With new poll numbers released this week showing that independents are moving away from the Obama administration, the White House unleashed two of their top spokespeople onto the Sunday morning programs yesterday, political strategist David Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
The blood is in the water with conservatives, who are seizing on those low numbers to suggest, as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan did in her Saturday column, that
In the past an LBJ showed his mastery by taming and controlling Congress. Mr. Obama's ability to work closely with the Democrats does not seem like evidence of mastery. The biggest single phrase you hear about him now, and it isn't coming from pundits and being repeated, it is bubbling up from normal people and being seized by pundits, is the idea that he is in over his head, and out of his depth. And this while he keeps winning.
On NBC's Meet The Press, moderator David Gregory asked Gibbs about that perception:
MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you a broader question that I posed in the open, and I think you should have an opportunity to respond to, which is on a lot of the issues that you face right now from the oil spill to the economy, to the war in Afghanistan, is the president and his team falling short, or are we in a situation where expectations were set too high?
MR. GIBBS: That's a good question. Look, I think on either, either one of these things, the time frame on—look, the time frame on the war in Afghanistan, we've been in Afghanistan for almost 10 years. The president has obviously added a number of new troops, both at the beginning of 2009 and certainly last winter, and those troops are coming in. But this is always going to take some time. We knew it was going to take some time. Sometimes the time for Afghanistan or the time for financial recovery may not perfectly line up with the 2010 elections, and we understand that people are frustrated. Everybody's frustrated. Look, the president is frustrated that we haven't seen greater recovery efforts. But that doesn't stop us from doing what we know is right, instituting the policies that we know will bring this country back and put it on a pathway forward that lets our economy grow or creates stronger security for our country
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2010.