September 21, 2008
I am delighted to welcome readers old and new to the first edition of TPJmagazine.us, the new format and totally re-designed website for The Political Junkies. I am very proud of the fact that it is my step-son Mark Newman, who has developed this elegant new site for us.
Mark is the President of consciousexpressions.com™, his own web design firm. He has not only given us a whole new look, he has also given us a locus with improved functionality, which will only get better as we move along in time and learn from both your experience and your input. I should note that Mark is also our new webmaster. And now to the subject at hand for today.
There is a long-standing lesson in American politics: He who controls the agenda wins the election. (I have addressed it over a long period of time on TPJ,) as for example at this column. Goldwater was the first modern Republican to recognize that if the Republicans, that is REAL, reactionary, right-wing Republicans, were ever to get power back like they had had before the New Deal, they were going to have to get control of the agenda, and then change it. From the time of the New Deal, even through the Eisenhower and Nixon Presidencies, the party differences were really over how much government intervention to engage in, not whether “government has a major role to play in our society, or not.”
In working this matter through, Barry Goldwater was the first modern Republican to recognize that one could never win by going after programs themselves, as long as they were generally popular or popular with some significant sector of the voting public. What was needed was going after what paid for the programs --- taxes. But of course one had to work out clever ways and means of separating taxes from the programs they paid for. It took the Republicans a while to figure out how to separate taxes from programs in the public mind, but they eventually did. “Proposition 13” in California, in 1978, marked the watershed in agenda control. It focused on “lowering taxes” (they happened to be the ones supporting the California education system, which has been going downhill steadily ever since) and was very cleverly pitched so as to separate the taxes from what they paid for.
The next step in agenda control was taken by Lee Atwater. He put personal attack at the center of the campaign plan, with the”Willie Horton” and “Pledge of Allegiance” ads against Dukakis. Karl Rove has turned the strategy into an art form for winning elections and has added organized cheating and lying. And so we come to McCain. He cannot win on the issues. The country for the most part hates Bush and what he has done to us over the last eight years. He can try to set himself up under the “maverick” label (and the media does play into it), but if he is forced to deal with the issues, there are truly few differences between him and Bush.
McCain’s new campaign manager, “Swift Boat Bullet” Steve Schmidt, knows this very well. He knows very well that to win he must get the agenda off the issues and onto personal characteristics, both of his opponent, Barack Obama himself, and of persons the public may be gulled into believing he is closely associated with, like Rev. Wright and Prof. Ayres. Yes, guilt-by-association is a major part of their get-control-of-the-agenda armamentarium too. Schmidt knows that the personal attack strategy has two very important elements.
First, of course, is the content of the attacks themselves. Second, and perhaps equally important is the use the attacks to get the media to focus on the content of the attacks, “fair/unfair,” “true/false.” This A) gets them repeated over and over again, whether true or not and B) uses very valuable airtime in which the attacks are discussed rather than the real issues in the election being discussed. The August McCain attack ads were further prime examples of this tactic, as are how Sarah Palin is being used.
How much time was spent discussing whether it was “fair” to link Sen. Obama with Spears and Hilton rather than discussing real policy differences between Obama and McCain? How much time was spent discussing whether the mainly false Corsi book was true or false? Further, the media then focus what the Obama campaign’s response is to the attacks is, then what the McCain campaign’s response to the response is, and so on and so forth. This leaves the real issues, well-known to TPJ readers, in the dust. This whole strategy is a variation of the old lawyer’s trick: “If you don’t have the law, argue the facts. If you don’t have the facts, argue the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law, argue ad hominem.” As long as Schmidt can keep the agenda on Obama’s person and away from McCain’s positions, he has a very good chance of winning.
