Why Voters Say they Don't Really Know Barack Obama (and Why They Don't Really Know Much about John McCain, Either)
A New York Times report this week described the frustration and perplexity of the Obama team as to why they are having trouble "getting their message out" in the face of GOP "distractions."
Sound familiar?
The economy is tanking, and McCain's chief economic adviser, Phil Gramm, made one of the most disastrous gaffes a high-ranking campaign official could have made when a nation is facing bank closings, record foreclosures, skyrocketing prices, spiraling unemployment, and an angry electorate: belittling the public for their distress and telling them to stop whining. It would have fit right into a story about a presidential candidate who has as many homes as most people have fingers, and whose first response to the mortgage crisis was to blame the lack of "personal responsibility" of young families buying their first one. It would have fit right into a story of a presidential candidate whose wife complained that the only way to get around Arizona is on a personal jet.
But the Obama campaign chose not to tell that story--or any of its supporting details. When Obama was standing on a world stage last week illustrating for anyone to see precisely what he would do for American respect again around the world--in a world where respect translates into help fighting the terrorists without borders who constitute the greatest threat to our national security--where were his surrogates reminding voters that McCain's whining about Obama's popularity was nothing but sour grapes, and preventing the media from turning Obama's extraordinary success into an example of empty "celebrity" and "arrogance"? (Last I looked, television news producers didn't take their own high ratings as signs of arrogance when they make a strong showing.) And when they finally put a surrogate on television this weekend--John Kerry to face off against Joe Lieberman doing his best Zell Miller impersonation--why did they pick a surrogate associated in every American's mind with the one thing you wouldn't want associated with a candidate who'd had a rough week: losing?
When a campaign has to ask why it is having trouble getting its message out, the campaign is usually the problem. Obama has a voice, and he has the microphone to say anything he wants anytime he wants to say it. But as his opponent "distracts" the media--and hence the public--daily with a relentless drumbeat about what's wrong with Obama--that he isn't strong, that he isn't American, that he isn't patriotic, that he doesn't have the judgment or experience to be president, that he didn't have the balls to serve in the military, that he eats arugula, that he is the most liberal member of the United States Senate, that he isn't "one of us"--what story has Barack Obama told that could possibly catch the public attention? That he has a slightly amended plan for dealing with the energy crisis? And what story is his campaign telling about why voters should worry as much about John McCain as they are beginning to worry about Barack Obama?
McCain has made abundantly clear since infesting his campaign with Rove protégées a few weeks ago that he intends to run a relentlessly negative campaign. For many of us, it was a relief this week to see Obama starting to run an occasional offense this week, instead of running a prevent defense with too few players on the field. What is not as clear is what the Obama campaign learned from the relentlessly negative campaign Hillary Clinton ran against him in the last half of the primary season. They clearly remember that he won. But what is not so clear is whether his campaign took away anything from the fact that he lost two-thirds of the primaries after Hillary turned to her slash-and-burn strategy and that many voters came away with an uneasy feeling about him.
His campaign needs to understand why that happened, because it's the same thing that happened to Al Gore and John Kerry. It's about narratives.
There is a simple fact about elections that has eluded Democrats in every presidential campaign they have lost in the last 40 years: that as a candidate, you have to focus first and foremost not on a litany of "issues" but on four stories: the story you tell about yourself, the story your opponent is telling about himself, the story your opponent is telling about you, and the story you are telling about your opponent. Candidates who offer compelling stories in all four quadrants of this "message grid" win, and those who leave any of them to chance generally lose.
Al Gore didn't tell any of the four. He didn't want to be associated with Bill Clinton (a fatal flaw Obama should not repeat), so he had nothing to say about what his administration had accomplished over eight years of extraordinary peace and prosperity. Even his chief strategist, Bob Shrum, now admits that the campaign suffered from its relentless focus on "issue" positions and policies without weaving them into any coherent story about why Al Gore should be president.
John Kerry told one story--the story of his military bona fides--and left the others to fate (and Karl Rove). He lost when he failed to respond to the two major stories told about him: that he was a flipflopper (a story that started the day he became the presumptive nominee and his campaign never deigned to answer) and the story that he was a fake war hero (a direct contradiction to his only story, which his team thought best to let fester). Neither campaign thought to tell a coherent story about George W. Bush. Try recalling the master narrative either one of them told about their opponent, and see if you can get past the first sentence.
