Last Wednesday, Chris wrote a diary, "Why McCain Is Losing", which seemed quite reasonable and striaghtforward. It had a YouTube video clip of McCain trying to sound like a Democrat, an ad that Chris had seen running at home in Philadelphia:
The ad, like much of McCain's messaging lately, focuses on energy independence, global warming, and standing up to other Republicans. Not to be too much of a concern troll, but there is simply no way that a Republican can win a campaign with this message. It is the exact same thing that caused Democrats to lose elections for the past two decades: McCain is admitting that the opposing party is right. Not only will this anger McCain's base, but when even the Republican nominee for President admits that Democrats are right on global warming, odds are that people will just vote for actual Democrats instead of the Republicans who are trying to act like Democrats. To quote Arianna Huffington quoting George Lakoff:| As cognitive psychologist George Lakoff told me: "Democrats moving to the middle is a double disaster that alienates the party's progressive base while simultaneously sending a message to swing voters that the other side is where the good ideas are." It unconsciously locks in the notion that the other side's positions are worth moving toward, while your side's positions are the ones to move away from. |
McCain's message focus for over a week now has been on how we need progressive change on energy and global warming. Even if his policies don't match, he is at least running on a progressive, Democratic message. Not only does this imply that Democrats have the right ideas on energy, global warming and other ideas, McCain's ad explicitly says that he stood up to other Republicans on this issue. In other words, McCain is bluntly saying that Democrats are right, and Republicans are wrong.
I nodded my head vigorously in assent. But then I read something by Theda Skocpol wrote over at TPMCafe that started me questioning. Skocpol is one of America's leading social scientists and historians. Her book on the origins of the American welfare state, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in United States is considered a classic. So I tend to pay just a leetle bit more attention to things she says than your run-of-the-mill bloviating, if you catch my drift.
Her piece was titled, "Can the Obama Campaign Shape the Agenda?" and it raised some surprising doubts, given how dominant the Obama campaign had seemed to me up to that point, and how inept McCain appeared--not to mention that massive bounce that seems to have genuinely emerged.
Here's what Skopcol said....
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Although Obama seems to be "up" in current national polls, McCain is actually doing a much better job of shaping the agenda to his advantage. He has used strong symbols (it does not matter if they are "gimmicks") to portray himself as activist on gas prices and the environment and put apparent distance between himself and Bush. And he has managed to paint Obama as an ordinary schemer on campaign finance. Abetted by the media's proclivity for dramatic gestures and horse race analysis, the McCain camp has done what it needs to portray their man as a fighting underdog focused on real-world issues. Meanwhile, Obama's "economic tour" has gone little noticed -- and his campaign seems not to understand how very difficult it will be to get the media to convey the economic stakes in this election to ordinary voters.
Two things. First, what Skopcol is saying, in effect, is that Obama is repeating his post-Iowa mistake of getting too ethereal, as will be amplified below. Second, her notion that McCain's theft of Democratic themes may be working, has more plausibility than I thought when reading Chris's piece. The reasons are complicated in their details, but fairly simply to sketch out in broad strokes.
The most basic reason is something we're all familiar with: Different rules apply to Democrats and liberals on the one hand and Republicans and conservatives on the other. Part of this is deliberately unfair, part of this is in the nature of things, and part of this is somewheres in-between--historical fact that can be altered with enough hard work.
While reinforcing the other guy's frames is generally a bad idea, as Lakoff argues in Don't Think of an Elephant, things change when you steal someone's entire agenda and get away with it. And this is what conservatives and the GOP have done repeatedly over the years. For example, after 20 years of attacking the New Deal in most of their campaigns, the Republicans finally embraced it under Eisenhower, and said, "but we can run it better than the Democrats," and they not only won the White House, but the Congress, too, ever so briefly.
What's more, Democrats look weak posturing as warmongers because, face it, posturing as a warmonger is weak. It's weak when conservatives do it, too. But Democrats are generally intimidated into not pointing this out. But then when they posture as warmongers, the Republicans are all over them in a second. The reverse is not true. Showing restraint when you've got the most powerful military in the history of the world is not a sign of weakness, and John McCain may not know much, but he damn sure knows that much. Democrats, of course, get faked out on this every time they even think about the Powell Doctrine. But it's true. And it's part of the reason that a Republican embracing restraint, and singing the praises of peace is not just the mirror image of Michael Dukakis in a tank or Barack Obama trying to sing harmony on "Bomb, bomb, bomb! Bomb, Bomb, Iran!"
Finally, this is the way that conservatism works. Liberals invent something. Conservatives rail against it for a couple hundred years. Then they give up, embrace it, and declare it an eternal conservative principle. Actually living by it, well, that's another story. But they have no problem embracing free speech or democracy in principle, so why should McCain's recent foray into all things Democratic be any different?
