Posted on 11/16/2010 7:52:26 AM PST by GlockThe Vote
'Revival' Author Outlines White House Identity Crisis by NPR Staff
November 16, 2010
_____________________________ __________
Observers applaud in the East Room of the White House on March 23, the day President Obama signed the health care bill.
Author Richard Wolffe writes that Obama was holding back tears amid the "hullabaloo" — and that moment helps explain why the president insisted on moving forward on the bill when senior advisers thought it was "insane."
November 16, 2010 Democrats are still deciding the direction to take following what President Obama described as a shellacking.
Richard Wolffe, for one, knows something about the way they operate from the inside. He interviewed Obama and the president's senior staff for his new book, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House, which tracks an intense period around the president's first anniversary in office.
Wolffe has spoken to people in the White House since the midterms about where they think they went wrong.
Read An Excerpt
"Their feeling is that they haven't been able to connect properly with voters — they haven't been able to say what they're trying to do, either on the economy, in terms of the Recovery Act, or about heath care — and they got outmaneuvered in any number of different ways," Wolffe tells Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep. "Now, as many people say, these are people with considerable communications skills — there's no shortage of talent inside the White House, and they have a huge communications staff. So, the question is: Why?
"And that comes down to identity: Who are these people? What are they trying to do? That's an unresolved debate for them. And until you can resolve that, you can't communicate properly."
While a failure to communicate may sound like an easy answer, Wolffe says, there are poll data to suggest that the public is really confused.
"Polling shows that people blame the Bush administration and Wall Street for the economy, but they don't think that the president has a clear idea about how to create jobs," he says. "On health care — which was supposed to have been the big conclusion coming out of this election — opinion is pretty much divided."
In addition, Wolffe says, while a third of the $800 billion-plus stimulus bill the president supported was for tax cuts, "there are lots of people who got those tax cuts and that had no idea where the money was coming from — they thought it came from their employers.
"So, you know, here is a situation where you're trying to be all things to all people and you end up being nothing much to anyone."
'Two Rival Camps'
The identity problem, Wolffe says, can be traced to "two rival camps" in the White House, "competing for attention, for message, for direction — and that debate goes on in the president's head, too."
Charles Ommanney/Crown
Author Richard Wolffe says there are two rival camps in the White House — the "Revivalists," who want to return to the spirit of the Obama campaign, and the "Survivialists," who believe in making deals to get things done in Washington.
Wolffe calls them the "Revivalists" and the "Survivalists." The former group wants "a revival of the campaign spirit" and feels that they have lost "that brand, that vision, that sense of reform — that sense of being an outsider." The Survivalists, on the other hand, are "the Washington crowd who believe that you had to compromise, you had to make deals — the backroom deals — you had to do whatever it took.
"And these two pieces of the White House have left the grand message, the grand identity questions, unresolved. And I think they're unresolved because the president hasn't resolved them — he has a foot in both camps."
For an example of a Survivalist official in the White House, Wolffe points to former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
" 'He was 100 percent loyal ' — this is a quote — '100 percent loyal to the president but he thought half of his decisions were insane,' " Wolffe says. "Their idea here was: Here was a guy who understood Washington, who would make these deals, who would compromise, and yet, they didn't figure out that he could not bend to the ways of the campaign, didn't understand it, and in their view — in the Revivalists' view — he sought to undermine what they'd done in the campaign."
In the other camp, Wolffe says, were people like campaign strategist David Plouffe and, "to some degree," White House senior adviser David Axelrod.
"There were real tensions for [Axelrod]. He felt that, much like the president, they had to shift from campaigning to governing," Wolffe says. "And what they woke up too late to was the fact that the other side, the Republicans, never stopped campaigning."
'They're Struggling'
So, how does Obama, who could be seen as trying to do too much, stack up against his predecessor, President George W. Bush, who was accused of oversimplifying things but also was clear about what he stood for?
"What the White House would say is they achieved a lot in that first year — maybe people don't know about it. So, on the domestic basis, clearly they have an impressive record by any standards of recent presidents," Wolffe says. "But in terms of the messaging, in terms of the mission, if you go around asking people, 'What did President Bush stand for?' — they'd come up with some kind of variation on 'Killing the terrorists,' 'war on terror.'
"If you asked people now, if you asked Democrats, 'What does this White House stand for?' — they're struggling. And I do think that comes back to this identity question of the revival of the campaign versus the people who wanted to just survive and get by."
'Here To Do Big Stuff'
Wolffe writes that Obama was holding back tears when he finally signed the health care bill. He says that it helps answer an important question: why Obama stubbornly insisted on moving forward with the health care overhaul when others advised against it.
"This was clearly a decision that his own chief of staff didn't agree with, and there were other senior advisers who thought this was insane, lunatic, to risk the presidency on it," Wolffe says. "And it comes down to the memory of his mother.
"So, his mother passed away because of cancer. Her experience in her final days and months was about struggling with insurance companies over ... the question of pre-existing conditions. And if you listen to the president, what does he talk about most?" Wolffe says. "It's about insurance companies quibbling with patients about pre-existing conditions.
