Election 2014: Obama’s Failure to Communicate
It’s not just Obama’s failure - it’s also a failure of the Democratic Party, their leaders, and mostly the left’s political press. Mea Culpa as well. If you look back the past four years you will find that the side show barkers of the right have been successful at keeping the progressive press largely focused on their freak show and looking outside of the main tent and away from the center ring. The carny barkers we pay attention to only have the power that we give them with our attention. So when we take the focus to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh then we are playing their game for the sake of the hits we know they will bring.
There’s a sick “ooh look at that car crash” like fascination that brings hits to any article with their name in the headline, but they aren’t in office, and most of the time they aren’t talking about actual policy or reality that matters. They are throwing flash bangs to get the focus off the serious issues. So going forward I’m going to try to focus more on the real issues, like Social Security, like Medicare & the ACA, and the policy and process of our institutions. I’m going to stop trying to deconstruct everything down and try to shore up what we have. I’m going to focus on what’s wrong with what the actual office holders are doing and saying. I’m going to stop poisoning the dialogue by paying too much attention to the bozos, because that’s just a distraction.
So if we are going to point out that President Obama could have done better, then let’s also hold the mirror up and state that we could have as well.
As president—as opposed to as candidate—Obama has not been able to engage fully the voting public. He has faced numerous obstacles—GOP obstructionism in Washington, global circumstances that yield one tough-to-resolve dilemma after another, and the rise of a profound unease and uncertainty (about now and about the future) among Americans. And Obama, like most two-term presidents, has had to confront the six-year itch that usually leads to a loss of House and Senate seats for the chief executive’s party. Still, it is partly Obama’s failure as the nation’s storyteller-in-chief to keep the citizenry—especially his voters—involved in the ongoing political narrative that afforded the GOP, a party on the wrong side of the country’s changing demographic tide and often at odds with public opinion (on the minimum wage, on gun safety, on key components of Obamacare), the chance to expand its political power.
Midterm elections are composed of individual contests, each with their own peculiarities and, frequently, odd bounces. Two years ago, what political pundit would have predicted that Joni Ernst, a slick Sarah Palin-like right-winger who called for Obama’s impeachment (and then denied she did so), would bag a Senate seat in Iowa, where Obama won reelection by 6 percentage points? Or Colorado? It elected Obama by 5 points two years ago, and it’s experiencing more job creation and a greater increase in personal income than almost every other state. Yet its incumbent senator, Democrat Mark Udall, fell to GOP Rep. Cory Gardner, a tea partier who sought to throttle back on his far-right positions.