It’s all just bad PR, Obama laments
If one is mystified as to how reasonably intelligent, professionally accomplished, “educated” people could have voted twice for Barack Obama and likely would vote for him again if they could, this is the article one should read.
Unsurprisingly, it is from the “Politico”, an undisguised admirer of all things ‘progressive’ and an unswerving apostle of the “Great Messiah”. (excerpts)
“The facts were that America had put more people back to work than the rest of the world’s advanced economies combined. High school graduation rates were at an all-time high, while oil imports, the deficit, and the uninsured rate had plunged. The professor-turned-president was even more insistent than usual that he was merely relying on “logic and reason and facts and data,” challenging his critics to do the same. “Those are the facts. It’s not conjecture. It’s not opinion. It’s not partisan rhetoric. I laid out facts.”
(snip)
Like him or not, Obama has had a hugely consequential presidency, transforming America’s approach to foreign and domestic affairs, enacting almost all of his original Change We Can Believe In policy agenda. And credit him or not, America’s trajectory has improved on his watch. Along with the trends he cited at Northwestern, the housing market, gas prices, combat deaths, and other vital statistics have moved in the right direction. So why does only a quarter of the public still think the country is on the right track? Why haven’t his reforms of health care, education, energy and Wall Street been more popular? In short, why hasn’t America gotten his message?
Obama veterans have a slew of theories about what went wrong. They cite the challenges of driving a complex message through the horrific crisis he inherited. They blame the intensifying polarization of the public judging him, with nearly half the electorate reflexively opposing almost anything he does. They recognize the contrast between his pristine campaign vision of change and the change he’s been grinding out in the real world, through the kind of messy Washington sausage-making he used to criticize on the trail. And the White House’s own messaging strategy, a subject of perennially fierce internal debate, has been perennially debatable.
Most of all, they cite the dizzying changes in modern media, . . .
In the piece Politico’s Michael Grunwald marvels at the wonders Obama has wrought, and laments the failure of many people to recognize the man’s greatness. Obama laments as well.
The article is very long and if you are better informed than Politico’s core readership, you will have real trouble reading it all in one sitting. The gist of it is that poor Barack is a hapless victim of the modern news cycle, all those alternative news sources, and media figures and a populace who really aren’t bright enough to appreciate the brilliant strategic mind of the man who ‘saved America’.
In the final analysis, Politico seems to believe that the American people have let Obama down.
Others might assess our outgoing (hopefully) president far more succinctly and accurately than the Politico paean. And they might offer a way our “much put-upon” Mr. Obama could have avoided the woes he has experienced, as expressed by a far greater president than he:
“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln
DLH
