Still Waiting for the Narrator in Chief
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/magazine/still-waiting-for-the-narrator-in-chief.html?pagewanted=1&ref=global-home
If Obama somehow manages to lose an election that seemed
well within his grasp a few months ago, this question of how he squandered his
narrative mojo will pain Democrats for years to come. As with so much else
about this presidency, the answers can probably be traced back to those first
overwhelming months after the 2008 election. Remember that John McCain’s most
effective line of attack against Obama during the campaign was that he was more
of a motivational speaker than a leader. And so, having won the election and
facing crises on several fronts, the president’s advisers were understandably
wary of too much speechifying, which might have underscored the idea that Obama
was going to orate his way through the presidency while leaving the business of
governing to others. As a result, Obama spent much of his first months — the
period when he might have been speaking directly to an anxious public, much as
Franklin Roosevelt did in a less technological age — holed up with aides and
members of Congress, rather than pushing any kind of overarching narrative.
Remember, too, that Obama and Joe Biden were the first
president and vice president to be elected directly from the Senate since 1960,
and most of the senior aides they brought with them came from Capitol Hill.
This had real consequences. Congressional aides know a lot about how to slap
around their opponents, but because they’re always either taking direction from
a president or trying to thwart one, they think very little about how to build
support for a governing agenda. A classic case here was the controversial
stimulus measure passed in the early days of Obama’s presidency; the White
House and its allies skillfully managed to win approval for nearly $800 billion
in aid to states, long-term investment and tax cuts, but they gave almost no
thought to whether the public understood the differences between these
categories of spending or the economic reasoning behind them.