Let’s suppose you are the PR executive in charge of THE GREATEST PRODUCT IN THE WORLD. I mean, this thing is so good, so unique, so undeniably appealing that testing and focus groups told you conclusively everyone in America will want it.

Now, the CEO has decided the primary marketing mode will be PR, so you have the responsibility of telling the story about THE GREATEST PRODUCT IN THE WORLD. This would seem like a dream job, one in which you only need to creatively put the product in front of the public and it will fly off the shelves.

Except, six years later, THE GREATEST PRODUCT IN THE WORLD has tanked, and for all the wrong reasons.

That’s precisely what happened to Barack Obama. The president has to look no further than his PR operation to find the cause.

Obama’s list of accomplishments is remarkable: the first African-American president, he pulled the economy back from the brink of a depression; he created 10 million private sector jobs without any help from intransigent congressional Republicans; he saved the American automobile industry; he avoided unnecessary bloodshed through the diplomacy; he killed Osama bin Laden and scores of other al-Qaeda leaders; and he insured tens of millions of Americans who had no health insurance. There’s a lot more, but you get the idea.

Yet, despite all his success and all his personal charm, Democrats were clobbered in the 2014 mid-term elections, losing control of the Senate while the House majority added more seats.

The bony finger of blame falls on Jennifer Palmieri, the current White House communications director and her predecessors, Daniel Pfeiffer and David Plouffe. The mastermind behind the Obama PR curtain, Valerie Jarrett, is likewise culpable.

How do you take somebody as accomplished, smart, and likeable as Obama and turn him into a scourge few Democratic candidates wanted anywhere near their campaigns?

First, you make sure the president always stays in his comfort zone. He’s a reticent, bookish lawyer who is naturally risk averse. His PR team and senior advisors thus keep Obama carefully cocooned in the Rose Garden, Oval Office, Air Force One, Park Avenue or Beverly Hills fund raisers, and other such easy-to-control “presidential” settings.

Every once in a rare while they release Obama from his gilded cage to address a crowd of adoring union supporters or walk through a widget factory, but he is quickly whisked back to the White House lest his pant cuffs get spattered by something unpleasant.

You allow the relentless right wing media lies about the president to go unanswered.

You stage only the most lazily predictable photo ops. For example, instead of touring Obama through a rural free clinic in Texas or some other GOP stronghold to show Americans why so many are desperate for healthcare, you invite fifty doctors in their white lab coats to the Rose Garden.

You always make sure the president is “on script,” dutifully reciting from a TelePrompTer the words you think the public wants to hear, often delivered in an uninspiring monotone. Before long, Obama’s ’Prompter becomes the punch line of a Jimmy Kimmel joke.

You make sure you do nothing to correct the president’s annoying verbal habit of inserting “uh” in between every other word he utters when he’s not reading the ’Prompter. That way Obama always sounds indecisive and inarticulate.

You let the president weigh in on every unfortunate incident in America involving race, from a Harvard college professor’s encounter with cops to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. By doing so, you give right wing media hysterics plenty of ammo to fill up their television and radio programs with racially charged anti-Obama propaganda.

You permit those same conservative pundits to run rough shod over the president during Super Bowl telecasts so half of America can see Obama get disrespectfully pushed around and “put in his place.”

You make sure Obama’s formidable skill as populist orator is minimized. Rather than getting him on the road for regular, old school whistle stop tours of America, you keep him inside the Washington Beltway, where he meets and greets the latest championship team and deals only with DC media elites.

Knowing the president is fundamentally a nice fellow turned off by confrontation, you never allow him to publicly back down his political opponents the way Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton did.

The few times you put Obama in unusual settings, say throwing out the first pitch or aiming a skeet gun, you make sure it appears stilted and awkward so his critics can mock the president.

When public relations tactics as dynamic as Obama are called for, the president’s PR team has consistently served up pabulum. There is obviously no push back on Obama or his senior advisors, no creativity, no energy or excitement, no spontaneity, no chutzpah.

The old PR saw, “if you don’t tell your story, your competition will” was never more applicable.

Despite all Obama has achieved, his electric personality and his broad appeal, the PR people on Pennsylvania Avenue have allowed their enemies on the right to successfully miscast this president as an effete, out-of-touch failure.

THE GREATEST PRODUCT IN THE WORLD is destined for the clearance bins.

* * *

Kevin Foley owns KEF Media Associates, Inc., an Atlanta-based producer and distributor of electronic publicity. He can be reached at [email protected].