I've been talking to a lot of frustrated Obama supporters over the weekend, wondering if Obama's victory rally in St. Paul tomorrow night will really, finally be the real one? Will enough superdelegates announce in time?
It's worth it to remember the heady days of 2007 when multiple candidates were announcing their runs for president... over and over and over again? After all, why announce just once, when you can stage a series of ever more elaborate announcements, one after the other, milking every last bit of press coverage for all its worth?
McCain was particularly ham-fisted about it, announcing with a smirk in March that he would announce his run in April:
"This is the announcement preceding the formal announcement. You know you drag this out as long as you can. You don’t just have one rendition. You’ve got to do it over and over."
Dan Balz kindly described the trend in the Washington Post of "multi-step announcement schedules to garner maximum attention for their bids."
But this kind of admittedly cheap stagecraft is hardly unique to this cycle. After nearly a year of campaigning in 2003, finding his campaign hitting a lull against Howard Dean, John Kerry decided to start all over again with a new re-announcement in front of an aircraft carrier in Charleston harbor. It worked.
And why just have an "announcement" anyway? When you can have an "announcement tour"? It's about savoring every last drop of free media coverage.
Let's not forget this, as Obama makes victory address after victory address, first in Des Moines last week and tomorrow night in St. Paul, that the cable networks will be broadcasting them at full length, granting the kind of airtime money couldn't buy. Let's use the victory lap for all its worth. Savor it.
Crossposted on One Million Strong