Upper-Middle Class Goo Goos for Obama? (David Brooks)

[susankh4]

Beneath the euphemisms, what the advice really means is that Obama has to start accusing Clinton of things.

This time, Obama, whose competitive juices are flowing, has apparently accepted the advice. The Obama campaign is now making a big issue of Hillary Clinton’s tax returns and dropping hints about donations to President Clinton’s library and her secret White House papers. It’s willing to launch an ethics assault. “If Senator Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate,” the Obama strategist David Axelrod told reporters the other day.

These attacks are supposed to show that Obama can’t be pushed around. But, of course, what it really suggests is that Obama’s big theory is bankrupt. You can’t really win with the new style of politics. Sooner or later, you have to play by the conventional rules.

<snip>

And the Clinton people will draw them every step of the way. Clinton can’t compete on personality, but a knife fight is her only real hope of victory. She has nothing to lose because she never promised to purify America. ****Her campaign doesn’t depend on the enthusiasm of upper-middle-class goo-goos.*****

As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself. And even if he goes on to win the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president.

In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.

****Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.****

If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.






http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/opinion/07brooks.html?ex=1205557200&en=ca1564d8182b54dd&ei=5070&emc=eta1

[TheDoorbellRang]

1. His "new politics" doesn't mean he can't go on the attack

His new politics is inspiring more people to get involved in their own government, and greatly increasing the transparency of the system. The only people that thought this means sweetness and light and celestial choirs singing are the ones still wanting to do the government's business in smoke-filled back rooms -- so bad for everyone's health.