President’s Midterm Loss Message Received: Washington Is Broken, Not My Policies. Just Let Me Sell My Mousetraps!
[guest post by Dana]
President Obama on midterm losses this morning on Face the Nation:
“Whenever, as the head of the party, it doesn’t do well, I’ve got to take responsibility for it… The message that I took from this election, and we’ve seen this in a number of elections, successive elections, is people want to see this city work. And they feel as if it’s not working.”
“They see Washington gridlocked and they’re frustrated. And they know one person in Washington and that’s the president of the United States. So I’ve got to make this city work better for them.”
Further, he does not believe his policies are the problem and that he just needs to re-brand and come up with a different sales pitch to the American people:
“It’s not enough just to build a better mousetrap. People don’t automatically come beating to your door. We’ve got to sell it.”
I would add that because Bob Schieffer is a lovely and polite gentleman who seems to have no desire to be seen as confrontational, a number of obvious opportunities to challenge the president were discreetly overlooked.
–Dana
Hello.
Dana (8e74ce) — 11/9/2014 @ 11:16 amSchieffer is an old fogey weaksuck… I watched the panel discussion, that woman from NPR was delusional talking about the President’s displays of humility and how those have been derided as displays of weakness. I think that Krauthammer – were he invited – would have responded that narcissistic personalities don’t do show humility… ever.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 11/9/2014 @ 11:22 amthe MFM is never going to stop protecting their Precious, even if the rest of the world knows that Obola is a #SCFOAMF with a room temperature IQ and all the mannerisms of a spoiled 3 year old.
expecting otherwise is folly.
redc1c4 (6d1848) — 11/9/2014 @ 11:40 amObama said, “It’s not enough just to build a better mousetrap. People don’t automatically come beating to your door. We’ve got to sell it.”
Well, then, since nothing sells like success, obviously Obama should do something that actually improves things for a change. Like, say, fix a problem instead of selling snake oil. That would sure be a welcome change and it would play in Peoria.
Here’s a suggestion: go on national TV and tell the protesters planning to riot in Ferguson to stay home and accept the fact Michael Brown was a vicious thug who attacked a police officer and got what was coming to him. That despite the lies of rabble rousing race hustlers, the police are not to blame for Brown’s death.
It’s sad when any young person dies unnecessarily, but that in Brown’s case he brought it on himself. Obama wouldn’t even have sell it, the truth sells itself, and the market is wide open for some truth from our President.
ropelight (7ba8bc) — 11/9/2014 @ 11:44 amobama is a deluded whore
the message these elections sent is not that people want to this city work
the message these elections sent is that you suck ass obama
you suck ass and people hate you
at best you’re a joke
a nasty divisive borderline-communist jew-hating joke
happyfeet (831175) — 11/9/2014 @ 11:56 amnot that people want *this city to work* i mean
happyfeet (831175) — 11/9/2014 @ 11:57 amThe GOP needs to be confrontational. Obama won’t be able to deal with it and will become increasingly unhinged. Cruz, maybe, knows this.
Nobody can tell this guy anything. He’s got it all figured out. That’s why he said as a candidate that he wasn’t just out to end the Iraq war, but the habits that keep getting us into wars. That’s why he needs to fundamentally transform America. We’ve been doing it wrong throughout our entire history and American finally came to its senses when it made him the Fundamental Transformation Czar.
He is obsessed with this delusion.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/president-vp-may-differ-immigration-strategy-obama-angrily-cut-biden_818457.html
From inside the Obama bubble, he fact that he has cost the Democrats 69 seats and control of the Senate can not mean the American people have rejected his agenda. They’ve only rejected the “gridlock” that is holding up his agenda. He’s rapidly losing patience with the GOP for blocking his agenda. Don’t they understand that they were elected to implement it?
Like he told the bankers in 2009, he’s the only thing between the GOP and the pitchforks (that’s how he views Ferguson; that’s why he had to bring up that town during his UN speech, to a crew of puzzled dictators who didn’t have a clue why he felt he had to talk about it since most of them never heard of it and if they had they could have cared less).
That’s how our community organizer in shining armor views himself and the world that’s unworthy of him.
He’s a loon. He’s a house of cards. And he’s desperate.
