From Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post:
One of my favorite bits of Monday morning quarterbacking is that President Obama should have put health care and Afghanistan and climate change and everything else on the back burner for the past year and insisted that he and everyone else focus exclusively on jobs, jobs, jobs. What do you call a $787 billion stimulus package of tax cuts and increased spending, a $50 billion auto industry bailout, a $1 trillion prop to the housing sector and nearly another $1 trillion in old-fashioned monetary stimulus -- chopped liver? And how exactly do you square the idea that the president and Congress should be working 24-7 to "create" jobs with that other nugget of conventional wisdom, that Americans are demanding smaller government, less spending and lower budget deficits?Bingo. The problem is messaging, not substance. Democrats need to get out of the ivory tower - or as Maureen Dowd would say, stop being Spock - and learn that legislating well takes two things: good substance and good messaging. We're often good at the former, but we're lousy at the latter. And if Obama didn't get credit for the first round of "jobs jobs jobs," why should we expect that he'll get credit for anything he does this year either? The problem is messaging.
(Well, to be fair, the White House also has a serious problem with negotiating with itself, which harms both the substance and messaging.)
