Finally, some explanation for why President Obama likened the election of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., – who campaigned on an anti-Obamacare platform – to his own presidential victory. Answer: maybe he didn’t know what else to say?
Ron Suskind portrays Obama, in his book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, as frustrated upon returning from a campaign stop on behalf of Brown’s opponent, Martha Coakley, who appeared doomed. The day before the special election, Obama called a senior staff meeting. “What is my narrative?” Suskind says Obama asked. “I don’t have a narrative.”
Suskind then adds this quotation from “one of the participants” in that meeting:
“He was right. He had no narrative. No story. For someone like Obama, that’s like saying I don’t know who I am. That I’ve lost my way.”
Obama eventually settled on a narrative:
“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” the president said in an exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
