Obama’s Sales Pitch: Ineffective?
Barack Obama has been selling his budget on a trans-continental PR charm offensive for the last two weeks, but public support is still slipping.
People who feel positively about his budget fell from 44% in late February to 39% this week. People who feel negatively about the budget increased one point to 27% in the same time frame. And after all that budget talk, people who claim to not know enough to have an opinion increased 10% from 30% to 33%.
The budget battles are far from over, of course, even with Obama’s own Democratic Party controlling both houses of Congress.
But imagine what could have happened to U.S. public opinion on the president’s budget if he hadn’t invested all that salesmanship. Can he keep it up? And is some public caution creeping in?