Memo to Obama: Moving to the Middle is for Losers
Last Friday afternoon, the guests taking part in Sunday's roundtable discussion on This Week had a pre-show call with George Stephanopoulos. One of the topics he raised was Obama's perceived move to the center, and what it means. Thus began my weekend obsession. If you were within shouting distance of me, odds are we talked about it. I talked about it over lunch with HuffPost's DC team, over dinner with friends, with the doorman at the hotel, and the driver on the way to the airport.
As part of this process, I looked at the Obama campaign not through the prism of my own progressive views and beliefs but through the prism of a cold-eyed campaign strategist who has no principles except winning. From that point of view, and taking nothing else into consideration, I can unequivocally say: the Obama campaign is making a very serious mistake. Tacking to the center is a losing strategy. And don't let the latest head-to-head poll numbers lull you the way they lulled Hillary Clinton in December.
Running to the middle in an attempt to attract undecided swing voters didn't work for Al Gore in 2000. It didn't work for John Kerry in 2004. And it didn't work when Mark Penn (obsessed with his "microtrends" and missing the megatrend) convinced Hillary Clinton to do it in 2008.
Fixating on -- and pandering to -- this fickle crowd is all about messaging tailored to avoid offending rather than to inspire and galvanize. And isn't galvanizing the electorate to demand fundamental change the raison d'etre of the Obama campaign in the first place? This is how David Axelrod put it at the end of February, contrasting the tired Washington model of "I'll do these things for you" with Obama's "Let's do these things together":
"This has been the premise of Barack's politics all his life, going back to his days as a community organizer," Axelrod told me. "He has really lived and breathed it, which is why it comes across so authentically. Of course, the time also has to be right for the man and the moment to come together. And, after all the country has been through over the last seven years, the times are definitely right for the message that the only way to get real change is to activate the American people to demand it."
Watering down that brand is the political equivalent of New Coke. Call it Obama Zero.
In 2004, the Kerry campaign's obsession with undecided voters -- voters so easily swayed that 46 percent of them found credible the Swift Boaters' charges that Kerry might have faked his war wounds to earn a Purple Heart -- allowed the race to devolve from a referendum on the future of the country into a petty squabble over whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant his medals.
Throughout the primary, Obama referred to himself as an "unlikely candidate." Which he certainly was -- and still is. And one of the things that turned him from "unlikely" upstart to presidential frontrunner is his ability to expand the electorate by convincing unlikely voters -- some of the 83 million eligible voters who didn't turn out in 2004 -- to engage in the system.
So why start playing to the political fence sitters -- staking out newly nuanced positions on FISA, gun control laws, expansion of the death penalty, and NAFTA?
In an interview with Nina Easton in Fortune Magazine, Obama was asked about having called NAFTA "a big mistake" and "devastating." Obama's reply: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified."
Overheated? So when he was campaigning in the Midwest, many parts of which have been, yes, devastated by economic changes since the passage of NAFTA, and he pledged to make use of a six-month opt-out clause in the trade agreement, that was "overheated?" Or was that one "amplified?"
Because if that's the case, it would be helpful going forward if Obama would let us know which of his powerful rhetoric is "overheated" and/or "amplified," so voters will know not to get their hopes too high.
When Obama kneecaps his own rhetoric and dilutes his positioning as a different kind of politician, he is also giving his opponent a huge opening to reassert the McCain as Maverick brand. We know that McCain has completely abandoned any legitimate claim on his maverick image, but the echoes of that reputation are still very much with us -- especially among many in the media who would love nothing more than to be able to once again portray McCain as the real leader they fell in love with in 2000. And the new Straight Talk Express plane has been modeled on its namesake bus, decked out to better recreate the seduction.
The transition between the primaries and the general election -- and from insurgent to frontrunner -- is tricky. Even a confident campaign can be knocked off course. So this is when Obama most needs to remember what got him to this point -- and stick with it.
In a Los Angeles Times article detailing Obama's attempts at "shifting toward the center," Matt Bennett of the centrist think tank Third Way says that Obama is a "good politician. He's doing all he can to make sure people know he would govern as a post-partisan moderate."
But isn't being a "good politician" as it's meant here exactly what Obama defined himself as being against? Instead of Third Way think tankers, Obama should listen to this guy:
"What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics -- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems.... The time for that politics is over. It's time to turn the page."
That was Barack Obama in February of 2007, announcing his run for the White House. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington," he said that day, "but I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."
Was that just "overheated and amplified" rhetoric?
The Obama brand has always been about inspiration, a new kind of politics, the audacity of hope, and "change we can believe in." I like that brand. More importantly, voters -- especially unlikely voters -- like that brand.
Pulling it off the shelf and replacing it with a political product geared to pleasing America's vacillating swing voters -- the ones who will be most susceptible to the fear-mongering avalanche that has already begun -- would be a fatal blunder.
Realpolitik is one thing. Realstupidpolitik is quite another.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ariann..._b_110026.html
I'm not a far left-wing nut so I don't have a problem with it. Personally I'm to the right on some issues and more to the left on others. This BS about moving to the middle is ridiculous. Why does a candidate have to be "left" or "right" on issues. I don't see them that way I see issues as "American" issues.
Big freakin' deal. If you all want McCain then vote for him. Hillary is OUT.
AndHuffington!!
cue the theme song to the 70s tv show the Jefferson's..... "moving on up!".....
where his black ass moves is not really the issue,
It's the flip flopping that bothers me.
Blah...progressives may huff and puff about Obama but inevitably when the choice is between Obama or McCain which way do you think they'll go.....besides, candidate typically move more to the middle after the primary to try and attract what I call the moron vote (because if your still in the undecidedes after illegal wiretaps, torture and Iraq your a moron!)
