With the recent appointment of Steven Schmidt and several other staffers to the highest levels of the McCain campaign, the political protégés of Karl Rove have now taken almost complete control. As a result Rove’s basic political strategy has been elevated to the core approach of the campaign.
At its heart, Karl Rove’s approach for the last 20 years has been an essentially class-based attack on Democrats – one that portrays them as representing an out-of-touch, educated elite who have little in common with average Americans. In this strategy, individual Democrats are not simply wrong about specific issues; their errors all arise from deep, pathological defects in their basic values and character.
This general strategy can be traced back to the campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. But one of Rove’s distinct additions was to recognize that attacks on a candidates’ character must be psychologically plausible – they must be fine-tuned to exploit weaknesses the opposing candidate actually appears to reflect in his behavior.
In this regard, Rove has always had an exceptionally sinister aptitude (one that is reminiscent of Hannibal Lector’s perverse but penetrating form of psychological insight) for being able to recognize subtle human weaknesses and frailties. For example, although Al Gore and John Kerry were both products of relatively advantaged, prep school environments and were clearly not working class “ordinary guys”, they were nonetheless quite distinct. On the one hand Gore was vulnerable to being portrayed as somewhat pompous, self-important and egotistic. Kerry, in contrast, invited the caricature of being a long-winded, detached, emotionally remote New England Yankee. The overall class-based frame worked for both men, but the political hit-man’s art lay in recognizing and exploiting the subtle variations between them.
Obama presents an even more complex challenge. Although meditative, professorial, articulate and elegant, he nonetheless does not fit the image of a typical left-wing college professor (or, for that matter, of a Black militant, a well-to-do New York limousine liberal or corrupt Chicago pol).
The solution the Rove team developed, only days after taking control of the McCain campaign, was to portray Obama as a resident of the rarified world of the “Hollywood movie star liberals” – a pampered universe of exclusive health and exercise clubs, expensive hotel suites and fancy bottled water. The implication was that, like other Hollywood stars, Obama must be “self-infatuated and effete” or “vain and out of touch” or “effete, elite and equivocal” – in short, a weak and vain man without real character; a male fashion model living a movie stars’ life and not the real life of ordinary Americans.
Democratic Strategist
With the Summer Olympics opening ceremony on tap for tomorrow, it’s obvious by now that the hoary tradition of viewing August, and particularly Olympic Augusts, as “down-time” for presidential campaigns has been abandoned, as Carrie Budoff Brown explained in The Politico yesterday. Both campaigns (first Obama, then McCain) have made heavy media buys for NBC’s broadcast and cable coverage of the Games. While Obama will personally take the first week of the Olympics off for a vacation, his campaign won’t miss a beat, and McCain will continue to hit the trail throughout August.
The idea of an “Olympic Hiaitus” probably died once and for all four years ago, when the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry–considered by many Democrats to have been the pivotal moment in the entire general election–broke out in the middle of the Games.
The big remaining question is whether either candidate will defy the old CW to the extent of announcing vice presidential selections during the Olympics. Heavy rumors that either or both would move on this front prior to the Opening Ceremony have not, obviously, proved accurate. The Olympics don’t end until the day before the Democratic Convention, and only four days separate the Denver gathering from the Republican Convention in the Twin Cities. So the odds have significantly increased that Obama and/or McCain will announce their veeps during the Conventions themselves–an ancient tradition that has been largely abandoned by both parties after 1988, on the theory that a pre-convention announcement will earn “bonus” media attention and avoid distractions from the Main Event.
Still, I wouldn’t be too shocked if either or both candidates (and McCain appears to have decided to let Obama “go first”) unveiled the Veep during the abandoned “Olympic Hiaitus.” For one thing, the theory that you need unobstructed media attention for the Veep announcement is based on the assumption that the choice will be an unambiguous positive development. It’s pretty obvious by now that the most likely options for both parties are vulnerable to reactions of disappointment, either because they are considered underwhelming safe-and-sound figures (e.g., Evan Bayh for Obama, Rob Portman for McCain), or because some element of the party faithful will react poorly. In Obama’s case, any Veep other than the exceedingly improbable Hillary Clinton will generate some heartburn among the HRC supporters who will be heavily represented at the Convention. Veep possibilities like Tim Kaine or Sam Nunn could produce an ideological backlash. And McCain is walking a tightline among GOP conservatives who view his Veep selection as a critical indicator of the party’s future direction, particularly on limus test issues like abortion.
