President Barack Obama, asked for a third time at Friday’s press conference if he’d still use force against President Bashar Assad’s regime even if Congress fails to back the move, finally told reporters they shouldn’t hold their breath for an answer.
“You’re not getting a direct response,” Obama said.
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It was a statement that summed up the messaging approach his administration has taken for nearly three weeks — ever since the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that prompted the president’s push for a strike on Syria — as it’s pushed a series of confusing, often contradictory lines of argument.
This past week alone, Obama found himself walking back a top aide’s assertion that he’d be disinclined to order an attack on Syria without congressional authorization, even as Secretary of State John Kerry told the Huffington Post that Obama “reserves the right in the presidency to respond as appropriate to protect the security of our nation.”
The president also distanced himself from his own 2012 statement that the use of chemical weapons represented “a red line” that would warrant American action — disclaiming ownership of a standard that he had originally described in starkly personal terms, saying the action “would change my calculus … would change my equation.”
And he said Friday he didn’t want to make a World War II analogy to argue for action in Syria — just before, in the very same sentence, comparing the current state of affairs in Syria to Nazi Germany’s bombing of London in 1940.
Meanwhile, he and his advisers are consistently defining potential American involvement in the Syrian conflict by what it’s not — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — even as they use rhetoric that often sounds airlifted from the run-up to those conflicts.
Even the president’s political arm seems confused. Organizing for Action made no public comments about Obama’s Syria push for five days after he announced he was asking Congress to weigh in, then declared its neutrality.
The next day, it directed its Twitter followers to watch U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s full-throated defense of intervention at the Center for American Progress.
None of this has served to build any momentum, among the public or the Congress, for Obama’s Syria plan. Even those who support action in Syria are blaming the White House for its failure to clearly articulate why Congress and the public should back the president’s policy.
“You have to be convinced that this is a worthwhile endeavor,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of Obama’s chief allies on Syria, told constituents at a town hall meeting Friday.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who also favors intervention, has tweaked Obama for his failure to galvanize congressional or public support. Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck played up the importance of Obama’s decision to address the nation on Syria Tuesday — while playing down the possible impact.
“The speaker has consistently said the president has an obligation to make his case for intervention directly to the American people,” Buck said Friday. “Members of Congress represent the views of their constituents, and only a president can convince the public that military action is required. We only hope this isn’t coming too late to make the difference.”
It isn’t that the president has been silent on the issue — it’s that the message from both Obama and his top advisers has been too fractured to be truly convincing. As the White House argument for action in Syria has evolved, aides and allies have offered competing explanations for it, and have yet to settle on a straightforward and compelling pitch for why an American strike in Syria is necessary.
Taken together, it all paints a picture of an administration at times as confused and conflicted as the Congress it aims to win over.
For instance, on the key question of whether Obama would act in Syria without congressional approval, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that he didn’t know what would happen if Congress said no. “Well, I can’t tell you what the president’s going to do because he hasn’t told me,” Kerry said.
Then Friday morning, NPR broadcast an interview with Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken in which he said Obama would be disinclined to order an attack without the blessing of Congress.
“The president of course has the authority to act, but it’s neither his desire nor his intention to use that authority absent Congress backing him,” Blinken said.
Four hours later, Obama was already walking that line back. Told exactly what Blinken had said, Obama characterized it as a misreading of his aide’s words.
“I don’t think that’s exactly what he said,” Obama said. “But I think I’ve answered the question.”
He had not.
The administration is pitching slightly different messages to the public and to Congress. Congress hears specifics, with in-depth conversations about what inaction would mean for Iran and Hezbollah — a pitch that doesn’t resonate as well with the public at large.
“Members understand that more than the broader public,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama National Security Council spokesman.
It isn’t just the hypotheticals that pose a headache for the administration — even the seemingly direct arguments Obama administration officials make have been a bit muddied.
