Barack Obama, Phone Home ~ By FRANK RICH

[bindelh]

Op-Ed Columnist
Barack Obama, Phone Home
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 6, 2010

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.

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[ProSense]

1. Rich makes some interesting points.

Some contradictory:

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.”

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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.”

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Yeah, Republicans have no message and don't know how to govern, but I guess those things are only important if you're a Democrat.