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I woke up this morning, horrified at the thought that John McCain just might win this election and I began thinking about what Obama must do to win this election.
Here are my somewhat rambling and probably too long thoughts. If you get through this all, I’d be grateful for your patience. And I'd appreciate any thoughtful comments. I hope I don't get dismissed as a "concerned troll." That's so insulting and juvenile. But I'm sure there will be those who do dismiss these thoughts as the still lingering resentments of a once avid Clintonite. THey are not that. They are just my morning thoughts about how we democrats can win instead of lose this time, given where we have gotten to.
Let’s begin with setting aside some illusions and facing reality. During the primaries, especially early on in the game, Obama, his staff and many of his supporters seemed to believe that he could win against anybody the Republicans were likely to put up in a cakewalk. That belief seemed to be predicated on the fact that independents and moderate republicans would be as susceptible to his charms as the campus crowd, upper crust liberals and African Americans proved to be. But that illusion gradually began to dissolve with the unfortunate appearance of the good Reverend Wright, Obama’s unfortunate comments about bitter, xenophobic, gun-toting small town folks – which the Clinton campaign deftly exploited to drive a further wedge between Obama and the lunch bucket wing of the democratic party. Of course, Clinton was winning that constituency and white women all along. But you will recall throughout the primary season a recurring question was whether Obama could poach some significant part of Clinton’s coalition (or Clinton poach some significant part of his) to break away once and for all. In Wisconsin, it looked like he did that and so was heading for a decisive and final victory in short order. We all know what happened to give the Clinton campaign renewed vigor after that.
Now I still think that most hard core democratic constituencies -- including older suburban women -- will almost certainly come home in November and vote for Obama. But I think softer democratic constituencies are much more up for grabs than one might have hoped. Moreover, I think soft republican constituencies may well be out of reach. And bona fide independents – who are swayed by who knows what in the end, election after election – are going to be harder to reach than Obama and his folks imagined.
What this means, in my estimation, is that democrats are perilously close to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We have, I think, turned an election that we thought should be ours in a cakewalk into a pitched battle that will require some pretty tough-minded and deft campaigning and advertising to win. But I still think Obama can pull it off. Here’s how.
First, he has to run a “both and” campaign. He has to refocus on his somewhat muted message of “change” . The democratic convention has to feature a whole bunch of new faces; it has to somehow showcase a fresh, exciting policy agenda. I still think that Americans at large are, by and large, with us on most issues. But that and several billion dollars of campaign spending over the last 40 years has won us the White House exactly three times (well four, really, but the keys to the building were given to the wrong guy by the Supreme Court after our most recent victory.) We keep managing to lose elections even when the policy is on our side. We’re perfectly capable of doing it again. But we have to fight the good fight. We have to press our policy advantage – especially our advantage on taxation, healthcare, stewardship of the environment, the energy future. And on and on.
Part of what has to happen to do this is that Obama has to become more like Clinton. The Clinton campaign used to think of her – I think rightly – as the candidate of “people with needs” while Obama was the candidate of people with – I’m not sure how best to put this but let’s call it “aspirations.” People voted for Obama out of a hunger for change and out the belief or at least hope that a new voice, a new face in politics, would enable us to do things in a different way, a more inspiring, less divisive way.
I think he’s got to find a way to appeal both to people with needs and to people with aspirations. To appeal to people with needs, he’s got to do two things. He’s got to make it clearer, as Bill Clinton would put it, that he “feels their pain” and that he has concrete policy prescriptions that directly address that pain. He can’t do that with lofty speeches about change alone. He has to do more of what Clinton was good at. You came away from a Clinton rally, especially later Clinton rallies, thinking that she understood exactly what our problems are, exactly what kinds of policies would address those problems, and, moreover, that she had the combination of shrewdness, toughness, and tenacity that would give her a fighting chance of getting those policies enacted over the naysaying voices of entrenched guardians of the status quo.
Obama needs to adopt more of that style. I’m not suggesting he become Clinton on the stump. Because he has his own unique magic. He speaks to our aspirations in a way that Clinton did not really. She was too willing to get down and dirty. She was old style, brass knuckle politics to the core. And she gave off no vibes that we could ever expect politics to be different in our lifetimes. (Of course I was for her and not for Obama partly because I believe her to be right.)
What we need is a campaign that combines a powerful appeal to people with needs with an equally powerful appeal to people with aspirations. We don’t need one and not the other. We need both. And we need them urgently.
But here’s the tricky thing. I think many people are starting to tune out Obama, to suffer from a little Obama fatigue. The Convention is his last chance before the debates to shift the dynamic. And he better get it right. He better put on a show that’s more than a show about his biography and personal narrative. And it had better speak to more than what I’m calling the aspirational voter. It certainly must speak to and reenergize that aspirational voter -- I'm expecting one helluva speech on that score. But it also has to speak to people with need, whose needs are too urgent for them to worry about a "new" politics. He's a brilliant man and I'm sure he can do it.
Finally, and this is the really tricky part, we have to set aside a little bit the new politics meme. We’re in a dogfight. In a dogfight you have to shoot the other guy down. It’s time to take the sheen off John McCain. That would be hard for any democrat to do. McCain has got an impressive biography in his own right -- the kind that many, many Americans will think a president should have. It will be even harder for Obama in particular to do. Because doing so is going to take a massive dose of old politics. Consequently, doing so will sully a bit the Obama new politics brand. You never want to mess up your brand if you don’t have to. But I’m afraid Obama has to.
Here’s one thing that I said a lot during the primaries that some people disagreed with and maybe took the wrong way. Perhaps because I could never find a completely artful way of making the point. Obama is really sort of a far less personality challenged and African American version of Gary Hart or Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown (circa ’76) or Bill Bradley. Those guys never really made inroads into Clinton style voters with needs. They appealed to the young and to upper crust liberals. But they couldn’t win partly because their appeal to that group wasn’t quite intense enough to sustain them when the going got tough, but also because they made almost no inroads into the voters driven more by need than by aspiration. Obama by contrast provoked an intensity that those guys never matched but also made inroads into a huge constituency that is usually driven more by need than by aspiration. That’s because he spoke powerfully to the aspirations of African Americans (from all walks of life) just by being who and what he is. I’m not criticizing this as a bad thing. It’s a very good thing. But it did help mask his weakness on the score of connecting viscerally to more downscale voters' sense of felt need. I reiterate this point now just to stress again that Obama really has to work to make that visceral connection. If he doesn’t, we will lose many weak democrats, because many of these weak democrats swing back and forth on the basis of their gut. Even though our policies are better for them, they don’t always have the sense that our candidates are better for them. I think Obama’s a bit in danger of becoming one of those guys who is right on all things substantive (as far as these voters go) but who gets tuned out because, well, he isn’t the right guy.
The convention is his last best chance to (a) convince more of our potential folks that he has the right policies; (b) is the right person; and (c) that McCain is not a legitimate alternative. He's got to do all three of those things.
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