Liberty in America
columnist: rtbohan

Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
3 Tips for Obama

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Barack Obama appears headed for the Democratic nomination. To win in Novemeber he must avoid three mistakes

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by rtbohan
(Libertarian)
Thursday, May 15, 2008

Senator Barack Obama appears to be headed for the Democratic party's nomination for President, although Senator Hillary Clinton has not yet ended her campaign and continues to pull out all stops pursuing her (apparently lost) dream of being President.

While nothing is certain in politics (look at what happened to the "inevitable" nominee of November 2007) I write this article with the belief that the Democratic Party this year will nominate Senator Obama in August.  With a recession going on, an unpopular Republican President in office, and an unpopular war dragging on, the Democrats looke like favorites in the election.  But since the 1960s the Democrats have shown an uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Senator Obama does not want to be another in the long list of Democratic also-rans.

There are a number of things that might allow Obama to win the election.  If he is able to flesh out what he means by "change" he may develop a greater reason to vote for him than his personal appeal and his eloquence and overcome the problems of the primary season (Rev. Wright and all) and attract tremendous support.  John McCain may help him by showing some of the more unattractive aspects of his own personality, and may be too explicit on his program for a permanent war for world domination.  That is up to the two candidates

But Senator Obama and his campaign can lose the presidency even with the above advantages if they fall into any of the three mistakes that are currently being urged on them.  So I am offering the campaign the advice to avoid three critical dangers:  1.  The Appearance of Arrogance; 2,  The Big State Fallacy; 3.  The Clinton Plague.

1.  Avoid the Appearnce of Arrogance.  Nobody who announces to the public that he is the one person in the country best suited to be the Head of State, the Head of Government, and the Commander in Chief of the armed forces is a paragon of humility.  But Senator Obama and his campaign have done things, and continue to do things that allow his opponents to portray him as a particularly arrogant man.  This has injured him as the primaries run down, and it must be corrected if he is to win.

When Obama was still being regarded mostly as an oddity in the presidential race, a man who had been impressed by him started an Obama for President website.  It certainly was beneficial to the campaign.  When Obama won the Iowa caucuses and began to be considered a serious contender for the presidential nomination, his campaign sued to seize control of the website and the list of visitors to the site while it was independent.  They eventually did get control of the website but not the list.

The campaign team, like all campaign teams, had a not unreasonable purpose in seeking control of the site.  All professional campaigns teams worry about supporters who are not members of the campaign doing something to embarrass the candidate.  In this case, it was the campaign team which embarassed the candidate.

During the campaign in Maryland, the campaign team became worried that an independent effort in the Baltimore area to register young black people to register to vote might be seized on as an effort by Obama supporters to stuff the ballot box.  They sent a message to the group, which had nothing to do with the campaign, ORDERING them to stop.  The reaction of the registration group was to go to the press with the order and continue registering voters.

The candidate has himself to blame for some of the charges of arrogance.  The statement about the "bitterness" of the small town white voters who cling to their guns and their religion" has been overplayed, but cerainly  was one which should not have been made, and appears demeaning.  Of course, the voters ARE bitter.  They are bitter because they have had decades of politicians promising that things would get better if they voted for the right party, and they have had decades of disappointment as the candidates continued with the same failed policies.  They certainly have lost their faith in the government and politicians who promise "change" but never deliver.  To add what might be taken as a gratuitous insult was arrogant, and was probably an effort to cater to the prejudices of the audience he was addressing.

Since the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Senator Obama has announced that he in concentrating on the fall campaign and curring back on campaigning in the remaining primaries.  Although it seems likely that he will win the nomination, he does not have it yet and it is a rather arrogant gesture to tell the people who have not yet expressed themselves that their vote doesen't matter.  He skipped any campaigning in West Virginia because Senator Clinton appeared to have an insurmountable lead there.  He was right that he could not win the state, but he was unwise to slight it.  In the first place, while Senator Clinton campaigned extensively in West Virginia, she by passed the northern panhandle area entirely.  The Charleston Gazette (www.wvgazette.com)  expressed the opinion that this was a wise move on her part, since people there held the Clinton administration responsible for the loss of the steel industry with its high paying jobs.  A visit to that area might not have prevented the loss of the primary, but might have avoided the embarrassingly high margin.

Instead of West Virginia, Senator Obama went to Oregon, where he told his supporters that Senator Clinton might carry the state, but it did not matter.  In effect, he was telling his supporters that their vote did not matter, instead of encouraging them to get the highest possible vote for him

My grandfather, who was active in small town politics in the first half of the twentieth century had a rule, which my mother passed on to me: "Every time you offend one person you lose ten votes."  Today, with the media playing "Gotcha" and You Tube blogs publishing your every move and misstatement, the number of lost votes increases exponentially.

2.  Avoid the Big State Fallacy.  In 1960, Richard Nixon promised in his acceptance speech for the nomination to campaign in person in all fifty states of the United States. It was a bold promise, and one which appeared to embarrass the Democrats because in 1960 the Republican campaign funds far exceeded the Denicraatuc funds.  He knew that Kennedy could not mount this kind of campaign.

