Buscando el mensaje apropiado

En estos días en que el equipo del Presidente Obama debate en privado sobre el mensaje de la campaña de reelección, de si es mejor mirar al pasado ("blame Bush") o hablar más del futuro ("winning the future"), del riesgo de perder credibilidad si siguen abusando de la palabra "recuperación", o del miedo a sustituirla por un vocabulario poco potente como el "estamos progresando", Stanley Greenberg, encuestador y veterano asesor estratégico demócrata, da su opinión al respecto en el Time: cree que hasta ahora Obama se está equivocando tratando de convencer a los votantes de que ha salvado la economía de una situación peor.

Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who helped elect President Bill Clinton, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Israel’s Ehud Barak, says all of his clients have had the same, sometimes terrible, instinct: “They want to prove that their economic policies have worked.”

In times of plenty, that gut feeling is right. The nation cheered the gangbusters growth under Ronald Reagan in 1984, and the mid-1990s Clinton economic boom. But when the economy is sour, politicians who litigate the past risk sounding tone-deaf to the troubles of the present. This is why Greenberg is now speaking up. He fears President Obama may make a huge mistake by trying to convince voters he saved the economy from a much worse fate. “No one is going to give you much credit for what you have done for this recovery,” says Greenberg, who has been testing messages in focus groups and polls for Democrats to use in the coming election. “Saying the economy is starting to make progress is bad.”

President Obama’s own strategists agree — but only in part. New projections of tepid economic growth under 3%, and unemployment over 8.5%, have all but erased hopes that Obama can run for reelection as the guy who saved America from the worst economic crises since the Great Depression. It’s not a convincing message when four out of five Americans still rate the economy as “poor.” So Obama has shifted to a message of “winning the future,” touting an “innovation” agenda. “The question is who has the vision to move the country forward,” says Daniel Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.

But behind the scenes, there is a fierce debate in Democratic circles about just how much Obama should also be focused on explaining the recent past. As it now stands, the President’s stump speech features a backward-looking message at its core. Obama trumpets “more than 2 million jobs in the private sector” that have been created in the last 15 months. At a recent speech in Ohio he dismissed May’s bad jobs numbers as “bumps on the road to recovery.” In Greenberg’s estimation, this is an error on par with President Obama’s midterm election pitch, which described the nation as a car that had just gotten out of a ditch that Republicans drove into in the first place. The metaphor didn’t work, Greenberg explained in a recent memo, because “people thought they were still in the ditch.”