That was the point of Putin’s NYT editorial. To let Obama, and the rest of us, know he’s got this guy’s number. He knows exactly what buttons to push to play him like a violin. He should; he had been turning student union radicals like Obama into Soviet spies since President Arrested Development was living in the freshman dorm trying to hang out with the tenured hot-house-flower Marxist professors and the coffee house chicano revolutionaries so he wouldn’t be seen as a “sell out.”
Prom Queen has only maintained this facade as “no drama Obama” because of the heavy lifting of his LHMFM praetorian guard like Shieffer. We all know it’s BS. If the GOP beats Putin to the punch and pushes those same buttons, but harder and faster, he won’t be able to control himself. Look at how he reacted recently to Michael Jordan calling him a s$#@@y golfer.
http://www.tmz.com/2014/11/05/president-obama-fires-back-at-michael-jordan-golf/
The first thing you’ll note is, he reacted. He’s supposed to be the President of the United States, for Chrissakes (he’s not; he keeps learning on TV that whoever is President is not keeping on top of things in the executive branch, and nobody is madder about it than Tiger Beat). It’s infantile for a man in his position to respond to something like this.
As Obama demonstrates by responding in an infantile, petty, snarky way.
I’m not psychoanalyzing the guy. But if you look at how he behaves and how he reacts to events (this is long enough without the complete list) he is unfit to be in that office. The LHMFM has to treat him with kid gloves because otherwise that shows. Putin could humiliate Obama on the world stage (Jordan just called him a s%$##y golfer and look at the wailing and gnashing of teeth) and he’s let Obama (and us) know that. Obama can’t stand that.
So the GOP needs to show everybody exactly who this guy is by making it clear that this guy is irrelevant. And more importantly going after his pride by treating him with condescension and a certain amount of derision. I don’t think it has to be much, considering how little it takes to get under Mean Girl’s skin. The we’ll see the same guy that Putin and Obama sees, and that’s what everybody in the US needs to see. As I believe elissa said, it’s getting so only Obama’s most loyal sycophants (like their ObaMessiah himself) are denying reality. It will be ugly, but it needs to be done. On-the-job training hasn’t worked for the Obamateure or the country. On-the-job therapy is out of the question. The only way to neutralize this guy is to cause him a career-ending meltdown. Obama really is on the verge of an implosion that will make Ed Muskie’s 1972 waterworks look like an Easter picnic. The GOP needs to hurry it along, not delay it like Schieffer.
Steve57 (c1c90e) — 11/9/2014 @ 12:10 pmPresident Lady MacBeth has finally stumbled across something that’s shovel ready. His “better mousetrap.”
Steve57 (c1c90e) — 11/9/2014 @ 12:11 pmObama and the Dem operatives with bylines in the media seem to think that voters replaced Dims with Republicans in the hopes that the Republicans would be more friendly to Obama and the Dims’ agenda.
Delusional deniability.
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 11/9/2014 @ 12:16 pm“We’ve got to sell it.”
IOW, just another messaging problem.
The beatings will continue until I leave office.
daleyrocks (bf33e9) — 11/9/2014 @ 12:18 pmThis is pretty much what he also at his press conference on Wednesday, November 5, 2014:
His policies were not the reason for the loss – because after all, one thing he’s been pushngis a raise in the minimum wage, and there were ballot proposals in 5 states raising the minimum wage, and 5 out 5 times in 5 different states it passed. So this was not a repudiation of his policy proposals.
It is rather, opposition to the gridlock in Washington. The voters blamed him because he’s the most prominent figure in Washington.
Unsaid but implied: But they were unfair to the Democratic Party. It’s not that they judged correctly who, or what party, was responsible for the partisan infighting in Washington. It was a bunch of what Rush Limbaugh calls “low information voters” who turned over the Senate to the Republicans.
Sammy Finkelman (89ef89) — 11/9/2014 @ 12:21 pmThe Russians are inside Obama’s OODA loop, and they want the world to know it.
That was the point of Putin’s op-ed. That’s the point of this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/russian-minister-makes-joke-u-054919334.html
The point is, President Norma Desmond (“…And I promise you I’ll never desert you again because after ‘Salome’ we’ll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!… All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”) and his SoS Seabiscuit wouldn’t stand around with their thumbs up their butts grinning if it were the lower life forms from the GOP joking at their expense.
