He [Obama] reacted to the election’s outcome in a way that suggested he’s still in his own world, still seeing a reality no one else is seeing. The problem wasn’t his policies, but that he didn’t explain them well.

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To hold the center you have to respect your own case enough to argue for it, and respect the people enough to explain it. ~Peggy Noonan

Yes, these quotes are from the same column. In the first part, Obama is a delusional, snakebit cretin because he thinks his mistake was failing to argue for his policies and explain them. In the second part, Republicans are in danger of losing the center if they don’t argue for their policies and “respect the people enough” to explain them. In other words, if the Republicans go on to lose the center it will be because they failed to persuade and explain, but Obama lost the center because of the innate horribleness of his agenda. I tend to doubt that voters in “the center” make such substantive policy judgments. If they did, they would not swing from from one party to another in just a few years and then back again. If they do, it must apply to both parties more or less equally.

For that matter, I’m not sure that poor messaging or lack of persuasion explains voter backlash against the majority party or incumbent. The “poor messaging” argument relies on an assumption that voters are judging a party based on the legislation it has produced. If messaging were better, the public would endorse the party’s agenda, but because the messaging was poor the public turned against it because of a misunderstanding. Suppose instead that the public, especially those swing voters, object to government pursuing the “wrong” priorities, and suppose that they also object to the appearance and reality of gross incompetence.

Voters seem to identify the “wrong” priorities according to whether they are “relevant” to them, and the more irrelevant the government’s activities seem to be the more frustrated these voters become at the sight of the government’s “neglect” of the voters’ top priorities. They are not frustrated because they know or care about the substance of the rest of the agenda. What they do know is that the rest of the agenda seems to have no bearing on what concerns them. If that’s right, Obama might have done anything, or nothing, and it would have seemed as if he was wasting time or not spending enough time on the “relevant” priorities. It’s not clear to me that voters in such a mood can be satisfied.

Perceived neglect is then counted as a form of incompetence: the government is supposedly ignoring the “real,” urgent problems while attending to problems that can wait. If the overwhelming issue during this cycle has been the economy, public frustration with the administration is best understood as discontent with what the public perceives as neglect of the country’s economic woes. That means that the content of Obama’s agenda and his messaging were both largely beside the point. That also suggests that there is no urgent demand for repeal of much of that agenda. On the contrary, starting with attempts to undo Obama’s agenda will be perceived as another exercise in neglect. Of course, if both parties never did anything that might frighten the horses swing voters, the concerns of the vast majority of the electorate would be neglected for the sake of placating a group of independents that doesn’t seem to have constant, discernible views on much of anything.