The announcement today that Robert Gibbs will be replaced as White House spokesman is evidence that President Obama has realized – finally – that he has to upgrade his message machine. The first step in changing the message is changing the messenger. But Obama himself will have to put more effort into communicating what he is doing and why he is doing it. In his post-election press conference, he acknowledged that that task had been neglected in his first two years and that he had paid a price for it. Hence, the famous “shellacking.”
One of the great mysteries of the first half of the Obama term is how one of the best communicators in politics failed to get his message across. We’ll see if that changes now.