If I’m right about that, then it makes abundant sense for both candidates to get the Veep issue out of the way before the Conventions, if only to let the inevitable grumbling subside. And a mid-Olympics announcement that gets less than total attention from Games-watching voters or vacation-going political reporters might not be a bad thing, either. We’ll see soon enough.
Today Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics conducts another of his impressive county-level analyses of a swing state, in this case Pennsylvania.
His bottom line is that the Keystone State has maintained a very consistent Democratic advantage (compared to the national vote) of about 4 percentage points over the last four decades, despite internal shifts. Basically, growth of the Democratic vote percentage in Philadelphia and its closer suburbs has been offset by a Republican trend in western PA, and the Philly exurbs. Cost identifies northeast PA (where Obama did very poorly in the primary) as an opportunity area for McCain, and the Philly exurbs as one for Obama.
Cost does not get into another X-factor: the astonishing pro-Democratic trend in voter registration in PA since 2004, a net shift of 486,000 votes, according to a recent study by Rhodes Cook. Ds now enjoy a party-registration plurality in the state of more than a million votes.
All in all, it’s hard to imagine Obama losing PA if he’s running even nationally.
As the McCain campaign has rolled out its new, “Karl Rove style” personal attack on Barack Obama, Democrats have begun to feel a very familiar sense of frustration.
On the one hand, for many Democrats the “high road” taken by the Barack Obama campaign in replying to the attacks until several days ago did not seem adequately aggressive. At the same time, the DNC and other third party Democratic attacks on McCain’s close financial ties to oil companies and other lobbyists and his subservience to the policies of the Bush administration seem somehow to be glancing blows that do less damage to his personal image than do his attacks on Obama.
There is a reason for this. One fundamental element of the Karl Rove approach is to focus the most visceral and aggressive attacks on the opposing candidate’s character and personality rather than his policies. The recent Democratic attacks on McCain criticize, sometimes very bitterly, his positions and actions, but the Republican attacks on Obama are directly aimed at impugning his character.
In the past, Democrats often felt that focusing one’s attacks on an opposing candidates’ character was inappropriate – that politics should be about issues and policies, not personalities. But repeated muggings by the Rove Republicans have made many, if not most, Democrats now quite willing to respond to personal attacks in whatever way seems required.
The more difficult problem is that McCain is not, at first glance, an easy target for attacks on his character. His youthful military experience as a pilot and POW and his well-cultivated media reputation as an occasional “maverick” in the 80’s and 90’s present no obvious vulnerabilities. Current characterizations of him as old, ill-tempered, easily flustered and prone to blundering, while certainly true, are also essentially trivial. Comparing McCain to “The Simpsons’” Mr. Burns or to a clichéd grouchy grandpa simply has no meaningful political effect.
But, in fact, McCain is actually profoundly vulnerable to a powerful, aggressive and damaging attack on his character. McCain’s actions in recent weeks have provided compelling evidence for three genuinely disturbing propositions about his character, core values and integrity.
1. That John McCain has become desperate to win this election and is willing to sacrifice his deepest principles and his personal honor in order to do it
2. That the John McCain we see today is only a pale, diminished shadow of the man he once was in his early years.
3. That John McCain is allowing men he once despised and held in complete contempt to manipulate him and tell him what to do – to literally put words in his mouth and tell him what to say.
At first glance these statements are so strong that they sound almost defamatory. But each is supported by McCain’s recent actions (as described below) and they fit together into a single coherent narrative of ambition overcoming integrity and moral character.
Here is how this narrative can be presented in the format of a typical 45-60 second TV spot
David Brooks’ New York Times column yesterday riffed extensively on a familiar theme in anti-Obama polemics: his status as a “soujourner” who’s wandered through an extraordinary life without putting down the sort of roots in any community or point of view that voters can recognize or identify with.
Salon’s Joan Walsh published a sound rebuttal of Brooks’ suggestion that successful American politicians are those who are unambiguously rooted in a clearly defined geographical, cultural, or temperamental mileiu. She cites John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and most of all, the synthetic cowboy George W. Bush, as presidents with complex and often self-contradictory backgrounds that rival anything “rootless” or confounding about Barack Obama.
