The Eight Things that Will Win (or Lose) This Election for Barack Obama

September 16, 2008 
Category: Keys to Victory

Surprise! John McCain is surging in the polls, and pundits as well as stunned Obama supporters such as myself are asking themselves how and why. Yet, a cold critical look at how this thing has been going since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination from the hands of Hillary Clinton in June can help to explain the hows and the whys of the McCain surge. These explanations have more to do with what the Obama campaign failed to do as opposed to what John McCain actually did. A number of mistakes are now apparent in the Obama campaign strategy which are threatening to lose him an election that was his to win… or lose.

In a context that was highly favorable to an easy Democratic victory in November, Barack Obama seems to be struggling. While many factors, such as race, could indeed contribute to this unexpected struggle, I believe that the negative impact of race on the perception of Barack Obama by white America cannot, alone, account for what is happening to the Obama campaign. If anything, I would argue that the answers to Obama’s inability to close the deal against John McCain come from mistakes committed in the very strategic choices made by the Obama campaign itself. Among these mistakes, one notes the following eight things:

1) Inability to adjust quickly to the campaign dynamics: As odd as it may seem, one of the biggest problems for Obama is that his campaign seems to know how to function only in one mode, and this mode is a passive/defensive one. When conditions in the campaign theatre change, there is virtually no adjustment in the Obama campaign strategy or discourse, and when this happens, exceptionally, it is generally too late. This is why many of the McCain/Palin narratives, even when misleading, have gone virtually unchallenged by the Obama campaign, therefore allowing McCain/Palin to frame the debate and perceptions of the American people around issues of personality and character, as opposed to issues of leadership and judgment. Even during the Primary season, the Obama campaign was more often than not content to ride the waves of Obama’s earlier popularity as opposed to seeking to actively influence the direction of those waves.

During the primaries already, the Obama campaign made the strategic mistake of letting Hillary Clinton run virtually unopposed, and therefore win strong, in several of the last state competitions. Yet, the smart thing to do would have been for Obama to go toe-to-toe against Hillary Clinton in those states that she was expected to carry, even if simply to reduce the margins of her wins. A positive side effect of a toe-to-toe strategy would have, for instance, allowed Obama to create a following for himself in those states and, perhaps, given him the opportunity to start building ground presence in anticipation of his expected general election run. By choosing to basically quit in the face of impossible odds, the Obama campaign finished the primaries in a considerably weakened condition, and left the electorate with the impression that Barack Obama was not a fighter but a quitter.  The consequence of this quitting strategy was that Hilary Clinton, who had finally adjusted her strategy into a kitchen-sink barrage directed at Obama’s character, finished in a considerably stronger position than Obama, leaving several Democrats doubtful and uneasy about the prospects of Obama in the general election.

2) Inability to shape public pinion: It is simply amazing how, in just a matter of days (less than three weeks after the Republican convention, and less than a month after McCain gave the VP nod to Sarah Palin), the McCain/Palin campaign has been able to (re)shape public opinion into trusting its narrative about Palin’s experience and values. The McCain/Palin ticket has even accomplished the feat of stealing the mantle of change from Obama, leaving the Obama campaign seemingly idle, if not in total disarray. They seem to have allowed the McCain/Palin narrative go unchallenged for so long that it has now begun making abrupt inroads into public opinion. The game has changed, not because of any real compelling substance in the McCain/Palin narrative, but because of Obama’s inability to effectively challenge it, and reframe it.

The overly-relaxed mode in which the Obama campaign seems to always operate raises the possibility of either overconfidence or the more scary scenario of an inherent inability to understand that a successful campaign is one that is able to shape public opinion with a narrative that appeals to the electorate, even when such a narrative is misleading (as McCain has successfully done). Simply sitting around and waiting for the waves of discontent against George Bush to take Obama to victory and the White House is, excuse the expression, a … fairy tale. The Obama campaign, in the end, seems to rely heavily on two misguided beliefs for their overall message:

- First, they have the naïve belief that the American electorate is intelligent, and that it will be able to sort out the lies from the truths of the campaign trail. But, as experience has shown over and over again, the electorate is not intelligent. It will believe what it is told by politicians, especially politicians who know how to tell their story and how to make up stories that, because of their plausibility, can become believable narratives (remember the Bosnian sniper story Hillary told in the primaries?). Thus, in the arena of campaign politics, victory generally belongs to those politicians who are best able to shape public opinion around their (misleading and/or not so misleading) narratives. John McCain seems to have accomplished this more successfully, and more effectively, than Barack Obama.

