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Tactics vs. Strategy
When the story of this election is written, I suspect that a lot of ink (or at least, electrons) will be spilled over what went wrong for McCain, and the mistakes of his campaign. To me, though, the biggest mistake is looking to be missing the point of a strong campaign.
In particular, I look at the negative campaigning. Both sides have engaged in it, of course -- most modern political campaigns do -- but it's been particularly relentless on the McCain side in recent months, almost abandoning positive ads in favor of negative ones. This seems to be driven by a conventional wisdom that negative ads win campaigns: that statement has been echoed repeatedly in recent months by the talking heads, and as far as I can tell the McCain campaign believes it. The problem is, it's wrong -- or at least, is only half the story.
The thing is, negative ads are often a very effective tactic, but they're not a strategy in and of themselves. When they're simply deployed without sufficient care, you get the effect that McCain is seeing (which is much the same as what happened in the Patrick/Healey debacle): the centrist voters get turned off by the negativity, without being convinced. When that happens, the negative ads become a net negative for you.
Negative ads *can* be very effective, but only when they are in service to a strategy, and that strategy always has to be defining your opponent. If you want to play hardball politics, much of the game is about painting two pictures: a vaguely fuzzy and warm one of you, and a sharply-defined dark one of the other side. To do that, you have to figure out what the voters *don't* want, and make a convincing case that this is what your opponent represents.
The Obama campaign has done this *much* more effectively than the McCain one has. Now partly, that's because they have a much easier sell: one of the most effective negative messages right now is "he's a conservative Republican", and that has the virtue of being unambiguously true. (Obviously, that's not a way to convince the conservative Republicans, but Obama's not going to win their votes anyway. The all-important center is currently more suspicious of the Republicans than they have been in decades.)
But mostly, it's been because McCain has handed them a picture on a silver platter. The original game plan for McCain was to paint this election as being about Experience. McCain clearly wins on that score, they hammered it early and often, and for a while it was working pretty well. But the past few months have seen Obama pull a very smooth disengage and riposte, changing it from Experience to Temperment -- generally related in peoples' emotions, but suddenly switching the advantage. When you look at Temperment instead, Obama has all the advantages that are usually associated with "old and experienced": he's thoughtful, cool-headed, methodical and hard to rattle. McCain, by contrast, has been acting like a stereotypical seventeen-year-old: impulsively changing his mind all the time, making impetuous decisions (the Palin pick is looking more and more like a gift to Obama), and generally looking testy and insecure.
Most importantly, that seems to be what people care about right now. McCain keeps trying to define Obama in terms of the last political war: trying to make him out to be some kind of socialist who hangs out with terrorists. But they're all half-truths, and what people *most* want right now is reassurance that their world isn't about to end -- and Obama is the candidate who has been painted as reassuring. In that light, McCain's attacks look more clumsy than scary, which just continues to play into Obama's hands and solidify his support.
(Admittedly, some of McCain's moves weren't half-bad -- the Joe the Plumber tactic was a good one at first. But in this, as so often in his campaign, they failed to pay attention to the details, and once the details came to light, they undermined the message. Failure to think the details through has been McCain's consistent Achilles heel.)
I won't quite say that Obama's campaign has been a master class in political strategy: they've made some real mistakes, and benefited from luck and timing. But in general, they've done a fine job of formulating a political strategy and sticking to its core, while being supple about refining the day-to-day details. Frankly, it's one of the reasons I've become so fond of Obama: if he's as good at diplomacy as he is at politics (and they are closely related skills), he should do well in many of the arenas a President must face...
In particular, I look at the negative campaigning. Both sides have engaged in it, of course -- most modern political campaigns do -- but it's been particularly relentless on the McCain side in recent months, almost abandoning positive ads in favor of negative ones. This seems to be driven by a conventional wisdom that negative ads win campaigns: that statement has been echoed repeatedly in recent months by the talking heads, and as far as I can tell the McCain campaign believes it. The problem is, it's wrong -- or at least, is only half the story.
The thing is, negative ads are often a very effective tactic, but they're not a strategy in and of themselves. When they're simply deployed without sufficient care, you get the effect that McCain is seeing (which is much the same as what happened in the Patrick/Healey debacle): the centrist voters get turned off by the negativity, without being convinced. When that happens, the negative ads become a net negative for you.
Negative ads *can* be very effective, but only when they are in service to a strategy, and that strategy always has to be defining your opponent. If you want to play hardball politics, much of the game is about painting two pictures: a vaguely fuzzy and warm one of you, and a sharply-defined dark one of the other side. To do that, you have to figure out what the voters *don't* want, and make a convincing case that this is what your opponent represents.
The Obama campaign has done this *much* more effectively than the McCain one has. Now partly, that's because they have a much easier sell: one of the most effective negative messages right now is "he's a conservative Republican", and that has the virtue of being unambiguously true. (Obviously, that's not a way to convince the conservative Republicans, but Obama's not going to win their votes anyway. The all-important center is currently more suspicious of the Republicans than they have been in decades.)
But mostly, it's been because McCain has handed them a picture on a silver platter. The original game plan for McCain was to paint this election as being about Experience. McCain clearly wins on that score, they hammered it early and often, and for a while it was working pretty well. But the past few months have seen Obama pull a very smooth disengage and riposte, changing it from Experience to Temperment -- generally related in peoples' emotions, but suddenly switching the advantage. When you look at Temperment instead, Obama has all the advantages that are usually associated with "old and experienced": he's thoughtful, cool-headed, methodical and hard to rattle. McCain, by contrast, has been acting like a stereotypical seventeen-year-old: impulsively changing his mind all the time, making impetuous decisions (the Palin pick is looking more and more like a gift to Obama), and generally looking testy and insecure.
