It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Today was President Obama's first official Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
The guy who was going to reform health care was forced to withdraw over a past tax bill. The lady who was going to root out waste in the government quit for pretty much the same reason. His Republican Commerce Secretary will be replaced by another Republican.
Democrats have seen this movie before. This is what happened to Clinton even before he took office. And if the President thinks he defanged or disarmed Republicans by his display of "post-partisanship," he's got another thing coming.
Some Ds are so dispirited by today's events they are counting the days to replacing him. For the first time in months Republicans are over the moon.
They're rolling him.
The difference between Democrats and Republicans over the last generation was that Democrats were mainly interested in governing, Republicans in campaigning. In the age of TV the two became the same thing, and the TV came to reflect this as reality.
Thus, in time, appearances trumped reality. If the President came out in a flight suit under a sign reading Mission Accomplished the mission was accomplished. Reality would take years to catch up, by which time the media perpetrators of the fraud were on to something else, and feeling invulnerable. The time is long past for the TV media to own their responsibility for this.
Republicans and their fellow travelers, the TV talking heads, will be spinning today as a triumph of their will. Never mind the President's 68% approval ratings. Never mind that voters don't like the Republicans. In the mind of their spinners, they're united and Democrats not so much. So they figure they're winning.
Now is the time when Obama needs friends, not enemies. And certainly not frenemies like Howie Klein.
What is the President to do?
The time has come to go around the "media filter" and reconnect with your base. Talk to some bloggers.
Schedule a conference call with people like Markos Moulitsas (right), Jane Hamsher, Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington. Lay down what you're going to do for them, and make it exclusive, so that reporters and others have to go to these blogs in order to get the story.
Throw them some red meat. Leak some stories about the cupidity of David Gregory at NBC, or Wolf Blitzer at CNN. Get them out online, go around the TV.
Use the Whitehouse Web site to Webcast Robert Gibbs' press briefings, and take some on-air questions from viewers. Have an assistant filter what comes in so you have a few that are coherent and make sense. Credit the questioners by name and use the answers to counter-attack against your critics.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
What is most important at this time is that you acknowledge that we have not just undergone a change in political parties or a change in governing policy, but a basic change in the media landscape. Just as TV replaced radio after Nixon, just as radio replaced newspapers after FDR, just as newspapers replaced books under McKinley, you get your side out by taking advantage of the new medium you have already learned to dominate.
There's another important component to this new media strategy, and that is detail. You need to get the details of your proposals out online, and make certain they are read with online memos which include links deep into each proposal. Force reporters to go online to learn the truth, where you can place that truth in the context you need — things are complicated — and you will turn around the media.
Then quickly find some nominees with qualifications equal to those which have gone down, insist that the Senate take up Hilda Solis' nomination, get the stimulus passed and we will truly have entered a new era.
