Good post – the point about belief (or vision, or leadership if you will) is crucial. Barack Obama is not getting this across, and is instead ceding a lot of ground to those who have a clear and distinct message, such as the massed hosts of F-you know who.

Given a clear message, the whole thing could turn around in short order – look at the Senate, where the Dems held on, partly because some of their opponents were so unelectable. The Tea Party movement, as I noted last week, effectively lost the GOP the Senate race:

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2010/11/sanity-is-now-unavoidable.html

and the pressures on the Republicans could set off infighting that could do them a whole lot of damage. For the Prez to get a clear message, and get it “out there”, has a potentially massive payoff.

Err! I thought the reason that the Democrats got slaughtered was because the people of the USA realized that their policies weren’t working and never have.

“People in the center will follow if you speak to their values”

I rather think that’s the problem here. The American people, (as far as one can generalise on this), do not seem to share much in the way of values with Obama. You can argue about who is the right and which side is sadly misguided but there does appear to be a significant disconnect.

Obama got elected by pushing his values in the vaugest terms possible, now the US know the specifics they are less keen.

Despite their rhetoric, both big parties in the USA essentially stand for some form of “business as usual” – and indeed I do mean business! Sound familiar? The Dems want to give a bit more of the spoils to the poor, and are more liberal on “social issues” – but there has been a broad consensus on US foreign policy since WW2, so the Dems have never suggested that several hundred US military bases round the world, plus numerous intelligence operatives – some of whom carry out acts that would be defined as subversive or even terrorist if done by others – is way too many.

A lot of people seem to be getting fed up with the whole Washington insider interest-group lobbyist pork-barrel thing, which applies to both big parties – sound familiar again? But it is probably worse in the US. Also for various reasons of history and size there is much more of a distrust of big government. Many on the left seem to think this is by definition mistaken, but I see no a priori reason to trust the state. And if the Dems feed from the trough as much as the Republicans, why should anyone believe their fine words. Sound familiar? The military-industrial complex – to which Eisenhower had originally meant to add the word “congressional”, and to which we should perhaps now add “financial” runs the show, and if you rock the boat too much they will flatten you by fair means or foul.

Oh, and it’s the economy, stupid! Obama has not visibly turned things around. It may be unfair for him to be hammered over this so soon, but it is standard stuff for the governing party to get hammered in theses circumstances. And the size of the US deficit, debt, etc, is astronomical, and Obama has not reduced it – perhaps the opposite. The first stimulus package was on Bush’s watch, but its effects seem not to have been dramatic. Unemployment is huge, the depression is the worst since the 1930’s, and although this is due to policies of successive US governments – basically letting Wall St. run riot and fighting wars all over the place – the incumbent gets the blame for the chickens coming home to roost.

Forgot to add – many of Obama’s original financial team were Wall St. loyalists. Wall St. has hammered Main St., and the President has no radical break with the financial past on his agenda. But boy, did he sound good in his election campaign! (Sound familiar?)

I have to say that claiming Obama’s and the democrats’ failure was tacking to the centre – when he and they have not really done that – seems a little odd.

I agree that if you present a strong agenda with passion the centre can move with you to an extent, but it is hard to think of many of Obama’s big actions that match at all closely with the centre ground.

do not seem to share much in the way of values with Obama

I like how this is said without actually going into the specifics.

By the way – that bit about winning the centre is not only excellent, but should be required reading for the Labour-right.

OP, Don Paskini: “But ask them one-dimensional polling questions like, “Do you think illegal immigrants should get health care?” and you’ll entirely miss the art of the possible.”

I hope that Sunny reflects on those words before submitting posts based on future opinion polls. Polls only tell us how people respond to an interviewer on the street and do not inform us about how people think *around* a political topic.

It is easy to invent two questions on the same subject that deliver contradictory responses:
1. Should all citizens be required to register in a national identity database? (Alas, NID was supported in most opinion polls.)
2. Should people escaping a violent partner be allowed to create new lives and identities?

@8

Polls only tell us how people respond to an interviewer on the street and do not inform us about how people think *around* a political topic.

Sunny’s by no means the worst offender here. Hell – The Sun has been using push polling to claim popular support for it’s editorial line for as long as I can remember.

As for the original post and the article that inspired it, I’m in total agreement that Obama missed several opportunities in his first 2 years in office, and seeing vested interests exerting almost as much influence on a Democratic Congress and White House as they did on the previous Republicans is a big disappointment.

However it is important to at least try to understand why, and for that you have to take into account the gargantuan clout that the media – television in particular – has within US politics. The Republican learned a painful lesson in 1960 – and that lesson was that for myriad reasons, much of the non-aligned US public will vote for the guy who looks better on TV – and this situation has only compounded itself in recent years. Now let me be clear here – this is not because the American public are stupid or incurious, but I suspect it has at least something to do with the fact that the majority of the working public in the US seem to be keeping down several jobs just to make ends meet and simply don’t have time to get into politics that deeply.

Getting a spot on TV is hellishly expensive, and those corporations are pretty much the only ones with pockets deep enough to fund a splurge of that magnitude every 2 years. Of course with those funds come a quid pro quo, and if that is broken then those corporations will simply switch their support to the other side and any legislation passed will likely be repealed in short order. So Obama is essentially having a gold-plated diamond-encrusted corporate gun held to his head – and it’s all very well saying what Teddy and FDR did, but neither of them had to deal with an opposition campaign bankrolled by hard-right multi-billionaires and a 24-hour television news cycle.

“do not seem to share much in the way of values with Obama

I like how this is said without actually going into the specifics.”

Provide a simplistic analysis and expect simplistic comments in return. However it is fairly clear that the more the American voters find out about Obama’s policies, presumably based on his values, the less popular he becomes.

@10

Er, what’s actually happening is that a cabal of right-wing billionaires are funding a movement that are actively lying about what Obama wants to achieve (“he’s a socialist”, “he wants to mortgage your children’s future” – as if any socialist ever hired ex-Goldman Sachs, and as if no administration ever ran a deficit during a recession before*).

Where he’s suffering is that he’s not being forceful enough in pointing out what he has done. But everything tells me that unlike his predecessor he’s more of a doer than a boaster.