An additional important element of the Atwater/Rove strategy for gaining control of the agenda is: “In response to criticisms/questions from your opponents and/or the media: Always attack; Never defend.” You can see this clearly in watching the McCain campaign’s response to criticism of or even questions about the Palin choice. For example, the population of Alaska is about 656,000. (By contrast, the population of the New York State county in which I live, Suffolk, one of the two on Long Island, is about 1,470,000.) So media interviewers try to raise questions about the Governor’s government experience with various Republican operatives. The whole focus of their response is not to defend her experience but to attack Obama’s by saying that she has been a Governor and before that a Mayor (of an Alaskan village with a population ranging from 5,000 to 8,000 depending upon which source is reporting), and therefore, just because she has held those positions she is much more qualified than Obama, who never has run anything.
A third major element of modern Republican political strategy, which has been added by Karl
Rove, is to attack your opponent’s strengths. So Morton Kondracke on the Fox”News”Channel refers to the Democratic Party program for attempting to fix what ails the country on everything from global warming to heath care to the tax structure to education as nothing more than “a set of clichés.” Never mind that the Democratic Platform focuses on real problems that the country faces, regardless of whether or not the programs have been there before. McCain (and the Clintons before him) attack Obama’s oratorical brilliance and his ability to inspire, as well as his newness and freshness. Modern Democratic candidates have been very slow to learn The Three Lessons: Get Control of the Agenda; In response to criticisms/questions from your opponents and/or the media: Always Attack, Never Defend; Attack your opponent’s strengths. That is until now.
In the weeks from the end of the primaries leading up to the Democratic Convention I was concerned that the Obama Campaign was falling into the same trap that had consumed Mondale and Dukakis and Gore and Kerry: a total lack of understanding of these lessons, both how they were being used against them and how to use them themselves. And then came the Democratic Convention and everything changed. I had been hoping against hope that after running a brilliant primary campaign with their eye always on the ball, the Obama organization would have set up exactly what they wanted to do at their Convention and then do it. And they did.
I will come back to consider what the organization is doing in the campaign in more detail as it proceeds. But briefly here, this is what they did and what they did is very encouraging, in terms of adopting The Three Lessons. They set six goals for the Convention. First, re-introduce both Michelle and Barack Obama to the nation as people, and quite ordinary people in their backgrounds at that. Second, get the Clintons fully and enthusiastically on board and convince them to try as hard as they could to convince their followers to do the same. Third, to deal with the personal attacks by either ignoring them or attacking them, or in this case for the most part by making fun of them: “you think that a celebrity would have a childhood like that?” Fourth, by, with speaker after speaker, focusing on the issues, the substance of the policy differences between Democrats and Republicans, not the atmospherics that Republicans need to have the focus on if they are to have any chance of winning. Fifth, by attacking over and over again with Bush and his record as the weapon. Sixth, by having Barack himself do three things: re-present himself and his background to the American people; discuss policy issues and programs in the detail that is possible in acceptance speech; and go on the attack against McCain’s supposed strengths: defense/foreign policy and his ”temperament and judgment.” (“Attack on Defense is a tactic I have also addressed over a long period of time in this space, as for example in this column.).
Now Bullet Steve Schmidt has shown that he is a master of the strategies. Announcing McCain’s VP pick right after the Democratic Convention was to be expected. But if it had been a conventional pick, the weekend media buzz would still have been with Obama and the Democrats. But the Palin pick would, Schmidt knew, if nothing else make the agenda item for the weekend at least “why her?” and push Obama and the Democratic Convention right off center stage. An absolutely brilliant stroke. Unexpected for me is the Obama/Democratic counter-stroke. “OK. We lost that one weekend. This week would have been a Republican week anyway. We’ll stay out of the way and (not knowing what a present the Republicans were handing them), and then we’ll go into full campaign mode when the real campaign traditionally starts, right after Labor Day or in this case, in this compressed Olympic year, right after the Republican Convention concludes.”
If Obama and the Democrats stay focused on: Agenda Control, on the issues, not the personalities; responding to the McCain attacks by a) ignoring them, b) counter-attacking or c) making fun (but never defending); and if the continue to attack McCain’s supposed strengths, they, and we, and the Nation at large are going to win in November. 