Obama could still lose this election, and if he does, it will be because of one single fact: naïveté. It seems that, contrary to what many have said this time around, Obama fell prey to the same type of complacency that has compromised Democratic candidates in the past two presidential elections. Both Gore, in 2000, and Kerry, in 2004, lost because of an incredible naïveté that assumed that the American electorate was fundamentally intelligent, and that it could sort out, for itself, the lies from the facts, and therefore carry the Democrats to victory without them needing to go negative and push harder in order to try and ensure victory beyond all doubt. In both cases, they were DEAD WRONG, and THEY LOST.
And here Obama goes again with the same naïve assumptions. My opinion is that Obama is making a huge strategic mistake in assuming that not going negative and simply sitting on his tenuous and volatile lead will be enough to take him to victory. And even if he did end up winning, why make it harder than it should be?
I am no troll and I deeply support Barack Obama. But I want Obama to win and to win big and painlessly. I believe that his insistence on clean politics is naïve and risky in an election cycle in which the only chance for McCain to win depends heavily on him being able to successfully smear Obama. There are signs the smears have begun to work, and this is because those smears have gone virtually unchallenged. 48 hours before election day is an eternity during which the moods of the electorate can still swing. A lead which may have appeared modestly sustainable yesterday can suddenly evaporate the next day, and what keeps the moods from swinging too much is sometimes as simple as not ceding ground to your opponent in the area of negative politics.
True, Obama's electoral rhetoric has been about warning his supporters about complacency and urging them to vote, but that's all it has been, rhetoric. The candidate's own actions and deeds have been incredibly complacent.
Obama's complacency has expressed itself most in his refusal to go tit for tat, blow for blow. Yet, I had written before in many past articles that Obama had a very good justification for going negative. He could argue that he had made a pledge to the American people that he would never be first to land a negative punch, but that, if attacked, he would respond with equal, if not greater virulence.
I have loved reading the Daily Kos's founder's call for the type of Democratic involvement that would "leave it all on the road" and break "the backs" and "the spirits" of the Republicans. I have loved this call and I have wanted both the supporters of Obama and the candidate himself to go for broke in these last 48 hours.
It is true that in this election Obama's supporters have really gone for it this time around. For once, the Democrats' sense of dedication, sense of organization and ground game have really been superior to those of the Republicans. Obama's supporters have contributed close to 800 million dollars and have supported the Democratic candidate with an exceptional passion. It seems, however, that the candidate himself has not left it all on the road, and he has not really gone for broke. He has not wanted to break the backs of GOP and McCain supporters, preferring to coast to victory on the sheer determination of his anti-GOP and anti-McCain/Palin supporters.
It was particularly disheartening to hear one of Obama's top advisors, David Plouffe, saying the other day that they were expanding their advertising campaign into McCain's home state of Arizona, but that they were not going to use any negative ad in there because of their deference and respect for John McCain. This is insane, especially considering that John McCain has shown no such reluctance in besmearing Barack Obama whenever he has had the opportunity to do so. It is this difference in philosophy that will make, and has made, this election closer than it should be.
The question is: will being positive to the end be enough for Obama to pull it off, and how hard will it be for him to do so at a time when John McCain, unhindered by such scruples, has decided to leave it all on the road?
In the game of American politics, there are three parties: the Republican candidate and his/her supporters, the Democratic candidate and his/her supporters, and the media. With much less money than Obama, McCain has successfully used the media to broadcast his smears to the American people. The McCain camp seems to have heavily invested in a very astute strategy: they understood they could match Obama's money by simply forcing the media to carry their outrageous attacks, cost-free. This strategy has given them ample opportunity to touch those Americans who had doubts about Obama. Their use of Joe the Plumber, a man whom they decided, beyond all logic, to use as a symbol of their non-message to the American people, has given them the type of media attention they needed in order to recast their economic message. This strategy paid off greatly because the McCain/Palin ticket was often able to own the airwaves, and thus repeatedly blunt any advantage that Obama may have gained. Not only did they prevent Obama from gaining further ground, they actually made some gains in some key battleground states.
