Former president Bill Clinton got into trouble last week for using fairytale and Obama in the same sentence, (same paragraph really,) but the real fairytale would be to think that we Democrats can reduce a whole campaign to one word and expect to win the general election.
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After losing two perfectly winnable elections to someone who packaged his message in the cloak of simple slogans like "Restoring Honor" and "Staying the Course", it's understandable and really about time that we too come up with simple ways of communicating a narrative rather than delivering a laundry list. Bill Clinton of course did both with his policy agenda and the "Bridge to the Future" slogan.
Yet we have some ways to go for at least two reasons: One is that first we need to pass the hurdle of the primaries and here we being Democrats need more sophistication from a candidate than a two word slogan to make up our mind and the second is that "Change" or "Experience" are really still at least one word short of being a good slogan.
The first reason is personal for me as I look at the field, and I have to admit that I am drawn to Obama's campaign more than Clinton's, but after every debate I walk away more confused and really could live with either one. Yesterday's "Caucus Me" skit in Bill Maher's show crystallized the issue for me and I realized that beyond an intuitive sense of why I support Obama over Clinton I would be hard pressed to rationalize and therefore communicate my choice.
Related to that of course is the second problem and here the "Change" or "Experience" mini-slogans are so generic and overlap so much that almost all candidates even Republicans now can and in fact are claiming the same themes. This would be like Al Gore also running on "Restoring Honor" and John Kerry running on "Staying the Course". It's clear why such a slogan would be less useful and why adding more color to these slogans is important for the candidates and for convincing others to support them.
Of course, after I finished thinking about all this I became far clearer on why I support Obama and not Clinton, so if you are a Clinton supporter brace yourself for what's to come of my analysis. But I did come up with what I think are "better" slogans for both so you may want to keep reading.
I have to say that like perhaps the majority of the population now I feel the need for urgent change and see experience only as relevant to the extent it can help bring about that change. So from the outset I am looking for the better change candidate not someone with experience to stay the course. But the change candidate must meet two criteria simultaneously. That person must represent change in the direction of more progressive and humane causes and they must have had experience doing so. This explains why Bill Richardson's resume was irrelevant. There are lots of other people who have equally long resumes and lots of experience that may have nothing to do with changing the mindset of opposing factions and transforming the political orientation of a nation.
In that light, though both Clinton and Obama, and Edwards for that matter, now constantly speak of change somehow I find not all three equally credible. But what is the basis for this intuitive judgment about these candidates credibility? After all they have all had Experience and they all support and have made Change in their lives. In fact that can be said of anyone. But as we think of these terms we have our own ideas of what Change and Experiences we want from a candidate and here is the critical differentiator. Clinton’s involvement with change has been strongest in the sphere of her personal style and occasionally her political goals. At least in the last 16 years when she has been in the national political scene, she has changed from being a divisive figure unsuccessfully pursuing ambitious causes to a more conciliatory persona with middle of the road positions at best and hawkish right wing positions at her worst. Here I have her attempt at overhauling healthcare in the 90's and her various votes including the vote to allow invasion of another country later in her Senate years in mind. What this says to me is that she was entrenched in the politics of tit for tat and what she has learnt from that Experience is to move closer to the dark forces that threatened her career. She is now referencing her ability to schmooze with the dark side and take up their occasional pet causes as a decisive reason why she should earn the progressive votes. These may in fact be important skills and after all her actual votes in the senate are very close to that of Obama's and she is mostly a reliable liberal. She is also someone that as I said before I would be happy with as a president. My analysis is only related to what she is calling the benefits of her years of government experience and what she is asking us to use in judging her credibility for being a better change candidate than Obama.
By contrast Obama's experience has had little to do with changes in his own political style and the finding of his own voice. As a young boy growing up without a father he found his voice through experimenting with life as his biography shows in some unflattering ways. But his work in public life has always revolved around motivating others and creating consensus. With that his experience goes back years. It's quite one thing to build consensus around your causes by compromising on its details with your adversaries, than it is to ingratiate yourself to your adversaries by taking up theirs. Obama's style has been visionary where he sees things that look like common sense to ordinary people but seem out of bounds of politics and he transforms those causes into politically actionable work. His work on ethics reform in the Senate was an example where the need for it is a no-brainer but it took his work to get it done and yet he did compromise on the details, so now if senators are standing up their meal can still be subsidized.
But overall, I feel even if Obama may be less successful in implementing every line and word of what he now gives us hope for, at least I am more confident he will not sign off on some nonsensical tax cut to company X or occasionally invade another country to show he is part of the in-crowd or prove his toughness. His proven ability to motivate people and build people powered consensus and therefore disarm his political adversaries is far more valuable in a progressive president than Clinton's knowledge of the inner workings of power circles and ways to avoid their wrath.
I have convinced myself about why I should vote for Obama though I have left many stones unturned regarding the facts of the lives and voting records of these candidates. Yet, I am not sure that those really matter in the final hours of forming a broad campaign narrative.
Related to their slogans I have to admit that both "Restoring Honor" and "Staying the Course" had a poignancy about them that "Change we Can Believe in" still lacks. Both of those implied movement forward and indicated a direction, where Obama's is still rather stagnant. The slogan describes itself rather than what the campaign is for. What kind of change, change we can believe in, but what is the campaign for? "Visionary Change toward Post-Partisanship" is something he can credibly claim and one that would differentiate him from others. In that light Clinton’s slogan should be something like "Experience for a Partisan Environment" which is something she can claim without an easy rival. That would make it clearer to voters what their options are: keep the same rules and hire a president who can maneuver them or vote for someone to change the rules and close the last chapter on divided American politics.