- Second, the Obama campaign seems to rely heavily on media inquiry and reports. Its belief seems to be that the media will collaborate in exposing the lies and misleading characterizations in the McCain/Palin narrative. This, again, is a very naïve belief. The media and pundits of America are, just like the rest of us, citizens with ideologies, preferences and sets of beliefs that do not necessarily lead to objective analysis. As a result, they are as much as the rest of us likely to be wowed by the personal stories and histories that fascinate our post-rational America (as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC likes to put it), a post-rational America of debased punditry, fallen journalism, bedazzled electorate, and Hollywoodized media. In fact, by simply making Sarah Palin the story of the day (or of the next 50 days), the media are, consciously or unconsciously, contributing to the shaping of public opinion about and around Sarah Palin. This means less coverage for Barack Obama and less coverage of the issues of substance that really matter.

Because the media generally responds to what the campaigns cause them to cover, McCain and his campaign used the media and caused pundits and journalists to trivialize the election by covering the trivial issues brought to the fore by the McCain camp. McCain did this by simply making the election about such trivial issues as personality, character, star power, celebrity status, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, as opposed to issues of leadership and judgment on such matters of substance as the economy and the war in Iraq.

By continuing to run their campaign around the more serious and real issues that America faces, the Obama people have allowed their voice to be drowned by the post-rational media frenzy around Sarah Palin. They have also allowed their message to be blunted by the more effective attacks by the McCain/Palin ticket, some of which have questioned Obama’s character, experience and patriotism.

3) The misguided pledge to never go negative: The Obama campaign’s apparent decision to remain on positive messaging and to simply continue to hammer away at the real issues that America faces is, therefore, a suicidal one. At a time when Americans are more fascinated by personal stories (a sign of the post-rational blogosphere times?) than by issues of substance, the inability of the Obama campaign to adjust to this reality is troubling. The deliberate choice, or pledge, of positive messaging they made, and that made them promise a new kind of politics that would reject attacks, character assassinations, lies and misrepresentations, has virtually tied their hands behind their backs, thus allowing McCain to punch them straight in the nose, unanswered. As a result, Obama’s ads have been based on (boring) interpellations on issues at a time when the McCain/Palin ticket has gone wildly negative, and has been successfully attacking the character of Obama. Even when it became obvious that this election would not be about issues, but rather about character, the Obama campaign has indolently continued to make of issues the center of their campaign, and refrained from attacking the characters of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Yet, there is a fine line that the Obama campaign could have easily walked that would have allowed them to remain positive while also using McCain’s own negative tactics against himself. All that Barack Obama had to do is tell the American people that, as someone who has pledged to change the way Washington works, he has pledged to never BEGIN a negative attack on anyone. HOWEVER, being a messenger of new Washington politics does not mean that one has to lie down and submit oneself to unfair characterizations.

One of the great values of America is that there is a strong belief in self-defense, that is, the ability to defend oneself when one is attacked. And so, he, Obama, also pledges to RESPOND to any unfair attack against him with the same vigor as was used by those who made the choice of going negative against him. In other words, Barack Obama could have gone as negative as John McCain has by simply rationalizing his negative campaigning as self-defense, thus attracting the empathy of the American electorate, who tend to admire people with strong character who will go down fighting for what they believe in. This is the very character that brought Hillary Clinton’s campaign back when she decided to throw the kitchen sink at Obama. It worked.

What is fascinating about the Obama campaign is that they failed to go negative even when they had their work half done for them by John  McCain himself. They simply had to know how to use McCain’s own attacks against himself. In war just as in politics, the person who attacks first loses. When McCain attacks, Obama should simply counterattack on the same grounds, but in a harsher way, thus blunting McCain. But Obama seems to have systematically missed the point.