Walsh could have gone further, insofar as complicated people have been the rule more than the exception among residents of the White House.
There was Richard Nixon, whose entire career (as best documented by Rick Perlstein’s brilliant book Nixonland ) involved an endless ambivalence towards the elite circles he despised and longed to join. There was LBJ, who aside from the ambiguities involving his views on race and economics, was a pathologically domineering personality whose political ascent was based on playing the submissive son to a series of powerful father figures (FDR, Rayburn and Russell most notably). Even an ostensibly “simple” figure like Eisenhower was actually a master Machiavellian who deliberately cultivated the false image of a genial and apolitical national father-figure.
Herbert Hoover? This paragon of sturdy heartland conservative values spent much of his adult life roaming the globe as a do-gooding cosmopolitan. FDR? The very symbol of progressive principle was generally considered a supreme opportunist, and a bit of a conservative, well into his presidency. TR? Hard to imagine a more complicated figure shaped by vastly conflicting personal and ideological impulses. Wilson? A born-and-bred fanatic who ultimately became identified as the epitome of global liberalism.
And you can go all the way back to the Founding Fathers, typified by the slave-holding egalitarian Jefferson.
In the last century, Coolidge, Truman and Ford are about the only presidents who stand out as what-you-see-is-what-you-get figures completely rooted in a particular and familiar time, place and culture.
All in all, Barack Obama’s in fine company as an unusual man seeking the unusual power of the presidency in this unusual country. Tomorrow James Vega is planning to post a follow-up to today’s piece on defining John McCain, with suggestions on how Obama can best define himself. It’s in the context of our long history of exceptional political personalities–of sojourners in a sojourner nation–that these suggestions should be understood.
Eric Kleefield of TPM Election Central has the new Obama ad — now playing on gas pump video screens.
Target shoppers much prefer Obama, while McCain wins the Wal-mart crowd, according to John Zogby’s HuffPo post comparing various department store shopper’s political preferences — a survey which might actually prove useful for voter registration campaigns.
Speaking of Wal-Mart, in his AFL-CIO Now Blog, James Parks puts their voter intimidation/campaign to stop the Employeee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in perspective.
MoJo/CQ Politics scribe David Corn features an 8-point plan for an Obama victory — and it comes from a former editor of The National Review, no less.
Southern Political Report‘s ace Tom Baxter has an inside look at Jim Martin’s big win in the GA Democratic senatorial primary, and he explains why it boosts Obama’s hopes of winning GA’s 15 electoral votes.
Maureen Dowd has a good NYT column today, offering some perceptive insights about McCain’s Obama-envy and hypocricy.
Politico‘s Ben Smith reports on the 50-state Obama Voter Protection Program.
Paul Waldman makes the case at The American Prospect that Obama should name his cabinet now, as a way of cooling out those who will be unhappy about his vp choice and strengthening Democratic solidarity by showing diverse Dem factions will be well-represented in his administration.
Michael Connery has a revealing post at The Nation explaining the barriers that diminish youth voter turnout and some possible solutions.
Dem candidates and campaigns will find some good talking points about the ‘War on Terror’ in this Consortiumnews.com post by Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Eland discusses the new Rand Corporation report on U.S. anti-terrorism strategy.
It’s increasingly obvious that desperate Republicans are well on the way to convincing themselves that offshore oil drilling is some sort of heaven-sent electoral silver bullet. Check out this statement at RealClearPolitics by supply-side economic warhorse Lawrence Kudlow:
As Sen. John McCain and the GOP leadership nationalize the drill, drill, drill message, the Republican party might conceivably be riding a summer political rally. The question of offshore drilling, along with expanded domestic energy production, has suddenly become the biggest political and economic wedge issue of this election. Is there a Republican tsunami in the making?
You might dismiss this as a disposable comment from the peanut gallery, if it were not for the fact that conservative House Republicans are currently threatening to shut down the federal government (a tactic that didn’t work out too well for the GOP back in 1995) if Congress’ Democratic management doesn’t instantly facilitate a vote to lift the long-standing offshore drilling ban.
