When a house drops on a witch, she dies, and the Munchkins can celebrate in song and dance. When the White House drops on a lame duck, he seems to stagger around for another 80 days, a zombie about whom the people scream, "He's alive!?!" The period between Election and Inauguration is ridiculous in a scenario like 2008 when the voters clearly reject the current incumbent over a successor who wants to head in a different direction. For all the dissatisfaction, though, the Dude abides on Pennsylvania Avenue (I don't know about you but I take no comfort in that. It's no good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy ...), and any new policy will have to wait. Meanwhile, the world suffers and the situation deteriorates ...
Yes, he can
"Look what he's done." The reaction of Colin Powell, and others, to the election of Barack Obama as the putative 44th President on November 4 sums up my own feelings. I never thought to live to see the day that the US would elect a black man to the Presidency. A day when it would start to atone for the stain on its ideals that the era of slavery, and the following hundred years of exclusion and discrimination, represented. A day when the society, which preaches liberty, equality and inclusiveness, yet enslaved, and later excluded, people solely on the basis of the amount of melanin in their skin, would become mature enough to put an African-American in the White House. But, for me, the day was a lot more than that, no matter how historical those events were. (It may be one of those moments that Mark referred to a few issues back: the moments in history where we say, "I remember what I was doing when I first heard that!" For me, however, the truly pivotal moment had been earlier, when Hillary Clinton moved, and the Democratic National Convention approved by acclamation, the nomination of a black man to be the head of a major party's ticket. I was in the Press Council office, surfing the Net for news, when that happened, and I choked up because I was so moved by the implications of the nomination. In a way, the general election lacked a little because it had become clear weeks before who would win.)
For an aficionado of elections, it was that the nature of the Obama campaign that made the greatest impression. Fronted by the Man, and headed by manager David Plouffe, gurus David Axelrod and Steve Hildebrand, communications boss Robert Gibbs and speechwriter Jon Favreau (no relation to the actor/director of the same name), the campaign team incredibly remained intact, from the campaign launch in February 2007 (in Springfield, Illinois (Abraham Lincoln's city), referencing Lincoln, Illinois' only previous resident President, throughout the speech, as he would during the campaign and again in the acceptance speech he gave on November 4 in Chicago), through the primaries and caucuses, and the general election itself. And its campaign messages (slogans like "Change you can believe in" and "Yes, we can", as well as the underlying themes laid out in Springfield, "That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people" and ",,, that there is power in hope") never varied. In terms of the nuts and bolts of campaigning and winning elections, Team Obama did everything right. Axelrod outlined to reporters well before the first caucus in Iowa the strategy for victory, and the tactics for the primaries and for the general election. They stuck to the game plan, and Axelrod's predictions for the outcomes of individual contests in the pre-selection process were eerily accurate. Later, faced with the most formidable opponent that the Republicans could muster, they stayed on message through September and October, even when they had a dip in their polling numbers. In the end, as Axelrod said he would, Obama fought the election on Republican soil (states won by Bush in 2000 and 2004), to win states that Democrats had all but written off, because he saw the country as "not a collection of red states and blue states but as the United States" - another Lincolnesque echo, stressing the importance of the union. Given all the handicaps that presented themselves to a young, relatively inexperienced, black politician from the mid-west, with little administrative experience and a minor legislative background, the size of the victory was an amazing achievement (it looks like he's won the popular vote 53 per cent - 46 per cent, and will have 365 votes in the Electoral College to McCain's 173). For that, Obama, Plouffe, Axelrod, Hildebrand, Gibbs, Favreau, and all their largely nameless elves and fairies, deserve great praise.
The breadth of that victory, in so many regions of the US, relied on the great "ground game" played by the Obama campaign. The team's efforts in recruiting the mainly young, and always enthusiastic, workers in every state was made obvious by the fact that Obama won every Caucus state in the primary season. When it came to the general election, they already had the personnel infrastructure to maximise the turn-out of Obama voters. But he did not do this in isolation. His strategy built on the "50-state strategy" brought to the Democrats in 2005-2006 by Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean. After the 2004 election, there was a sense of despair among many local organisers, a despair that was partly responsible for the establishment of a network of operatives, corresponding over the Internet, in what has become known as "Netroots". This group helped push Dean into the chairmanship and then supported his contention that the party needed to compete everywhere in the US, not just in the "blue" states. This strategy paid dividends in the 2006 mid-term elections, when the Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives and, with the support of two independents, a majority in the Senate. In 2008, the strategy proved successful again, with the Party winning at least 7 further Senate (there remain a recount in Minnesota and a run-off election in Georgia to come) and 20 House seats, to give them overwhelming majorities in both houses of the Congress. Obama's ground game was in sync with the Netroots network and had similar aims: to forge a Democrat majority by eating into Republican turf.