Yet, what Obama should do, and can do rather effectively, is the following:

- When, for example, the McCain/Palin ticket questions his patriotism, he should find a way not of defending himself against such attacks (which is a defensive position, therefore a position of weakness), but rather of, in turn, questioning McCain’s own sense of patriotism. For instance, if I were Obama’s campaign manager, I would create a counter ad that would say: “People like John McCain believe that the only way for an American to show his patriotism is to fight in wars abroad or to start reckless wars against nations that did not attack us on 9/11. Well, I have news for John McCain, patriotism is also about questioning war when it is the wrong war to fight, bringing our troops home from a war in Iraq that should never have been authorized, etc.etc.” The ad would then end with a series of people from cities and small towns, workers in offices and plants saying something like: “I am a steel plant worker in Detroit. I love my country. I am a patriot because I opposed a war in Vietnam that should never have been fought.” Another would say: “I am an employee of McDonalds in Philly. I love my country. I am a patriot because, just like Barack Obama, I opposed a war in Iraq that should have never been authorized.”

In other words, instead of seeking to lamely defend himself against the charge of lack patriotism levied against him by John McCain, what Obama needs to do is reframe and redefine the idea of patriotism in a way that would reshape public opinion in the minds of the Americans who have begun to lean towards John McCain.

- Another example pertains to the Palin attack against Obama’s “community organizing” past. In her attacks, Palin basically belittled the work of millions of community organizers nationwide. Instead of finding a way to use this attack against the McCain/Palin ticket, the Obama campaign resorted to the usual defensive oddity of trying to defend Obama’s experience and explaining why he is more experienced than Palin. Not only is this a lame way of responding to an attack, it also shows why the Obama campaign has been unsuccessful at really going after the McCain/Palin  inconsistencies. What Obama should have done is simply put out an ad that would have done the following:

- First, the ad would have said something like: “In her convention speech, Sarah Palin belittled the work that community organizers do for the common people all over America. Well, this shows how out-of touch the McCain/Palin campaign is with the concerns of the American people. Not only does John McCain not know how many houses he owns, contrary to most of us who are barely affording to pay for our mortgages on the one house that we own, this insult to those who most usefully work in the streets of America to alleviate the sufferings of millions of Americans cannot be left unanswered. In case Palin did not know it, community organizers are the bread and butter of our communities in both big cities and small towns. They are the people who fix the mistakes that small-town mayors and out-of-touch governors make when they cause unemployment, do not provide adequate housing, do not take care of the sick, and do not provide good schools and education for our kids. When corruption by those who have actual responsibilities as small-town mayors and out-of-touch governors cause unemployment and lack of health-care, when their mistakes cause homelessness, poverty and crimes in inner-cities, it is community organizers and families, and neighbors and churches, who fix the mess. Maybe John McCain and Sarah Palin do not really get it. Maybe they just do not know what is going on in the backyards and streets of America.”

At this point in the ad, there would be, once again, a series of known and unknown community organizers, or even politicians who began their careers as community organizers, saying something like: “Before I became governor, I worked as a community organizer in the streets of town XYZ. I helped fix the mess that corrupt mayors and Governors were causing to my community. Please tell Sarah Palin to stop insulting the work of community organizers saving lives and restoring dignity in the streets and families of America.” Another would say: “My name is ABC, and I am a community organizers. I helped put 150 people back to work through my work. Those people were out of work because of the corruption of small-town mayors and out-of-touch governors. They are working today thanks to my work as a community organizer. Please tell Sarah Palin and John Mccain to stop insulting the work that community organizers do in communities all over America.”

At this point in the ad, Barack Obama would appear and say: “All across America, community organizers are at work finding jobs, schools, family support for millions of America that the corruption in Washington and small-town mayors and out-of-touch governors left with no hope and no dignity. Tell John McCain and Sarah Palin to stop insulting those of us who are at work in the cold of streets of America during the winter providing food and shelter to the homeless and the unemployed, providing health care to the uninsured and helping families cope with challenges that neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin seem to know about. Tell the McCain/Palin campaign to stop being out of touch with real America.”

