It’s a necessary evil tucked into the president’s job description: the chief executive is supposed to also be a good salesman. Presidents have a unique megaphone and bully pulpit, which they have to use effectively if they plan on getting what they want.
With that in mind, McClatchy’s Steven Thomma makes a good observation: Bush is really bad at this.
President Bush now has what he asked for — time to sell the people and the Congress on the Iraq war.
But an extra 60 days from Congress, the addition of the talented Ed Gillespie to run the White House communications strategy, and a newly ramped-up sales pitch cannot change the underlying fact: George Bush is a poor salesman.
He’s never really sold the country or Congress something it didn’t already want. And when he’s tried to sell something the people or the politicians didn’t want, he’s fallen flat.
That’s largely true. In fact, I’d argue that Thomma is pulling his punches when it comes to Bush’s sales ineptitude — as a rule, when the president starts pushing a policy, it not only fails, but also gets less popular. This president doesn’t just struggle to convince skeptics, he manages to make his product sound less appealing, even to those who might be inclined to agree with him.
First-term examples are less common, but the second term provides two gems: immigration and privatization of Social Security.
Thomma explained:
Despite his long, hard push for a comprehensive overhaul of border security while providing a path to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants already here, he succeeded only in insulting his own political base. In a May interview with McClatchy Newspapers, for example, he questioned the patriotism of conservatives criticizing a proposal he charged they hadn’t even read.
They were outraged. The proposal died.
When Bush started touting his policy publicly, it was unpopular. The more he pushed, the less support he found.
Social Security privatization was even worse, by virtue of the fact that the White House invested more political capital in the endeavor. But the Salesman in Chief managed to turn people off his proposal by trying to pitch its virtues.
In the Clinton White House, presidential aides kept a maxim in mind: when in doubt, bring out the Boss out there and let him win people over. In this White House, it’s been nearly seven years, but aides haven’t quite realized that Bush and his agenda would generally be better off if he stayed home and kept quiet. The poor guy just isn’t persuasive.
But what about some of the policies Bush was able to sell? Thomma tackled this one, too.
Bush has had successes, but they probably falsely inflated his sense of his sales skills. In reality, they were relatively easy sales.
He courted Ted Kennedy and won congressional approval of the No Child Left Behind Act. But getting Washington to increase the federal role in education — or anything — is hardly tough.
He won tax cuts. But seriously, who couldn’t sell tax cuts, especially back when the government had a surplus of tax revenues.
He did convince both the country and the Congress to approve an invasion of Iraq. But that was at a time in 2003 when the country was still in a mood for war in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. And the pitch was based on the false claim that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States with weapons of mass destruction.
Thomma doesn’t go this far, but I think there’s an explanation for the president’s sales troubles: he’s far better at undermining something (or someone) than generating affirmative support. In other words, Bush excels when he’s against something, but trips when he’s for it.
It’s why he was a capable presidential candidate — he went out and gave speeches talking about how awful his opponent is. He didn’t have to sell himself; he just had to tear down the other guy.
Of course, that managed to get Bush to where he is today, but as we’ve seen many times, it’s not enough to actually govern.