And that's how he did it.
It must be said that he was assisted by the unbelievable (given his experience and the help he had) incompetence of John McCain's campaign ...
No, he couldn't
It's amazing how quickly the mythology of elections takes root. In modern times, when political journalists tend to write with a single viewpoint, feeding off each other, the speed of such myth-making is increased. In Australia, such myths include the belief that Howard lost in 1987 because of the Bjelke-Petersen insurgency, when in truth he lost because Keating destroyed the credibility of his tax proposal. In the US, the myth of the 1960 election - Kennedy won because Richard Daley voted the Chicago graveyards (in fact JFK would have won even without Illinois) - is among the most prevalent.
The myth of the 2008 election is that Obama had "the wind at his back". The agreed version is: there was a deeply unpopular president, two unwinnable wars, an economic meltdown and a compliant media that, added together, made it easy for Obama and hard for McCain. But this summary is both facile and inaccurate. First, the Democrat-controlled Congress was just as unpopular as W, but the Democrats still increased their majorities. The wars are indeed unpopular, particularly the Iraq adventure, but the conduct of the wars was not an issue that decided the preference for most voters. The economic meltdown was a fact of the campaign but ... it was foreseeable, yet McCain made no preparation for dealing properly with it; and it was a question a good Republican campaign would have exploited. As for the media being "in the tank" for Obama: "Which media?" McCain won the nomination because he courted the press early on; then, in the general election, he neglected it, kicking journalists off his bus and not dealing directly with them. Nonetheless he had the strong support of a number of media outlets, including Fox News and The New York Post, as well as the conservative radio shock jocks. The combination of The Drudge Report, Fox News, talk-back radio and conservative journals and newspapers meant that he was able easily to promulgate his negative campaign. The fact that much of the media accurately reported that McCain's campaign was largely negative, and occasionally riven with dissent, and that they reported that his campaign made many more goofs than Obama's, is not a symptom of media bias, but a reflection of the realities of the two different campaigns. Similarly, the fact that the comedy shows had much more fun with McCain and Palin than they did with Obama and Biden is a reflection of the reality that the Republican ticket provided much more ammunition.
McCain should have had the wind at his back. McCain, with thirty years of experience and leadership, was faced with a young, black, inexperienced politician, with questionable connections, and a very liberal voting record. It was a time of crisis when the country was looking for calmness and reassurance, and for a steady hand to take the reins. The McCain of 2000 would have eaten this up. Even before Obama had cemented the nomination McCain should have established himself as the centrist, acceptable to all time zones, with the ability to reach across the aisle and deal with a crisis like the one that emerged during the campaign. But he didn't, and he had blown the centrist identity well before Lehmann Brothers collapsed. He was no longer the McCain we knew. Take immigration as an issue: McCain has always been seen as pro-immigrant; he comes from Arizona, with a huge Hispanic population, and he has always won that vote. Yet very early, on this issue as with many others, he veered to the right, adopting a stance very close to Bush's. As a result of which Obama won 67% of the Hispanic vote, enough to consolidate wins in New Mexico, Nevada and Florida, and even threaten McCain in Arizona.
McCain won his party's nomination well before Obama won his. He had several months, while Obama and Hillary were tearing each other apart, to establish himself as the sensible choice for independents. In that period he really did nothing and he let the Democrats control news cycle after news cycle. In fact he did less than nothing: he stopped briefing the press and talking directly to the reporters following him (and he didn't ever resume the sort of direct and informal contact that was a hallmark of his 2000 and 2008 primary campaigns). He didn't properly establish his economic credentials nor separate himself from W on economic issues. In that period, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac flopped, so the first signs of the economic tsunami were there. He did nothing. He let the Democrats tie him to the Shrub. It was not until the third debate - three weeks before the election - that he finally enunciated the best line of his campaign, "I am not George Bush. If you wanted to run against George Bush, you should have nominated four years ago". By then it was too late. His campaign was unfocussed, sending out conflicting messages - and overwhelmingly angry and negative ones at that. Nothing in his stump speeches, nor in his ads, communicated the Mac of 2000. The campaign jumped from one accusation against Obama to the next without ever really settling on a single message - or giving the voters a reason to vote for McCain-Palin, rather than against Obama-Biden. His choice of Vice President reinforced this lack of focus. Sarah Palin may have played well to the conservative base but it was the wrong signal for the independents and blue collar Democrats whom he needed to win. There were a number of better choices, including the governors of Minnesota and Florida, who might have helped win electoral-college votes in their own regions and apeealed to the centre, where the election was decided. (It was the choice of Palin that was wrong, in what it said about McCain's judgment, not the woman herself. Sarah Palin was not the reason John McCain lost in 2008. On the other hand, given her antediluvian views, she would be the wrong candidate for 2012 - or any year.)