What such an ad would do is put the focus back on the “out-of-touchness” of the McCain/Palin ticket and, therefore, use their line of attack against themselves. Obama had, during his convention speech, done something similar when he said “McCain does not get it because he simply does not know”. Why he stopped expanding on this idea powerful idea and strategy is, to say the least, puzzling.

This “boomerang” model could be replicated on every single line of attack that the McCain/Palin campaign would throw at Obama. All Obama would do, in this case, is simply sit and relax, wait for the next attack, study it and find a way to simply use the attack against John McCain. The idea here is to reframe and to redefine each attack in a way that finds, within the same context, faults in McCain and Palin that could be boomeranged right back at them.

4) Giving in to Pressures Not to Question McCain’s military experience (because he is a POW) and Palin’s values (because she is a woman): It is fascinating to see how the McCain campaign has successfully cornered the Obama camp into believing that criticizing McCain’s military experience and Palin’s values would backfire because the one is a former POW and the other is a woman. One of the biggest mistakes that the Democrats have made across the board, therefore, has been to preface their speeches and criticisms of McCain with the now overused “John McCain is a great man who has sacrificed greatly for his country.” Well, if I were McCain, all I would need to do for my campaign ads is to use this litany of positive praises by all the leading Democrats, and contrast them with the criticisms that Hillary Clinton, Biden and other presidential contenders had levied against Barack Obama during the primaries. This would go a long way destroying Barack Obama further.

So, if I were a Democrat, I would stop this “McCain is a hero” nonsense right now because I believe that this positive prefacing of all criticism against John McCain can only reinforce in the minds of the Americans the notion that McCain must be rewarded because he is a POW. The Democrats, instead, must be able to turn McCain’s sense of entitlement against himself, especially in those contexts where he has criticized Obama as someone who had the ambition to become president since he was a kid.

Because McCain has used his POW status not only as a shield against attacks, but also as an experience that entitled him to the presidency of the United States, all that Obama has to do is make an ad questioning McCain’s sense of entitlement and featuring, in this ad, former POWs that would criticize McCain for this sense of entitlement. To the line, for instance, used by Palin that accuses Obama of using change to advance his career while McCain has used his career to promote change, Obama could respond by finding a safe formula that would question this apparent electoral “blackmailing” by John McCain, who is basically telling Americans that they must vote for him because he was a POW. The Obama must find a way of defeating McCain’s wild claims about his military greatness, especially claims such as “I know how to win wars,” when, in fact, there is no record of McCain fighting in a war that America actually won, nor is there any evidence of McCain leading soldiers into battle in wars that America won. So, the ad could simply ask: “John McCain claims that he knows how to win wars. Can John McCain tell us what wars he has won?”

The same goes for the surge claims. Why the Obama campaign has been unable to combat McCain’s narrative about the surge is astounding. Yet, it is a rather easy thing to do. All Obama has to do, in some ad, is to explain to the American people that McCain is being disingenuous by presenting the surge as all and everything when it comes to the Iraq war. He must remind the Americans that the “surge” was just one strategy and one step in the longest war that America has ever fought. To summarize McCain judgment by virtue of the surge is tantamount to a bad driver of an SUV causing a bus to drive into a ditch, helping the bus out of the ditch by pulling it out with a cable attached to his SUV, and then wanting the bus driver and his passengers to thank him for pulling the bus out of the ditch. Thus, Obama must argue, the reality of the war in Iraq cannot be judged based on one single episode in the history of the Iraq war. The surge, which was just one good step in the direction of victory, cannot be used to justify a war that should have never been authorized in the first place.

