What Barack Obama must do to win this November

Morning everyone. Computer snafu kept me from posting all of yesterday, my apologies.

So anyway, I was listening to Michael Thompson on Sirius a little while ago, and he posed a question to his listeners that caused a rather varied array of responses: are you worried about Sarah Palin? The answers ranged from “nah she’s a lightweight” to “yes she’s the harbinger of the apocalypse”. As I mulled over my own answer, it occurred to me that we’re seeing something almost… familiar.

Earlier in the primary season, McCain seemed sunk. His campaign was hemorrhaging money, he had no one at his rallies, and no one really cared about what he was doing to the point that he almost looked quaint. Sort of like “hey look at McCain, thinking he’s still relevant”. Enter the Rove machine and not only did McCain get the nomination, he’s a force to be reckoned with. Keeping that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of things Barack Obama simply must do if he plans on winning in November.

1. Remember that the base follows policy, the middle follows character. To answer Thompson’s question, Palin doesn’t worry me in the slightest. She’s a political non-entity with enough scandals wrapped around her to sink her instantly… if the people get the gist of it. Unfortunately, that’s not how the media coverage has been.

I wrote a few days ago theorizing that McCain intentionally is keeping the media focused on Palin’s tabloid-esque issues as a distraction, and I’ll add to that now. It’s not just a distraction, it’s that the Republicans know how to sway the middle voters, and it ain’t with policy. I passed by a magazine rack and saw that Newsweek, Time, OK, and People all featured Palin, three of them showing her holding a baby. What the “Bristol pregnancy” line has done is turned her into a working mom hero, a woman with a disabled baby and a pregnant daughter that’s still fighting the good fight.

The voters in the middle don’t give two shits about whether Palin’s abstinence-only education advocacy meshes with a pregnant daughter, it just passes right through their ears. What matters is that she’s a mom with a lot on her plate from a small town that supposedly stuck it to the phonies. You can holler until you’re blue in the face about windfall taxes and Troopergate (a story which McCain genuinely wants quiet, by the way), but to the swayable voters that’s a bunch of jargon.

This isn’t a foreign idea, either. This is why the right-wing base didn’t care that McCain was a “war hero” during the primaries, they were looking at his policy and didn’t like it. Once he sealed the nomination, though, and they realized they needed to sway voters, they just shifted their focus from the policy to his character and out came the “war hero” image. That’s the part that sticks.

Right now the election has been framed as between a rought-and-tumble hockey mom and a grizzled war hero, versus two Senators, one of whom is brown. Without a serious and concerted effort to paint himself as X character, Obama is going to have to work in overdrive to make the undecideds pay attention to tax plans, or start tearing apart the foundation of the GOP’s portrait pronto.

2. Don’t give McCain the military-sympathizer vote. The fact is that McCain’s voting record is absolutely abysmal and the military itself hasn’t missed this. At last check, the military has donated to Obama by a six to one margin, and various veteran political groups from VoteVets to Iraq and Afghanistan Vets for America have espoused their support for Obama over McCain.

This isn’t some small bit of trivia that the Democrats can chuckle about and then work on their stump speeches. An overwhelming majority of Iraq veterans are abandoning the “war hero” and are rallying behind the effete liberal Senator. These people need to be front and center whenever possible. Republicans have called dibs on the military vote for the last handful of elections, assailing Democrats for not supporting the troops and so on.

While the military themselves obviously aren’t falling for the hype, the people who want to show their support for the troops are. Without a focused effort to show just how much of the military is behind Barack Obama, people are going to continue to believe that a vote against McCain is a vote against our men and women in uniform.

Think 2004. There would have been no way to torpedo John Kerry’s military record unless they got veterans to do it. The image of a few dozen Vietnam veterans standing in unity against John Kerry was a powerful image, enough so even for many a Democrat to waver and worry about their man. It’s not impossible to pull the camo carpet out from under McCain’s feet, all we need are the troops to tell the people how the Arizona Senator has done nothing for them except make sure they keep getting sent to Iraq. Speaking of the Swifties…

3. Do not trust the media. I don’t mean this in the sense of “they’re coming to get you” in a conspiratorial sense, but rather in the sense of “don’t trust that the media will report all the facts in an objective manner.” What we’ve seen is that the media, despite getting smacked around constantly by the right, is going to do its normal act of cowering and folding.

If our news media were reliable, then McCain’s campaign or his supporters couldn’t utter the name “Ayers” or “Rezko” without “Keating Five” being thrown back at them. Palin’s constant claim to have opposed the Bridge to Nowhere would have been shot down right off the bat. The Wright story would have been joined with Hagee, or McCain’s embrace of Falwell later (not to mention Palin’s church now). Instead, we get flag pins and fist bumps.

The latest GOP strategy is to keep Palin away from the media entirely and only let her speak in stump speeches and “town hall meetings”. Eventually she’ll do a softball interview on Larry King, maybe, but do not expect her to be grilled in the way that, say, O’Reilly sneered at Obama.

4. Do not fight them on their terms. One thing you can’t deny about the Republicans is that they’re great with framing the debate to their advantage. Once you say the media’s liberal, everything can be justified in that regard. Reporting on a legitimate concern with Palin’s credentials? Liberal! Won’t give airtime to a smear on Obama? Liberal media protecting him! And so on.

Right now they want the debate to be on who’s the bigger “reformer” and they’re going to use things such as party-line votes. Obama simply cannot win this, the numbers are not on his side. He will be shown to be far more liberal than McCain is conservative, and have voted with his party more than McCain did his.

