The Obama administration loves Twitter and Facebook, but a more apt analogy for the increasingly chaotic atmosphere around President Barack Obama may be the arcade games of the early 1980s: The farther you go, the harder it gets.
With a constantly accreting policy agenda, numerous political distractions and a strategy to continually push the message through news media and the Internet, the Obama administration often appears to be playing through successive game stages without a cohesive plan.
“The early video games teach you to just keep playing through challenges until you fix them,” said Joe Tuman, a political scientist at San Francisco State University. “Obama comes from the same culture of ‘Why not just attack everything?’ ”
With his health care plan in trouble, Obama last week struggled to keep moving the issue forward. But he stepped on his own message by sounding off about the arrest of his friend, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Before that controversy was over, the president announced a major new initiative for funding education.
Tuman called the approach multitasking. Cindy Rugeley, a political scientist at Texas Tech University, said the effect was confusing.
“You can’t even follow what they are doing,” Rugeley said. “You get the impression they are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.”
Two frequent criticisms of the administration are that it is doing too much, and also that the president is overexposed. But lately, the two issues have merged, with the result being an increasingly busy White House buzz machine.
The effectiveness of Obama’s high profile in the news media is in doubt after last week’s prime-time news conference — his fourth, which posted ratings of about half the nearly 50 million viewers who tuned in for his first one.
Rugeley said public frustration with Obama’s approach could be measured in polls showing his personal appeal ranking well ahead of his handling of issues.
“No longer is he going to be able to just call a presser and move people,” she said. “That cat has just about had its nine lives.”
Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak said the White House diluted its message by going after Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina for his political remarks calling health care Obama’s “Waterloo.”
“All this sideshow stuff doesn’t matter, because the bottom line is they don’t have the Democratic votes to do [health care reform],” he said.
The administration in August will get a rare opportunity to do a course correction. With Congress leaving town, Obama will have the stage largely to himself to clarify his agenda without a chorus of dissent.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama would stay visible with “press conferences, statements, speeches” to refocus on his top three priorities.
“I’d think it is safe to say that we had always assumed the president would continue to talk about that — to talk about this and other important issues like the economy and energy, even while Congress was back at home,” Gibbs said. “So there will be a busy month of that.”