The same goes for the use of the words “victory in Iraq” by John McCain. For McCain, “success of the surge” in Iraq has meant “victory in Iraq.” Obama can successfully challenge this idea of victory by saying that McCain is highly misguided when he equates success of the surge with victory in the Iraq war. Seeing that George Bush and John McCain both proclaimed victory several times earlier in the war (another lack of judgment), and were forced to acknowledge that their claim had been premature, one must conclude that victory in Iraq will require steps beyond the surge. As a result, Obama must hammer in that the only true measure of victory for America in Iraq will come when the last American soldier leaves Iraq and the Iraqis themselves take over the direction of their own country (in the first 18 months of the Obama presidency). Thus, Obama must say, the surge, when seen as an important step towards victory, HAS WORKED. However, a successful surge does not mean VICTORY. Obama must then offer his vision of what victory will mean, and, above all, how he will ensure real victory in Iraq in the first 18 months of the Obama presidency by bringing the troops home. Arguing the war this way would offer a very useful contrast between Obama and McCain as far as the meaning of the word “victory” goes.

It is also a fact that the McCain camp has shamelessly used the gender of Sarah Palin to blunt and prevent any attacks on her from the Obama people. Yet, to turn the sexism attacks around, all the Obama camp would need to do is say something like: “When one cannot handle the heat, one gets out of the kitchen. If Sarah Palin wants to be vice-president, and therefore a potential President of the United States, she must submit herself to the same type of scrutiny, the same type of questinong and the same type of vetting that we have all been subjected to for 18 months. She has been in this thing for less than three weeks and already expects the American people, who do not know anything about her, to simply vote her in unvetted, unquestioned and unkown, simply because she is a woman. The job of vice-president of the United Sattes is just a whisper away from that of President of the United States. It must be taken seriously and not be trivialized by bogus accusations of sexism. When one runs for president of the United States, one does not run as black or white, male or female. The American people deserve the right and the respect of knowing who they are voting for before they can go in the voting booth in November to decide the election of the most powerful head of state on earth. We must ensure that whoever we elect is going to be able to go in front of the Putins of the world and stand his or her ground as a man or woman of character who is out here preserving the interests and respect of the United States of America.”

5) Lack of Consistency in Message: In his acceptance speech during the Convention, Obama beautifully laid out the contrasts between him and McCain. In essence, he finally provided the kinds of responses to the McCain charges that we had all been waiting for. For once, and at last, Obama’s rebuttals were not circumvoluted, but clear and to the point. In one such punch line, Barack Obama had undone the McCain “Gates of Hell” claim by saying: “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell – but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.” This was good. But, curiously, instead of Obama taking these contrasts to the campaign trail and hammering them home over and over again, he basically abandoned his rebuttals and resorted, once again, to overused speeches and ads on real issues that the Americans people no longer seemed to care about after Palin broke into the political scene.

The total shift from real issues to caricature, which occurred much more abruptly after McCain announced Palin as his running mate, meant that the campaigns were now going to concentrate on issues of character. Because of the Obama campaign’s inability to develop lines of attack capable of caricaturing and trivializing John McCain, they have allowed John McCain to continue to assassinate Barack Obama’s character virtually unchallenged. The Obama campaign has wrongly continued to believe that this election was going to be won on issues. Yet, it has become clear for a while now that, to win this election, Obama had to descend into the gladiator’s arena and go for the jugular. Unfortunately, each time Obama went on the attack, he did so very reluctantly. He also failed to maintain consistency and perseverance at a time when he really had to go toe-to-toe with John McCain.

Another mistake of the Obama campaign has been its tendency to always react to controversies from a very defensive standpoint. On the Tuesday after Barack Obama made the “lipstick on a pig” remark, he was quickly cornered by accusations of sexism from the McCain campaign. Even as Obama sought to retaliate by declaring: “I don’t care what they say about me, but I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and swift boat politics. Enough is enough,” he made the suicidal mistake Democrats often make. He tried to defend himself and took the high road. Instead of mounting an attack of his own against McCain’s hypocrisy, he went back to the lame excuse he has been providing, that is, he will not participate in negative campaigning.

