10 Little Mistakes

Don Surber lays out 10 little mistakes which have helped add up to Obama's poll troubles:

1. He failed to ingratiate himself into Washington society. Desiree Rogers, his social secretary, pissed off Sally Quinn. How dumb can you be to piss off the wife of Ben Bradlee? Not since Lemonade Lucy banned alcohol from the White House has a president so isolated himself from the DC crowd. They should call Rogers the anti-social secretary, for when you piss off DC society, Maureen Dowd bites back. Hard.

2. Taking six months to pick a dog. Long before Dick Cheney uttered the word dithers, the image was already planted in the minds of Americans. This is why dithers stuck so quickly.

3. He appointed Robert Gibbs as press secretary. Gibbs is a sneering, sarcastic man who seems hellbent on turning off a pro-Obama press. When you are tanking this quickly, maybe your public relations guy is incompetent.

4. Not recognizing early the seriousness of the tea party crowd. Obama has a blindspot called “white conservatives,” whom he really does not understand. He should work on that.

5. Rolling out health insurance reform in July in a slow, dull press conference whose highlight was the last question on Skip Gates. Race relations — not health insurance reform — became the topic of the day for weeks on end. Had Obama made a better presentation on health care, Skip Gates would have been forgotten.

6. Blowing off the townhall meetings. He miscalculated not just the intensity of the anger but the breadth.

7. He was smug early and blew off Republicans at their first meeting with a dismissive “I won… I will trump you on that.” He waved a red flag at the bull for no reason at all.

8. His war on Fox might have worked, except we already were at war in Afghanistan and in Iraq at the time. People quickly assessed which of these three wars meant the most to the president.

9. Not having a snowball fight when he came home to two feet of snow. Jack Kennedy would have had one. A spontaneous snowball battle would have humanized the president more than a backyard garden (a good idea) or a date night in New York City ever could.

10. Begging for an Olympics in Copenhagen — and then not getting one. When he returned to Copenhagen two months later, he also did not get a global warming agreement, which hurts him on cap-and-trade, which denies him the money for Obamacare.

Each on its own is not that serious, but added together they show a White House that doesn't seem to have its act together. The image that gets to the people is therefore damaged and down go the polls.