The final straw was his reaction to the economic crisis. His first reaction was to say that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. He then decided to suspend his campaign and return to Washington to help solve the crisis, telling David Letterman that "the economy was cratering". But he neither went immediately nor contributed significantly to the President's or the Congress's response. Barack Obama, whose campaign was strong in its quick reaction to events, had spot-on reaction to McCain's confusion. In a line delivered in Florida on September 19 that NBC called one of the best in the campaign, allowing him to frame the race, Obama said:
"I think it's a pretty clear that Senator McCain is a little panicked right now. At this point, he seems to be willing to say anything or do anything or change any position or violate any principle to try and win this election, and I've got to say it's kind of sad to see. That's not the politics we need."
McCain's subsequent behavior, including his angry over-reactions during the debates, his use of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, a creepy-looking unlicensed handyman from Toledo, his inappropriate laughter during speeches, his bouts of memory lapse and his stumbling diction during speeches, reinforced the view that McCain 2008 wasn't up to the job. Had he, even for a week or two, been the John McCain that showed up on election night to concede with style, grace and humility, he might just have won the election instead of losing it.
Perhaps it was that he was too old; perhaps he was badly advised by his team. Whatever the reason, it was not a wind at Obama's back that won him the election. There was no conspiring of events that ruined McCain's chances in 2008. It was the failure of Team McCain to catch the wind at its back, to exploit the advantages it had in its candidate and the times, that led him to defeat.
The rest of the election
Mea culpa. My prediction of 320 electoral-college votes for Obama turned out to be conservative. In my defence, the prediction was made a month out from the election and I thought it courageous at the time. The weekend before the election I publicly revised the estimate (at Stephen Gamble's 40th birthday) to "between 335 and 353", but even that underestimated the final outcome. I stuck throughout to my view that the Obamacons would come out in force for their man but that the Republican base would be less enthusiastic for McCain. Voting figures show that registered Democrat voting increased from 2004 while fewer registered Republican voters bothered this time. Other Exit Poll data are interesting as well:
Males (47 per cent): Obama 49 per cent; McCain 48 per cent; other 3 per cent
Females (53 per cent): Obama 56 per cent; McCain 43 per cent; other 1 per cent
Aged 18-29 (18 per cent): Obama 66 per cent; McCain 32 per cent; other 2 per cent
Aged 30-44 (29 per cent): Obama 52 per cent; McCain 46 per cent; other 2 per cent
Aged 45-64 (37 per cent): Obama 50 per cent; McCain 49 per cent; other 1 per cent
Aged 65 and Older: (16 per cent) Obama 45 per cent; McCain 53 per cent; other 2 per cent
"White" (74 per cent): Obama 43 per cent; McCain 55 per cent; other 2 per cent
"African-American" (13 per cent): Obama 95 per cent; McCain 4 per cent; other 1 per cent
"Latino" (9 per cent): Obama 67 per cent; McCain 31 per cent; other 2 per cent
"Asian" (2 per cent): Obama 62 per cent; McCain 35 per cent; other 3 per cent
Other ethnicity (3 per cent): Obama 66 per cent; McCain 31 per cent; other 3 per cent
Oratory returns. Obama's speeches were a highlight, and props to Jon Favreau (no, the other one) for that. Obama's March 18 speech in Philadelphia in which he addressed the issue of "race" in the USAmerican experience was the one that alerted me to the probability that he would win - and to the desirability that he should win. That led me to his launch speech of February 9, 2007, in Springfield, Ill, with its Lincoln references. I love a couple of his recurrent stump speeches: any of his "Yes, we can" speeches or the ones that reference the refrain "Fired up! Ready to go!" His acceptance speech at the Denver Convention echoed many of the themes from Springfield and from Philadelphia. His "closing argument" at Canton, Ohio, a week before the election, reiterated the main ideas and presaged the acceptance speech with its "Yes, we can" peroration. One of McCain's real problems was that he could never match the rhetoric and, therefore, never match the promise Obama represented.
The Great Schlep was one of the great yarns. The idea of film director Mike Binder and others, promoted through the Intertubes by a viral video featuring Sarah Silverman (she of the "I'm Fucking Matt Damon" song), the great schlep asked Jewish kids to contact their retired relatives in Florida, preferably by personal visit, or alternatively by phone, to urge them (and all their retired mates) to vote for Obama. In Yiddish, a schlep is an onerous journey, so the title was both accurate and ironic. The carrot was a visit from the grandkids; the stick was the withholding of further visits. This was a successful campaign that saw schleppers like Binder not only talking to Bubbe and Zaide but to all their friends in the same retirement village. Did it work? For all the rumors that Obama was Muslim, or anti-Israel, or just a schvartzer, he won the Jewish vote 78 per cent-21 per cent, which is 4 per cent better than John Kerry did.
