September 12, 2008

Dukakis, Kerry, Obama?

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In the spring of 2004 I attended a roundtable media discussion with John Kerry at his campaign headquarters. This was not long after Kerry had locked down the Democratic nomination. He was incoherent, droning on in an unorganized fashion about the mistakes of the Bush administration, and various programs he’d push for. There was no concise argument on why he should be elected, and not Bush.

He clearly felt he didn’t even need to make such an argument. It was obvious to Kerry that Bush was a failure. He seemed to be living in a kind of Democratic-liberal-Senate cocoon, assuming that its attitudes reflected those of the rest of the country – or at least, 51 percent of it.

As the campaign wore on, Kerry improved. But this basic, temperamental complacency followed him throughout. We had to wait until the first debate to hear him make a good argument against the Iraq war.

I hate to pile on Obama, as everyone is doing this week. But he seems to share this same temperament: that the blunderbuss attacks coming from the other side are absurd and irrelevant to the “real issues,” and thus unworthy of attention, except in rote “I will not be swiftboated” statements. And that the election will ratify what is already obvious to him, and to what he thinks is a majority of Americans.

Dukakis had the same problem. Remember this now-famous SNL sketch from 1988:

Diane Sawyer: You have fifty seconds left, Mr. Vice-President.

George Bush: Let me sum up. On track, stay the course. Thousand points of light.

Diane Sawyer: Governor Dukakis. Rebuttal?

Michael Dukakis: I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!

It’s amazing that Obama and his team of geniuses could look back at the campaigns of the past 20 years and not devise a strategy to deal with what they’re facing now. The Obama campaign is the proverbial aircraft carrier, under attack by a swarm of kamikazes.

Or, maybe Obama really is doubling down on boring and passive. The fundamentals still favor him. And the message of the McCain attacks – that Obama is rude, or something – doesn’t seem compelling, at least compared the GOP attacks on Dukakis or Kerry, which at least made semi-coherent arguments about leadership. (Dukakis was a down-the-line liberal running during a time of conservative ascendancy; Kerry was a creature of Washington who had trouble articulating clear positions.) It may be that Obama’s apparent complacency about dumb attacks is justified – that people won’t buy it this time, that the news cycle gyrations are less important than the political universe believes them to be. We’ll see.

 

June 4, 2008

McCain’s message entropy

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You can usually tell how successful a campaign is going to be by the coherence and consistency of its message, its rhetoric, what the candidate and campaign say each day. Campaigns are constantly fine-tuning this – the trail is just one long focus group, and you can tell what’s working and what’s not pretty easily. The more consistent the message, and the more coherent it is – in other words, the way everything (speeches, issue briefs, press releases, ads, imagery) fits together, pointing back to a few clear, central points – the more successful the candidate is going to be. This is Obama, at least so far.

You can also tell a candidate is having trouble when his message does not cohere, either because s/he cannot put the relevant ideas together into a coherent package, or because people don’t like what they hear, necessitating constant changes in an attempt to find something that resonates. This describes McCain (also, so far) whose speech last night wandered all over the place (he’s not seeking a third Bush term, Obama is inexperienced, the world is dangerous, McCain wants to reform government, etc.)

George H.W. Bush, interestingly, is the best exemplar of both message discipline and message entropy in recent political history. In 1988, he began pounding Michael Dukakis as a wacky liberal in June and kept on the same points until November. But four years later, he couldn’t make up his mind what was worst about Clinton – whether he was inexperienced, had done a terrible job in Arkansas, was corrupt, had avoided serving in Vietnam, or had protested the war “in a foreign land” (Britain). His attempts to portray himself as dependable leader (“the man behind the desk”) seemed similarly out of sync in the economic doldrums of that year.

 

May 4, 2008

The specter of 1988

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I covered the 1988 presidential campaign. I was in my 20s and had no idea what I was doing, though I did enjoy myself. And watching as the George H.W. Bush campaign turned it into a referendum on prison furloughs and the pledge of allegiance (the reductio ad absurdum being Bush’s visit to a flag factory), I learned some fundamental lessons about politics: Democrats must never be outflanked in the culture wars. A Democrat must never allow him/herself to be portrayed as less than 100 percent patriotic; must always express outrage at crime, even hypothetical ones; and never be photographed riding in a tank. (The coda being: Never allow yourself to be photographed in a flight suit. Politicians may control the military and exploit it symbolically or bureaucratically – but they shouldn’t literally cloak themselves in it.) The final lesson: at its highest levels, politics is most effective when reduced to the trivial and sentimental, to cultural hot buttons divorced from the actual functioning of government or the presidency.

But are these rules still in force today? With the exception of the tank/flight suit rule, I’m doubting it more and more. But 1988 won’t go away:

That year, the Republicans used the symbols of nationhood (notably, whether schoolchildren should be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance) to bludgeon the Democrats, challenge their patriotism and utterly redefine their nominee, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts.

The memory of that campaign — reinforced, for many, by the attacks on Senator John Kerry’s Vietnam war record in the 2004 election — haunts Democrats of a certain generation.

The 1988 campaign was, in many ways, the crucible that helped create Bill Clinton’s centrist philosophy and his fierce commitment to attack and counterattack, which drove the politics of the 1990s.

Things have changed. It’s the attitudes of the political class and the media that haven’t.

Unlike ’88, there are now some real issues before the country, and a record level of political engagement among Democrats, and, with conservatism in the ditch, a sense that some kind of political-cultural change is afoot. The main question now is not about the cultural resonance of, say, Obama’s absent flag pin. (It does have some.) It’s that much of the media is still stuck in 1988, and that 1988 itself has gained a kind of mythic resonance with the campaign press corps.

Back then, the press corps was a bit stunned at the success of such tactics (which were very self-consciously, almost ironically, employed by the otherwise temperamentally and politically moderate elder Bush). Today, by contrast, the media almost revels in it when the culture war’s long knives are drawn. There’s a weird bloodlust to it.

The media won’t give up its flag pins easily. The “1988 forever” bit of conventional wisdom is the cornerstone of the current campaign press sensibility. But by definition, the conventional wisdom is, and must be, several beats behind what’s actually happening.

 

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