For the past two weeks, Kerry has been comparing Assad to Saddam Hussein and Hitler, saying the trio are the only leaders to use chemical weapons on their own people in the last century. This week, he argued for aid to Syrians by pointing, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, to an incident shortly before U.S. involvement in World War II in which a boatload of Jewish refugees was turned away from the coast of Florida.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) upped the ante at the White House Tuesday, saying “never again” — a nod to the Holocaust — should the U.S. turn a blind eye to people being massacred. And Obama himself on Friday compared the situation in Syria to Nazi Germany’s bombing of London in 1940.
But the administration has also argued that the past actually isn’t a guide to why there’s a need for action in Syria, or to the potential pitfalls that could await. Top officials from the president on down have stressed almost daily that Syria is not Iraq. And the president himself said Friday he was “not drawing a analogy to World War II” other than to highlight the similarity between the domestic unpopularity of U.S. intervention early in that conflict and the anemic support for Syria intervention in current polls.
Past aside, the present environment has posed its own set of messaging challenges. The White House just can’t seem to consistently answer the question: How much of a threat, if any, does the situation in Syria pose to the United States?
The president and his top aides have certainly left the impression that lack of action in Syria could harm U.S. national security, arguing that if Assad’s chemical weapons use goes unpunished, it could lead to the further development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
“Failing to respond to this breach of this international norm would send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes, and terrorist organizations that they can develop and use weapons of mass destruction and not pay a consequence,” Obama said Friday. “And that’s not the world that we want to live in.”
But Obama said Friday that he had the luxury of seeking congressional authorization precisely because there was no immediate threat to the United States or its allies.
“I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed a imminent, direct threat to the United States,” Obama said.
If the danger were truly immediate, he said, he would have acted first and allowed lawmakers to ask questions later.
“In that situation, obviously, I don’t worry about Congress. We do what we have to do to keep the American people safe,” Obama said. “I could not say that it was immediately, directly going to have an impact on our allies. Again, in those situations I would act right away.”
Then, a day after saying the threat posed by the chemical weapons attack was neither “imminent” nor “direct,” Obama used his Saturday radio address to call it “a serious threat to our national security.”
None of this has rallied the public to the cause of attacking Syria. Nor are the administration’s efforts Monday and Tuesday, with Obama to appear on network television and to address the nation, likely to move people in his favor, said Clinton White House speechwriter Michael Waldman.
“The president’s speech will be one element of a public campaign here, but its important to remember presidents almost never can rally the public toward military action in advance, especially with a big speech,” Waldman said. “The public is almost always skittish about military action. Once it begins, then people rally around the military and rally around the flag.”
If the present landscape is murky, the future seems completely uncharted territory for the administration, which has been far from clear about how the action being discussed would help it attain concrete goals in Syria, about its vision for a likely endgame — or about its views of the forces who stand to gain ground if the United States takes aim at Assad.
For instance, when Obama met with congressional leaders at the White House Tuesday, he emphasized that a bombing campaign is part of “a broader strategy that will allow us to upgrade the capabilities of the opposition” fighting the Assad regime, something McCain had pressed him on the day before.
By Friday, the only mention Obama made to an opposition was the opposition he faces in Congress. There was little framing of his goals in intervening in Syria beyond punishing Assad. A White House website focused on the Syria conflict — which went live late in the week — didn’t do much to clarify, offering just one sentence on mission objectives, but no detail on any opposition forces or preferred political outcomes.
In the face of a messaging flop on this scale, even the Obamaland political snark hasn’t held up.
Minutes after Obama announced he’d seek congressional authorization on Syria, former adviser David Axelrod took to Twitter to dub Congress “the dog that caught the car.”
But by Friday he was all in earnest. Sure, the president has been pitching Syria action for weeks now. But he hasn’t made the sale. And so the priority for Obama, Axelrod told “Morning Joe,” had to be generating a message that resonates on the Hill.
“[Obama] needs to make the case and give them the arguments and the cover, frankly, for a yes vote,” he said.
Obama’s upcoming address to the nation is intended to help Congress relay a more unified administration narrative back in their districts. “When you go on TV and do a speech, that’s an address to the nation, it’s because Congress thinks they need help explaining it to their constituents,” Vietor said.
It may be the administration’s last, best hope to budge the needle — but it only works if the story the president relays Tuesday doesn’t require any more explanations of its own.