John McCain is telling a story about himself--that he's a man of courage and conviction who loves his country. He is telling a story about Obama--that he's a man of none of those things. Virtually everyone in the country is receiving a barrage of email from anonymous sources detailing this message about Obama without constraints of truth. After watching Hillary Clinton lose to Obama's charisma and after watching Obama enthrall the rest of the world and the troops McCain claims Obama doesn't support last week, he is now in full attack mode, trying to tell a story about his opponent's greatest strength (that Obama is someone who can inspire people, and can even do so on a world stage, where McCain's master narrative had claimed a decided advantage). So now he is telling the story of Obama as an arrogant, uppity, empty celebrity.
That story may well backfire, but it wouldn't hurt if the Obama team put a team on the field, emphasized the desperation underlying McCain's message, turned McCain into a grumpy old man who's just angry that no one seems to find him compelling, and threw something other than an occasional weak arm-punch against McCain for his having nothing to say about himself other than that he doesn't like to talk about the years he spent in Hanoi that he talks about incessantly. Nor would it had hurt if the Obama campaign showed signs of a functioning rapid response team when McCain starting trumpeting the story that Obama only wanted to visit injured troops in Germany if he had camera crews with him, which turned out to be fabricated out of whole cloth. But days of negative press passed before the Obama team had even got their stories straight on that mini-story, leaving the impression that was, as McCain suggested, a dishonorable grandstander. The elapsed time between a charge like that and a powerful count-attack, as any veteran of the Clinton War Room will tell you, should be no more than one hour, so there is never a news cycle--let alone four or five days--during which the primary voices are the opposition and the pundits, who will echo the opposition unless they hear a clear, forceful counter-response.
Barack Obama has told one story: that he will bring change and hope. Many have argued, from early in the Democratic primary season, that his was a campaign of soaring rhetoric and words without substance. That charge has "stuck" in the minds of many voters, who say they don't really know who Obama is and where he stands. It's a peculiar charge for a candidate who has laid out detailed plans for every issue of our time. Try going to his website or listening to his wonkish policy addresses.
But whereas the standard Democratic response is to throw more plans and positions against the wall and hope that they'll stick, that's missing the point: that Obama hasn't yet told a coherent, consistent narrative of who he is that weaves together the themes of his campaign with his own life history. The result is that he has left his race, his exotic history, and the smear campaigns aimed at defining him as "not one of us" to resonate with voters. When I work with candidates, one of the first things I do is to spend a day with them walking through their life history and listening for the salient events, the values that mean something to them, and the stories from their lives or from the people they have met in their lifetimes or on the campaign trail that make those values vivid and come alive and illustrate where their heart is, so that when they go on the road, they have a coherent story to tell about who they are, what they stand for, and how their life story connects with the lives and concerns of their constituents.
Obama began to tell the story of who he is and what his values are in his first biographical ad of the general election, although the ad ran briefly and he did not reinforce it on the stump. I suspect he will attempt to develop that story at the Democratic Convention, but if his team understands how networks work in the brain, they will begin laying the neural tracks now so they have neural traction. And if they understand what it means that Karl Rove and his protégés are now at the helm in McCainland, they will be ready for and inoculate against the counter-narratives designed to derail that message--counter-narratives they have already begun to offer--that he's a black man who readily cries racism (something he has done everything possible to avoid, knowing that that "race card" just activates latent white resentment), that he's exotic in a way that makes him so far from the lives and experiences of everyday Americans that he can't connect with them (all the while drawing record crowds that contradict that story), and do forth.
The average American actually doesn't know Barack Obama, despite all the media attention. They know that he's a gifted, charismatic man with a winning smile, a keen mind, and a tendency to alternative between RFK on the stump and Michael Dukakis in interviews and debates. Most people haven't read Dreams from my Father or The Audacity of Hope, and their only exposure to either will be in Republican attack ads using his words against him. Most white people who worry that he doesn't share their values don't know that he grew up in a family much like theirs, with a white mother and blue collar white grandparents. Most people don't know that he cares so much about the absence of black fathers from the lives of their children not only because he understands the destructiveness, particularly to boys, but that he understands it firsthand, and was only saved from its more destructive impact by the presence of a loving (if sometimes overly fun-loving) maternal grandfather.
