social security in 1965, liberals hated it at st time because it it hardly covered any seniors. so this is always going to be a problem with the base, but it s not all the base s fault. the administration has not done a good enough job of framing its message in memorable terms. even just yesterday, when you went out after he won on financial regulation, what s the takeaway? what s the sound bite if you will that comes out of that that people can sink their teeth into? he s only said one memorable thing politically this whole year, which is, you know, they drove they, the republicans, drove us into a ditch. don t give them back the keys. that s a good line. if he could keep saying that sort of thing and focus it as a choice. you have to dramatize the choice. jonathan and i were talking the other day. it s barton, boehner and blunt. these are people who go to wall street to sell the party to wall
the president is not focused on that. then we concentrate on the environmental damage. then factor in how much money it s going to cost to rebuild the administration that still hasn t been rebuilt after katrina. so the problems don t get better, unfortunately. a lot of aides will tell you before april 20th, when the deepwater horizon exploded. march 11th or 12th they signed health care. they had the good jobs report coming in. the end of the month jobs report from february to march. they really thought they were turning a corner. it stopped everything dead, didn t it? id dit. it focused on the limits of what government can do. there were probably some deficiencies. overall this was a hard thing. you had republicans like haley barbour not criticizing the president, saying he had done a good job. there s political posturizing
is another catastrophe as big as this one? yes or no? you know, i think that s a real leap. that s a leap? yeah, huge leap. this has only worked for 24 hours. we don t know how much longer it s going to work. beyond that, the biggest thing is, chuck, is they don t know how to clean up the oil once it spills. we have this area dealing with this for 88 days. and it is threatening to destroy a way of life, wetlands, marine life. the damage is extraordinary. even if the cap works to some degree, i can t imagine people will walk away from this and say, okay, problem solved. when the only way to clean up the oil is with a shovel and carefully scraping it off the sand, we re using tiny drum skimmers in marshes or flushing out marshes.
going on on each side. e everything else is seen through the prism. so you deal with an intractable problem like this that points out the limit of what government can do, it points out frustrations on other areas. it just did another thing which is you hate to call it a distraction, but they were trying to make the turn on the economy. they ve been trying to make the turn on some other things. they would talk about it, but we were covering the oil spill. the president wants a singular focus on jobs. you can t do that when he s surging up forces in afghanistan, dealing with health care reform, financial regulation. too many other things is going on. having a singular focus is not something he s been able to do. he can t swoop in and effect in a way that makes him look good. there s no looking good here. there just isn t. the problem is too big.