There is a saying that you shouldn’t bring a knife to a gunfight unless you want to end up in the morgue. So, too, it is with presidential elections. And that is the fundamental drama yet to be played out in the election battle between John McCain and Barrack Obama.
We know that the Republicans have no problem pulling out the heavy artillery, and will go for the kill every time. What we don’t know is whether Obama and the Dems have the cajones to beat the schoolyard bully at his (her) own game.
Because of this, what would otherwise be a one-sided victory by Obama over McCain is instead (currently) fighting to a draw.
Think about it. Despite a cratering economy, an unfathomably expensive war with the wrong enemy in Iraq and a historically unpopular Republican president, McCain is still very much in the game. How can this be so?
Frank Rich, in Sunday’s New York Times, sums it well in the Op-Ed piece, ‘Truthiness Stages a Comeback:
“McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.”
So where does that leave us? There are two primary ways to win an election. One is to focus your efforts on ‘owning’ a well-defined constituent base, and then surgically targeting that base (via direct mail, geo-targeted ads, etc.).
The Republicans have mastered this approach by intersecting the binary interests of BIG business, STRONG military and CONSERVATIVE religious values advocates, and frankly it’s too late in the game for the Dems to define themselves so singularly (and effectively).
The other approach is to wrap yourself in popular sentiment and target your message accordingly. Bill Clinton’s poll-driven ‘I feel your pain’ mantra is the quintessential example of this approach played to perfection.
Ironically, Obama was well down the popular sentiment road with his populist ‘Change You Can Believe In’ message (since re-framed as ‘The Change We Need’) when the Republicans got smart and decided to co-opt the change message as their own.
What to do? Cue up the classic scene from ‘The Untouchables,’ where Sean Connery’s Jim Malone sermonizes mob fighting District Attorney, Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), as follows:
Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I'm saying is, what are you prepared to do?
Ness: Anything within the law.
Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they're not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.
Ness: I want to get Capone! I don't know how to do it.
Malone: You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way! And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?
Ness: I have sworn to capture this man with all legal powers at my disposal and I will do so.
Malone: Well, the Lord hates a coward. [jabs Ness with his hand, and Ness shakes it]
Malone: Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?
Ness: Yes.
Malone: Good, 'cause you just took one.
Ah, but isn’t such an approach yet another example of politics as usual? Doesn’t this undermine Obama’s message of change?
Well, maybe if campaigns were fought in isolation chambers, such analysis might hold. In the real world – of flesh and blood and human emotions – life is a complex bundle full of paradoxes. So get over it.
People want to elect someone that they identify with, that they ‘get’ at the gut level, someone who will fight for them. They don’t want an egghead, they don’t want an academic and they certainly don’t want a preacher…they want passion, and the best place to channel that passion right now is….anger!
Anger? Yes, anger at the party that has stolen our civil liberties, sat idly by as our 401Ks washed away, turned a blind eye to protecting our enlisted youth by fighting an unprovoked war – on the cheap no less – and basically, shit upon every bit of collective good will that our country had after 9/11.
And supreme anger at the former maverick who, for the past eight years, has abandoned every moral fiber of his leadership responsibilities and status as Mr. Straight Talk in the vain hope that he could become president. Anyone willing to exhaust a lifetime of personal currency on such a Faustian bargain has no right to lead his nation.
To frame the potency of such a message, Maureen Dowd, writing in The New York Times, imagines a conversation between Obama and Jed Bartlett (the fictional former president of TV’s West Wing) that goes like this:
OBAMA: The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?
BARTLET: Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.
OBAMA: What would you do?
BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!
For starters, it wouldn’t hurt to relentlessly, mercilessly remind people that the best proxy for understanding our current financial meltdown was the S&L crisis, whose cast of infamous ‘political insider’ characters were known as ‘The Keating Five.’ The most famous member of The Keating Five…was/is….John McCain.
So, Obama, what are you prepared to do?
UPDATE 1: In response to a clear turn by the McCain/Palin campaign to "go negative" in the final days and weeks of the election, Obama is FINALLY counter-punching, and launching a multimedia advertising/education campaign against McCain, drawing tight parallels to the current financial crisis and the S&L crisis where McCain was a member of The Keating Five. Check out Keating Economics for more detail (story first covered at Huffington Post).
Related Posts:
- Why Experience Matters: On Palin, Putin and Prudence.
- Rhetoric - Why it matters: Obama's acceptance speech and where free markets and government meet.
- Base motivations: The Matter of McCain v. Obama.
