Obama's happy, drama-free appeal

[Adelante]

In the days and weeks ahead, the Barack Obama campaign is going to pose a simple question to the undecided voters and undeclared superdelegates who will decide the Democratic nomination for president: If Hillary Clinton can’t run a good primary campaign, how is she ever going to run a good campaign against the Republicans?

And while she says she is ready from Day One to be president, she is at something like Day 430 into being a presidential candidate and her campaign seems to be going from bad to worse to train wreck.

Mark Penn, who just got booted as her chief strategist, is only the latest problem in a campaign that has been heavy on drama and light on results.

“None of these folks have ever run anything, other than Hillary running a health care task force,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, told me Monday. “But these campaigns are big, complicated, pressure-filled enterprises, and it is an important proving ground.”

The Obama campaign is going to tell voters it is proving itself every day. It says it had a calm and deliberate strategy that it has executed well: Win Iowa (I will write more about this in my next column) and then aggregate delegates.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9436.html

[kid a]

1. Wow..It really is that simple from here on out - GOTV and "Do you want THAT?"

GoBama!!!

[Labors of Hercules]

2. It's easy to recognize that Barack is staging a great campaign....

I knew it the second I walked into our field office the day before it opened. It is the most frugal, malleable and efficient campaign I have ever seen.

[DUyellow]

3. you are right about that, we had our grass roots team ready to go, they came in the week before

and it was smooth sailing. They know what they are doing.

[bigbrother05]

4. kandr

[rug]

5. It will be a real nailbiter in November waiting for those caucus results.

:scared:

[Bensthename]

9. You don't understand. He is winning because he plays the game better..

You have to give him that. To win you have to win delegates. He went after the caucus delegates and she didn't. So who is the smarter candidate here? Answer me this?

If the game was popular vote or college electorate he would have played that game.
Don't hate the man, hate the game..

And when it comes Nov. We need the candidate who can win.

[rug]

10. He's run a far better primary campaign. The GE is a much different game.

I suspect he'll be playing Humphrey to McCain's Nixon.

[Kahuna]

15. And what pray tell would Hillary be playing? If she can't beat Barack

how do you expect her to beat McCain???? Huh?

[Bongo Prophet]

17. The historical parallel you are looking for might be Ed Muskie.

Not a bad guy, by any stretch.

I wish we'd had a Eugene McCarthy/Robert Kennedy ticket that year, if only history had been so kind.
Alas, it was not.

[knixphan]

30. He'll be Magic to McCain's Bird.

[DearAbby]

6. Woot!

Let's kick it up a notch!

[Bensthename]

7. Obama's coolnest with his campaign and delegate strategy proves he's "The One""

[babylonsister]

8. So simple. What's not to like about that? nt

[bigtree]

11. his campaign team wants the prize before they've won the race

winning a primary (if they do manage) by such an historically slim margin against someone they consider so inferior and flawed is a good endorsement for another primary run, but, by that measure, any successful primary run would be 'proving ground'. The real 'proof' will come in November.

[FrenchieCat]

13. Big Tree, you know that was exactly the Hillary Campaign's stance......

remember? It was supposed to be over on Super Tuesday. remember? :shrug:

[Kahuna]

16. Obama is doing just fine considering he's running against TWO Clintons.

Sometimes three. What does it say about Hillary that even with the help of her husband, a popular former president she's losing to a complete novice?

[knixphan]

31. Yep. 3-on-one and he's still outscoring.

[Cha]

12. Aha...

"Three months ago, I wrote there was a risk in Clinton’s having Penn as both her pollster and top strategist. “There is a natural tendency for someone who holds both positions to say the strategy can’t be wrong because the polling can’t be wrong,” I wrote. “And sometimes you need a strategist who is willing to say, ‘I don’t care what the damn polling says, we need to try something different.’”

Penn was not that person. And the Clinton campaign never really tried anything different. Clinton did show a little human emotion in New Hampshire, a state she narrowly won, but then she went back to being an issues machine.

And then there was her vote for the war in Iraq. I don’t care what Penn’s polling showed; Clinton’s refusal to say that her vote was a mistake and apologize for it has seriously hurt her with activist Democrats, those who vote in primaries and especially those who turn out in caucuses.

<snip>
..I am not in any way declaring victory,” Axelrod said. “One of the Clinton campaign’s biggest mistakes was they declared victory months before the campaign began. But these campaigns are a test not just of a candidate’s managerial skills but how they handle the vicissitudes of the process. It is a good barometer.”

[dkf]

14. What's worse is having Penn as her top pollster, top strategist, and top lobby for special interests

THAT is the straw that broke the camel's back.

[Adelante]

18. Organization-building

The Errors Haunting Clinton
By E. J. Dionne

WASHINGTON -- The most striking critiques of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign have come not from her opponents or her enemies, but from her most loyal friends.

Since December, I have been hearing a steady stream of worries from Clinton partisans who took Barack Obama's challenge seriously from the start. These loyalists felt her campaign was misreading the nature of the political year, the state of the Democratic Party, the organizational requirements of a long struggle for the nomination, and the complexity of the party's attitudes toward both the candidate herself and former President Clinton.