Yet, a better answer would have been for Obama to point out that John McCain himself had used the “lipstick on a pig” line  at least four times in the past, and as recently as May 2008, yet McCain did not call himself a sexist. This would have allowed Obama to call McCain a hypocrite who will lie and fake outrage to get elected. In other words, Obama should have painted John McCain as someone who is ready to do and say anything to get elected, including stealing Obama’s mantle of change. To this idea, Obama could have added the following line:

“When a candidate for president who does not have ideas of his own resorts to stealing his opponent’s ideas on change, and makes of change his mantle when he had been talking about experience before that, then one really has to come to the conclusion that such a candidate has nothing to offer to the American people. No wonder John McCain has been campaigning on Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears, and pit bull lipsticks and pig lipsticks. I have a message for John McCain, ladies and gentlemen. Tell John McCain that when he is finally done debating whom, between himself and Sarah Palin or Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is the biggest celebrity in the world, I will be happy to finally have an intelligent debate with him and engage him on who is best able to lead this nation to its promised land of opportunity for all. This election is about issues and not lipsticks on pit bulls or pigs.”

6) Campaign Trail Speeches and the Teleprompter: The teleprompter made Obama. No politician in America matches Obama’s oratory when it comes to standing in front of a microphone and a teleprompter. Yet, the Obama campaign has, very often, been cornered by the McCain campaign into believing that the teleprompter is a bad thing. Since his memorable speech in Berlin in front of 200,000 people, Obama has been on the defensive even on such a trivial idea as using a teleprompter to make a speech. This is because the McCain people successfully suggested to the media that it was a bad thing to draw so many big crowds, and both the media and Obama bought into this narrative. And so, being popular became a negative thing. But this was only when Obama was the only (popular) kid on the block.

Ever since discovering the joys of popularity with his pick of Sarah Palin as a running mate, John McCain is no longer complaining about big crowds. What a reversal! This goes on to show McCain’s hypocrisy, and his willingness to win this thing at all costs. John McCain is relentlessly ruthless, and Barack Obama has been unable to find a way of discrediting McCain as a liar who will say and do anything, including misleading the American people on both his record and that of Sarah Palin, to win the election. Contrary to his assertions, country is not first for John McCain. It’s McCain first, country second. Sadly, Obama has not even attempted to trivialize the McCain attack by saying something as simple as: “It is not my fault if McCain is incapable of drawing a crowd. Perhaps he is jealous. But that McCain should be jealous of our crowds and speeches is a testimony to his fundamental lack of message of change, being as he is a prisoner of the lobbyists who have taken Washington hostage under the Bush presidency. It is also a testimony to his stale message, which proposes nothing more than the same old failed Bush policies.”

I believe that Obama should stick to either the teleprompter or a written speech delivered from a podium. The idea of letting Obama speak off-the-cuff, just because his campaign wants to prove that Obama can talk without a teleprompter, is a childish move which shows, once again, how easily the Obama campaign is set off track, and its behavior easily shaped, by the McCain camp.

It seems that the Obama people have been overly sensitive to many of the McCain-manufactured characterizations of Barack Obama. Obama makes a historic speech in front of two hundred thousand Germans, McCain says it’s unpatriotic to speak in front of 200,000 Germans, and there you go! The Obama camp basically folds under the attack, instead of finding a way of using the attack against John McCain. Obama reads from a teleprompter, McCain says it is elitist and out of touch, and there you go again! The Obama campaign folds and forces Obama to start talking off-the-cuff and doing small town hall meetings. Yet, it is precisely because McCain has successfully cornered Obama into ineffectiveness by making him change his game plan over and over again that McCain has finally come on top in post-convention polls.
My take on Obama is that he is very inefficient at making unscripted attacks on McCain. This inefficiency comes, not from the fact that he cannot speak without a teleprompter (he can), but rather from the fact that, in a speech made off-the-cuff with no text nor teleprompter under his eyes, Obama either forgets lines of attacks or is simply unable to deliver them with the kind of rhetorical effect that would give the lines all their power. In political speeches, what you say matters as much as how you say it. A joke that is not said well can fall flat, just as can fall flat a powerful line meant to attack an opponent or rebut an attack from an opponent.

