Let's stipulate that President Obama is a wonderful speaker, vigorous in promoting his policies and even eloquent at times. But there's a problem: He's not persuasive. Obama is effective at marketing himself. His 64 percent job approval (Gallup poll) is a reflection of this. But in building public support for his policies, Obama has been largely unsuccessful.
You'd never guess this from the laudatory press coverage of Obama. With every major speech or press conference, the media and a sizable chunk of the political community--including many Republicans--assume Obama has carried the day. Actually, he rarely has.
The most striking example is Obama's strenuous defense of his decision to close Guantánamo pris-on by next January 22 and to bar "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding in questioning captured terrorists. He gave a highly publicized address on this policy last month. After the speech, support for closing Guantánamo fell.
And this occurred despite Obama's supposedly powerful argument that Guantánamo has "set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world," become "a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists," and "weakened American national security." As usual, the media praised the speech.
The president's remarks were followed (same day, different location) by a speech by former Vice President Dick Cheney in which he criticized the president on Guantánamo and interrogation tactics. "Clearly the president is a more popular figure," says pollster Scott Rasmussen. "The numbers still shifted a little away from Obama."
Obama first announced his intention to close Guantánamo as a candidate last year.
Public support for keeping the prison open dropped, in Rasmussen's polling, from 59 percent last summer to 42 percent in January. Two days after taking office, Obama announced his decision to shut the facility. Since then, the public balked. Support for leaving it open has increased to 49 percent.
Nor has the president been able to increase support for other terrorist-related policies. Public approval for Obama's policy of not using "torture" to interrogate terrorists dipped from 58 percent in January to 49 percent in April in ABC News/Washington Post polling. Rasmussen found overwhelming opposition, 57-to-28 percent, to Obama's plan to bring Guantánamo prisoners to the United States.
The negative drift in public opinion isn't entirely due to Obama. "It's not so much the rhetoric," Rasmussen says. Rather, "it's the reality" of dealing with the problem of what to do with the terrorists jailed at Guantánamo. "The more people hear about it," the less they support Obama's policy.
There may be an institutional reason as well for Obama's inability to stir approval of his policies, including a surge in domestic spending. George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University, argued in his book On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit that presidential speechmaking almost never alters public opinion.
Both scholars and journalists, Edwards wrote, "refer to the White House as a 'bully pulpit' and assume that a skilled president can employ it to move the public and create political capital for himself. The fact that such efforts almost always fail seems to have no effect on the belief in the power of public leadership."
|
