The Economy, the Future and Communication

The title of this post is filled with the 3 biggest things that have shaped the looming 2010 midterm elections.

The war cry of the 1992 Clinton Presidential bid as blasted by James Carville was "It's the Economy, Stupid". Eighteen years later, the story is still the same. The economy is still is very bad shape. Slowly growing, far from where it was and where it could have fallen to, but still very bad. We as Americans are not very good at nuance. We rarely acknowledge that this bad reality is a whole lot better than the disaster of a few years ago. It stinks now, so everything else is irrelevant. We are impatient and there is no good reason why the economy can't be good now. We are tired of suffering. Relatively better is irrelevant.

The Obama Administration could certainly have taken different steps that would have made some improvements on the current state of the economy. However, I doubt it would have nudged the unemployment level far from its current level of 9.6%. This is an enormous structural problem, was a long time in the works and will not change quickly regardless of what measures are taken. However, I am pretty sure of one thing that will drop the mark another tick or two (more later).

A president has two possible roads they can travel...they can deal only with current issues and leave the big, hairy, long-term issues for a future president to deal with or while juggling the realities of the present they can take a stab at trying to resolve issues that will rear their head in the future. There is rarely any current popularity benefit to dealing with long-term issues. Solving them involves pain in the present and our country is not very good at giving up something now for a long-term benefit (or pain avoidance). The Obama Administration has tried to tackle a few long-term issues such as health care, energy, education, civil rights (Lily Ledbetter and DADT), etc. People can agree or disagree with the way they have tried to change things, but nobody will really know the outcomes for certain until years from now. It is impressive that they have tried to deal with them, rather than push them to the next administration as has been happening for quite some time. Again, very little public acclaim for any of this, only angst and hatred for money spent, perception of freedom lost, etc.

Which brings us to the third and most important part of this post. Communication, or rather the true failing point of this administration. By many accounts including those listed at Politifact.com, the Obama Administration has performed very well in doing pretty much exactly what they said they were going to do. You may not agree with it, but if so, you probably didn't agree with it in 2008 when Obama was campaigning on it. But a majority of Americans did support Barack Obama in the 2008 elections, so what gives? He has done most of the things he said he would do but public opinion has dropped from the 53% of 2008 voters to early job approval polls cresting over 60% to the current level of 44% (with a low in August of 41%) The long and short of it is that Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton. Obama and his team are really quite poor at making people aware of and feel good about the good things they have done. They have also let the Republican opposition hammer them time and time again both with legitimate claims as well as farcical ones. For example, time and time again, polls asking about people's opinion on the passed Health Care Reform bill show at best an even split. However, when asking about specific items in the HCR bill, overwhelming support is shown. That is messaging or rather a horrific lack of it.

The Mid-term election outcome on November 2nd will be much more determined by the Obama team's inability to get out their message than the public's actual opinion on the specifics of what they have done.