Most importantly, that seems to be what people care about right now. McCain keeps trying to define Obama in terms of the last political war: trying to make him out to be some kind of socialist who hangs out with terrorists. But they're all half-truths, and what people *most* want right now is reassurance that their world isn't about to end -- and Obama is the candidate who has been painted as reassuring. In that light, McCain's attacks look more clumsy than scary, which just continues to play into Obama's hands and solidify his support.
(Admittedly, some of McCain's moves weren't half-bad -- the Joe the Plumber tactic was a good one at first. But in this, as so often in his campaign, they failed to pay attention to the details, and once the details came to light, they undermined the message. Failure to think the details through has been McCain's consistent Achilles heel.)
I won't quite say that Obama's campaign has been a master class in political strategy: they've made some real mistakes, and benefited from luck and timing. But in general, they've done a fine job of formulating a political strategy and sticking to its core, while being supple about refining the day-to-day details. Frankly, it's one of the reasons I've become so fond of Obama: if he's as good at diplomacy as he is at politics (and they are closely related skills), he should do well in many of the arenas a President must face...
no subject
This. This right here.
I mean I agree with the rest of what you have written, but THIS is the core of it.
The current Administration has also failed to think the details through:
Afghanistan
Iraq
Katrina
Economy
Tax Cuts
Etc.
When McCain fails to think the details through, he reminds me alarmingly, of the current administration. And I can't be the only one thinking that.
no subject
Taking a centrist VP might have kept McCain more competitive.
A minor defense of the Palin choice
Re: A minor defense of the Palin choice
Also, I suspect that the real problem is that this helped him mostly in the states that he was going to win anyway (the deep-red ones), and mostly hurt him in the genuine swing states...
no subject
Obama secured his base, then turned to the center. McCain secured the center, then turned to the base.
This let Obama secure the center, too, while leaving his base no place viable to go.
I think they both "needed" to do what they did, but the order was telling.
The Republican base, over the last 16 years or so, has moved largely to the Right - and took the money and volunteers with them. Without their support, McCain would have gone no place at all. So he needed to turn to them.
no subject
I was watching some of the talking heads last night and heard an interesting counter to this. While many pundits believe that attack ads sway voters more than positive ads promoting a candidate, they were also saying that the candidate that is viewed as being more optimistic almost always wins. A tricky balancing act, that.
no subject
no subject
There's one important factor, a deep structural one, that's been undermining the McCain campaign from the outset, and the Palin pick is only a facet of it: the Republican party is currently deeply fractured. In order to secure the nomination, the candidate has to be acceptable to Religionist Right, which eliminated several of the other candidates: Giuliani (mayor of librul hommasexshul elite New York), Romney (LDS is not considered actually "Christian"), etc.
[Note: Although I don't understand exactly why Huckabee wasn't able to do better with this base and get a jump on McCain in the early stages.]
This filters out candidates who might be more appealing to the other sections of the GOP: fiscal conservatives, old-fashioned actual philosophical big-C Conservatives, banking interests. So whoever wins the primary then needs to tack to re-engage with those other factions. But McCain, or his strategists, were concerned with the lack of enthusiasm in the social-conservative base -- hence the Palin pick.
Obama's good luck was McCain's failure to properly vet Palin, or to accurately judge how she would be received by the rest of the GOP and the electorate's undecided middle. But it was the current fracturing of the GOP that both got the nomination for McCain and pushed him to pick someone like Palin.
So count the factionalism in the now-disintegrating GOP as a lucky break for Obama. And tick off the big financial implosion, coming on the heels of McCain's "fundamentals of the economy" remark as another lucky break. And ring up Palin's spectacular inability to provide any assurance whatsoever to most folks that she'd be even a semi-adequate VP.
Question: in those various ancient Japanese war treatises that everyone was reading a few years ago, wasn't there something about a good commander finding ways to make genius and good planning look like a series of "lucky breaks"?
no subject
Yep, this is definitely a major part of it: the election was the Democrats' to lose, to a substantial degree. I credit Obama for not falling prey to the usual errors that have helped the Democrats lose so many prior elections anyway. (Not that he's won yet, but he hasn't done anything stupid to *make* him lose.)
I really hope to see the Republicans dissolve into the in-fighting they so richly deserve after the election, and have to endure a while out in the wilderness. I'm by no means certain it will happen, but they're going to have to work hard to avoid it. And it's probably the only thing that will drag the party back towards the center again.
[Note: Although I don't understand exactly why Huckabee wasn't able to do better with this base and get a jump on McCain in the early stages.]
See "defining your opponent". From the very beginning, *everybody* else jumped on Huckabee, painting him as an extreme religious wingnut. Between that consistency and the fact that it's at least substantially true, that stuck. So he was the absolute *darling* of the extreme right, but everybody else perceived (correctly, I believe) that he would lose badly in the general election.
The thing is, you're correct about the fracturing, and the religious right isn't the only part that counts. The neo-cons are pretty powerful as well (although badly discredited by Iraq), and the libertarian pro-business wing still quite strong. Huckabee was great for the religious right, but terrible for the other two. Giuliani was the candidate of the neo-cons, and Romney of the libertarians. In the end, McCain got the nod because he was perceived as not being entirely part of *any* of the factions, while pandering heavily to all of them -- the classic compromise candidate.
Really, it's kind of a pity: aside from his excessive religious views, I quite like Huckabee. Of the Republican candidates, I think he is the most honest, has the best perspective, and may well be the smartest of the bunch -- he's the only one who is actually pleasant to watch in interviews. But he's an *overt* theocrat, and that's beyond the pale even for the US...