Mr. Obama's vow to go on the offensive comes just over two months before the first votes are cast for the Democratic nomination, and after a long period in which his aides, donors and other supporters have battled - and in some cases shared - the perception that he has not exhibited the aggressiveness demanded by presidential politics.
In an interview on Friday that was initiated by his campaign to signal the change of course, Mr. Obama said "now is the time" for him to distinguish himself from Mrs. Clinton. While he said that he was not out to "kneecap the front-runner, because I don't think that's what the country is looking for," he said she was deliberately obscuring her positions for political gain and was less likely than he was to win back the White House for Democrats.
Asked in the interview on Friday if Mrs. Clinton had been fully truthful with voters about what she would do as president, Mr. Obama replied, "No."(…)
Asked about Mr. Obama's remarks, Mrs. Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said: "Senator Obama once promised Americans a politics of hope. But now that his campaign has stalled he is abandoning that strategy and is engaging in the same old-style personal attacks that he once rejected. We are confident that voters will reject this strategy, especially from a candidate who told us he would do better."
The limits of what a high-profile presidential campaign can do on its own this late in the cycle are revealed in two ways in this article. First, the article foregrounds how this change was a process based decision from the Obama campaign. The article notes that campaign was worried about its strategy, and so it initiated an interview in order to signal a change of course. The fairly obvious artifice of the move, combined with the emphasis on process stories within the media, makes almost any move conducted by any campaign suspect from the start. Second, as the quote from Howard Wolfson shows, even if the campaign is successful in making news for a move like this, the opposing campaign always gets to respond in the same article. So, not only does it appear artificial, but the other campaign gets equal time. In a media environment like this, how can almost any move from a high profile campaign ever really make a significant impact on the nomination process in and of itself? I honestly don't see a way.
By now, it should be clear that the Clinton campaign has locked up the majority of "influentials" in the Democratic nomination campaign who have so far made up their minds. Considering her upward polling trajectory, it seems this has been the case since at least mid-June. This seems to be basically the same thing Howard Dean accomplished in 2003, when by mid-June he had locked up most of the influentials who had made up their minds. This has resulted in a campaign trajectory where Clinton has been slowly gaining both nationally and in early states for over four months now. In order to change this trajectory, all other Democratic campaigns, including the Obama campaign, need a major anti-Clinton and / or pro-someone else narrative / event to take hold, and result in the remaining undecided Democrats to break hard against Clinton and / or in favor of someone else. The only major event that a campaign can pretty much control, in and of itself, is the Iowa caucuses. My gut feeling is that Iowa isn't enough to change the campaign, and something else needs to break against Clinton before Iowa takes place in order to change the outcome of the nomination campaign. Whatever that something is, a series of attacks against Clinton by one campaign or the other isn't going to do the trick.
Clinton's path to the nomination is not something that a single campaign can stop right now, no matter how many interviews they request, new directions they vow to take, and stump speech attacks they might dish out. For Clinton to not win the nomination will require a major anti-Clinton narrative that places doubt in the minds of many Democrats, and which is verified in either some sort of scandal, gaffe, or defeat in Iowa. That is basically what happened to Dean, as the "Kerry is electable" and "Dean is angry" narratives collided with Dean's defeat in Iowa and subsequent, bullshit "scream." The narratives set up the possibility of a Dean collapse, which was cemented by his Iowa defeat and endless replayed "scream." Apart from winning Iowa and setting up the electability narrative, the Kerry campaign didn't do most of that on its own. It required the assistance of anti-Dean media narratives to plant doubt about the good doctor to push him over the top.
I'm not entirely sure what the Obama campaign, or any other Democratic campaign, needs to assist their attempts to knock off Clinton. Painting her as a hawk seems to have more legs than painting her as an "insider" or "unelectable" have, but I'm still not convinced the hawk angle is making many waves. What I do know is that in order for Clinton to not become the Democratic nomination, she will have to be defeated by more than the campaigns of her opponents. Something much broader is going to have to take place in order for Clinton to lose her dominant position. Lord knows I have tried to develop narratives that would call some of her policies into question, ala residual forces, but other leading campaigns dropped the ball on that one by not taking a clearer stance on Iraq themselves. Even had that not been the case, one has to wonder what major event would have caused concerns over Clinton's hawkish-ness to come to fruition. Would it require an attack on Iran, or a week where over one hundred American soldiers die in Iraq? If so, that is clearly something no campaign has control over, ala the capture of Saddam Hussein in late 2003, not to mention where the event would probably be a serious, short-term negative for progressive policy positions. Given that the institutions in which Americans have the most faith are the police, the military and religion, national crises pretty much always tend to favor conservatives. Katrina might be the only counter-example I can think of, although no matter the devastating impact that had on Republican electoral chances at the national level, it actually helped Republicans, big time, at the local level in both Louisiana and Mississippi.
Basically, what I am trying to say here is that while the campaign can still change, it is going to take something massive to do so on the Democratic side. Further, in order to change things in a progressive direction, it might also take something both extremely rare and which comes from outside individual campaigns themselves. It can happen, but the window is closing, and this effort by the Obama campaign has no chance of being enough, in and of itself. |
