Charlie Cook is America's most respected pollster by general agreementr Insider Interviews site from : Cook: Health Care Is Obama's Iraq By Theresa Poulson If Obama has a communications problem as you suggest, then what should he do to reach out to the American people? Should he try to appear more populist? Cook: I sort of reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it's just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush's decision to go into Iraq. While Bush went, "We're going to go after Afghanistan as a reaction to 9/11," and then just pretty soon got distracted and obsessed with going into Iraq with varying rationalizations that sort of evolved over time.
This was a case where I think the White House people could see, look at the president, the White House and congressional Democrats as sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn't big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn't want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care. And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn't worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn't a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet. And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we've seen in modern political history. NJ: What do Democrats have to do to correct this? Cook: I've spent the last couple of days talking to some of the brightest Democrats in the party that are not in the White House. And it's very hard to come up with a scenario where Democrats don't lose the House. It's very hard. Are the seats there right this second? No. But we're on a trajectory on the House turning over.... There are nine months, certainly things could happen, but the odds of unemployment being below 9 percent are minimal by the time of this election. We're probably going to have a year of basically, more or less, 10 percent unemployment, which hasn't happened since the Great Depression.
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