It seemed like a good gimick at the time he announced.Unfortunately, Nixon became  ill in the middle of the campaign season, shortening his campaigning time by weeks.  Since the promise to visit all fifty states was a promise Nixon was uncharacteristically determined to keep, he spent the week before the election campaigning in Alaska, while Kennedy was revisiting some of the larger states.  On election day Kennedy captured a small majority of the electoral vote.  The Democrats developed a dislike for carrying small states, although in 1960 they had lost a number of the large states and achieved their electoral victory with the help of both small and large states.

The large state strategy appears to have been adopted by the Democrats at the urging of Bill Clinton, who claims that this is how he won two presidential elections.  One cannot blame the Democrats for listening to Clinton, since he is the first Democratic candidate since FDR to win two elections in a row.  But to accept the sagacity of his advice the party must ignore how he won those two elections.  He won in 1992 primarily because Ross Perot's independent candidacy siphoned more votes from Bush than Clinton, allowing Clinto ro win a majority of the electoral vote with a minority of the popular vote.  He won re-election in 1996 because the economy was enjoying an economic boom, fostered by the speculative bubble created by Alan Greenspan's lowering of interest rates, and not by any policy of Clinton.  That the Republicans nominated an almost uniquely unlikeable candidate, whom they had rejected twice before, certainly helped.

So Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton all followed the big state strategy in seeking election (for the first two) and seeking the nomination (for Senator Clinton).  And all three lost.  The Democrats this year appear to be doing better in fund raising than the Republicans in addition to their other advantages.  If Obama is the nominee and the campaign avoids the big state fallacy, the Party might actually win the election.

3.  Avoid the Plague of the Clintons.  At this point, without being disrespectful to Senator Clinton, who is after all a colleague in the Senate and a candidate who deserves high marks for her tenactiy, if nothing else, Obama he needs to do three things.

A.  Don't put Clinton on the Ticket.  Mario Cuomo, not a great advisor on presidential poliitics, is the latest to call for an Obama-Clinton ticket.  The media is hailing this as the dream ticket.  It is a dreamd only for the press, and they are excited about the prospect because they know that Obama and Clinton will get along like Eugene Field's Gingham Dog and Calico Cat, and destroy each other before the election. The media loves to cover disasters

It is certainly not Senator Clinton's dream.  Her current dream is to be nominated and elected this year.  Her secondary dream is for Obama to lose the election, in the hope that she will be "the ineviatable nominee" again in four years.

It is not Senator Obama's dream.  For him. putting Senator Clinton on the ticket must seem as intelligent and as likely as having a cancerous organ implanted in his body.  Having a running mate with more negatives than the presidential candidate is only advisable (as in the case of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew) if you regard it as insurance against assassination.

It is not the dream of Senator Clinton's supporters, except for the ones who tell you, "If Obama is elected President, he will be assassinated.  Americans won't stand for a black President".  It was in response to people like this that Clayton Powell disclaimed all interest in elective office.  Obama may be braver or have more faith in the American people, but he is not foolhardy.

B.  Don't help retire Senator Clinton's campaign debt. The website of National Public Radio (also known as The Voice of the Democratic Party) yesterday carried a story on its website called "How Will Clinton Resolve her campaign debt" (www.npr.org)  This story includes the strange sentence "Her campaign said nobdy is talking about it but Obama could ask his contributors to chip in, a gesture that would...promote...party unity."   Obviously the Clinton campaign is talking about it, and their lap dogs at NPR are passing it along.  One would hope that Obama and his staff ignore it.

It must be remembered that Clinton ran up her debt arguing that Obama was unelectable, dor reasons of race or class.  There is not reason that Obama should bail her out.  A group of Clinton contributore threatened to withhold all donations to any Democratic candidate at the national level if their candidate did not get the nomination.  Giving aid to Senator Clinton will not prevent the Senator and her campaign staff from providing smear research to the Republican candidate.  The debt is not the responsibility of Senator Obama or his supporters, and they would be foolish to take cognzance of it.  The Clinton's, of course, will use their own fund raising campaign to soak up as many potential donations as possible before the Party begins fund raising for the fall, but they will find some pressing need for fundraising in any case, as they did in 2000 and 2004.

3.  Don't ask the Clintons to campaign for you.  The media will, of course, seek them out for comment at various times, and that can't be helped.  But you should not give them free rein to speak for your candidacy or in your name.  Hillary and Bill made enough "misstatements" and enough embarrasing arguments in the primary campaign they wanted to win.  Who knows what they would do speaking for a candidate they still want passionately to see lose.

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2008 rtbohan, all rights reserved.
Published: Thursday, May 15, 2008
Last modified: Thursday, May 15, 2008

The views expressed in this article are those of rtbohan only and do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. rtbohan is solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.

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