President Obama is in jeopardy of overexposure in the debt debate, with a bevy of recent television appearances and public appeals that could dilute his message and turn off the American public, political communication experts say.
Stuck in a standoff with Congress, Obama has increasingly turned to the public in an attempt to shift opinion a week before the Treasury’s Aug. 2 deadline to raise the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.
Along with his address to the nation Monday night, the president has held four press conferences, conducted a town hall meeting at the University of Maryland and granted a handful of local and national TV interviews on the debt-ceiling impasse over a two-week stretch.
Some say Obama is relying too much on his bully pulpit during a crisis in which he needs to maintain the clout of the presidency — a currency that should be spent only in limited circumstances.
“He’s been out there an awful lot,” said Martin Medhurst, a presidential communication expert at Baylor University. “If you come across as just another politician, you forfeit the great power of the White House. He’s awfully close to doing that.”
The public blitz is a departure for Obama, who on a wide range of issues — overhauling health care, averting a government shutdown and allowing gays in the military — opted to quietly cobble together coalitions instead of attempting to directly rally the public.
Such a shift, analysts say, must contain a concrete purpose.
“The frequency of the message would be fine if there were news behind it,” said Doug Heye, former communications director of the Republican National Committee. “It’s like he said nobody was paying attention last time; so let’s just do it again in prime time. I still don’t know the president’s position.”
Despite his abundance of public appearances, Obama has been dogged by criticism for failing to articulate a precise plan for how Congress should push through a compromise to raise the nation’s debt limit.
However, others argue that the prospect of economic calamity forced the president’s hand and that his increasingly public message just reflects the magnitude of failure to broker a solution.
“I don’t think he’s there yet [in terms of overexposure],” said Northeastern University journalism professor Alan Schroeder, an expert on presidential communication. “It’s certainly an unusual amount of attention to an issue in such a short amount of time, but it’s also an unusually large problem.”
Congressional phone lines were flooded with calls Tuesday after the president urged the public to press lawmakers for a “balanced approach” to solving the debt impasse, which Schroeder said demonstrated “a clear public response to Obama’s message.”
But other experts said the president’s onslaught of television appearances has alienated some in his base, who say he has given too much ground to conservatives, and turned off some Republicans tired of being ridiculed on the most public of stages.
White House press secretary Jay Carney acknowledged Tuesday that Obama had been “out here with an unbelievable amount of regularity” but said it was necessary to educate the general public on an esoteric subject.
“He needed to talk to the American people, to those Americans who haven’t been paying close attention, to let them know where this stands and why it’s so important,” Carney said.