-snip

And Penn committed another sin that, in truth, affected the entire Clinton apparatus: believing that Obama would be trumped by Hillary Clinton's "inevitability" and that media messaging could overpower organization. This meant that the Clinton campaign was, to be charitable, underorganized. During a visit to Little Rock, Ark., a few days ago, I heard tales of woe from people who truly love Hillary and Bill Clinton but were astonished at her campaign's internal shortcomings.

Obama's team is well-known for its use of new technologies to raise money, engage volunteers and spread his gospel in unorthodox ways. Yet equally important has been Obama's own old-fashioned version of micro-politics.

He built local organizations all over the country, especially in the overlapping groups of smaller states and those holding caucuses. He won most of the small states that voted on Feb. 5, the Super Tuesday primaries that the Clinton camp thought would secure her the nomination, and he swept the states that voted in the weeks immediately after. Much of Obama's current lead was amassed in that period.

Not all of these problems can be laid at Penn's feet. But he did come to symbolize a campaign that was much given to infighting and failed to understand the new energies unleashed in the Democratic Party by the reaction against George W. Bush. It did not grasp early enough how much politics has changed since the Clinton '90s. The post-Penn Clinton campaign has only a little time and a narrow window to make up for these mistakes.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/penn_the_symbol_of_clintons_pr.html

[paulk]

22. Clinton's biggest error is that she was more focused on a

general election strategy than a primary one.

Obama has run a brilliant primary campaign, focusing on smaller states, caucuses, and using a built in demographic advantage in the south to build his lead. But, the GE is an entirely different dynamic -

If he does win this nomination, I guess we'll find out then if he's got something different for after the convention, because the same strategy will not work against the Republicans.

[Adelante]

24. Well, I am thinking this point over

I don't entirely see why a primary strategy and a GE strategy should be so separated dynamically. The party itself has been well-built in almost every state throughout the primary season, along with the campaign's organization, so as to be much stronger as an organizing force for the GE. The primary's structure and energy carried through to the GE reinforces Obama's inclusive policy. Of course, I think Obama will beat the pants off McCain and I don't think you have that confidence. I do see this is something different than what has worked in the past. But I also see it is a different era and Obama's methods may be more suitable to a GE victory for Dems in a time when Republicans, except for the most conservative, and most independents, want out of where they are.

[paulk]

25. in a primary a campaign can target a specific demographic, or

several different ones, within their own party, to put them over the top. The point is that in a national election, those groups won't have the same weight as in a primary. It's an entirely different group of voters, so the same "targeting" won't work.

The most worrisome aspect of this race for me is the real divide between the base support of the two different Democratic campaigns - they are appealing to separate and distinct groups - and the groups that Hillary appeals to more closely mirrors the group that votes in the GE than Obama's support does. That's why Hillary has done better than Obama in the bigger, more diverse states.

I don't think either HRC or Obama will beat the pants off of McCain, I have felt that he is the most dangerous opponent the Republicans could throw at us, and I posted that here over a year ago back when the punditry had written him off. If McCain runs toward the center, he will be a real threat. I think the lesson of CT in 2006 has been lost on a lot of people. A centrist, established politician easily beat a liberal newcomer in a liberal state.

I don't have the faith that you and others have that things have changed that dramatically in just two years.

[DevonRex]

28. Seems to me that the grassroots

campaign is also key to winning in November.

[paulk]

29. can a grassroots campaign win a general election?

a nationwide election, at that? As I note in another post, it didn't work for Lamont in CT, and that in a "liberal" state.

When I talk about Obama's narrow demographic, that's what I'm talking about. He has appealed to a certain subset of the Democratic Party - that's why the base that's voting for him is different than the base that's voting for Hillary. What happens when you expand that race to not just Democrats, but Independents, and Republicans as well? Will the appeal translate itself to the number of voters needed to win a general election?

The primaries in the the bigger, more diverse states show some evidence that this may be a problem for Obama.

[JayFredMuggs]

19. There's probably another reason, (among many) why Obama is ahead...

There are more voters Dem., Rep., and Ind. out there that simply don't want or like Hillary Clinton.

But you have to hand in to Obama, among all ten candidates, he's the one to emerge as the OTHER finalist, all the others, (fine men, all of them) had to drop out.

[struck_dumb]

20. pink bunnies too?

Are all the dump trucks and mixers going to join in on a game of hoops on the White House lawn and we can all mellow out and not worry about being a world power anymore?? It is such a bother. Let's just be happy and have a laugh instead.

[Adelante]

21. Welcome to DU, struck_dumb

Enjoy your visit :hi:

[Cha]

26. Yeah, too bad

about your condition.

[JBoy]

27. Did you reply to the wrong OP? I have no idea what you're talking about.

[mtnsnake]

23. I'm not glad to hear this, but FINALLY one Obama supporter on DU posts something relevant

and worth discussing without telling lies and being slanderous. How refreshing. Thank you!

Yeah, WesDem, while I don't agree that Obama's campaign in the GE (if he gets there) will be anything as easy as it has been in the Primaries, it is food for thought that Hillary will need to change a few things for the GE if she's going to come off as a good GE campaigner. I haven't wavered on how I feel about her, but I think there's lots of room for improvement in logistics of her campaign. PA will be a good test. If her campaign can turn the momentum around there, then there is no reason that she can't turn it around for good. OTOH, if her campaign can't come up with an ace by PA....