No strategic counterpunch and a self-emasculating VP makes Obama's job twice as hard. If his team understood messaging, he'd be doing much better against "Me-too" McCain, the make-believe maverick.
Winning presidential campaigns have four strategic messages and two messengers. Obama's glass is half empty. Let's start with "Political Strategy 101" -- well, it should be "101" but for Democrats starting with Al Gore, it apparently has been a graduate level elective that they skipped. As psychologist and Political Brain author Drew Westen explained in Huffington Post last month:
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.
The word "story" here is roughly equivalent to two other popular terms -- "narrative" or "frame." It is also equivalent to rhetoric's "extended metaphor," which I argue is the most important figure of speech in my not-yet-bestselling unpublished manuscript, Politics, Religion, and the English Language.
Good candidates will pound away with a strong positive extended metaphor of why you should vote for them and with an equally strong negative extended metaphor of why you should not vote for their opponents. Winning two-term candidates, like President George W. Bush with the help of Karl Rove, will have a counter-punch to their opponent's positive and negative extended metaphors. The counterpunches always use the same figure of speech -- dramatic irony, wherein someone's words unintentionally mean something quite different from (and often opposite to) what they intended.
The goal is to find a powerful dramatic irony in their opponents' words or deeds that blow up the opposition's own extended metaphor. That always makes a great story, since it is satisfying sport for people to be hoist with their own petard or for people to be uncovered as a hypocrite.
Think Michael Dukakis in an army tank, or President Bush on the aircraft carrier with the "Mission Accomplished" banner in the background, or the Swift Boat ads run against John Kerry. Dramatic irony is the key to understanding both popular culture and politics -- but that is another post.
What Karl Rove and his disciples now running the McCain campaign figured out is that since the media doesn't really police the truth in a meaningful fashion, you can pretty much take whatever your opponent says out of context and turn that into a defining dramatic irony. Or just make stuff up entirely. The Rovian dramatic irony is almost always linked to the same extended metaphor -- the Democrat is an out of touch, intellectual elitist who is "not one of us." After seeing so many many Democratic candidates fall into this trap so easily, it is a very easy sell to the public and media, as the Rovians are proving once again. Rove's candidates, on the other hand, are always a plain spoken man (or woman) of the people.
The other point of having the four stories or frames or extended metaphors is that it makes responding to attacks very easy. If you've been rebranding McCain as the make-believe maverick then whenever he launches a phony attack, you can just point out this is more proof he is the make-believe maverick pushing the old politics, whereas you remain the one-and-only candidate of real change
Back to the four stories Obama needs.
1. He has (most of) the story about himself: "Change" or "Change we can believe in" -- although, as McCain has shown, it is not really a full frame or extended metaphor because it doesn't really connect Obama's background and values with his policies, as an ideal story would do. Thus it can be twisted into "the wrong kind of change."
2. Obama's best story is about McCain: McCain=Bush, McCain is more of the same. None of these is rhetorically memorable, though at least there are a lot of visuals and facts linking McCain and Bush. This story is, of course, mostly policy-oriented and not a character attack -- and it is certainly true that Obama is winning the policy war but losing the character war.
3. Obama, however, has no counterpunch to McCain's story (or McCain's attack on Obama). Now in part that's because McCain reversed his story from "experience" to "change/maverick." And in part it's because Obama mistakenly muzzled the 527s who would have branded McCain as the out-of-touch old-politics lobbyist-loving flip-flopper he is
It must also be said that Obama didn't have much of a response to the "experience" frame in the first place because Obama insists on calling McCain a war hero, a man of honor, blah, blah, blah. Not exactly how Rovians winners deal with the Kerry team losers. Indeed, by not forcing McCain to defend the experience frame, by buying into his McCain's frame, it was that much easier for McCain to pivot to a new message.
As I've said, Obama should be rebranding McCain as a make-believe maverick. To get in even more alliteration, I might call him "Me-too McCain" since that covers his disingenuous copying of Obama's change message and his dangerous copying of Bush's policies.
Also, Obama should have gone after McCain as an out of touch elitist -- in fact, he still can. The Obama team let Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" and "mental recession" lines die in the ether, and seems to have dropped the blockbuster gaff of McCain forgetting how many houses he owns. Yet these fit right in with the make-believe maverick meme. I can assure you, a Rovian winning candidate would still be using those dramatic-irony gaffes regularly. Indeed, Palin continues to talk about Obama's "bitter" comment, and that is from even further back in the campaign.
4. The main reason for Obama to continue pushing the extended metaphor of McCain as an out of touch elitist, aside from the fact that it's true and powerful, is to inoculate himself against the McCain-Palin-Rove onslaught that has begun to frame him as the out of touch elitist in the campaign.
Right now, Obama is diving directly into the "too clever" and "not one of us" extended metaphor that overcame Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry. I suspect that this will be the McCain team's central frame for winning the debates even if he loses them on policy points, since that was how Bush bested Kerry strategically in the debates even though the polls seemed to indicate that, at a tactical level, Kerry won them all. But that is a long story I will come back to closer to the debates.
For now, in passing, I will just note that Sarah Palin is using almost verbatim the exact same attack that Bush used to prove Kerry is not one of us. Palin is attacking Obama's language, that he says one thing to working-class people in the heartland and another thing to his supporters in San Francisco.
