At the six-month mark amid polls showing slipping public support for his ideas, President Barack Obama is convening the Cabinet for a two-day huddle.
“It’s an opportunity for the president, the vice president, senior White House staff and Cabinet officials all to get together and talk about the agendas both past and forward, [and] how we can continue to work together to make progress,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
He added, “It’s not a midcourse correction or a report card.”
The group will gather at Blair House and the White House Conference Center, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. They will dine together today and meet again Saturday.
A new spate of polls coinciding with Obama’s six months in office present a stark assessment for the president, who has been trying to leverage trust and popularity into support for his policies.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Obama’s job approval at 53 percent, down from 61 percent in April.
Obama dropped 10 percentage points among those who believe he would bring real change, from 61 percent in February to 51 percent now. Those who said he could be trusted to keep his word dropped to 48 percent in July, from 58 percent in April.
Perhaps most starkly, the poll show that the harder Obama campaigns for health care reform, the worse it gets for him. The poll found 42 percent say the president’s plan is a bad idea — a 10 percentage point jump from a month ago. Thirty-six percent said it was a good idea.
The dynamic is reminiscent of former President George W. Bush’s campaign to pass an overhaul of Social Security — the more he talked about it, the less people liked the idea. The plan eventually failed.
Gibbs downplayed the polls, saying the White House is not concerned.
“The president isn’t fixated on the ups and downs in polling,” he said. “If we were, we’d have quit two years ago this summer, if ever even run for president.”
Dismissing polls is a standard White House line, but the Obama administration also has proven itself nimble in responding to public concern — most recently, by making the president more visible as a way to sell his programs.
But if Obama is increasingly less popular, as the polls suggest, making him more high-profile has limited utility. Enter the Cabinet, and a back-to-the-drawing-board self-examination.
“There is not an awful lot of historic precedence for this,” said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution. “To some degree, it reminds us of how far we have come from a Cabinet government.”
The Obama administration, like several of its modern predecessors, takes a top-down approach to policymaking and the Cabinet.
Many of the key decisions are made inside the White House and conveyed outward to the federal agencies.
Obama’s first Cabinet meeting was not until April. Even so, the president’s Cabinet includes members who are loyal to him and committed to his agenda.
Gibbs called the two-day talk “an opportunity for everyone to get together on hopefully a little bit less hectic pace. Rather than seeing each other at a meeting for 15 or 30 minutes.”
