Obama at the Helm: "His campaign should reassure voters that he can run the government."

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Obama at the Helm
By Peter Beinart
Tuesday, April 8, 2008; Page A19

....Luckily, Obama doesn't have to rely on his legislative résumé to prove he's capable of running the government. He can point to something more germane: the way he's run his campaign. Of the three candidates still in the 2008 race, Obama has run the best campaign by far. McCain's was a top-heavy, slow-moving, money-hemorrhaging Hindenburg that eventually exploded, leaving the Arizona senator to resurrect his bankrupt candidacy through sheer force of will. Clinton's campaign has been marked by vicious infighting and organizational weakness, as manifested by her terrible performance in caucus states.

Obama's, by contrast, has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer. From the beginning, the Obama campaign has run circles around its foes on the Internet, using MySpace, Facebook and other Web tools to develop a virtual army of more than 1 million donors. The result has been fundraising numbers that have left opponents slack-jawed (last month Obama raised $40 million, compared with Clinton's $20 million).

But the Web is the political equivalent of gunpowder: It can mow down your opponents, but it can also blow up in your face. In 2004, Howard Dean's campaign also raised vast sums online, but it spent the money just as fast. By embracing the anarchic ethos of the liberal blogosphere, Dean generated enormous excitement, but he couldn't harness it. Within his decentralized, bottom-up campaign, a thousand flowers bloomed, but not at the right time and in the right place. "You cannot manage an insurgency," said Dean's Web guru, Joe Trippi. "You just have to ride it."

The Obama campaign has proved that adage wrong. It has married Web energy with professional control. It has used the Web masterfully but, unlike Dean in 2004, sees it as a tool, not a philosophy of life.

At the top, in fact, the campaign is quite hierarchical. There's no question who's in charge: David Axelrod, a grizzled Chicago street-fighter whom Obama has known since he was 30....

It is this remarkable hybrid campaign, far more than Obama's thin legislative résumé, that should reassure voters that he can run the government. As president, he'll need to keep his supporters mobilized: It will take a grass-roots movement, breathing down Congress's neck, to pass universal health care. But in dealing with those very supporters, he'll also have to be ruthless so as not to get caught up in the kind of side skirmishes, such as gays in the military, that weakened Bill Clinton early on. Obama's experience whipping up support on MySpace while simultaneously tamping it down is exactly the kind he'll need in the Oval Office.

The danger is that Obama will fall prey to the malady that ruined Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter: self-righteousness. Elections are winner-take-all, but governing isn't....

(Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a monthly column for The Post.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/07/AR2008040702196.html?nav%3Dhcmodule&sub=AR

[babylonsister]

1. Rec'd! Very nice, and so true! nt

[shaniqua6392]

2. Very nice article!!

Thanks for sharing.

[Larkspur]

3. Obama is not god. He can't tap down the grassroots anymore than Nancy Pelosi

I'm not an Obama-bot, and don't take orders from Obama. What Obama will find out is that the grassroots will be pushing him to pass progressive policies. The grassroots is using him more so than he is using us. Course DLC Beinart couldn't think of that because he loves authoritarianism.

[blm]

4. Actually Obama is using BOTH the national network Kerry put in place AND Dean's residual

activist networks.

Dean can't actively tap the DNC's national network yet for Obama, but that network, too, is a thousand times stronger than it was under McAuliffe and previous chairs.

I think it took getting all the Clinton loyalists out of the others and working together for Hillary2008 to get rid of the actual weak links Dem party was stuck with for so long in recent elections.

The Clintonites WERE the weak links - of course, they had their own agenda to protect and Dems winning in 2000, 2002 and 2004 was NOT part of that agenda.

[theoldman]

5. The most important thing that Obama can do as president is

choose the right cabinet. He has chosen the right staff during his campaign but it is more important to choose the right staff as president. Bill Clinton did an excellent job on this but Bush screwed up royally.

[blm]

6. After 9-11, I would have to disagree with that conclusion.

Bill made too many concessions to BushInc's establishment powerstructure and allowed them to control CIA and FBI picks.

[4_TN_TITANS]

7. Excellent article - k/r..

Great correlation - if he can out run two old-timers like Clinton & McCain, I think we've found our guy.