Like Kerry, Obama has offered the American voter one story when he should have offered four, and that one story can be summarized in one sentence. Regardless of how detailed your policy positions, that isn't enough. It isn't memorable. It doesn't capture the imagination of a brain wired over the long years of our species' evolution for a particular kind of narrative structure, when the only way to pass knowledge and values down across generations prior to the rise of literacy--and when our children have not yet learned to read--was through stories.
Obama infrequently answers the stories told about him by telling a story about the attacker (the most effective strategy for addressing attacks, and very different from the nuanced answers he often gives responding to attacks that are smokescreens for deeper attacks on his character). Like Kerry, he has made no sustained attempt to define McCain, except on-again off-again efforts to brand McCain as Bush's third term. While getting smacked repeatedly with the charge of elitism, the candidate with the humble roots hasn't mentioned that perhaps McCain is so out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans because he was born with a silver spoon in his hand, is a poster child for affirmative action for the wealthy and well connected (having both gained admittance to and barely survived the Naval Academy at the bottom of his class as the son and grandson of four-star admirals), and that maybe he should speak more with the servants in his eight homes if he wants to know what the energy crisis or health insurance crisis or mortgage crisis he's been part of the problem in creating in the Senate for three decades actually feels like to everyday Americans.
Is that dirty politics? Is it the dreaded "negativity" (dreaded only by Democrats, who confuse negative statements about their opponent with low-road politics)? It all depends on whether you think telling people the truth in a way that catches their interest, gets them to feel something, and leads them to remember it is unethical. There need be no contradiction between Obama's high-road message and a realistic campaign that addresses all four quadrants of the message grid. If he wants to retain the high road, the least he can do is to counterpunch every time McCain tries to tell a story about Obama or undermine Obama's own story, with a simple, "There you go again--that's exactly the politics of division that has led us to where we are in Washington."
From a neurological standpoint, positive and emotions play different functions, arise in different ways, and even have largely distinct neural circuitry. If McCain creates enough ambivalence about Obama, Obama will need to create enough ambivalence about McCain to cancel it out. No one has ever won an election by saying what a great guy he is, letting his opponent pummel away at his character, and refusing to define his opponent or derail the glorious narrative his opponent is telling about himself.
Perhaps Obama will be the first. But he should study the stump speeches and convention addresses of the only Democrats to win an election when Republicans controlled the White House since FDR: JFK in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Bill Clinton in 1992. All three ran positive, forward-thinking campaigns, but all three ran against the incumbent and his party with a strong story that resonated with the American people. None was afraid to mince words about his opponent.
Obama needs to remember that one of the most "negative" political documents ever written was the Declaration of Independence.
Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," recently released in paperback with a new postscript on the 2008 primaries.
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This analysis is right on. The reason that the election is so close is that McCain is running a much more effective (but unprinciped gutter) campaign than Obama. I think that the only reason Obama is still in the lead in spite of this is that working people instictively recognize that McCain represents the interests of the rich and big business and not ordinary people.
Anybody who is in a position to show this article to the Obama campaign people needs to do so.
the only reason mccain is even close and the republican party is still considered a legitimate political party instead of a crime syndicate is because they own the talk radio airwaves and largely determine what is and what isn't acceptable in American media, what is a lasting subject for major media hacks, and what isn't.
At this point the election is not about issues. So many possible voters are aware of the promises being pandered. No, this election is actually a kind of cultural war, as to whether a brown skin man can be President of The United States. There is great resistance to that idea. It does not help that Senator Obama's resume is thin. Stating his "years as a community organizer" does not help much; who was he organizing in Chicago? the church and pastor that he now disavows? A stint in the Illinois state legislature and then a lucky ascent to the U.S. Senate. The biographical nonsense about Obama and poverty, also does not help.
The only way for this difficult task to be accomplished is for the Democratic party to be truly united, in a way not seen for many decades. Not even Bill Clinton in 1992 is enough, for there is no Ross Perot assistance this time, no 19% being taken away from his opponent.
Bill Clinton's damning with faint praise of Obama is not a good sign. The Obamakins scorn of the Clintons will probably prove fatal. The Clinton brand is a known quantity, just like the Bush brand. Most of the candidates offered for VP are mostly known only to those who follow politics.