I concur.
Hillary was the better choice.
If you're a McCain fan, sureHillary was the better choice.
Yeah no . I swear this has to be the first presidential campaign PeeWee has ever watched. And the issues don't even matter to him. What matters to him is that he hates Obama after he beat Hillary.
Oh well, he can hate him for the next 8 years.
I concur.
He's graduated from Flip-Flop school and is working on his Masters Degree in U-Turns <per Jack Kelly>. That's progress, right?
Flipping and flopping
By Jack Kelly
July 5th, 2008
IT'S A good thing many of Barack Obama's supporters don't care much about issues, because their candidate has been changing his position on them with dizzying speed.
"Barack Obama aligned himself with welfare reform on Monday, launching a television ad which touts the way the overhaul 'slashed rolls by 80 percent,'•" ABC News reported July 1. "Obama leaves out, however, that he was against the 1996 federal legislation which precipitated the case-load reduction."
When the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia ban on handgun ownership June 26, Mr. Obama said he supported the decision of the 5-4 majority. But last November he told the Chicago Tribune he thought the D.C. handgun ban was cons utional. While in the state legislature, he proposed legislation that would, in effect, have banned handguns in Illinois.
Mr. Obama said he disagreed with another 5-4 Supreme Court decision the day before, which struck down a Louisiana law that had authorized the death penalty for someone who rapes a child. When he first ran for the state senate in 1996, Mr. Obama said he opposed capital punishment, and in the legislature he opposed applying the death penalty to gang murders.
Campaigning in Ohio before the Democratic primary there, Mr. Obama said the North American Free Trade Agreement should be renegotiated. One of his economic advisers, University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee, told a Canadian official that Mr. Obama's anti-NAFTA rhetoric "should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."
When the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported this, the Obama campaign initially denied that Mr. Goolsbee had met with the Canadian consul in Chicago and then claimed he had been misquoted. After the CBC provided conclusive proof both of the meeting and what Mr. Goolsbee had said, Mr. Obama distanced himself from his economic adviser.
No longer. In an interview with Nina Easton of Fortune magazine published June 18, Mr. Obama said he didn't want unilaterally to reopen negotiations on NAFTA. "Sometimes during a campaign, the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he said.
In August, Mr. Obama called for easing the economic embargo on Cuba. When he was running for the U.S. Senate in 2003, he indicated he favored lifting it entirely. But in a speech to the Cuban American National Foundation May 23, Mr. Obama said he'd maintain the embargo.
Last September, Mr. Obama said he would accept federal matching funds for the general election campaign if his GOP opponent did the same. But on June 19, he announced he wouldn't. The reason was simple. The Obama campaign thinks it can raise more than twice as much as the $85 million he'd get from the feds. The flip-flop probably would have gone down better if he hadn't offered a transparently phony rationale for it.
"Mr. Obama had an opportunity here to demonstrate that he really is a different kind of politician, willing to put principles and the promises he has made above political calculation. He made a different choice," said the Washington Post in an editorial. "Fine. Politicians do what politicians need to do. But they ought to spare us the self-congratulatory back-patting while they're doing it."
Mr. Obama said on Jan. 28 that he would "strongly oppose" an intelligence-surveillance bill that provided retroactive immunity from lawsuits to telephone companies that cooperated with the U.S. government. But on June 20, he announced he'd support a bill that does just that.
In his debate in Philadelphia with Sen. Hillary Clinton in April, Mr. Obama pledged to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months of assuming the presidency. But foreign policy adviser Susan Rice appeared to be laying the groundwork for another change in position in her appearance on MSNBC on Tuesday. "That's not a deadline," she said. "He will listen to his commanders on the ground, he will follow and heed their advice."
Dominic Lawson, writing in the left-wing British newspaper the Independent on Tuesday, described Mr. Obama as "the master of the U-turn."
Some Obama supporters are experiencing buyer's remorse, Mr. Lawson said, but most think "Obama doesn't believe any of the things he is now saying to woo the 'redneck states.'
"To this group we must address a simple question," Mr. Lawson said. "How do you know what Obama really believes in?"
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll...ST14/807050328
[B]Jack Kelly[/B] is a member of The Blade’s national bureau.
I have the same question about McCain."To this group we must address a simple question," Mr. Lawson said. "How do you know what Obama really believes in?"
Not really.
What gets me is that all of you pulled for Obama over Hillary because he was such a DIFFERENT kind of politician and that he brought hope of change.
But, it turns out, as I pointed out many times before, he's exactly the same. And, if hope and change was the reason you guys pushed for him, don't you feel betrayed?
Be honest.
Arianna Huffington blasted Hillary and pulled for Obama for those reasons and now even she is starting to doubt him.
He was always the same as Hillary.
That's why I never understood why you acted like there was a difference.
Not according to all the Obama supporters.
The only real difference I saw was the relative lack of negative baggage. I can certainly see that's being enough for many.
Racist pastor, wife finally proud of her country, ties with Rezko, flip-flopping, promising change only to be like the rest . . . none of those are considered negative baggage?
(Mind you, I don't care about the pastor, what the wife said and all that . . . but it is baggage nonetheless)
Nothing compared to merely being Hillary Clinton.Racist pastor, wife finally proud of her country, ties with Rezko, flip-flopping, promising change only to be like the rest . . . none of those are considered negative baggage?
I voted for Obama because I want to keep that Y chromosome in the White House, and while Hillary might have one, McCain doesn't, so Obama was the logical choice.
I'm not voting for Obama but at least he's showing a willingness to pull his head out when it comes to Iraq...and moving to the middle is always good.
4 Conservatives to 1 Liberal.....not fair! (to the conservatives)
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