"And he tears up — it's strange that people didn't kind of notice it — in all of the hullabaloo around the signing in the East Room, he can barely keep it together. And that's very, very rare — to see a president, especially this president, who is struggling, fighting with himself, to hold back the tears."
Although the health care overhaul may have hurt Democrats at the polls, it wouldn't have been Obama's style not to go for it, Wolffe says.
"He goes around telling people that he would rather do big stuff and be a one-term president than small stuff and be a second-term. So all those people who say he should be more like Clinton — he should have gone small, not done health care, backed away — that's not his self-image," Wolffe says. "In that sense, and this is not going to please partisans on either side, he's kind of like President Bush — the stubborn self-image of saying, 'I'm here to do big stuff; I don't care what the price is.'
"The difference ... is that Bush had a simple, clear message and he would repeat it until everyone was sick of it, including himself. This president feels like everyone's heard it already — 'You know about this stuff, right? You know what's in health care or the Recovery Act.'
"Well, it turns out people don't."
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/12/131274744/-revival-author-outlines-white-house-identity-crisis
And he has two more years to destroy this Country,dream act will be next.
Actually, if you go read Roots of Obama’s Rage, this story is 1000% plausible that he did it for the mother as sort of a revenge attack on the “Evil” insurance carriers.
Oh give me a friggin' break already! His communist mamma was well connected and couldn't have wanted for anything. His maternal grandparents who raised him were well off and hugely connected in the financial circles in Hawaii.
Don't give me this hearts and roses krap(TM) about her having to fight insurance companies to get treatment. It's not like she was on welfare-medicare and some death panel denied her the needed treatments.
Oh, wait...
Definitely sounds like cr*p ground out of the NPR propaganda program. Got all the tics ~ but this one is so bad the only “truth” concerns the names these people go by.
Great! We had 1/6 of the economy annexed to the US government, because this goof ball’s mom was fighting with an insurance company who probably capitulated and paid the medical bills anyway. (We don’t know otherwise).
Go read DSouzas book. This fits right in.
We need a Keeper of the Plot to document all the nonsense they’ve used against our Country. For instance, paraphrased: you must pass the bill to see what’s in it. And establishing czars right out of his arse without any approval and vetting. And fire the CEO of a major corporation.....my God the list is endless and I would love to see it regurgitated back in their faces.
I do not believe he cared as much for his mother as this article implies. If he did, why didn’t he help her? He has talked about how SHE had to be on the phone arguing with insurance companies. I don’t believe this fraud of a “man” Obama. I do not believe any of his stories. The author is trying to sell a story, not the truth.
Merely commenting on the insane attempt at Obama ass-saving in the article.
The article is sheer hogwash.
On a historical note, in June of 1876, General George Custer spotted the combined forces of about 1800 Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors near the Little Big Horn. Worried that they would break up and scatter in different directions, Custer divided the eleven companies of his soldiers into three groups (not counting the 12th company that was guarding the supply pack train), and attacked the entire Indian force with the five companies (just over 300 men) that he kept with him.
I imagine that the 19th century equivalent of NPR would report this as "Custer got outmaneuvered in any number of different ways" rather than as "Custer got whooped because he was a strategic and tactical moron who had no business leading a toddler to bed, let alone leading real Americans".
Note: Custer graduated at the bottom of his class from West Point, which puts him above our cowardly and secretive "Leader", who won't release any records at all.
Obama = FFFAAAIIILLL
The idea that not enough people “understood” what Obamacare was designed to do is 180 degrees from the facts and the truth.
There was NO failure to communicate.
It was extremely clear that the intention, the agenda, the purpose, the mission, the objective of Obamcare was simply how to use “health care” as an excuse to vastly expand Federal power, Federal control, Federal tyranny over one of the largest sectors of the economy.
Every major element of Obamcare is not about solving a problem but simply about inserting Federal power and authority and Federal control, in a tyrannical fashion, over the perceived problem.
Obamcare is all about extending, in every way possible, Marxist-type ideology, in the form of centralized Federal power, to various elements of health insurance and health care. That extension of power, not health care or health insurance “reform” IS its agenda, its mission, its purpose.
There was NO failure to communicate.
What failed was the lies, about what Obamcare is not.
Are you going to share your inside information?
The Democrat House and Senate had NOTHING to do with the economy?
Whoever wrote this cr@p has no idea what voters think.The dems should consider themselves lucky that more of them were not on the ballot in 2010!If this is what they are getting out of what just happen just wait until 2012.I fully expect Obama to be booed during his 2012 campaigning.There are far too many pople who dislike him for that not to happen.
Whoever wrote this cr@p has no idea what voters think.The dems should consider themselves lucky that more of them were not on the ballot in 2010!If this is what they are getting out of what just happen just wait until 2012.I fully expect Obama to be booed during his 2012 campaigning.There are far too many pople who dislike him for that not to happen.
FYI
FYI
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