Oh, and one more thing. McCain's had himself a surge laterly in Missouri, as shown, for example, by this:
A big reason why McCain's surging is that he's spending a lot of money on the airwaves there. And the ad Chris cited is one two 30-second ads he's been using:
Since his visit to southwest Missouri last week, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has aired more than three times as many campaign ads in the state as his Democratic rival, Barack Obama.
McCain's campaign outspent and out-aired Obama in every major media market in Missouri, including St. Louis, from June 19 through last Wednesday. McCain held a town-hall forum in Springfield, Mo. on June 18.
McCain spent $224,696 for 791 spots that ran on local broadcast stations around Missouri. That compares to $115,054 spent by the Obama campaign to air 212 spots.
McCain's more aggressive spending comes as both campaigns say that Missouri is among their targeted states as they head into the remaining four months before the Nov. 4 general election.
Of course, it's still a sign of incredible weakness that McCain has to spend money in Missouri in the first place. So I'm not saying that the sky is falling. And neither is Skopcol. But she is saying that there's an early warning pattern of problems that need attention.
So, recalling point one above, ("what Skopcol is saying, in effect, is that Obama is repeating his post-Iowa mistake of getting too ethereal, as will be amplified below") here's Skopcol again:
Baldly put, the last two weeks leave me wondering if Obama's campaign is prepared for the general election battle. Here are my questions:
* Why did the Obama people roll out his abandonment of the "public" finance system without simultaneously orchestrating many prominent surrogates to attack McCain's abuse of that system in the primaries -- and highlight McCain's stated unwillingness to rein in 527s on his side? They allowed the narrative to become his flip-flop and, perhaps even worse, the expectation that his campaign would amass a huge bankroll.
* Why has the Obama campaign allowed elite big money fundraisers, mock presidential seals and press conferences, and arrogant-sounding Axelrod interviews and Plouffe strategy seminars to dominate media coverage of him at the very moment the press/McCain criticisms of the public finance maneuvers were at their peak? Obama comes across as over-confident, rich, and acting like he is claiming a victory the voters have not given to him. He plays right into the Republican narrative that he is both inexperienced and overweening.
* Why are the Clintons again at the fore of coverage of the campaign and the Democrats? Unity events are fine, but why play into all the stuff about paying off Hillary's vendors, propitiating her donors, and messaging Bill's ego? To be sure, the Clinton camp and media pundits are largely responsible here, but the Democrats and Obama need to get the agenda elsewhere fast. Clearly, the Clinton drama never goes away, but Obama needs to come up with a way to keep it from swallowing him.
* Why isn't Obama getting his economic message across with a few bold symbolic gestures -- eyecatching programs (not necessarily really new) that he uses to feature what he proposes on gas prices, college access, family leave, etc? This whole area needs much more thought. The elite media find it boring and irrelevant to talk about the huge distributional consequences of an election like this -- after all, most of them are rich and spend time talking to other rich folks and insider "analysts" -- yet ordinary voters have to be able to wrap their minds around specific examples of what Obama and Demcorats can do to make life better. It up to Democrats to use eye-catching moves and message discipline (lots of surrogates at once) to get specific messages through on the economy. So far, little effectiveness here, yet this is what Democrats should have going for them in this election!
It's hard to argue with her points--just as its hard to shake the feeling that this is eeily similar to what happened after the Iowa victory. There is a failure to focus on fundamentals and substance, and an intoxication with sheer success of Obama's operation so far--a success that is absolutely undeniable, but that should not blind people to the sorts of points that Skopcol is making.
Honestly, I don't think that the problems she points to will cost Obama the election. But they can give him at least a chance at a fighting chance--a chance he should not have. They could shave 5, maybe even 10 points off Obama's potential margin of victory. And they could significantly shorten his coattails, losing us 2-5 potential Senate seats and 10-30 in the House. In short, they could turn a massive landslide into merely a comfortable victory--one that would still be hailed as historic, but without actually carrying the oomph that it should have.
And note--all this happened before the FISA betrayal. The two are connected, I would argue. Indeed, the long-term incompetence of Democratic national campaigns is historically linked to the erosion of the party's principles. The predictable results of terribly-run campaigns are regularly and routinely blamed on the party's "liberalism" and cited as further proof of the need to become more like the Republicans, thus opening the way for the Republicans to move even farther to the right.
This has been the great secret of American politics for the past 30-something years. The American people have not moved to the right, but the political class most certainly has, and this is how it has done it. And Barack Obama's FISA betrayal, outrageous as it certainly was, needs to be seen within this larger pattern in order to be properly understood. It is, of course, the very epitome of "politics as usual" in drag as transformation. |
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