When Obama was campaigning he was a brilliant and inspiring speaker, but when he got to the White House, something changed, almost instantly. Yes I was still supporting Obama (still do), but somehow he seemed different, less bold, not the same inspiring man he was on the campaign.

Well I think I know what caused the change. Rahm. Rahm was not part of the campaign, he wasn't there when Obama was on top of his game. The time when Rahm started giving Obama advice is exactly the time when Obama's star began to fall.

Today I discovered another piece of the puzzle. According to an article in the Chronicle review, Rahm spent an entire chapter of a book that he co-wrote attacking Lakoff.

This is very bad.

George Lakoff is the one guy who tells Democrats how to stop making one of the biggest mistakes they made for years. Lakoff taught Democrats how to not be boring. He taught them how to speak clearly and persuasively. And to shed the mistakes of horrid speakers like John Kerry.

And the Obama campaign used to listen to Lakoff. I know this for a fact because when I meet an Obama campaign staffer in 2008 I gave him Lakoff's book, and the staffer told me the campaign already had distributed Lakoff's materials.

So lets just summarize what we know so far:

Leaders like Howard Dean told the Democratic party to study Lakoff, we did, then we started winning. Whether Lakoff is one of the reasons we won or not is hard to prove, but those are the facts.

Then Obama's people studied Lakoff, again they started winning.

Then Obama won, and took office with one of the highest approval ratings ever.

Then, Obama hired Rahm Emmanuel, one of Lakoffs biggest critics, as chief of staff. And as soon as Rahm, the man who doesn't believe in framing started to give advice, Obama's approval started to drop and has so far not recovered.

Again this is only a correlation of data, I'll have to let you judge if it is good or bad to have a man who vehemently rejects George Lakoff in the White House.

But I think Rahm is the problem. I think Rahm has too much ego to admit that he didn't understand framing. I think rather than admit he had made some mistakes, and learn from Lakoff, Rahm decided he already knew everything he needed to know, and attacked Lakoff.

And I Rahm is the biggest thing holding Obama back from being the great leader he was on the campaign.

Food for thought. Here's the original article from the August 15th Chronicle review which made me think of this:

[Edited for copyright infringement - MB]