The West Wing references. The election episode of The West Wing includes the death of Leo McGarry. Fortunately life did not imitate art in this case. Nonetheless it is sad to note that in the days immediately before the election Obama lost his grandmother, "Toot", and the Campaign Manager of his Nevada campaign had a massive heart attack and died.
On the other hand, some of the scuttlebutt emerging from the campaign makes clear that the Santos character was, in part, based on Barack Obama. So some of the coincidences are not so coincidental. When plotting out the last two seasons, the writers, particularly Eli Attie, spoke to David Axelrod about Obama, then a newly minted US Senator, about how Obama might react to a presidential run earlier rather than later. And Lawrence O'Donnell Jr, one of the series' producers, says that Arnie Vinick was based on the McCain of 2000. So that explains it. But how do you explain that Rahm Emanuel, the aide to Bill Clinton on whom the character Josh Lyman was based, is to be the chief of staff to President Obama - the same role that Josh Lyman performs for President Matthew Santos.
And, in one final act of reality imitating art: Obama and McCain met after the election, in the same way that Santos and Vinick did - although I do not believe there was an offer of Secretary of State in the meeting in Chicago this year.
William Ayers. There, but for the grace of god ... In 1968 I was Vice Chairman of the Sydney University branch of Students for a Democratic Society. SDS was the archetypal 'new left' group, pushing for radical change in society based on the ideals of the Port Huron Statement. In the late 1960s, in the US, an even more radical element broke away from SDS to form the Weathermen, later the Weather Underground, which carried out violent protest, including bombing unoccupied government buildings, in furtherance of their aims. Bill Ayers was one of those - going figuratively underground, adopting a series of false identities in his flight from authorities. Charges against him were dropped in the mid-1970s and he came back above ground to establish a career as an educator. Fortunately, I went by a different route towards establishing my career as an educator. Influenced by Gandhi, my actions were always non-violent, even if provocative. I left SDS in 1969 as when my worldview started to differ radically from the group's and, as a result, I was never mentioned in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Strange debate. In the first of the presidential debates between McCain and Obama, the theme was foreign affairs. After a number of questions about the then emerging economic crisis, there were the questions for the candidates on matters foreign, and every one of them addressed a nation inimical to the US or where there was a current conflict involving the US. Not a single question on relations with friendly countries. Not one on Western Europe or APEC or the Americas or free trade agreements or even relations with trading partners like Japan and the Republic of Korea. Does this result from some form of SWOT analysis that sees American foreign relations as all threats and no opportunities, or is it presaging a new era of American isolationism?
My favorite bit of Americana. The nastiest story in the last week of the campaign was that Barack Obama intended to ban short-sleeved shirts and singlets. I know this thanks to a poster on a conservative blog who said:
Mr. Obama's better history is in sharp contrast to what our founding fathers and framers of the Constitution had in mind. In fact he is anti-constitution as he seeks to change it. Beware all, free speech and the right to bare arms will soon disappear. His better history is the government having control over our lives and keeping more of what we earn to redistribute to those who don't ear [sic] ... [Emphasis added]
What pissed me off. The myth of American exceptionalism was apparent in the concession speech of John McCain and the acceptance speech of Barack Obama. There is nothing exceptional in the American experience that is not replicated in the history of most comparable Anglophone democracies - except for the stain of slavery, the continued interpretation of the Second Amendment as a right to private gun ownership and the dangerous prevalence of the worst of Christian fundamentalism, including anti-abortion and creationist positions. The idea that the US alone believes in egalitarianism or the ability of the poor to rise to positions of power or the provision of opportunity for all is a peculiar, and not very attractive, American trait. How the Canadians have put up with this for 220 years without invading is beyond me?
Five guys named Joe. I keep trying to fit the 2008 election to the Jerry Bresler classic jazz number that Joe Jackson made famous again, "Five Guys Named Moe":
One guy ... big Joe (Biden)
Two guys ... little big Joe (Lieberman)
Three guys ... four-eyed Joe (Madden, Tampa Bay Rays' Manager)
Four guys ... no Joe (six-pack)
Five guys ... eat Joe (the Plumber)
Five little guys named Joe
And then there was Joe McCain, whom the campaign put a kibosh on after he made false 911 calls. He should be in there somewhere.
First written: November 2008
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