The news that Obama and McCain are in a virtual dead heat is the cause of much consternation among my friends in the political blogosphere today, for good reason. Obama is the better candidate, he's running the better campaign, he's got more money by far--so why is he still struggling when he should be putting the boots to McCranky and be done with it?
Nate Silver from the LA Times has a decent explanation for why this is, but the core question remains: Why is McCain still exploiting his reputation as a moderate, when he's clearly anything but?
I found what I think is the answer in Malaysia, of all places, and that country's struggle between its political establishment and an oppositional force organized and propagated on the Internet.
As Sean-Paul notes, the battle between the Barisan National Coalition and the Democratic Action Party was a cyberwar, fought on Web sites and blogs as the latter actively outflanked the former's control of the established media by providing an alternate perspective. Yet, even though the American progressive blogosphere does the same thing, we don't do nearly as well in getting the message out and pushing people to act. I think he gives the right-wing blogosphere too much credit in terms of being an organizing force--Kos and company have been crushing Instapundit, Malkin, etc. in page views, hits, credibility, etc. for literally years.
But I think he is absolutely right in his assertion that the right-wing blogosphere has been co-opted by the larger conservative media machine, letting itself be used as an amplifying arm for whatever smear or bullshit is being peddled each week. Worse, the mainstream media willingly goes along with this (Remember "Drudge rules our world?"), enabling a cycle of codependency that empowers the right wing to get its message out and muddy the waters just enough to prevent undecided or low-information voters from having a clear choice.
Speaking of clear choices, that leads to my second point. In Malaysia (and I'm grossly oversimplifying here), there was a clear choice between two parties. I'm not passing judgment on either party's platform, but evidently the voters did, and they did so because the Internet mobilization for the DAP gave them a strong alternative option to simply accepting what came before. Clear choices lead to stronger support from voters. Simple, right?
The problem is that Obama's campaign has done all it could possibly do to alienate its strongest online fighting force--the netroots--while not doing enough to distinguish its candidate from the opposition. When Obama is shifting on everything from FISA to drilling, it weakens his core message and lets McCain and his surrogates define the debate. Even his response efforts, like the excellent Low Road Express, are just that--responses. Obama needs to come out first and hit hard, defining himself on his terms, not his opponent's. We were able to retake Congress in 2006 because it was a clear referendum against Bush, and we failed since then because Congress has muddled its message with every victory it hands Bush--a trend that, thankfully, seems to be ending.
I'll be exploring the Malaysian political scene off and on for the next few weeks not only to better my own anemic understanding of foreign policy, but to understand how their political struggles can give us lessons about winning our own. Americans have a chaotic mess of information to deal with on a daily basis, most of which is bullshit talking points that people take too easily at face value. We would do well to better understand how other countries approach the same problem.
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