What Dubya Can Teach Obama

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Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo The president's sagging poll numbers aren't his real problem, says The Daily Beast's Nicolle Wallace. It's that his White House is out of touch, just as the Bush team was sometimes.

You can overcome sinking poll numbers. Negative press comes and goes. But when the public no longer sees you as someone who understands the problems the American people are facing, you’re trapped inside the presidential bubble—and you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.

This summer, President Barack Obama became a full-time resident of the bubble. And he’s going to have a hard time climbing out. The plummeting approval numbers are not the crisis pundits and political opponents suggest; polls turn around based on events and legislative triumphs. But falling out of touch with the gritty reality facing a majority of families in this country is like falling out of love. It’s often difficult—if not impossible—to generate the starry-eyed adoration and trust again.

As an alumna of President George W. Bush’s senior staff, I’d say that we succeeded in pulling back the curtain some of the time—and failed miserably other times.

The president has an astute and skilled staff. But they bear much of the blame for allowing him to become detached from political reality. Take the flap over the back to school address, for example. The protests to Obama’s planned talk have very little to do with schoolchildren or classrooms. Most people agree that the president is entitled to urge kids to study hard and stay in school. But someone deserves blame for creating an additional political headache for Obama by letting an instruction to have students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” accompany the announcement. It’s likely that the failure lies with an overworked White House staffer who missed the glaring red flag—language that should have stood out to anyone paying attention to the debate that’s raging in this country about the role of government in American life.

• Mark McKinnon: Flunk the Far RightIt’s a similar story with health-care reform. All White House staffs are exhausted, and I can’t imagine the Obama White House is doing anything less than burning the candle at both ends. But one of the most vital responsibilities of the senior staff is to provide a president with that final “gut check.” The chief of staff and other top advisers must pull back the curtain for a president and show him where the vast majority of Americans stand on the most important issues facing the country. But judging from the response the public has been giving Obama’s health-care reform plan this summer, he didn’t see the freight train of opposition coming.

I know a little about the bubble; I’ve seen it from the inside. As an alumna of President George W. Bush’s senior staff, I’d say that we succeeded in pulling back the curtain some of the time—and failed miserably other times. In certain instances, our failures were due to incompetence, and at other points, we failed to grasp the depth and breadth of public sentiment. In early 2005, when the public was growing frightened and discouraged by the violent events and images coming out of Iraq, we squandered the president’s political capital with a failed attempt to reform Social Security instead of shoring up support for the difficult days ahead in Baghdad with frequent and straightforward assessments of the challenges there. In all cases, the consequences of being out of touch with the American public were devastating.

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