Only a truly united Democratic party can pull this off, one that is compelling enough to attract those independent voters who are also sympathetic to traditional democratic ideas.
Get over it, she lost.
After what Bill did to Obama, any remaining possiblility of Hillary getting the Vice Presidential slot is now completely gone. Bill Clinton has again shown that he is a dangerous loose cannon that you want to keep your distance from.
Democratic leaders who supported Clinton but want to win this election have to put unrelenting pressure on them, especially Bill, to stop sulking, suck it in, and get with the program. Because if they do not, they will be blamed if Obama loses and will be finished in the Democratic party.
Petulance rules!
"Because if they do not, they will be blamed if Obama loses and will be finished in the Democratic party."
You say that 0-man is the greatest because he beat the "Clinton machine", and now you hold the Clinton's responsible to get him elected. Something is incongruous about this statement. The SDs were set up to make sure the best qualified and most electable candidate is nominated; so it seems to me that the SDs should do the job they were created to do. There is no way in h*ll that you can hinge his defeat to the Clinton's, but that is what you seem to be saying.
So on target it hurts and when you see it happening yet again with the answers to it staring even the most oblivious in the face you have to start wondering what the problem is with the Democratic campaigners when they can't answer simple attacks by pointing out the basic hypocrisy of the people making them or the obvious holes you could drive trucks through in them.
Bring Back America.
Obama 2008
This should be the Democratic Tagline.
The campaign should emphasize truth, fairness and equality. TOTAL EQUALITY! All men created equal! No preference for anything but GOOD CHARACTER(credit).
Which America do I speak of? The one upon which we base our laws, freedom, and prosperity.
Besides, guys, the Repubs WILL self destruct by nature.
All we have to do is call it.
Excellent from a fellow who believes the same, story telling is what its all about. Story tellers pass on important information and with it empower.
Someone needs to get DREW WESTIN's Blog to the OBAMA CAMPAIGN. Please?
I just sent it to David Plouffe and Steve Hildebrand.
They need to read it...AND follow his advice....
Let's not forget that the media works very hard at being distracted from anything of substance.
What substance? A little flip a little flop there, all forgiven because one has to do that to get elected. Well, who knows where the candidate really stands? The American public is beginning to question that!
All he has to do is tell his vision against John McCains non-vision, and then tell the truth about McCain-
that is--- a forgetful, badly dispositioned old man with little idea of what to do about the economy or the continuous war in the middle east. John McCain has been in Congress 26 years and has little to show for it. How can anyone expect him to all of sudden start solving a bunch of our problems, with the same or similar set of advisors and underlings. Heavens, he can't even remember questions that were asked two minutes ago.
OMG....McC
Why I like to know is where the hell is the Democratic Party, where are our leaders? Yes Obama is the presidential candidate but should the Party stand behind him particularly the legislators who have a great opportunity to use their abilities for pork barrel projects and inject day after day their knowledge of the Bush administraion so the American people are duly informed and not fall for the lies and innuendos of the Republicans?
As for the media's so called experts, they are paid to make news not to report them, should it not the Party pay someone to debate them and make them look foolish?
Yes, where is the Democratic Party? Think someone is blackmailing the whole crew? Certainly, something is wrong. The silence is deafening.
I've followed Professor Westen's theories with interest, and I've got to say that I hope for the sake of this country that they are, to at least a certain extent, wrong. Certainly they are overblown to the extent that they posit the kind of approach he proposes as innately and immutably the only way to go. There was a time, not too long ago, in our nation's history, when issues, and not candidates' biographies or what stories they told, or how they looked on TV, decided elections, and there are *many* places in the world today where issues, and not personalities, still decide elections. I happen to agree with Westen that Obama needs to get down and dirty--the claim that he is a 'different kind of politician' has long since been torn off his brand--but not because I believe voters are incapable of taking in policy positions and facts on the ground.
