Election '08 by Gus: Part 7

My prediction for PA: Clinton 54, Obama 46
Reality: Clinton 54.7, Obama 45.3

Although I hoped reality would be a little bit better than my prediction, in fact reality was a little bit worse (as an Obama supporter). Now, in the couple weeks off until Indiana/North Carolina, I'll throw my 2 cents in on where the Obama campaign could've been better. My focus will be on the period of time since it has been just him and Clinton.

1) Having re-votes in Florida and Michigan.

From the beginning, when this issue came up, he should have loudly advocated for those primaries to be re-done. He easily could have pushed behind the scenes for them to be held in June, giving him plenty of time to campaign in those places. He would've lost Florida, since the only Democrats in the state are old white New Yorkers (I know- Nacole and I flew down there in '04 and went door to door getting out the vote on election day), but he could've kept it close. Michigan would've been close also, but could've gone either way with some serious campaigning.

Going the opposite way has left him open to the charge that he's disenfranchising people, but more broadly, makes him look scared of Clinton, scared that he can't win. It's like those early round NCAA games, where a #16 team jumps out to a surprise lead early in the game, and then starts playing not to lose, instead of playing to win. Meanwhile, the #1 seeded team just keeps doing what it's always done to get there in the first place, and then in the end the lower seeded team ends up succumbing. Clinton was the #1 seed in the Democratic tournament, and Obama was a mid-range seed. Once Obama was ahead, and started feeling the pressure, they started playing not to lose, instead of playing to win. This brings me to:

2) Whether/when Clinton should drop out of the race

I cringe every time I read something saying Obama supporters are calling for Clinton to exit the race. That also makes Obama and his campaign look scared, like he can't actually beat her. And it makes him sound like a complainer. No one is looking for whining/complaining in their commander-in-chief.

Again, from the beginning, when this kind of talk first surfaced, Obama should have strongly and clearly said, "This is a democracy, and Senator Clinton should be in this race for absolutely as long as she pleases, and no one should be saying she ought to quit." Setting that tone would have kept people in his own campaign from saying it, and it would have established him as confident that he can beat her, and supportive of participation in our democracy.

In the end, what she has to throw at him is going to be nothing like what the Republican attack machine is going to throw at him. He has coasted in his previous, rather minimal electoral experience, and beating Clinton is a necessary step in his development as a candidate. And if he fails to beat her, he will have no one to blame but himself.

3) Trade

In the run-up to the Ohio election, which is really where he let Clinton back in this thing, Clinton was talking all kinds of talk about the downsides of trade, and so Obama also started in on that topic. Then one of his people was quoted up in Canada as saying that Obama didn't really believe any of that stuff, but was saying it because he needed to.

Oh crap, I thought, when I read that.

The working class white folks in Ohio-Pennsylvania-Michigan type country need to hear someone of high political stature tell them the truth- expanded trade is better for the country as a whole. Yes, we should negotiate some basic environmental/labor requirements into our trade agreements, but those can be negotiated upward slowly over time, as increased trade provides us with increased leverage with our trading partners. But increased trade benefits America, economically, and from a security perspective, as it makes other countries richer, and therefore more likely to focus on making money, and less on making trouble.

Those folks need someone to tell them that all those manufacturing jobs that built those towns are gone, and they're not coming back, and any politician who promises that either doesn't know anything about global economics, or more likely is just telling them what they want to hear. What the discussion should be about is how to help those people make the transition into those portions of the economy that are benefiting from increased trade. It's a great example of where government could come up with some reasonable ideas to accomplish some good, which is central to the Democratic party story. The Republicans understand that increased trade is better, but their response to the issue that the cost of increased trade is real pain borne by real people is "too bad for you".

I don't know Obama personally, but as soon as I read that comment I was sure that it was true, and so, I think, did everyone else. And in the moment when that came out, Obama lost a great deal of his image as a new, transformational candidate, and became a lot more like just another politician telling you what he/she thinks you want to hear. While Obama was still seen as pretty much a transformational figure, he was largely immune to charges of lack of experience, since transformational figures only come once in a blue moon, and people understand that. Whenever Obama does something that makes him seem like just another politician, he becomes just another politician, only one with virtually no national political experience. And then Clinton starts sounding better, because the Clintons, both of them, are master politicians, and she has way more experience than Obama does.

On the trade issue again, Obama played not to lose. And it cost him. I think if he had said what he really thinks about trade, as thoughtfully and candidly as he did about race, people in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and similar places, would respect him more, and be more likely to vote for him, even if they disagreed with his position. Those people, in their hearts, know what the real story is. But no candidate is giving them an option to hear it and face it constructively.


4) Bitterly clinging

The night that we got back from our weekend of paintball and skydiving, which I previously wrote about in the very first posts on this site, Ed sent out a global email response to a global email, which resulted in the entire NYC office having to attend sensitivity training (fortunately for me, I left NYC just before the trainings started). When I read that email, just before the shit starting hitting the proverbial fan, I actually yelled at my computer "No, no, no, Ed, WTF are you doing??? WHY, oh WHY, would you ever say that?"

That's the kind of response I had when I read those remarks by Obama.