This conservatives’ excitement over the alleged power of the offshore drilling issue emanates from two public opinion data points that they assume are connected: polls showing significant majorities of the public favoring more offshore drilling, and John McCain’s rise to parity with Barack Obama in some national polls.
On the second point, there’s no concrete evidence I’ve seen indicating that McCain’s recent slow drift upward in tracking polls is primarily or even significantly attributable to the Drill Now! Drill Here! message.
And on the first point, polls have long shown that given a straight-up yes-or-no choice, Americans favor just about anything that will increase energy stocks, though promoting alternative energy sources typically rank first. A CNN poll last week showing big majorities for offshore drilling is often touted by Republicans as documenting the power of this issue. But that poll actually showed (as pointed out by TNR’s Eve Fairbanks) slight drops in support for offshore drilling during the course of the current GOP campaign. And getting to the substratum of the issue, the poll also indicated the public is split down the middle on the proposition that offshore drilling could have an immediate effect on gas prices.
The longstanding support of most Americans for a comprehensive energy strategy that includes all options helps explain why Barack Obama is making it clear he’s not an absolutist on domestic oil and gas exploration. But unlike some progressives, I don’t necessarily view that as a flip-flop or “surrender.” It’s long been a basic talking point among pro-environment Democrats that expanded domestic production of fossil fuels, where consistent with environmental needs, should be a part, albeit a small part, of any overall energy strategy.
The key point about the positioning of the two presidential candidates and the two parties on this issue is that Obama and Democrats consistently favor a balanced, alternatives-and-conservation-heavy approach, while McCain and Republicans are now going out of their way to signal that domestic oil and gas drilling are their overriding priorities. And that exposes them to a potentially lethal counter-attack.
The same CNN poll that conservatives are crowing about shows that 94% of Americans think that U.S. oil companies are a major (68%) or minor (26%) cause of rising gas prices. The Bush Administration is viewed as a major (54%) or minor (35%) cause of the problem by 89% of Americans. (“Democrats in Congress” are viewed as a major cause by 31%, and a minor cause by 45%).
It is very important that the Obama campaign and Democrats generally make the following points:
(1) McCain’s sudden championship of virtually unlimited offshore drilling represents a recent (June 2008) flip-flop conducted in close conjunction with an identical flip-flop by George W. Bush.
(2) This flip-flop was towards the maximum position of U.S. oil companies, now enjoying record profits, who immediately showered some of those profits into the campaign accounts of John McCain.
(3) There’s zero evidence that reversing bans on oil drilling offshore or in national wildlife reserves will have any immediate effect on gas prices, and 100% evidence that a oil-o-centric energy policy will perpetuate dependence on foreign-controlled oil markets and U.S. oil companies.
(4) McCain, Bush and the GOP continue to pursue not only bad and oil-company-driven energy policies, but bad and special-interest-driven policies on health care, housing, globalization, pensions, economic insecurity, public and private debt, and income inequality. And that’s just the domestic side of the ledger.
If Democrats relentlessly pursue this message, then it’s all to the good that Republicans have deluded themselves into thinking that oil drilling is the only domestic talking point they need. Let them continue to back themselves into this corner. Let the Kudlows of the world continue to make their Rube Goldberg arguments that oil market speculators (yet another target of public ire) will reward pro-drilling, pro-oil-company-profits policies with lower oil prices. Let conservatives continue to argue that perpetual semi-occupation of Iraq is necessary to protect the access of multinational oil companies to that country’s production. Let the GOP make itself the symbol of Congress’ futility by threatening to shut down the entire federal government until oil drilling is extended into sensitive areas affecting actual voters in specific parts of the country.
Give ’em enough rope, and Republicans will soon regret making Drill! Drill! Drill! their primary economic talking point in 2008.
As you probably know, demands by the United States that its forces and personnel be entirely exempt from Iraqi law has been a sticking-point in negotiations with Baghdad over a Status of Forces agreement to govern the U.S. presence in Iraq. But as the Progressive Policy Institute’s Jim Arkedis points out in a post at his fine new national security blog, allourmight.com, the problem also extends to private security contractors (PSCs), such as the famous private army run by the North Carolina-based company Blackwater Worldwide.
