Obama still tilting at windmills

And he's still beating a dead horse on health care. The President's new health care plan is still a trillion dollars and not radically different from that of the Senate or Congressional bills that passed. He's not starting over. He's not coming into the summit on health care with Republicans with an open mind. The GOP is right, this summit is going to amount to an infomercial for Obama's plan. Meanwhile his windmill jobs strategy is still full of holes too. But that's not going to stop him from charging ahead on either agenda item. In these two charges he's leading, it has become clear to me what the President's problem really is.

The President's problem is simple. He believes that people see him and his vision as he sees it all himself. In other words, when he was campaigning in vagaries of 'hope and change' (or as it has turned out HYPE and CHANCE), he was indeed campaigning on specific agenda items. These were items that he was cleverly not sharing details on, or dispensing in disconnected moments that wouldn't allow the public to connect the dots. 

While it may have been deliberate on his part, I suspect the ploy was devised by campaign managers like Axelrod and carried out by speech writers. Notice how the President was a bit specific and got caught only in moments like the Joe the Plumber interaction? He may be a good orator, but he's not a good speaker, or talker. So he was kept on a tight script and it worked. As he said to the GOP early on in his Presidency, effectively locking them out of any meaningful discussions on legislation - he won.

But here's his disconnect - he believes he won on his ideas and that the public believed in them. He does not realize that people were projecting their own ideas of him onto him and each was imagining their own specific sets of hope and change. 

As a result, we have a public that is now disillusioned with the actual changes he is talking about, particularly on the stimulus bill and health care. They are also increasingly seeing the light in the global warming fraud and Cap and Trade will become increasingly unpopular as well. 

But President Obama doesn't see it that way. He sees a populace who believes in him and his ideas and has been swayed by a more effective GOP message machine. The President should take a look at CPAC's keynote speech by Glenn Beck. He displayed a distaste for the GOP as nearly as much as the Democrats. The GOP may be getting the Tea Party message in large part, but the Tea Party and many conservatives in general don't seem to be hearing that the GOP is hearing them. So that GOP message machine isn't the 'culprit' in Obama's popularity slide, and the slide in approval for the direction he's taking the country, or the declining hopes for Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections or losses in New Jersey, Virgina and Massachusetts over the past few months. The fault is that of a far left agenda and lock-step Democrats marching without seeing where they are headed.

The American people in large part have finally seen for themselves the specific change the President was talking about and it's not what they want. The trajectory has 'crash' written all over it. Conservatives should breath a sigh of relief at the prospect of the Democrats plowing ahead. The GOP still have ways of slowing the agenda to a crawl, even if the Democrats resort to reconciliation. more importantly, that stalling gives them a chance to have their actions speak to conservatives, where their words have gone unnoticed or unheeded by a skeptical constituency.