I won't dwell too much on the word selection, since so many others have at length- "bitter" could have been "angry", "frustrated", or even "anxious", but "bitter" implies a character flaw, a smallness of spirit. "Cling" makes a person sound weak and needy. It's going to be hard to win people over by implying they are weak, small-spirited people.

The more interesting point, which appears to me to be largely unexplored (I've seen one small piece in the NYT that focused on it), is, what exactly was Obama getting at and did he have a valid underlying point, albeit one that got blown away by the firestorm resulting from his extremely unfortunate choice of verbiage?

I'd been thinking a lot along the kind of lines I think Obama was exploring, and here's what I think he was trying to explore; since Obama was in San Francisco at the time, I'll use homophobia as my working example.

I've been wondering a lot about why Republicans have had so much success using extremely divisive social tactics in their electoral strategies over the last 20 years or so. Homophobia is a great example; witness all the "defense of marriage" stuff that inevitably comes up when gay people try to obtain the right to marry each other.

When push comes to shove, I don't think that the vast majority of people care if Mike and Ed marry each other, yet many are willing to be drawn in by all this defense of marriage baloney (as if Mike and Ed wanting to commit themselves to each other for life somehow weakens marriage as an institution; I mean, how can more people wanting to make commitments to each other be weakening the institution of marriage?). But if the Republicans have been successful with this sort of tactic, then using the framework of economics, it must be because they are supplying something that people are demanding. But what is it that people are demanding?

I think if you look at the long arc of human history, the amount of change per unit time (the velocity of change, if you will), has been steadily increasing; i.e., change itself is accelerating. In the Middle Ages, you probably wouldn't have noticed that, since the velocity of change at that moment in time was still slow enough that the world looked pretty much the same when you died as it did when you were born. Plus, lives were typically pretty short.

But now, that ever increasing rate of change has produced a world in which you can expect to live 60-80 years at least, and that number is increasing, and at the end of any 20 years the world appears to be vastly different than it was at the start of the 20 years. 20 years ago, there was, on a practical level, no internet or cell phones, gas cost like a dollar a gallon, terrorism was something that only happened in places like Israel, and it wasn't easy or practical to move all your manufacturing operations to whatever country on earth had the lowest average hourly wage.

Now, the velocity of change has reached such a level that it's possible to observe the world around you changing in large-scale ways. And that can easily be disconcerting. But what's really disconcerting is the effect all this change has on social institutions, which are a primary tool people use for organizing/making sense out of their lives.

50 years ago, it was still more or less the case that everyone could expect a man to work, a woman to stay home and raise the kids, the man would have lifetime employment at a reasonable wage with healthcare and a pension, and wherever you lived, you knew pretty much everyone around you, and pretty much everyone you knew, lived around you. People met each other at local community events, married each other, pretty much stayed married to each other, raised kids, and died. Everyone pretended homosexuality didn't exist. It was, relatively speaking, a simple framework with which to understand the world, even if it glossed over a lot of messy reality (i.e., divorce happened, some women worked, homosexuality did exist, etc.)

But in 50 years' time, basically every one of those expectations has been destroyed. (Except dying, of course. We can all still expect to die. Though who knows what the next 50 years will bring on that front.) And there really hasn't yet been time to evolve a new set of expectations about how the world will work. Because although it doesn't take a lot of time to destroy institutions or expectations, it does take a long time to build them. I alluded to that in the last post, in which I claimed that the conceptual debate over racism and sexism is over, but it will still likely take generations to work the majority of legacy effects of them out of the system.

With all of people's expectations about the way the world will work for them effectively destroyed, people become some combination of anxious, angry, and/or frustrated. They want to make sense of the world, and have some kind of reasonable expectation of how life is going to work. And then along comes the Republican party, offering up the spectre of "liberals", "secular humanists", and "gays", as the convenient target to focus all that anxiousness, anger, and frustration. And so otherwise decent, friendly people get sucked into some of the bizarre stuff that the extreme right-wing, socially conservative part of the Republican offers up.

And because the Democratic party hasn't developed an alternative narrative to organize around, the Republican party has had the market cornered, and has profited handsomely from it. And may yet again in this election; I think it's going to be a close win for the Republicans if it's McCain-Clinton, and a close win for the Dems if it's McCain-Obama. But I think this is the sort of thing that Obama was trying to articulate, however imperfectly.

Oh, and don't think that the Democratic party is without guilt on matter of this nature; there are portions of the left wing that offer up the spectres of "globalization", and "multinationals" as convenient labels to explain all the ills of the world, and those labels are no more useful than the ones the Republicans offer up.

Change will continue to accelerate. As a people, we need to get more adaptable, through more realistic expectations about how stable life will be, and especially through becoming better educated; the more you learn, the easier it is to learn new things. And the easier it is for you to learn new things, the more adaptable you are.

Adaptability should be a new ideal. Now what we desperately need is leadership, to explain this to people and get started the process of making ourselves more adaptable. That's the hope that I- dare I say it- cling to that Obama can provide us, and why I continue will continue to root for him in this contest.

So, Senator Obama- stop playing not to lose, and start playing to win. Your potential is great, but the leadership so far has been shaky. There's not a lot of time left to steady it up. But we need you to do it.

Yes you can.