As I have discussed previously, it has seemed that for the majority of this election, the Clinton campaign has misidentified the best line of attack against Obama. At first, her line was less of an attack, and more of a proclamation, framing her inevitability as the best reason to cast a vote in her direction. When that failed, she framed the debate in binary terms: change versus experience. In doing so, she failed to convince Democratic primary voters that Obama’s lesser experience disqualified him for office and helped solidify his mythology as a change candidate.
There is a better attack, one that may take a longer time to materialize, but that could certainly be more effective than her previous failed attempts. As I wrote yesterday:
Hillary failed to recognize, late in the game, that her victory would depend not just on winning undecided voters, but on convincing some Obama supporters to realign. Rather than dismissing their enthusiasm, she could have empathized with it.
While hope and change are the mantra of the Obama movement, at its core, it is undergirded by trust. Obama supporters trust him, and he has gone a long way to cultivate that trust. The extraordinary thing about Barack Obama is not the poetry with which he aspires to hope, change, and political realignment: it is that fundamentally, people believe him. Hillary needed to attack Obama to overtake him, but that attack should have been aimed at diminishing his credibility. Had she framed the debate around whether Obama was trustworthy or not, she would have put him in a defensive position that may have proved more effective.
Over the last 48 hours, it appears the Clinton campaign may have figured this out. Twice in the last two days, the campaign has gone after Obama on credibility issues. Both times, the pitch was fouled off, but we can expect more to come.
Plagiarism
Clinton’s attack on Obama for sharing words with Deval Patrick failed to have the kind of resonance in the media that her campaign had hoped. In American politics, after all, there is no such thing as a copyright. Candidates share each other’s lines all the time, and often quote historical statements without attribution. It’s more about the flow of a speech than a willful attempt to deceive the voters; more about finding the right words, whosever they are, to convey a message. The Clinton attack here made her especially vulnerable; a number of media outlets have already produced videos of Hillary sharing Bill Clinton lines. The Obama campaign has released tape of Hillary sharing Obama lines.
Moreover, earlier in the campaign season, Obama did give Deval Patrick credit for a line he took, playfully explaining that it was okay that he was stealing the line because Patrick had stolen a bunch of lines from him. His ultimate conclusion: “But these are the right words…”
The coverage of the event has been relatively minor, and not particularly critical of Obama. The media generally accepted his perception of the narrative, that the incident was “not too big a deal,” and its likely that the event will become one of the tiniest of footnotes in a long campaign.
Public Financing
This week also began a steady stream of attacks levied at Obama by John McCain. Early in the campaign season, Obama implied, if not outright pledged, that if he could preserve a publicly financed general election, he would. Now, with more than 500,000 donors and the ability to raise over a million dollars a day online through small donations, it is not surprising that it’s been difficult for Obama to live up to that pledge.
John McCain saw an opening and took out the hammer. What he could not have expected was that Hillary Clinton would join in the fight. A number of times now, the Clinton campaign has criticized Obama for being willing to “break pledges,” bringing further focus on the public financing spat.
There are a number of problems with this line of attack, but none more significant than this: When Hillary Clinton attacks Barack Obama for his conduct in a general election, the underlying presumption of that attack is that Hillary Clinton will not be the nominee. This is an enormous blunder on the part of the Clinton campaign -- she is raising Obama’s standing on the national stage by commenting on his race with McCain, and she is minimizing herself in the process. She is trying to corner Obama into taking a position that Democratic primary voters do not want him to have to take – the idea of Obama shutting off the spigot of his movement is unthinkable for the vast majority of the party. And as she stands shoulder to shoulder with McCain on the issue, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish their styles.
Going Forward
Despite Clinton having failed in her first two attempts at attacking Obama’s credibility, she will not be deterred – and she shouldn’t. Forcing Obama into a debate that is framed around whether he is trustworthy or not has the potential of putting him in an uncomfortable position. Whether there is any evidence of his untrustworthiness or not, being forced to proclaim innocence – the “I didn’t do it” defense – rarely sounds convincing. If Clinton were able to paint Obama as lacking credibility, the pillars on which his message is built could begin to crumble.
Obama does have a strong defense to this line of attack. An attack on a politician's credibility is usually stronger if it happens early in a campaign, before voters have solidified their perceptions of that candidate. Now, even among Clinton supporters, Obama is viewed as trustworthy, and it may be too little too late for the Clinton campaign to begin reversing that perception. If she tries, she will have to face Obama using the credibility he has built to fend her off.
Because it is not advantageous for Obama to have the debate framed in terms of “credible or not,” he shouldn’t allow it to be framed that way. Instead, he should turn to those who trust him, the Democratic primary electorate, bringing with him a new three word phrase: “You know better.” For Obama supporters, all that is needed to reaffirm their support of their candidate is to hear that status-quo politics is rearing its head again, lobbing false claims in the way that the status-quo usually does. If “you know better” becomes a secondary mantra of his, he will be able to marginalize any attack on his credibility with a familiar refrain. And from that defensive position, he will be able to continue to solidify her persona as the chief representative of the politics of old.