Obama uses chaos control6/5/2023 ![]() They also set the tone for this year’s campaign to replace him, with Republicans blasting him as a pure catastrophe while Democrats gingerly try to embrace him without denying the prevailing narrative of hard times. Obama may resent how “the narrative” judges long-term policies and even historical legacies according to the latest polls, but his struggles to make the case for his record have helped Republicans reclaim both houses of Congress, along with governors’ offices and legislatures nationwide. Perceptions of presidents matter: They can shape an administration’s ability to get things done, and even the way the nation thinks about itself. ![]() What happened to Obama’s message is not just an inside-baseball question. His tenure has often felt like an endless series of media frenzies over messaging snafus-from the fizzled “Recovery Summer” to “you didn’t build that” to the Benghazi furor, which is mostly a furor about talking points. The narrative began spinning out of his control in the turbulent opening days of his presidency, and he’s never totally recaptured it. Obama was hailed as a new Great Communicator during his yes-we-can 2008 campaign, but he’s often had a real failure to communicate in office. “Everything he said was true and important, and that one line got turned against him.” “I’m still pissed off about that,” Keenan told me. The substance of the speech was ignored, and Keenan still blames himself for letting one off-message phrase eclipse a story of revival, a prelude to the second Republican midterm landslide of the Obama era. Even Axelrod called it “a mistake” on Meet the Press. “Republicans couldn’t have written a better script,” declared The Fix, the Washington Post’s column for political junkies. They quickly became a staple of campaign ads and stump speeches tying Democrats ball-and-chain to their leader. ![]() Nothing, but Obama’s words couldn’t change the narrative of his unpopularity they just gave Republicans a new opening to exploit it. “What exactly was untrue about it?” Obama asked, a bit incredulous. The only line that made news came near the end of his 54-minute address, an observation that while he wouldn’t be on the ballot in the fall midterms, “these policies are on the ballot-every single one of them.” When Obama boarded Air Force One after his speech, his speechwriter, Cody Keenan, told him the Internet had already flagged that line as an idiotic political gaffe. The Northwestern speech did reshape the narrative, but not in the way Obama intended. 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. High school graduation rates were at an all-time high, while oil imports, the deficit, and the uninsured rate had plunged. The facts were that America had put more people back to work than the rest of the world’s advanced economies combined. “Sometimes the noise clutters and, I think, confuses the nature of the reality out there,” Obama said. If the presidential bully pulpit couldn’t drown out the echo chamber, he figured nothing could. But Obama thought it was time to spike the football, and in a speech at Northwestern University, he tried to reshape his narrative. Obama’s strategists, led by his longtime political guru David Axelrod, had always warned him against “dancing in the end zone.” Their polling suggested that gloating about the recovery would backfire when so many Americans were still hurting. Unemployment was dropping and troops were coming home, yet only one in four Americans thought the nation was on the right track-and Democrats worried about the midterm elections were sprinting away from him. But in the fall of 2014, he got sick of the narrative of gloom hovering over his White House. He urges his team to tune out “the noise,” “the echo chamber,” the Beltway obsession with who’s up and who’s down. President Barack Obama insists he does not obsess about “the narrative,” the everyday media play-by-play of political Washington. Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine. ![]()
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