My belief is that, to be effective, Obama must continue to use a teleprompter in situations in which the crowd is more than two thousand, and a written speech on paper set on a podium in situation where the crowd is smaller. Using a written speech set on a podium is more likely to help Obama stick to message by combining scriptedness and unscriptedness in ways that could render his speaking more effective. For instance, in a speech meant to provide for powerful rebuttals to the McCain/Palin attacks, Obama should refer to his text and READ the passage in a way that would bring out its full rhetorical effect. It is only THEN and ONLY then that he can get out of the text to provide additional comments. This would be akin to what preachers do in church or professors do in their classrooms. First, an idea is read from he Bible or from notes exactly as one prepared it, and thereafter discussed or commented upon in an off-the-cuff manner. This methodology would go a long way ensuring that the messages that must be transmitted to the American people are transmitted effectively, while allowing Obama to walk around on the stage to show that he can indeed speak without a text or teleprompter.

7) Obama must learn how to control the news cycle: One of the lessons of the post-convention period has been that the momentum will belong with the person who makes, creates and controls the news cycles. The McCain campaign has been very effective at making news in the post-convention period in two ways. First, they heavily banked on Sarah Palin’s popularity and used it to control the news cycle (get the news media mad by keeping Palin away from interviews, exploiting the sexist charges, making her a it bull of an attack dog by making her go after Obama big time, etc.). Second, without even spending any money to buy advertising around the country, they simply rolled out a series of provocative ads that were meant to tease the media, with hope that by seizing upon their contents, the media would, wittingly or unwittingly, become partners of the McCain bandwagon. Because they would treat these ads as news, the media would help John McCain build momentum, get better in the polls and begin to establish a sense of inevitability that would durably register in the unconscious of the voters, thereby ensuring an easy McCain victory come November. The net result of the McCain strategy has, indeed, been a relentless media frenzy around the Palin phenomenon, which immediately led to a Palin surge in popularity, which, in turn, translated into a McCain surge in the polls. This McCain strategy was both ruthless and artful. And it worked.

The only time that Obama MADE the news, finally, was when he used the “lipstick on a pig” phrase, which came out as a subliminal response to Sarah Palin’s “lipstick on a pit bull” phrase. But what this apparent “mistake” by Obama did was, surprisingly, to break the McCain/Palin- dominated media coverage and put some focus back on the Obama campaign. For a while, Obama’s popularity had been thwarted by the overwhelming media frenzy around Sarah Palin, leaving Obama begging for attention in a way that was reminiscent of poor John McCain in pre-Palin days.

Now, some have argued that Obama used the “pig” expression intentionally to counter Sarah Palin’s “pit bull” line. Others, especially the McCain camp, went beyond and accused Obama not only of sexism, but also of having called Palin a “pig”, which, again, came to reinforce the charges of sexism levied by the McCain people. Whether Obama did this consciously or unconsciously does not really matter. What matters is that the Obama camp finally got some attention back after two weeks of media coverage that had been all about Sarah Palin.

But the real lesson to be learned here is that even “mistakes” such as the one “committed” by Obama can help a campaign come back from oblivion and begin to reassert itself in the media.  But what if this “pig” metaphor was not a mistake? What if it was part of a campaign strategy that the Obama people used in order to draw John McCain into a trap? Now, I do not believe the Obama people knew what (wonderful thing) they were getting into when they decided to use the “lipstick on a pig” phrase. They are not as cunning as I am about political strategy. But let us assume for a moment that they KNEW what they were doing. Let us assume, for a moment, that by letting Obama go on the offensive with the “lipstick on a pig” expression, the Obama people knew that John McCain would fall into the “sexism” trap by going all out as he did, accusing Obama of being a sexist, in the hopes, obviously, of rallying women around the McCain/Palin ticket. Let us also assume that the Obama people had known beforehand that John McCain had used the same “lipstick on a pig” expression in at least three instances in the past, and that the Obama people knew there was even a video of him saying this “pig” thing. Well, what this would have done is to give the Obama people the opportunity to throw the “pig” thing out there as a bait, draw John McCain into the type of reaction that he had (precisely), and then come out with an ad which, by showing McCain using the same expression, would point out his hypocrisy in a most damaging way.

