David Corn: “A former Clinton White House aide who has helped the Obama crew points out that the president’s big problem has been message development.”

No, no, no, a thousand times NO. The problem is not the sales pitch. The problem is the product stinks, and no amount of happy talk is going to hide that.

When your effort to stimulate the economy is heavily weighted towards massive amounts of spending through federal agencies, you put yourself at the mercy of the federal bureaucracy’s ability to spend the money quickly and wisely. When you give large amounts of federal dollars to state governments, of course they’re going to use it to plug holes in their budget and avoid reckoning their past overspending. And none of this is a good way to create jobs, much less private sector jobs, as promised. And when unemployment rises well beyond your worst-case scenario without the stimulus passing, people begin to think you don’t really grasp what’s going on in the economy.

When you overpromise that everything on your spending list is “shovel-ready”, and then you later say that actually large numbers of the projects aren’t actually ready, people conclude they’ve been swindled.

When you promise that you’re building a web site to help track the spending, and then that web site is full of bad data and nonexistent congressional districts, people think the whole thing is a con. When you constantly use this meaningless, unverfiable “jobs saved or created” statistic, people suspect you’re using imaginary metrics because the real ones look so bad for you.

When you explicitly promise that all of the health care negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and then they’re all done behind closed doors in the Senate Majority Leader’s office, people begin to think you don’t really care about you campaign promises.

When you promise not to raise any taxes on anyone making more than $250,000, and then turn around and immediately raise tobacco taxes, people conclude your word is worthless. Or we could look at the promises to renegotiate NAFTA, or that the stimulus would get Caterpillar rehiring, or going through the entire budget line by line, or pledging to eliminate earmarks, or lobbyists not working in the White House, or posting bills online for five days before signing them, or recognize the Armenian Genocide, or any one of many, many others..

This past year has also seen a lot of controversial and unpopular policies and ideas that this president didn’t campaign on, because campaigning on them would have meant he would have gotten shellacked.

Ideas like giving Khalid Sheik Mohammad a civilian trial in New York City. Ideas like lowering the tax deduction for charitable contributions. Ensuring that bonuses for AIG employees are federally protected. An unlimited bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Having the federal government take over GM. Bowing to foreign monarchs. Unannounced low-altitude flybys of lower Manhattan for a photo op. Ideas like loudly announcing that you’ll close Guantanamo Bay within one year, and then later announcing that you won’t make the deadline because it turns out there aren’t good alternatives.

Obama didn’t campaign on any of this, and if he had, he probably would have lost by a landslide.

Message? Message? The problem is not the message. The problem is the decisions of the messenger.