I mention McCain's VP mainly to segue into Joe Biden aka "the man who wasn't there." Only lipstickgate spared us from the lead story being Biden saying, Hillary "might have been a better pick than me." The mere utterance of that self-emasculating sentiment makes it true. Needless to say, the McCain campaign immediately said:
"Barack Obama's most important decision of this election, and Biden -- the candidate he selects -- suggests, himself, that he wasn't the right man for the job, and that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice. Biden certainly has a credible viewpoint on this."
The Biden comment suggests he is speaking from a position of great personal weakness and that he feels completely overshadowed by Palin, which could be a disaster for the VP debate. Taking nothing away from Hillary, whose credentials and experience speak for themselves -- indeed, if Obama loses it will be clear that not choosing Hillary was a mistake -- the choice of Hillary would also have allowed McCain to pivot to being the real change candidate anyway, and opened up Obama to a slew of different attacks. Though it is as certain as death and taxes that Hillary never would have said Joe Biden "might have been a better pick than me."
In any case, the Rovians always find stuff or make stuff up. If the Obama team doesn't understand political messaging, it doesn't really matter who their VP is or what how they are attacked.
Josh Marshall wondered today, "Did Biden forget to mention to Obama that he was retiring from public life in September?" Exactly. If Biden is feeling like the fifth wheel -- fourth wheel? -- he should keep it to himself, buck up, and find a damn message.
To read more from Joseph Romm, go here.
And let's not kid ourselves. Obama would NOT be winning handily if Hillary were on the ticket. The GOP would be in full frothing Clinton hate mode; they were GUNNING to run against her in one form or another. The GOP's repeated criticisms that Hillary should have been on the ticket are nothing but expressions of their own frustration, that they don't have their favorite scapegoat.
A while back, as I was harping ad nauseum about why Obama's choice for VP was a no-brainer, I wondered if the media and blogosphere would continue to ignore and dismiss Joe Biden even if he was the VP nominee...just as both had done so blatently during the early primary process. I figured they would do their best to follow their old ways while promoting - at every opportunity - the media-driven and conceived national myths of epic proportions about Joe Biden. I had no idea that it would happen to the extent that many voters are asking, "Where's Joe Biden?".
I guess it's just par for the course and that if Joe Biden didn't get any bad press, he wouldn't get any press at all!
I remain hopeful that this sad situation will change dramatically after the VP debate. I can only hope that it will attract many more millions than who watched both conventions, combined! Call me a cockeyed optimist.
Instead of messages of hope and excitement, all I seem to find here is messages of despair, critiques of how Obama is running his campaign, and meaningless rants against the lies being spewed by McCain and Palin.
ENOUGH!
ENOUGH being armchair quarterbacks and offering all this advice to Obama on how he SHOULD be running his campaign
ENOUGH whining that we're going to lose this thing and the American people are stupid and none of it really matters any more
ENOUGH ranting and raving about McCain and his total lack of honor or Palin and her total inability to be VP
ENOUGH!!!
Leave this site, head over the Obama site and VOLUNTEER
To sign up new voters
To make phone calls
To send letters to the editor
Find out where your county's electoral board take volunteer clerks for voting and sign up for that
Find some really inspirational stuff out there and get your friends fired up, then tell them to get their friends fired up....
GET OFF YOUR BUTTS AND HELP US WIN THIS THING!!
Obama has said it before. This election is NOT about HIM
It's not about Biden
Or McCain
Or even Palin
IT'S ABOUT US!!!
Remember in the phrase Yes, we can, the most important word is WE!
SO, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO WIN THIS FALL GET TO WORK!!!!
OBAMA BIDEN 2008, 12, 16, 20
I've read at least a dozen articles since the Palin roll out and the ensuing bank run somberly enumerating deadly mistakes of Team Obama. Half of those have referenced Politics 101. They were all conspicuously silent about two important elements of the story.
1) The Obama campaign has beaten a formidable team (all of them holders of graduate degrees in Politics 101), building an unprecedented network of volunteers and financial support along the way..
2) None of the authors are employed by or informally advising any political campaign in the nation.
In reality these “definitive postmortems” have no impact on the campaign they purport to instruct. But they can engender a sense of powerlessness. I f we start to believe the outcome is out of our hands, it is.
They need to see this and start acting.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Seriously, do you even read what you write, or are you so consumed with pettiness and sour grapes that you can't see how contradictory your claims are? And you certainly do have some Clintonian ideals: Choosing anyone but Hillary is suicide in and of itself! Only Hillary is capable of doing the job! It's all about the Clintons and their egos, not what's right for the country, right? Right.
Only even Hillary Clinton herself isn't that damned stupid right now.
Damn straight.
I think there are only two possibilities at this point. Either Obama's campaign has no clue what it is doing, or he just wants McCain to think so, and will bring out the good stuff closer to November. I really hope it is the latter. :) I think it is, as well.
And Obama seems to be trying to run EVERY campaign like it's a primary against fellow Democrats and everything should be civil. The thing about experience is even when you don't have the right kind you've gotta be open to listening to those who do. And Obama doesn't seem to be able. He's fixated on what HE knows and is in love with his own aura and story. That might sell books, but people really care about what you're gonna do for them. And they want to hear it in terms that won't make them tune out or doze off.
Unfortunately, Hillary provided McCain with most of his narratives, and even some C-in-C endorsements.
If the Democrats lose this thing, there is no way Hillary wins in '12. I think the Democratic party itself will lose its 'base.'
There will be hell to pay for the Dems if they lose now. I hope fear is a good motivator.
And also, there are all those cries of sexism.
Maybe Biden laid it on a little too thick by saying Hillary would have been a BETTER choice....
I am a woman, by the way.