In case, you haven't heard, Exxon has posted a record profit--$$11.68 billion--this quarter. Obama's response below.
Here's the excellent statement from Obama:
Perhaps the only thing more outrageous than Exxon Mobil making record profits while Americans are paying record prices at the pump is the fact that Senator McCain has proposed giving them an additional $1.2 billion tax break. While Senator McCain’s plan has succeeded in helping his campaign raise over $1 million from oil and gas company executives and employees just last month, it won’t lower gas prices or end our dangerous dependence on foreign oil. Instead of an energy policy that reads like an oil-company wish list, it’s time to create a new American energy economy by investing in alternative energy, creating millions of new jobs, increasing fuel efficiency standards, and ending the tyranny of oil once and for all.
More like this, please. Every day. Five times a day. And TV ads too.
Good populist rhetoric, and linking McCain to corporate greed, is the way to beat not only McCain's drilling nonsense, but the Brittany-Spears smear campaign.
I mostly agree with Dansac when he says:
Get scrappy Obama, no more worrying about "looking Presidential." The high road is for suckers and we thought you knew this. Winning is really quite simple:
"John McCain is Bush's 3rd Term" and "John McCain is Completely Out of Touch and Knows Nothing about the Economy"
Repeat it over and over. Not just Obama, but a coordinated surrogate strategy with really tough talking points. Call his ads "pathetic" and what you'd expect from someone "who has nothing to offer but a 3rd Bush term and knows nothing about the economy."
Frame HIM instead of allowing yourself to be framed. Because don't be fooled Obama folks or Kossacks, that's what's starting to happen.
Yup, he who plays offense will win. He is forced to say, "No, I'm not..." loses. Missing, however, from Dansac's recipe is the key ingredient. He needs to trump bogus, dishonorable conservative populism with genuine, honorable, progressive populism. As I saidthree months ago:
Clinton is portraying Obama as an out-of-touch, effete, liberal elitist who can't relate to (white) working class and voters. If and when Obama wins the nomination, McCain will do the same...
We've seen this crappy movie before, of course. For the last forty years, the GOP has managed to portray every Democratic nominee--except the two winners, Carter and Clinton--as egg-headed elitists. Indeed, conservative cultural populism, originating with Nixon's "silent majority," has arguably been the dominant political force during this time. For a politician like Obama--who, unlike Bill Clinton, lacks both a Southern accent and a willingness to demagogue cultural issues--there's only one recourse.
That recourse is to run against the Axis of Greed and Corruption: corporate power, its lobbyists, and the D.C. Establishment (including, in some cases, the Democratic Establishment.) Obama should, by all means, link McCain to Bush, but it's not enough. It mostly misses both the cause and target of the middle class's anger and economic anxiety. Here's a key finding from Democracy Corps:
If Americans have ever been angrier with the state of the country, we have not witnessed it...When you ask in a national survey the 70 percent who say the country is off on the `wrong track' what underlying developments they are thinking about, they point to three inter-related themes, fully consistent with the more emotional response of the groups: big business getting whatever they want in Washington, leaders forgetting the middle class and America doing nothing about problems at home.
Obama sometimes speaks to this dynamic--when, for example, he argues against the war in Iraq because of its impact on our economy, or when he rails against the "special interests." But his critique of Big Business and its servants in Washington is far too muted, and he has utterly failed to connect McCain in the public consciousness to the culture of corporate-sponsored corruption. As I said, Bush-bashing is essential but insufficient. Bush is deeply unpopular, yes, but he's not nearly as unpopular as HMOs, Congress, and Big Business--the three least popular institutions in the country, according to Gallup.
A populist campaign would both explain people's anxiety and provide an antidote. That is, it would link McCain to Corporate Special Interests, vilifying both, and provide simple, concrete solutions that would put money in people's pockets at the expense of Corporate Special Interests and their whores, like McCain.
I realize that Obama, neither by inclination nor design, is William Jennings Bryan, or even Sherrod Brown--he's simply not going to portray Big Business as a dark force--but the makings of an decisive and relatively sunny populist campaign already exist within Obama's own rhetoric and positions. It's a matter of emphasis and focus: in politics, if you're not saying something every day, you're not saying it.
This Exxon quote is great. Now don't stop, baby. Don't stop.