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Watching a president crash and burn

I've been saying it for a while now, Obama is in deep deep trouble from a PR perspective. His brand of Hope and Change is imploding at an exponential rate. The right hates him, the independents think he's ineffective and the left feels utterly let down.

Until now though this has only been a theory of mine and it was yet to be seen whether he could protect his brand regardless of his performance (and there are strategies by which he could have done so).

But the dam is finally breaking. An onslaught of negative Obama sentiment is now starting to bubble up, and it's not even coming from the right (it's actually come from Democratic-friendly and/or unbiased sources).

Gallup Poll recently released findings that show that 71 per cent of Americans disapprove of the job he's doing as it relates to the economy.



You've got African-American constituents now apparently telling their Africa-American congress people to go after Obama.




It's not surprising if you believe the claim (and it sounds reasonable) that black people were hit far harder in this recession than whites, as stated in the MSNBC article Blacks' economic gains wiped out in downturn. 

Economists say the Great Recession lasted from 2007 to 2009. In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the EPI.


Since the end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.

Even Jon Stewart is ripping in to the president, accusing him of campaigning (despite the president saying he is not campaigning) and making fun of his "Yes We Can' slogan and saying now it's "I Though We Could but it turns out the other guys are A&&holes!"


(by the way, this is getting very annoying, this clip was censored of YouTube AND dailymotion. Enough with this absurd level of censoring television clips already).


So there you have it, Obama's brand is spinning out of control and it's not Fox news or Republicans that are stripping it of it's shine, it's people on the left.

While we aren't at the mockery levels that we experienced under Bush yet, I think Obama is actually doing worse than Bush for this point in his presidency in terms of maintaining his brand. Two years in to Bush I think a lot of people still liked the guy. He only started to really tank at around the four-to-five-year mark. 

Yes, Obama's has had a tough situation to deal with, but when it comes to brand, that doesn't have to be a negative. The American people understood that he was dealing with a giant clusterf*ck of a mess. He could have used their sympathy at the outset to protect his brand equity over the long run.

Yet, it's clear that he's burned through whatever good will people had for him (that's with consideration for how tough the situation he has is) and they now beginning to see him as a nice guy who meant well, but who doesn't know what the heck he is doing. 

If the opposition really wanted to start stripping his brand equity away, they should create a parody campaign using the Holiday Inn Express commercials (which by the way are impossible to find on the internet anymore with all this copyright restrictions - argh lawyers ruin everyones fun).


Holiday Inn Express_Doctor from Mike Fetrow on Vimeo.

It's not hard to imagine a series of ads wherein an Obama look-a-like delivers a grand speech of Hope and Change, wins the presidency, and then in a discussion with a confident is asked "But Barack, are you really ready to be president?" and Barack answers "Of course, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

I'm not a fan of negative campaigning, but that would be a hilarious way of making the point that he wasn't ready to be president.

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