In the aftermath of President Obama’s tenth pivot to jobs and economic growth in less than five years, liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank suggests that Obama is out of “fresh ideas” and that his current message is a “turkey” and a tired “rerun.”
by Dana Milbank
“I don’t normally do this,” President Obama’s senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer wrote in the subject line of an e-mail blast to reporters Sunday night.
This was tantalizing. What would this top White House official be doing? Singing karaoke on the North Lawn? Getting a “POTUS” tattoo on his arm?
Reality was rather more prosaic. Pfeiffer was announcing the rollout of a series of economic speeches Obama would begin on Wednesday — roughly the 10th time the White House has made such a pivot to refocus on jobs and growth. What would set this one apart is that Obama would be reprising a speech he made eight years ago, when he first became a senator; Pfeiffer included a link to clips from that speech, set in part to mood music from the Canadian electronica group Kidstreet, the same music used in an Apple ad last year.
But even a reincarnated Steve Jobs would have trouble marketing this turkey: How can the president make news, and remake the agenda, by delivering the same message he gave in 2005? He’s even giving the speech from the same place, Galesburg, Ill.
White House officials say this will show Obama’s consistency. “We plead guilty to the charge that there is a thematic continuity that exists between the speech the president will give in Galesburg, at Knox College on Wednesday, and his speech in Osawatomie [Kansas, in 2011] and his speech back at Knox College in 2005,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said.
Yes, but this also risks sending the signal that, just six months into his second term, Obama is fresh out of ideas. There’s little hope of getting Congress to act on major initiatives and little appetite in the White House to fight for bold new legislation that is likely to fail. And so the president, it seems, is going into reruns.
In fairness, the 2005 speech was on the timeless theme of the need for education, training, regulations and tax changes to preserve the middle class. “The true test of the American ideal,” he said then, is “whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead and reach their dreams.”
That message was so good he repeated it in 2011 in Kansas, where he said, “This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules.”
But while that message remains relevant, Obama is now facing a Republican opposition that, by House Speaker John Boehner’s own account, is measuring its success by how many laws it can undo. There’s no longer serious talk about a grand bargain that could reform entitlement programs and the tax code. Legislators and administration officials have little hope of doing more than short-term skirmishing over the debt ceiling and mindless spending cuts in the “sequester.”
If he’s to break through the resistance, Obama will need some bold new proposals. That’s why his speech returning to the oldies would seem to confirm that the White House has given up on big achievements.
To build interest in the new series of speeches, the White House scheduled an invitation-only briefing (RSVP required) for Monday, then set cloak-and-dagger ground rules requiring that the briefers not be quoted, even anonymously. Reporters protested, but they needn’t have worried: The official who gave the briefing made clear that there would be no new policies announced, at least not major ones and not initially.
Pfeiffer told me Tuesday that the president, in his series of speeches, will eventually get around to ideas about “some things Congress could do, things they should do but probably won’t in the near term, and executive actions the president can take himself.”
I admire Pfeiffer’s pluck in trying to generate enthusiasm for what is largely a news-free initiative. And it’s smart politics for Obama to keep his emphasis on economic matters. But it would be easier to rally enthusiasm if he gave supporters something big, bold and new to reach for, rather than leftover proposals coupled with lofty ideals.
“It will be a pretty good speech,” Obama told activists this week at a gathering of Organizing for America, an outgrowth of his campaign. “But as we’ve learned, I’ve given some pretty good speeches before, and then things still get stuck here in Washington, which is why I’m going to need your help.”
True, but with three years to go in his presidency, Obama needs to help his supporters help him — by giving them the power of fresh ideas.
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Dana Milbank is a liberal columnist for the Washington Post.