Every week for the past month, the United States’s all-news cable channels have been telling the same story about Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. The headline along the bottom of the screen says something like ”Obama on the ropes”; above, the talking heads agree that his campaign remains stuck in neutral.
Then, lo and behold, along comes some new piece of information reminding you that Obama is still very much in the hunt. A Newsweek survey from late September showed him just leading Hillary Clinton in Iowa — and it’s Iowa, not the national polls, that matters. His campaign is building an army of volunteers in the state, waiting to spring into action on caucus day. So he could still win Iowa and wake up as the front-runner next January 15.
But he’s got some work to do. Obama’s campaign so far has been disappointing in two ways. First, it provides, especially in contrast with Clinton’s, a reminder of an often hidden aspect of presidential politics: campaigns are multimillion-dollar corporations in which the chief executive has to provide the vision and direction and all the moving parts have to work together.
This means, to take an obvious example, that major speeches and policy proposals that are meant to represent fundamental parts of the candidate’s platform and identity have to be rolled out with great forethought. The candidate and the team need to get the right balance of politics and policy. And they need to be thinking ahead to how the media will react to the speech. They have to write it and present it in a way that increases the likelihood that the next day’s stories emphasise the parts the campaign wanted emphasised.
The Clinton campaign has done this brilliantly, as with for instance her proposal for universal healthcare coverage three weeks ago, which was more ambitious and more pragmatic than many observers had expected. The Obama team has struggled.
On August 1, Obama gave a major foreign policy address. Republicans and pundits often carp that Democrats have ”no ideas” on foreign policy, but Obama’s address was shockingly substantive — full of proposals about foreign aid and international strategies to combat terrorism and fight poverty, proposals that really did add up to a vision of the US’s relationship to the rest of the world that was genuinely liberal and appropriately tough-minded.
But this was also the speech in which he said he would approve a strike in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden: ”If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
I’d imagine the Obama team knew that this line would dominate the headlines, but they surely didn’t plan on how, because rather than getting praise for being a tough guy, he was mostly attacked for speaking naively about ”bombing” an ally. It went on for days. The campaign couldn’t control it and had to backtrack and clarify. As a result, probably no more than 22 people in the entire country have any idea of the content of the rest of the speech.
The Obama campaign keeps making mistakes like that, mistakes a better-run organisation would have ironed out in the eight months he’s been an active candidate. There’s been no sign of progress on this front. His speech on tax policy last month was overshadowed by Clinton’s health plans and received the mixed reviews it deserved.
The second way in which Obama has been a disappointment is that he just hasn’t been able to present himself as quite as different a political figure as his admirers had hoped he’d be. In the beginning he seemed like someone who had a deep contact with the ideals that animated the US’s founding ideals of shared civic responsibility that he captured well in his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. The sentences in that speech were not mere anodyne clichés about unity; they were more profound than that and they clearly sprang from somewhere deep within him.
”There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes.” That is what so many people found inspiring about him.
He hasn’t been able to be that person. Maybe a political campaign is the last context in the world in which someone can be that person. Or maybe this problem is related to the first and the corporation’s many moving parts somehow got off track and the campaign sort of forgot its raison d’etre.
The experts say he has to attack Clinton more directly over her initial backing of the Iraq war and her polarising reputation. Maybe. But I say he needs to do a little of the precise opposite, too. Right now he’s like an American football team that, with about five minutes left in the third quarter, has been thrown completely off its game plan. His game plan is not to go nose-to-nose with the Clinton machine. His game plan is to inspire — not to tell us he’s different but to show us through his actions how he’s different. Most people who found the Obama who gave that 2004 address so promising still remember what the appeal was in the first place. But people are forgetting. — Â