Obama the Road Warrior

Hmm it seems that the White House may be no place for Obama after all.

Officials say that although Obama won’t necessarily travel every week, as was suggested in one briefing, he will continue to be out of the White House a lot. “He feels best, he is at his best, and our agenda is the most popular and at its best when it’s getting sold by the popular in the administration and the person who connects with voters,” one official said.

I think this is a pretty wise plan because the Salesman-In-Chief should be out there amongst the people drumming up support for his plans. Also he needs to clearly define what he wants and force Congress to back him not the other way around.

The biggest failure of the stimulus was getting Pelosi and Reid to write the thing in the first place. Obama should have presented them with the bill and had them make changes to it. So that way he gets his message across that he has the political capital while they have the 12% approval ratings. They need to sell his bills and not the other way around.

A longtime adviser contends that Obama “actually didn’t spend a lot of political capital” on the stimulus, “because at the end of the day, he wasn’t on the phone begging Democrats to vote for it." The adviser added: “He’s going to get credit for getting some stuff done at a time when people are just desperate to feel like something is happening.”

This longtime adviser needs to know that a failure of the stimulus written by Pelosi and Reid are going to be pinned on Obama. He can't fall back to the stance of "they gutted my bill" and that is why it failed.

Instead it is a case of Obama telling them to write a bill and it was crap so ultimately it is his fault for outsourcing it to Congress. However if it somehow succeeds (by some miracle) then Obama will have his thunder stolen by Reid and Pelosi who get to take credit for writing the thing.

This plan had all of the risks of failure and all of the credit going to someone else. Hopefully he understand that his voice will always be louder then Pelosi and Reid because he has a 68% approval advantage over them.