocations, watched his party lose both chambers of Congress (including 54 seats in the House) to a G.O.P. that then moved steadily to the right in its determination to cut government spending and rip down the New Deal safety net. Two years after this Democratic wipeout, despite a hostile press and a grievously divided party, Truman roared back, in part by daring the Republican Congress to enact its reactionary plans. He won against all odds, as David McCullough writes in “Truman,” because “there was something in the American character that responded to a fighter.”

Surely there are dozens of supporters reassuring Obama with exactly this Truman scenario this weekend. But if he lacks the will to fight, he might as well just take his time and enjoy the sights of Mumbai.

[babylonsister]

3. Spot on, Pro! Rec'd your response! nt

[highplainsdem]

7. He does explain the Republicans' message, the standard one:

Traditional Republican boilerplate — lower taxes, less spending, smaller government — was chanted louder and louder, to pander to the Tea Party rebels, but with zero specifics of how it might be carried out.

That actually is a coherent message. The incoherence is in the lack of specifics as to how to carry it out, and Rich is correct in pointing out that this is an opening Obama should exploit.

I'll concede that one sentence of Rich's you're objecting to should have been written differently. Maybe something like this:

You can’t win an election without a coherent message. Obama, despite his administration’s genuine achievements, didn’t have one. The good news — for him, if not necessarily a straitened country — is that the G.O.P. doesn’t have a much more coherent message, with no specific plans for achieving their traditional goals.

Of course the party out of power typically gets more leeway from voters in providing those specifics. The Republicans have lost that advantage by regaining control of the House, And Rich emphasizes that Democrats can now demand that the Republicans make their plans clearer (and then we can highlight how unpopular those GOP plans are likely to be).

But that still doesn't excuse our Democratic leaders from coming up with a coherent message, coherent policies, and a coherent political narrative that can be communicated more effectively to the voters.

[bluestate10]

16. Force the issue.

President Obama must force republicans to lead. Republicans wanted leadership, they have it. If President Obama lets republicans off the hook that they are on, President Obama does not deserve re-election in 2012. President Obama must force republicans into votes that they don't want to take. Tax cuts? President Obama must propose that tax cuts provide tax equity to states, give tax donor states some of their money back to run their states and pay down debt. Cut social programs? Give states that pay excess tax money to Washington part of their excess and demand that they use it to fund payment of social programs in their states. Soft on Defense? President Obama must demand that 15% of what a state pays the Feds in taxes go for defense, the rest stays with states to fund their own education and social welfare systems. Tea partiers and republicans will learn fast the nature of the faustian bargain that they fought long and hard for, that bargain will not be a good one for red states.

[somone]

4. Don't forget the first paragraph:

AFTER his “shellacking,” President Obama had to do something. But who had the bright idea of scheduling his visit to India for right after this election? The Democrats’ failure to create jobs was at the heart of the shellacking. Nothing says “outsourcing” to the American public more succinctly than India. But the White House didn’t figure this out until the eve of Obama’s Friday departure, when it hastily rebranded his trip as a jobs mission. Perhaps the president should visit one of the Indian call centers policing Americans’ credit-card debts to feel our pain.

[Hardrada]

8. Great Point!

[laughingliberal]

5. Big K & R! nt

[Angry Dragon]

6. The last sentence in the quote is the thing that Obama needs to learn

I do not know if he is up to that task........

[AnArmyVeteran]

13. Everyone supports someone who fights for them. It's human nature. I wish we'd see some fight in him.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Bitwit1234]

10. I just posted that the Democrats lost because they

did not come out swinging. I said if you are going to lose and lose they did they might have well have gone down fighting for the real principals we wanted out of them, instead of sitting back and letting republicans walk all over them.

[highplainsdem]

11. kick

[proud patriot]

12. I was listenig to a radio show today that was discussingTruman

very interesting stuff ..

[highplainsdem]

14. "Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever

apologize for anything." - Harry S. Truman

Words that President Obama should take to heart.

[proud patriot]

17. Amen to that

:-)

[bluestate10]

15. The article hit the nail on the head.

One of my lasting memories from the campaign was the woman telling President Obama that she was weary of defending him from attack daily, only to have President Obama give her a clinical reply that showed no emotion. President Obama needed to focus his administration on a disciplined attack on joblessness from day one. What we got instead was health care reform with President Obama allowing opponents to fill in the blanks, a first State Dinner where the aide that responsible for organizing the event was more interested in attending than she was in doing the grunt level work that make such events happen without public notice, we saw dispirited members of Congress and the Senate that had no idea of what their President wanted or whether he would cover their backs or cut a separate deal with republicans. President Obama needs to throw away teleprompters, write his own speeches and get rid of aides that want to be public figures in favor of ones that work tirelessly and effectively behind the scenes. Most of all, President Obama must start outsmarting republicans. Outsmarting republicans start with giving them their tax cut, but one that shreds republicans and forces them to either vote against tax cuts or loose pork barrel benefits for their states and districts. Once President Obama wins the tax cut fight, he should not stop, he must target earmarks, blue states are large tax donors, blue states DO NOT get earmarks that are worth a damn and will be inoculated, President Obama WILL NOT loose their votes. President Obama must relentlessly hit republicans where the hits are going to hurt them. There is much talk about Bill Clinton being a template for a Presidential and Democratic comeback, a better template is Harry Truman or Harry Reid of Nevada. Americans love a fighter that fights relentlessly and tell them what the fight is about and why it must be waged.