If issues decided elections Schwartzenegger would never have become governor of California. Public opinion polls showed that on the issues people agreed with Gray Davis and not Schwartzenegger. But they voted for Schartzenegger.
thanks to a constant non-stop swiftboating of davis on talk radio. and as a monopoly, there was no way to reply to the uncontested repetition of GOP and chamber of commerce talking points every california and national talk radio blowhard was spewing. without them and the illegal (hired) petition process to get swartznegger in an election (that talk radio was instrumental in pushing) it wouldn't have happened in the first place. right now the blowhards are probably arguing the cal economy would be even worse with a democrat still in.
whether it is issues or character is moot. this democracy is broken and bipartisan discussion of our problems is impossible as long as the talk radio monopoly is allowed to continue allow a minority in the GOP to determine the media flavor of America.
Except for the roll-back on car license fees. A lot of people fell for that one. Today's L.A. Times carries a story stating that if the roll-back had not occurred, California would not have a budget deficit. Of course, the other problem that Grey had was that he was not supported in the recall efforts by the Democratic party. In that case, Bustamante was the villian. Wonder what companies he lobbies for.....
We have to be realpolitick attack dogs. Don't like that? Get a new line of work!
Drew, you've obviously struck a cord. This race is turning into Monty Burns vs. Ned Flanders..
Long way to go to say the Democrat party smothers their candidate with policy wonkisms that the public has rejected for several election cycles.
The independent fiery Barack Obama is gone and we now have the Democratic Presidential nominee, owned by the corporate interests and lobbies of the Democratic party.
I really felt Barack Obama meant change. I voted for him once already. I don't like the changed changes of the Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
He has turned out to be that very astute Chicago politician who will do anything and say anything to win. Change that you can believe in has become change whenever necessary to win votes. Only problem with that is in the end no one really knows who you are, and your campaign is complaining about the result....
Obama should make it clear that one of the major changes he is for is to bring an end to gridlock so that the problems facing the country can be solved. That means making compromises with the opposition if it moves his programs forward, rather than ridgidly holding to dogmatic positions at all costs. For example, if agreeing to offshore drilling with strict environmental safeguards makes it possible to get programs to move toward alternative energy sourced through congress, this is a compromise that should be made.
The people who thought that Obama's message of change meant dogmatic adherence to rigid ideologically pure positions clearly did misunderstand him.
I agree that what most people don't know about Obama is that he is a very strewd politicians. He must first win the presidency to impliment any change.
However, when it comes to the drilling issue why not tell the people the truth. The oil companies are trying to amass as many drilling leases as possible before Bush leaves office. They already have 8 or 9 million acres inside of the U.S., but now they want the leases for off-shore drilling.
Off-shore drilling will only hurt the people, because what most people don't seem to understand is that the major oil companies are exporting our American oil at this very moment for huge profits. The oil belongs to America, not Exxon, or BP, or the other oil companies. It belongs to the people, so why are we paying such high prices for our own oil? None of the people in other oil countries pay more than .50 cents per gallon. Only in America.
Obama, say something, do something. Tell it like it is.
(cont.) His grandmother's family was a well-to-do "white collar" family from Kansas, whose family disapproved of her marriage to Obama's "bluecollar" grandfather. But even that designation isn't entirely accurate. Obama's grandfather wasn't a factory worker or auto mechanic. He was a very talented and able furniture salesman who did quite well for himself in his chosen field. The Obama camp needs to stop misrepresenting him as a poor black Horatio Alger kid from a broken home who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and be honest about his background, of which he has nothing to be ashamed.
His father was not a goat herder, but the son of a landowner (wealthy?) who owned livestock.
True.
Someone paid for his private Prep-school education in Hawaii.
Not a public school kid like me.
The bottom line is that McCain's parents were never on food stamps, Obama's mother was at one point.
McCain, with his 8 houses and his mutimillionarie wife is the elitist in this race.
What does that have to do with qualifications for POTUS?
Do you want to know why the voters "don't know" Obama? It's because Obama himself, as well as his supporters (apparently including the author of this article) seem to think it's okay to play fast and loose with the truth about his background. Want an example? It can hardly be said (at least not with a straight face) that he grew up with "white bluecollar grandparen
John McCain was in the bottom 4 of his class before Daddy and Grand Daddy got him the Navy gig...
tell us what where John McCain is on the issues?? hmmmm???
But he went on to be a respected member of the US Senate for 26 years; so what does this have to do with qualifications for POTUS?
$650,000 is a lot of money, hey? What planet are you living on?
Certainly not one that contains New York or California. But 650K is probably an underestimate for Honolulu.
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