When I grew up, my father owned a computer consulting firm. On each of his business cards was his firm's slogan. In that slogan is an idea that many people, especially in today's age of high speed internet and rapid response blogging, fail to understand. It's a simple idea.
There is time to do it right.
It's a slogan that reasonably explained my father's idea about his work. He believed that it is better to spend more time on a project and get it right than try to push something non-functional, bug-ridden, etc. onto a customer. It has had the effect of maintaining an incredibly dedicated customer base to his company.
Note that this slogan does not imply there is an infinity of time to get the job done. It implies that you can rush and put in a patch job that makes a bigger mess of things in the long run, or you can work solidly and get the job done right the first time. You can overreact to an issue and hack something together that deals with it in the short term, or you can lay out a plan of action and follow through on it and have a fix that lasts longterm.
So what does this have to do with political strategy?
For the last 2+ weeks I've been seeing a variety of bedwetting stories on DailyKos freaking out because Obama wasn't "going on the offensive." Stories by people worried that he was going to turn into another weak-kneed Kerry. Even I was starting to worry about Obama's lack of action... until today.
Today, I saw this campaign advertisement attacking McCain:
It's a beautifully crafted response to the attack ads McCain has been vomiting onto the airwaves for the last month. Obviously they have been preparing it and working on it for a long while, and ensuring that it effectively attacks McCain on the very point that he was attacking Obama on without harming the positive nature of Obama's campaign.
It's a clean, solid, highly directed advertisement.
It took time to create it. It took time to ensure that McCain would be thoroughly ensnared in his own "celebrity" meme. It took time to make sure that the advertisement wouldn't backfire by being "negative". It took time to come up with something that was more than just a hack and it took time to follow through on it.
It took time to do it right, and it is a perfectly targeted response to McCain.
Unlike previous campaigns which either rushed out the door responses which simply made matters worse, or didn't respond at all. Obama has shown that his team knows how to take matters in stride and deal with them in a fashion which is not simply a patch, but rather a well thought out, solid solution.
The Obama campaign has always worked this way, and this is why I'm positive Obama will be an awesome president. He's not playing politics as usual. He isn't bouncing around everytime some small thing gets amplified by the media. He looks at the problem that has arisen, plans a clean strategy to deal with it, and implements said plan in a reasonable fashion. He's done this time and time again over the last year, and he's been successful with it almost every time.
What more could you ask from a good leader? What more could you ask from a great president?