Arkedis unravels a new GAO report that seems to offer reassurance that PSCs are operating under the rule of law. But in the fine print, he discovers that PSCs continue to enjoy immunity from Iraqi law under an obscure order from the long-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority. Thus:
In laymen’s terms, nothing has changed – security contractors remain immune because the CPA order is considered Iraq law, and the CPA gave contractors a get-out-of-jail-free card in 2004.
Almost more disturbing is that the GAO leaves the distinct impression in the “highlights” that the situation is vastly improved. Most Congressional staffs only have time to read the executive summaries, and may never dig down to find the devil in the details.
When it comes to the challenge of restoring full Iraqi sovereignty, this is a devil indeed.
(Note: this is a portion of an item cross-posted from Beliefnet.com)
I’m less certain than Mara Vanderslice that John McCain’s recent pattern of decrying Barack Obama’s “messianism” is a deliberate effort to label him as the Antichrist. It’s not that I consider Team McCain incapable of “dog whistle” appeals to the Christian Right; their candidate has certainly mastered those dark arts in a variety of abstract references to his hatred of “judicial activism,” which to that audience means legalized abortion, gay partnership rights, and church-state separation. But unless John Hagee spent some time whispering in McCain’s ear during their brief public partnership, I wouldn’t guess he or his campaign advisors possess the kind of theological dexterity necessary to paint the 666 on Obama’s forehead. But maybe Mara’s right. We’ll see if McCain’s campaign continues using religiously-charged terms like “the anointed one” in references to their opponent.
The more obvious problem with McCain’s attacks on Obama’s charisma is simple hypocrisy. No recent presidential candidate in either party has done more to build a cult of personality around himself and his biography, from the arrogant assertion that he is uniquely a “straight-talker,” to the massive investment his campaigns past and present have made in the proposition that his courage and suffering as a POW should fully qualify him for the presidency and rebut any criticism. (Yes, I know he has a long record in Congress, but even many Republicans admit that record is something of an incoherent mess, particularly given his vast flip-flopping during the current campaign cycle).
McCain has also been an eager participant in the self-parodying WWRD (What Would Reagan Do?) idolatry so common among conservatives. And let’s don’t forget (which is easy to do given subsequent events) that during the brief moment of triumphalism before, during and after the invasion of Iraq, many conservatives engaged in an orgy of messianism about George W. Bush as a towering world-historical figure who was decisively and single-handedly smiting the forces of Islamofascism by deposing Saddam Hussein (another candidate for the Antichrist job in some Christian Right precincts) and creating a pro-American revolution throughout the Middle East and beyond.
One party’s “messianism” is clearly another’s “charisma.”
Over the weekend, Barack Obama’s campaign notified the Credentials Committee that he wanted Michigan and Florida to have full voting rights at the Democratic National Convention later this month.
This was a totally predictable move, based on a desire to heal wounds in those two states now that their voting status at the Convention has no bearing on the nominating contest.
But it’s still amazing to realize that it was just two months ago when this issue was making front page headlines and roiling the party with passionate arguments about fairness, representative government, and even equal voting rights. It seems like eons ago, doesn’t it?
By comparison, there’s nearly three months left before election day, with a host of important intervening events, most notably the conventions, the presidential debates, a vast array of paid media, and perhaps (at least on the Democratic side) the most impressive get-out-the-vote operation in electoral history. Those Democrats who are currently panicking over the close polls should calm down for a while. At least there’s no longer much risk of over-confidence for Obama, eh?
Getting back to the FL/MI issue, some party stalwarts are worried about the residual effect of the latest decision, according to the New York Times‘ Katherine Seelye:
Mr. Obama’s “request” to restore full voting strength to Florida and Michigan is likely to cause heartburn for party officials, who have struggled to maintain some authority over the primary calendar.
By granting Mr. Obama’s request, the party will essentially be giving a green light to other states to ignore the calendar next time because there will be no consequences.
Well, yeah, but remember this important fact about the calendar: If Obama wins in November, and escapes a major primary challenge in 2012, then he will be in a position to do whatever he wants to do to the prmary/caucus timetable, with “no consequences.” Indeed, it would represent one of those rare moments when major changes in the entire system for nominating Democratic presidential candidates could become entirely possible.
But if eons have passed since June, and we’re light years from November, then 2012 can be barely imagined.
