By Kevin Foley
As every good football coach knows, the best defense is a good offense. Effectively execute your offense and you keep the opposition's on the sidelines. Meantime, your own defense gets a break while the opponent's stays on the field and gets worn down.
With the football season here, it's fitting that President Barack Obama has finally recognized the wisdom of playing PR offense. After 20 months, most of it spent watching the GOP move the ball up and down the field against his unsteady and at times timid team, Obama is finally running the ball up the gut.
His chief opponents on the GOP's side of the ball are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner. Obama has called them out and reminded voters that those two were George W. Bush's featured ball carriers when the previous president was calling the plays.
The result of that particular game, Obama has reminded voters in recent weeks, was a rout of the middle class.
“They called it the ownership society,” Obama told a Labor Day crowd in Milwaukee. “What it really boiled down to was: if you couldn't find a job, or afford college, or got dropped by your insurance company – you're on your own.”
Obama began naming names, citing McConnell and Boehner for their complicity as Wall Street ran amok while working Americans lost their jobs and homes. With his GOP opponents backpedalling, Obama launched another long bomb, offering employment legislation to the tune of $50 billion to repair the nation's infrastructure along with a wide range of tax breaks for small businesses and the middle class.
The GOP leadership is scrambling for defensive schemes to offset Obama's new onslaught. Head coach Rush Limbaugh signaled in several of his special dirty plays including “Muslim Misdirection,” “Birther Blitz,” and “Black Blowback,” and while these once may have worked, Obama saw them coming this time.
“I'm not bringing this up to re-litigate the past; I'm bringing it up because I don't want to relive the past,” Obama declared. “These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class and drive our economy into a ditch. And now they're asking for the keys back.”
Obama's halftime is just six weeks away. As the clock winds down and with the loss of too many seats in congress looming, the President now has to consistently put points on the scoreboard. He can't be satisfied exchanging punts with the GOP.
That will mean holding the GOP offense to three and out then getting his offense back on the field. [The New York Times reports today that Obama's team is mulling more aggressive options, as well.]
The way Super Bowl champion quarterback Drew Brees makes the most of his athletic talents, President Obama must optimize his oratorical gifts to make his case to middle class Americans while keeping the GOP and its echo chamber on their heels in the weeks ahead. He must ignore distractions like mosques and Tea Partiers and pound away at the glaring weakness of his opponent the way he did last week.
The fans like what they see when Obama's on offense. His approval rating is creeping up as he focuses on the populist messages of jobs and middle class prosperity. Nothing else means more right now for the Democrats.
As Vince Lombardi liked to say, “Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing!”
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |