It's 2008 All Over Again
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Friday, January 29, 2010


ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch  
Publication Date: January 28, 2010

President Barack Obama's first year in office was supposed to unfold like a scene from "Avatar": Morally superior beings would sweep into the West Wing, show jaded Americans the folly of our greedy and combative ways, and refashion our nation into a utopia where peace, love and progressive politics reign.

Instead, the Obama presidency is looking more like "Groundhog Day." He promises change, but he keeps repeating the same excuses and making the same mistakes.

Last week, when the fury of Massachusetts voters swept Republican upstart Scott Brown into a Senate seat that Democrats had held for more than half a century, Obama and his aides responded by pushing the rewind button and replaying 2008's greatest hits.

They blamed George W. Bush. They blamed pollsters and fellow Democrats. They blamed voter ignorance. And they rehired political consultant David Plouffe, architect of Obama's 2008 victory and master of the blame game, to help the president segue back into campaign mode and style himself once again as a Washington outsider.

In 2008, this approach seemed ingenious. In 2010, it's embarrassing. And tiresome.

Even as Obama attempted to regain ground this week by touting a few new plans and policy initiatives, he and his advisers couldn't bring themselves to abandon the bellyaching, arrogance and willful blindness that got them into this mess. Top White House aides fanned out across the Sunday morning talk shows to chide the president's critics for their ingratitude, insisting that Bush saddled America with a fiscal mess and voters are just lucky that gallant Obama offered to clean it up. To demand success from Obama - or even a modicum of responsiveness to voter concerns about skyrocketing deficits and persistent unemployment - is presumptuous and naïve.

Obama himself echoed this refrain, if more subtly, when he told ABC News last week that "the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office" - anger over "what's happened in the last eight years."

Lest that sound-bite leave any doubt that the president missed the message of an election in which the victor explicitly campaigned against Obamacare, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said that the vote proved Americans want Obama to push harder for his agenda: "People are sick and tired of Washington not delivering for them." Communications director Dan Pfeiffer concluded that "the process often overwhelmed the substance" in the health care debate - in other words, if we understood the substance of the health care bill, we'd support it. Senior adviser David Axelrod made the point sharper still, arguing that "the underlying elements" of Obamacare are popular, despite what polls say. Said Axelrod: "People will never know what's in that bill until we pass it, the president signs it and they have a whole new range of protections they never had before."

Translation: Shut up and eat your vegetables, voters. We know what's good for you.

Such paternalism is a tough sell in today's populist political climate. Yet the Obama administration seems oblivious to the disconnect. Axelrod's other take-away from the Massachusetts election was that Obama needs "timely intelligence and early warnings" about similar outbreaks of voter unrest. Apparently, a year of town-hall protests, tea-party demonstrations and plummeting presidential approval numbers were not warning enough.

Obama campaigned on change, but he cannot seem to grasp that the change voters most want to see these days is in him. They want him to make good on his campaign promises of pragmatism and bipartisanship and abandon the profligate spending and big-government power grabs that have characterized his first year in office. They want him to stop fixing the blame and start fixing the problems.

Inside the echo chamber of the Oval Office, such demands sound like the incoherent mutterings of a fickle, uninformed fringe. Outside, on the streets of an America that has awakened from the dream of an Obama-created utopia, they sound like the first rumblings of a November rout.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.