For McCain/Palin, it did not matter that they were perceived as negative and immoral. What mattered was that, in order to own the media, and win, all they had to do is throw as many smears and attacks as they could muster, and use as many goofy symbols of "real America" as they could find, in the hopes that the media would take the bait and thus give John McCain both free press and free pass. Over and over again, McCain has successfully blunted the momentums that Obama had tried to develop since the Democratic convention.
What Obama has done, therefore, is to allow John McCain's negative message to go unchallenged. And this message, however misleading, has gained some traction in the less educated white suburbs and regions of America, thereby gnawing away steadily at the real gains Obama had made since the convention, and constantly resetting the race.
Yes, it is generally expected that polls will tighten as we get closer to the election, but the reality is that they do not have to. My theory is that in elections in which Democratic candidates are involved, polls have tended to tighten because the Democratic candidates have tended to become complacent towards the end, avoiding negative attacks and leaving it to the voters to decide which is which. The Republicans have always known how to fight to the end, and this has always served them well.
What I mean, therefore, is that a little negativity has never killed anyone. It can sometimes help to go negative, especially when this negativity is based on real facts. In reality, Obama did not really need to go negative the way John McCain did. John McCain's negativity is both baseless and tasteless. It is based on outright lies and debased stretchings of the truth. Obama did not need that kind of negativity. All he really needed to do was to implement a strategy for responding in tit for tat fashion to every McCain/Palin lie with the truth. In previous articles posted on this blog, I had already suggested ways of doing this (see Here, here and here, for instance). But, if I may, in a nutshell, rehash those ideas here, I would say that, instead of simply sitting on his tenous lead and letting McCain own the terrain of negativity (which is now earning him some points in the polls), what Obama should do in the next 48 hours is the following:
- To the attacks against his patriotism and associations, Obama has a clear winner in bringing up the fact that Todd Palin, Sarah Palin's own husband, and Sarah Palin herself, have had associations with the Alaskan Independence Party. Because this party advocates the full secession of Alaska from the United States, which is illegal in the spirit of the Constitution of the United States, this constitutes a worst case of association than Ayers and Wright. If thus, apples must be compared to apples, Sarah Palin, based on McCain's own idea of patriotism, would be considered unfit to be Vice President of the United States. John McCain himself, for choosing her, would be seen as lacking the appropriate judgment to serve as President of the United States.
- To the attacks against his values and morals, all Obama has to do is point out the fact that, while his opponents have used unfounded rumors and guilt-by-association schemes to besmear him, Obama has never been the object of an ethics investigation. He has never been questioned by the American justice system for his association with Ayers, Wright or Rezko. If these had been criminal acts, Obama would have been questioned by the American justice system, unless, of course, John McCain wants to argue that George Bush and the Department of Homeland Security are also in the tank for Barack Obama. While most of the smears about his associations and values have been fabricated in the windmill of rumors and innendoes, both his opponents, John McCain with his Keating Five involvement and Sarah Palin with her Trooper Gate abuse of power fiasco, have been the real objects of real ethics investigations, and have been found very lacking in judgment and honesty. On the basis of that reality, who is really to be trusted?
We could go on and on with many such examples where a tit for tat strategy aimed at nullifying John McCain's negativity would have been useful.
