Unless you watch Fox, get ready to see a lot of President Obama in the coming days. At the White House today, Obama is taping interviews with ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Univision to be shown during each network’s Sunday-morning talk shows. On Monday night, Obama will be the first sitting president to appear on the Late Show With David Letterman. In other words, it’s going to be all Obama, all the time, for the next few days─except on Fox, which hasn’t exactly had the best of relationships with this White House. The subject of this media blitz: Obama’s push for health-care reform. It’s a Hail Mary strategy not unlike what we saw last spring when Obama hit all the networks to boost public support for his then-struggling stimulus plan. It worked then. Can Obama do it again?
It’s not unusual for a sitting president to take advantage of the bully pulpit to push his message, but Obama’s strategy is notable for a few reasons. One, for an administration that is incredibly media-savvy, the White House has struggled to stay on track with its message. There has been much hand-wringing over Obama’s selling of the plan over the past few months: Was he too involved? Was he not involved enough? Yet the biggest problem is how the White House has stepped on its own message─especially this week. Leaving aside Obama’s big speech on the financial system on Monday, the White House has tried to keep it all health care, all the time, since Congress returned from the August recess. On Thursday, the administration hoped to illustrate its talking point of growing public support for reform with pictures of Obama at the campaign-style health-care rally he attended in Maryland. But it was overshadowed by yesterday’s surprise announcement that the administration would drop plans for the Bush-era missile defense system in Central Europe. An administration official says the missile-defense announcement had been timed for next week, to coincide with the meeting of the United Nations' General Assembly and the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. But someone jumped the gun─drowning out coverage of what the White House hoped would be viewed as a crucial health-care event.
The White House has been pleased with an uptick in poll numbers since Obama’s speech to Congress last week. A CBS poll found that post-speech, Obama’s approval rating on health care had inched up to 52 percent, up from 47 percent the week before. But here’s a number that explains why you’ll see Obama blanket the airwaves this weekend: according to the same poll, only 22 percent of those surveyed believe the reforms laid out by Obama in the speech would help them personally. In other words, more than two thirds of the country still doesn’t see how the bill helps them─a devastating number for a bill that will need the full-on support of the country to ensure its success.
What can Obama say this weekend that he hasn’t said before? Let’s face it: the president likely won’t say anything dramatically different than he did in the speech he made to Congress. What the White House is looking for in these blanket TV appearances are more eyeballs. After all, Obama’s speech to Congress attracted iffy ratings─according to Nielsen, roughly 32 million people watched, compared with the 52 million who watched his State of the Union address. No doubt the Sunday shows will help a little bit, but the appearance to watch is Obama’s stint on Letterman, which the White House is hoping will attract an audience that hasn’t necessarily been tuned in to the ups and downs of the health-care debate. A big if is what the tenor of the appearance will be. Letterman can be a pretty tough interviewer. Just ask John McCain. Will he let Obama simply get out the talking points he needs to? Or will there be a little pushback? The one thing we do know: it's bound to be interesting TV.