This is a flawed debate because it has nothing to do with whose policies were better. What Obama needs to do is get away from this “who’s more lockstep” nonsense and actually go after the times when McCain voted against his party. If it’s such a feather in his cap that he crossed the party lines, don’t counter with how many times Obama crossed party lines, that one hasn’t gained a lick of momentum. Instead, embrace those times and suggest that “if John McCain had crossed the aisle a little more, maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.”

If the Republicans want to argue that they’re the guys to vote for because their candidates didn’t follow lockstep with the Republicans that put us in this mess, let ‘em. Just fire back that it means the badge of honor is the handful of times they agreed with the Democrats. Maybe instead of voting for a guy who only once in a while broke from the catastrophic policies of Bush and the Republicans, America should vote for the guys that fought them the whole time.

5. DO NOT TALK FONDLY ABOUT MCCAIN OR PALIN. This feeds back into the idea that Americans are repulsed by negative campaigns, as though they hadn’t worked absolutely famously in 2000, 2002, and 2004 (with 2006 working because Dems stepped up to the plate a bit). Americans respond, and respond well, to negativity. End of story.

We have a lopsided debate going now thanks to the “Nice Guy” politics Obama and Biden are trying to engage in. While the Democrats are quick to preface everything they say about McCain with “I’m good friends with John McCain” and “no one is discounting his heroism”, the Republicans have been absolutely unflinching in their painting of Obama as an America-hating liberal.

When you start off a paragraph with “Sarah Palin is a fine woman and I respect her strength to be running for office with so much on her plate”, the part that will stick the hardest is the profession of respect. Someone, I believe Josh Marshall of TPM, described the “Bitch Slap Theory” in 2004. The basics of it were that Bush, in his acid-filled attacks on Kerry, was saying “Kerry is my bitch.” By not hitting back and hitting back hard, Kerry was implicitly sending the message, “I am Bush’s bitch.”

So what will happen in 2008 is that Biden and Obama will fall all over themselves to make sure they don’t sound as though they’re not insulting their opponents, calling them “my friend” and “good Americans”, while McCain and Palin do nothing of the sort. When one side talks nicely of their opponents but then “disagrees” while the other launches hard attacks, the middle (remember, they respond to character issues) are going to get the message that there’s a reason Obama and Biden have such kind words for McCain and Palin, and that there’s a reason the feeling isn’t mutual.

I don’t mean that every sentence out of Obama and Biden’s mouths should be about how Palin is a horrible woman and McCain is the devil incarnate. What I mean is that there’s nothing wrong with simply railing McCain for this or that. You can call him out on a flip-flop or having a failed Iraq policy, that’s kinda how this whole thing works. Stop undermining your own efforts.

6. Latch your jaws and don’t let up. Ask yourself why Kerry’s image as a “flip-flopper” was embraced so well. The simple fact is that the line “I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it” was repeated so often that it turned into one of those things that everyone just internalized. Once they said Kerry was a flip-flopper, everything in the campaign centered on that.

We have the benefit of an opponent who actually has flip-flopped so many times it’s impossible to let it just slide. Immigration, Bush’s tax cuts, drilling, taxes for social security, the “agents of intolerance”, torture, Roe v Wade, even whether he’s a “true conservative” or not. The number of McCain’s legitimate flip-flops is so long it’s almost staggering. Don’t let him hang onto his “Straight Talk Express”.

Sarah Palin is a far-far-right evangelical conservative who’s stonewalling an investigation into corruption in her hometown, aside from the fact that she was amazingly inept at managing funds in Alaska both as mayor of Wasilla and as governor. Don’t shy away from not just pointing this out, but hammering it home at every opportunity. These are legitimate issues, there’s no reason not to sink in. You know the GOP won’t be as loathe to hit Obama and Biden with all they’ve got.

7. Don’t let the opposition dictate your campaign. The blogs and a few nooks of the media have been pointing out the fact that when Clinton called sexism this was used against her, but criticisms against Palin have been decried as sexism by the same people.

The problem that’s been going for a while now is that whatever criticism the GOP lays on the Democrats, they internalize and try and “improve”. When Clinton’s calls of sexism were mocked in the media, she stopped (and keep in mind a lot of sexist comment really were being thrown at her). When Obama started gritting his teeth, the GOP said he was flip-flopping on his promise to elevate politics, and now he’s just “another politician”. When anyone grills Palin, it’s sexism.

Remember that they aren’t saying this because that’s what they believe, it’s a tool. Does the McCain campaign thing the media is being sexist by actually examining Palin’s experience and views as they relate to being Vice President? Of course not, but they know that if they say it enough the Democrats and the media will respond, not with “oh shut up,” but with “we’re not sexists, watch us prove it by laying off entirely!”

A surefire way to lose is to fold like origami whenever the Republicans accuse you of being overly mean or unfair, because frankly they’re not gonna go easy at all. The media has yet to pick up on this, as we saw in the glowing coverage of Palin’s speech contrasted with a surprising number of accusations that Democrats were “going after” McCain. Even as Biden et al heaped praise upon McCain before simply going after policy differences.

We can’t have an unflaggingly mean Republican campaign that kowtows the Democrats into avoiding any “mean-spirited” attacks. This relates back to points #5 and #1. Hit hard, don’t let up, and if the Republicans cry foul the proper response is to call them out on it instead of apologizing. It won’t work, it’s never worked.

These are just a few tips, certainly not comprehensive. I’m not overly optimistic that the Obama campaign will listen, but it’d be nice to see them learn from their mistakes finally.