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February 10, 2009

Panel on Obama's Style Selling the Stimulus

Special Report With Bret Baier

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: Our nation will sink into a crisis that at some point will be that much tougher to reverse.

So we cannot afford to wait. We cannot wait and see and hope for the best. I believe in hope, but I also believe in action.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER: So what about the style, the tone, the phrases President Obama is using to try to sell this stimulus package?

We're back with the panel. Jeff, what is your take on how this has been sold?

BIRNBAUM: I think that he is a little bit too dire and too gloomy, and too stridently partisan. By my count he attacked the Bush administration and Republicans at least three times in his news conference last night.

And I think it is a very bad mistake. He shouldn't be directing his attack to congress. He should be trying to uplift the American people to try to get them to spend more, to involve themselves in Congress more. I think he needs to be a great deal more like Ronald Reagan and less like Jimmy Carter in the way that he dealt with rhetoric.

We saw the rhetoric of hope during the campaign, and it would probably behoove him to talk more to the American public directly and try to get them to be more optimistic about the economy rather than trying to scare the Congress into acting quickly on his stimulus plan and other initiatives.

HURT: That is the thing that has been so surprising to me, having watched him on the campaign trail for the last two years, really, where he really ran a brilliant campaign, regardless of what you think about his politics.

But it is weird, because that campaign was sort of all about a couple of words like "hope" and "change," with no specifics. This campaign he's running now is all about specifics. It's 900 pages of specifics.

And he seems completely paralyzed in capturing that ability to persuade voters that this thing is crucial to them, that their lot in life is going to be worse if he does not succeed.

Out in Elkhart yesterday, in Indiana, everybody I asked, they either didn't understand anything about the package and thought it was just going to be money in their pocket, or they were very skeptical that it would do anything to help them.

BAIER: Maybe less about how bad it would be and more about how it would help families?

HURT: Just if he did a better job of explaining the specifics of what's in the plan, like, last night, I think a missed opportunity. He should have taken eight minutes to say "This is what is in the plan, and this is why it will keep you and your neighbors from being foreclosed on."

ANGLE: I don't know that he is scaring Congress into action when they can point to a whole list of things that don't create jobs. What he's doing is scaring consumers and businesses but constantly talking about us sliding into another great depression.

The fact is his own economic advisor says if we did not spend a penny on stimulus, not a penny, the unemployment rate would go up to nine percent.

Now, it peaked at 10.8 percent in the early 80's, so we are in difficulties, it is--when you talk about the great depression, why would any business expand, why would any bank loan money, and why would consumers go out and spend?

And what he has been doing here is create a classic straw man. He says the choice is between doing nothing and doing this plan. No, it is not. The choice is between doing this plan or another plan or another plan.

And the Republicans in both houses have their own plans, all of which, they claim, they argue, creates more jobs at smaller expenditures.

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