My bet is that John McCain has begun a slow, but steady increase in the polls that is due to one thing and one thing only: Obama's naïveté and complacency. Obama has relied more on spending money and building his message around positive values than on not allowing John McCain to besmear him unchallenged. It is all good to try and promote positiveness, but, in general, an uneducated electorate tends to believe lies and smear more easily than the truth, especially in a context in which only one side is smearing and the smearing is allowed to go unanswered. In this cycle, Obama would have been well advised to remain on the offensive in terms of responding to every smear, every attack, every innuendo. Where McCain would have run a negative ad with lies, Obama would have run a negative ad responding to this with an attack of his own on the same topic. The attack vs. counterattack dialogue would have gone something like this:
OBAMA: John McCain and Sarah Palin have questioned my patriotism and have played dirty guilt-by-association schemes that have distorted the truth, all for the sake of winning an election at all costs. They have called me unpatriotic, have called me a terrorist, and a socialist. But let me ask you, isn't that hypocrisy? How can John McCain call me unpatrioctic when his own Vice Presidential choice, Sarah Palin, has a husband who was a member of the Alaskan Independance Party, whose leader has expressed his hate for America and developed an ideology aiming at seceding from the United States? John McCain can call me all the names he wants, but how can we trust John McCain's judgment when he has chosen as a vice presidential running mate a secessionist who wants her state to break away from the United States? This is not rumor, this is fact. How can we trust people who have both been the object of ethics investigations? They have questioned my associations, but none of my associations have led to ethics investigations. One cannot say the same about John McCain and Sarah Palin, whose acts and associations have led to actual investigations. Who should we, then, trust with the destiny of America? Those who have used their power and influence to engage in questionable practices and abuse of power, or those who, like Joe Biden and myself, have never been involved in questionable practices?
And so on and and so forth. Obama would win the negativity argument by simply pointing out that his attacks are based on facts, not rumors. Did Todd Palin belong to the AIP? Yes, therefore fact. Were McCain and Palin involved in ethics violations? Yes, therefore, fact. Attacks based on facts are much more powerful than attacks based on rumors such as John McCain has used. To argue that Obama launched his political career in Bill Ayers's living room is conjectural as there is no proof of that. To argue, however, that Sarah Palin has been found guilty of ethics violation is a much more powerful attack because it is grounded in fact.
As I said above, I have written previously on various other ways in which Obama could go negative without appearing to be negative (see Here, here and here, for instance). I hope that Obama could, in this last 48-hour stretch, make a strategic choice to invest in countering every negative attack that the McCain/Palin ticket have thrown, or will undoubtedly be throwing, at him.
Not doing so will be tantamount to not having learned any lesson from the primaries, when Obama ended his bid in a considerably weaker position than Hillary Clinton, losing a number of important later primaries that he should have been winning. He never gained real momentum because he tended to sit on his lead, just to be surprised later that Hillary Clinton's attacks had actually worked and changed the minds of people in the last 48 hours. Obama's lack of aggressivity, his decision to simply sit on his tenuous leads almost cost him the nomination, and made the election go on for much too longer than it should have.
We are seeing the same thing at this very crucial moment. Obama is running out the clock at a time when John McCain is throwing everything at him.
I don't know if Obama is addicted to nail biting and stress, but his tendency has been to make easy wins look hard by simply ceding the last-minute advantage to his opponents, who have tended to have free reign in the area of negative attacks, thus pushing Obama to his limits in contexts where the win could have been easier.
That is a disheartening practice. I want blood, I want Obama to go for the kill. I want him to leave everything on the road. I do not want to stay awake on Tuesday night waiting for chads to be counted or lawyers to take an unresolved election case to the Supreme Court. I want a victory that is certain, not one that has been allowed to become close because of Obama's own miscalculations.
Yes, Obama has more paths to victory when considering the current electoral maps. Yes, he has more chances of putting more red states into his column. Yes, Obama currently has a lead, but this lead has been rather volatile. The latest state polls out of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Missouri, North Carolina have been rather unstable and could still go either way. Meanwhile, John McCain's negativity has been gaining traction. As Obama now seems to have reverted to the bad habit of sitting on a lead and hoping that a last minute surge will not overtake him, all we have left, as Obama supporters who have given him all we can in terms of support, money and dedication, is to hope that the free reign McCain has enjoyed in the area of negativity will not come back to haunt us come November 4.
If John McCain wins, it will not be because of racism, or because of the white suburbs of Pennsylvania not daring to vote for a black candidate. It will be because of Barack Obama himself and the Democrats' inherent inability to win elections.
Tomorrow, as part of my Day of Reckoning series," I will write a "Day of Reckoning 2" piece, which will be titled "Day of Reckoning 2: Why John McCain Will Lose"
Brought to you by: The Barack Obama Unofficial Advisory Council
Original Link: Click Here.
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.