Which is why the GOP needs to do it. To turn up the heat. Obama is throwing a tantrum now, it’s just on low boil.
Steve57 (c1c90e) — 11/9/2014 @ 12:34 pm“there were ballot proposals in 5 states raising the minimum wage, and 5 out 5 times in 5 different states it passed. So this was not a repudiation of his policy proposals.”
Sammy – The minimum wage proposals which passed in all five states called for increases in the minimum wage to a level below that called for in bill which Democrats have been unable to ram through the Senate, so passage by the states of these proposals does not necessarily signal agreement with what Democrats have been pushing at the Federal level.
daleyrocks (bf33e9) — 11/9/2014 @ 1:03 pmFrom Forbes:
More than two-thirds of voters in Alaska agreed to raise minimum wage to $9.75 by 2016. Sixty-five percent of Arkansas voters set the state on course to adopt an $8.50 figure by 2017. In Nebraska, 59 percent said the number should be $9 an hour by 2016. Only South Dakota stood out with a slimmer margin; 53 percent voted to raise minimum wage to $8.50 an hour next year.
Whoa. Arkansas went all red this year, but is raising minimum wage to $8.50 in 2017. They better brace themselves for the waves of immigrants from Mississippi which I think has no state minimum wage.
In Arkansas in 2013 the mean hourly wage for the two lowest paying occupational groups was $8.91. That tells me it isn’t hard to make $8.50 already as long as there a jobs available
Of course no one tells much about how many 40HR week workers actually earn less than those new $HR rates to start with but out of the employed group of 1.219M a poverty research center claimed 92,365 persons in Arkansas worked 40HRs a week at the current Federal minimum wage level.
I bundled together the four lowest paying occupational groups and found they employed 203,140 at hourly means ranging from $8.91 for fast food to $11.10 for healthcare support, so this tells me a number of Arkansas residents have somehow found a way to earn considerably less than the mean for their group. The extenuating circumstances are probably rife with tragedy, stupidity, drama, laziness, ineptitude, diminished mental capacity, early pregnancy, and multiple felonies
My opinion on $8.50Hr by 2017:
Not a big win for Obama when you figure the market in Arkansas was already paying an average of $17.95HR. 92% of the 40Hr workers earn at least $8.91 already. Those that earn $7.25 instead of $8.91 have found their way to underachieve the market in even the lowest rated occupational group by 20%.
The people of Arkansas just voted to give a little bump to the people who cook their burgers and mop the floors at work. So what this does show is that Republican voters in Arkansas have a heart and voted for this while the Democrats stayed away
steveg (794291) — 11/9/2014 @ 1:41 pmdaley,
In his eyes, in his world, it is just that – a messaging problem. To call it anything else would require him to really assume responsibility – as in I screwed this up big time – not just an empty buck stops here routine. How easily that phrase, which some actually lived by, can so easily become empty blather from the mouth of another. A sad, feeble attempt at pretending to assume responsibility.
Dana (8e74ce) — 11/9/2014 @ 2:08 pmOf course. How could it be anything else?
Yeah, I know he told everyone if they liked their old meal plans, they could keep their meal plans. And if they liked their apple pie, they could keep their apple pie. But, this new moose s@%$ pie is way better than your old apple pie, which was full of sugar and really fattening and would probably end up killing you. But this new moose s^$& pie is all natural, sugar free, and chock full of roughage (otherwise it would have stayed in the moose).
Obama hears the voices of the people who didn’t vote last Tuesday. They’re sick of the gridlock. They’re dying for their moose s(^% pie, and they’re frustrated with obstructionist Republicans standing between them and their plate full of s@#$.
As for the rest, if Obama just finds the right advertising campaign, they’ll be lining up for a nice big fat steaming slab of moose s@## pie. And if they don’t there could only be one reason for that.
Raaaaacism!
They’d eat moose s##T if all those dead white Preezies had made them a pie out of it.
Steve57 (c1c90e) — 11/9/2014 @ 5:18 pmFull transcript of yesterday’s Face the Nation:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcripts-november-9-2014-obama-bush/
Sammy Finkelman (d22d64) — 11/10/2014 @ 2:38 pm