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Obama's health care media blitz could backfire
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Based on polling trends during the past six months, here’s a prediction: Obama’s TV talk show media blitz this Sunday morning will have limited, if any, impact on staunching the hemorrhaging of support for his health care plan.
Indeed, there seems to be an iron law at work here: the more Obama speaks about the Democrats’ plan to take over our health care sector, the more support for his radical plan erodes.
Prior to his addressing the nation from the well of the House, billed by many as his last best chance to sway a skeptical public, Obama had already addressed the health care issue publicly some 122 times. Yet, in the wake of his unprecedented speech to a joint session of Congress to bolster his sagging poll numbers, the modest bounce he received proved to be ephemeral. Support for Obamacare not only quickly returned to its pre-speech levels, it actually dropped even further.
Obama is the most over-exposed president in modern American political history. A weary public, craving a respite from the media saturation of all Obama, all the time, long ago tuned him out. In this regard Obama, would be well served to embrace the counter-intuitive maxim that less is more. Yet, since he suffers the delusion of believing that his soothing voice can conquer all, the media blitz goes on. Edward Lucas, writing in the Telegraph seems to state the self-evident, “Mr Obama’s public image rests increasingly heavily on his extraordinary speechifying abilities.”
Yet in the end, it will all be for nought. Many Americans have already concluded that Obama doesn’t have a health care plan, indeed, he never has. His “plan”, has always been to see how much mischief the Congressional left wing of his party can get away with.
Supremely self-assured in his insufferable belief that he is somehow a mythical and transcendent political figure, as his ideological allies overreached, he has remained throughout the fractious health care debate, utterly detached from the process, uninvolved — above the fray.
Responding to the resulting — and predictable — fury of public reaction, he then, like a prophet, swoops down from above, playing the role of the great reconciliator, the exemplar of the golden mean between the squabbling partisan extremes, as he reassures the skeptical with his soothing and therapeutic rhetoric. One moment insisting on a public option; the next, comforting the disaffected with his assurances that it is not necessary after all, as it is only one of many means to achieve a desirable end.
As evidenced by the multitude of conflicting health care messages emanating from not only the White House, but from the Speaker of the House, is it any wonder that many Americans are confused about Obama’s health care “plan”?
The problem for Obama is that the mystique, the exultation, is gone forever. Having badly squandered his credibility with the disastrous, extravagant and pork-laden stimulus bill, in the words of George Will, “His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.”
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