archived: 27 Apr - 3 May, 2008         Back                 Next

UPDATED:  APR 29, 2008 

“A GAME PLAN FOR OBAMA” 

Four weeks ago, in my column “TPJ 185: Democratic Alchemy, Revisited,” I considered the substantive issues that in my view (and in the view of many others) should be at the center of the Democratic Party platform.  I summarized them in what I call “The Ten Commitments.”  (I first referenced “The Ten Commitments” in a column that ran in November 2005, TPJ 86.)  “Substantive issues” are about “what to do, what we will do, when we win the election and take power.”   

In this column I am considering elements of an Obama Campaign Plan that can be considered “process” elements, that is “how should we go about campaigning,” “how do we present,”  “how do we respond,” “how do we best organize our material and our presentations.”  Some elements of my list have substantive components, but they primarily deal with process as here defined.  Some of the recommendations/components are already being followed by the Obama Campaign, at least in part.  But this is a package that I am presenting here.   

Please note that it is a single package designed to win both the Democratic nomination and the general election.  This single-track approach, with which I strongly agree, is how the Obama people currently at least seem to be running their campaign.  The Clintons are running against Obama first, McCain, if at all, second.  Obama is running against McCain first, Clinton by occasional reference second (at least until the final days of the Pennsylvania campaign, which was concluded after this column was written but before you will have seen it). 

1.          Take control of the agenda.  This is the single most important process element to consider.  He who controls the agenda wins the election.  The Republicans have known this very well since the days of Nixon, but it was Reagan/Bush I’s Lee “Willie Horton” Atwater and Bush II’s Karl “Let’s Get the Gays” Rove that brought the strategy to its highest level of “perfection.”  If the agenda for the Democrats is the economy, the War on Iraq, Bush, and health care, the Democrats win.  If the agenda is race, immigration, “patriotism” (as they define it), “liberals” and how bad they are, “honoring our troops,” and “victory,” the Republicans win.

 

2.         Never defend; always ----.  Lee Atwater’s’ other major “contribution” to modern political strategy was the tactic: “always attack, never defend.”  Democrats are always more nuanced than Republicans.  They should be, because Democrats recognize how complex both politics and governing really are.  (Reagan always tried to tell the American people how simple, how black and white, everything was.  Indeed, it was said of his simplistic approach to reality: “simplicity is complexity misunderstood.”)  And so the first part of this rule of process is: “(Almost always) Never Defend.”  The second part is tri-partite.  I. “Sometimes attack” (as in the case of military policy where I have on these pages more than once counseled  “attack on defense” [see for example, my TPJ column 125 of that title] which I am pleased to say Sen. Obama is doing).  2.  “Sometimes explain,” but never defensively, illustrated by Sen. Obama’s treatment of the question “why did you stay in that congregation?” (when in 30,000-plus minutes of sermons there were perhaps 100 minutes of rhetoric that some describe as “anti-American,” as they would describe some of Dr. Martin Luther King’s late-in-his-life rhetoric).  3.  “Use certain critical moments in responding to go beyond the immediate subject.” This of course Sen. Obama did with his magnificent speech on race.  But never, ever simply defend.

 

3.         The role of government (a “crossover” issue, of both process and substance). Republicans just love the “big government” mallet.  (One of the reasons why some folks labeled Bill Clinton as a “Republican” President was because of his famous statement in a State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.”)  Well, the Republicans don’t really hate big government.  When it comes to such matters as freedom of belief as to when life begins, freedom of practice in such matters as in-born sexual identity, freedom of choice in the matter of the use of potentially addictive drugs, and the ability to, when the President says they need to, over-ride any and all provisions of the Constitution that they don’t like, they are totally married to the concept of big government.  Personified by  Grover “Drown it in the bathtub” Norquist, they just don’t like big government when it comes to national domestic spending and regulation of the “free market” economy so that it has something of a chance of working for the benefit of folks other than those who hold and control capital.  It is, however, for us the Preamble to the Constitution that defines the role of the Federal government: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more per­fect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the com­mon defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Consti­tution for the United States of America.”  Sen. Obama could make great use of it in carrying out task 1, taking control of the agenda.
 

       4.        “The problem is Washington; government doesn’t work.”  No, the problem   is not      “Washington,” and the problem is not that “government doesn’t work.”  The problem is that under Republicans government is made not to work (except to do those things that Republicans like to do.  For example, under the Bush administration the Federal government has been very effective in funneling Federal funds to right-wing Christian religious organizations and to Cheney's buddies in Halliburton and related companies.)  People like Gingrich and Bill Kristol love to blame all of our current problems on “big government” and “bad government,” especially “since the 1960s.”  They never point out that in the 40 years since Nixon was elected President, Republicans have controlled the White House for 28 of those years (70% of the time).  For the other 12 years, there was the modern weakest Democratic President ever (Jimmy Carter) and a Democrat who did not line up with his potential Congressional allies but spent his time, when he wasn’t fending off self-induced impeachment and other scandals and non-scandals to which he did not know how to respond, “triangulating” those allies.  Of course Bush II had a totally compliant Congress for his first six years in office and for the last one-plus a Democratic Congress which has not had much of a clue about how to use their power.  So it ain’t’ “government” or “Washington” that’s the problem.  It is “Republican-run government” and “Republican-controlled Washington” that is.
 

5.               Likewise it is not unmodified “partisanship” that has taken over American politics,     especially since the Gingrich-led Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.  In the Congress it is Republican partisanship, as exemplified by Gingrich and DeLay and Frist and contemporaneously Boehner and McConnell (who has openly said that he will filibuster to death any legislative proposal he doesn’t like).  For the Georgites in the Executive Branch, it is Rove’s desiderata of a “Permanent Republican Presidency,” that has defined the political landscape: not dealing with issues but establishing his Party permanently in power.  Outside of the regime it has been O’RHannibaugh and Coulter and their various clones (like Mary Matalin, wife to the Clinton acolyte Jim Carville), and the way that they define the issues that have made the political atmosphere so caustic.  Recall that Coulter (with whom I have dealt more than once on these pages) has defined “liberals” as traitors.  Under US law, the penalty for treason is death.  That is the atmosphere we are in reality dealing with, not some unmodified “partisanship.”
 

6.         Finally, in my view the primacy of the Rule of Law in making our country so successful in the 200-plus years since its founding should in my view be stressed.  Of all the sins that the Georgites have committed in their 7-plus years in power, none has been more egregious than their constant assault on the rule of the Law, encapsulated most recently by the release of the Yoo memo defining Presidential power as without limit when the President declares it to be without limit (The Progress Report, “TORTURE: The 'Blueprint That Led To Abu Ghraib’ “April 7, 2008).  While this argument should be used openly against McCain/Bush, its implications in dealing with the Clintons, for whom retroactively changing the Party’s nomination rules is essential if they are to win the Democratic nomination, are obvious. 

Process is secondary to substance in defining a political party and a candidate.  But in winning elections it is coequal.  The Obama Campaign is getting there, to be sure.  I have just offered a few more process suggestions that one might make, that are possibly useful for Sen. Obama.

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