This is the type of “carrot and stick” trap that the Obama people need to use in order to disqualify John McCain as a liar who will do and say anything to win, including lying. In other words, what Obama needs to do, now, is to start building the character of John McCain as fundamentally dishonest. Since the Obama campaign is reluctant to attack John McCain’s honor on the basis of his military service, they can easily question his honor and integrity when it comes to his tendency to distort the truth, and even to lie. All Obama would need to do, therefore, is to know beforehand a few potentially damaging things that John McCain said in the past, but that he has flip-flopped over during this campaign. By drawing McCain into traps based on the themes of sexism, honor, and others that McCain likes to highlight, and by knowing beforehand some of the public pronouncements of John McCain on the issues on which he has now totally flip-flopped, the Obama campaign would be able to paint the man as a liar and discredit him in the eyes of the American people. All of Obama’s ads going forward, in my opinion, have to go this way and always have a line at the end that offers the following conclusion. “This is not the honorable John McCain we all knew. This John McCain will do and anything to win the election, including lying to the American people. Is that really who we want in the White House, after eight years of similar lies under George Bush?” The same can be done with Sarah Palin.

8) Obama must redefine McCain as a liar: In the last two presidential elections, George Bush was successful because he successfully reduced his opponents to mere caricatures. In 2000, Al Gore was depicted as “too stiff” and too out there in the clouds of American intellectualism, and unable to connect with the common people of America. John Kerry was painted as a flip-flopper and, additionally, was swift-boated. Both Democratic candidates lost. To win against John McCain, Obama must successfully question John McCain honor and integrity and reduce him to the caricature of a liar who is willing to do and say anything to win an election. The current media coverage is very conducive to a strategy premised upon the need to paint McCain as a liar. Because the media has started to question the McCain/Palin stories and distortions, not only about themselves and their records, but also about the record of Barack Obama, the time is right for the Obama campaign to go all out with whatever they can find that will participate in this “debunking McCain” strategy. The way Obama does this is to:

- wait for McCain to attack. Obama would then take each of McCain’s attacks, study it and find things in McCain past that would contradict his lines of attack. By then bringing these contradictions to the fore, Obama would be able to show McCain as a man without honor who would rather lie to win.

- implement the strategy outlined in item 7 above.

In an election in which character counts more than anything, and in an election  in which McCain himself has made of character the single most important issue, they only way Obama wins this thing is if he succeeds in convincing the American people that John McCain is a liar who will stop at no lie to win the White House. I can easily imagine an ad line that would say: “George Bush lied to send us into a war in Iraq. John McCain is lying to us to get into the White House. Is that really the type of President we want for America right now? Do we really want the same old tactics and the same old lies for four more years?” And at this point in the ad, a series of citizens, including a toddler, would be featured repeating lines similar to this: “I am a steel worker, and I do not want four more years of lies.” “I am a small-town mom, and I do not want four more years of lies”. And so on and so forth. Then Barack Obama would appear and conclude: “I am Barack Obama and I approve this message”.

CONCLUSION: In the end, if the Obama campaign does not stop being on the defensive and responding to the McCain/Palin attacks only from a defensive position, that is, going to great pains to explain in detail why their perceived inexperience is not true, why the patriotism charge is not true, and things like that, then Obama will lose this election. For some weird reason, Obama does not have to do much by way of finding lines of attacks to beat John McCain at his game. Obama’s success in this election will depend on how well Obama can simply digest McCain’s attacks and use these against McCain. Somewhere in this text, I gave an example of what an Obama counter attack on patriotism could look like. That’s the way to do it, and that is what will win Barack Obama this election, that is, his ability to simply reframe and redefine what patriotism is, what experience is, and what a maverick is by using not himself, but regular Americans that would provide a background to his rebuttals to the McCain lines. Obama must, through such rebuttals, show how much more he is in touch than McCain with the regular American people. Not doing so, immediately, will inevitably doom the Obama campaign.

Dr. Daniel Mengara
The author is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Montclair State University (New Jersey). He is also the leader of Bongo Doit Partir (Bongo Must Go), a movement of expatriated Gabonese citizens opposed and seeking an end to the 41-year-old dictatorial regime of Omar Bongo in Gabon.

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