Taegan Goddard asks: “Did Obama’s Speech Backfire?”
Short answer: no.
Slightly longer answer: it’s a pretty silly question to be asking at all. Here’s the context:
First Read notes that recent polls showing a sharp drop in President Obama’s approval rate seem to confirm that his speech last week on the national debt “might not have played well.”
This is an Occam’s Razor moment. What’s more likely? Option A, where popularity fluctuates, but mostly is indexed to the state of the economy – which people are very pessimistic about. Or Option B, where speeches watched by almost no one (except for the political class) can somehow drive literally millions of people to change their minds overnight?
People love narrative, and there is absolutely a place for it. But using narrative as an explanatory tool is almost never appropriate.
Presidential speeches may have some role in setting agendas, defining terms of engagement, etc. And those things might well matter for long-term shifts in popularity, or other large political shifts. It is almost inconceivable to think they have a meaningful, direct relationship. And even if it’s true that millions of people changed decided to shift their position on Obama based on him saying vaguely mean things about Republicans in one speech, the only thing it could possibly prove is that voters are idiots when considered en masse.
But that’s not exactly news, is it?
Or, to quote Kevin Drum:
This will probably satisfy no one, but I think the answer is pretty simple. First: the vast, vast majority of independents don’t really have any idea what Obama’s plan to handle the deficit is. They just know that (a) the deficit is high and (b) Obama is president. Beyond that, there are kids to get to school, laundry to be done, bosses to be pleased, and leaky faucets to be fixed. The details of the deficit debate are just a bit of partisan background noise that they haven’t really parsed yet.