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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (53480)

9/15/2013 11:37:17 AM

From: koan

Respond to of 85487

Reference:

Richard Wolff explains the intricacies of the Obama administration:

Fascinating stuff. Again, the material is from Mike Allen's morning newsletter.
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PALACE INTRIGUE - RICHARD WOLFFE'S 'The Message: The Reselling of President Obama,' out Tuesday from Twelve Books: "At the start of their second term, it took a little longer [than in the first term] for Obama's team to lose control of communications: around three months, rather than three weeks. But the second time around, it was a sudden collapse rather than a slow, grinding disintegration. First they could not must enough support to get gun control out of the Senate; then they were deluged with four controversies in quick succession: [Benghazi, national-security leaks, IRS, NSA]. ... David Plouffe, the de facto campaign manager, left the West Wing at the start of the new term. His sidekick, Dan Pfeiffer, took his place as the first among equals of the senior advisers. ... [T]here were no plum jobs offered to anyone senior from campaign headquarters in Chicago. ... [F]or the Obama reelection campaign, there was no payoff in the new administration. A small handful of midlevel campaign officials, like polling director David Simas, found similarly midlevel jobs inside the new administration. 'At the end of 2008, there was a long list of campaign staff landing administration jobs through the presidential appointment office. They made sure they looked after them,' said one senior campaign official. 'Where is that list now? It never happened. They just moved on.' ... Inside the White House, the senior officials kept their jobs whether or not they were washed out. ...

"Obama's aides believed the gun control debate was immune to arm-twisting and schmoozing. Besides, they had tried the strategy in health-care reform and it had backfired badly: voters who did not understand the legislation were very clear in disapproving of sweetheart deals to buy a lawmaker's affection. The White House felt the most powerful message came from the Newtown families themselves: if senators were prepared to ignore them, they were prepared to ignore anybody. This kind of passive fatalism was common in the first term, as well as the start of the second. Obama's team felt they faced issues - in the recession and gun control - that they could not message their way out of. That was not their approach during the campaigns of 2008 and 2012, when they confronted huge personal and political challenges, including a struggling economy that threatened to overwhelm them. When faced with an apparently insurmountable obstacle, they sought to redefine the opposition and the nature of the obstacle. They did not give up the fight at the thought of high unemployment; instead they ran against an economic system that hurt the middle class, and redefined their opponent as part of the problem. ...

"Inside Washington , the Obama White House was much more leery of redefining the opposition in the kind of caricatures used against Romney. There were only one hundred voters they cared about, and all of them were United States senators. However, this was the same trap they fell into with health-care reform. By playing an insider's game, they could not afford to alienate anyone who might be a gettable vote in the Senate. Public events were powerful, but they did not translate into effective pressure on individual senators. The grassroots remnant of the Obama campaign - Organizing for Action - proved far less potent [than] the grassroots campaign of the National Rifle Association. Playing an outsider's game would have required different staffers, a great focus on a single message - backed by real ad dollars - and a swarming response to the other side. Instead, Obama returned to the White House after the election to his old team, slightly reshuffled. The tough offense and the ad dollars were in the hands of outside groups, like Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns. In that sense, with a reliance ion outsider messaging, Obama's White House looked more like the Romney campaign ...

"Obama's single most effective aide in political strategy and messaging was David Plouffe, and he left the White House as the new term began, to pick up private-sector consultancies and rejoin the speaking circuit. ... Plouffe was a great asset to the president, but he wasn't flawless. His decision to base the campaign in Chicago, while effectively running the campaign out of the West Wing, was questionable. ... [T]he message team was stuck in a quagmire of infighting and suspected conspiracies, not least because Plouffe was out of view. ... Plouffe's absence - like that of the president - left a vacuum that others filled poorly. There was no way for the campaign staffers to bring their election spirit to a new term, because those staffers were essentially frozen out of the biggest decision during the election itself. Besides, many of them were dispatched to the campaign precisely because they were frozen out of the administration's decision making in previous jobs. That dynamic underscores the cliquish nature of Obama's presidency." $16.20 Amazon preorder; $11.04 on Kindle amzn.to