By Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin, Co-Editors CenteredPolitics.com
The choice of Senator Joe Biden, all about shoring up Obama weaknesses, represents
a continuation of a defense minded strategy that has marked the early weeks
of the General election campaign. But we have now reached the end of the beginning.
The convention marks the beginning of the end of this 2 year campaign, and the
question becomes, can team Obama – Biden go on offense? Beyond responding
to McCain’s strategic moves, can Obama and Biden, with help from the whole
Democratic Party including both Clintons, lay out a compelling vision of America
under 4 years of Obama, Biden leadership and connect with voters on all levels.
If they do the Democratic ticket could open up enough of a lead to sustain the
anticipated McCain counter attack, and more importantly, any unanticipated attack,
stumble, or change in the strategic landscape.
When winning is not good enough
Barack Obama and Joe Biden have a good chance of winning the election, but for
Democrats who believed the same about John Kerry in 2004 and lived through the
stolen election of 2000, “a good chance” is far from good enough.
At the elite level, coaches do not prepare their sports teams to win games,
but rather to dominate the field of play. Teams that are winning can still lose
or have the game ripped away by dirty play or a bad referees’ decision.
In any sport the great champions seek to enter the field having already won
through superior preparation that allows them to get ahead at the start and
put the contest away early. That way they cannot be dropped by a buzzer-beater
3-pointer, KO’ed by a punch below the belt, or reversed by the referees
on replay. Democrats have come to love the new Al Gore, and cry a little bit
every time HBO shows “Recount” but Dude, it should never have been
that close. By winning the starting job as Democratic nominee, Barack Obama,
accepted the responsibility to do his best to lead the team to victory and the
team’s goal for this election should be this sort of dominance.
And, it must be said, both Barack Obama’s race and novelty raise fears
that he could be vulnerable to political attack. For Democrats to have anything
short of night terrors, Obama needs to do in the General Election what he was
able to do to secure the Democratic Nomination, and that is to get far enough
ahead that he is able to weather a storm like Jeremiah Wright and still prevail.
That translates into a need to be well ahead by the end of the Democratic Convention.
Offense fills the seats but defense wins championships
From the outside, one can look at the Obama campaign and see the makings of
a pretty good defensive strategy at work. Nearly everything the campaign has
done since securing the nomination can be explained as a reaction to McCain’s
moves, and more often, anticipated McCain moves. David Plouffe, David Axelrod
and the team seem to have spent a lot of time playing the other side’s
chess pieces, imagining the campaign they would run against Obama and the closing
arguments they would make if they were scripting McCain, and then they have
moved, sometimes decisively and at a short term loss of good press, to take
away McCain’s options.
If McCain had hoped to paint Obama as inexperienced on the world stage and
taunted Obama to visit Iraq, so he did. Many Democrats have been nervous, that
even though he received great press and drew large crowds, his poll numbers
failed to advance. This may be misplaced fear. They did not send the candidate
to Europe in order to gain votes in Middle America in July, but rather in order
to reduce McCain’s strategic options in October.
If McCain wanted to assert that Obama’s plan amounted to “retreat
and surrender” in Iraq, team Obama had another response. The campaign
seemed to have made the calculation that it did not want to take a hard and
fast commitment to remove troops from Iraq within 16 months into the debates,
so he created some wiggle room by emphasizing his earlier commitment to “be
as careful getting out as we were careless getting in” even though the
apparent shift angered many of the “netroots.”
Not long after this Obama traveled to Bagdad and Iraq’s Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki endorsed the idea of a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. This may
not have been due to Obama’s strategy but it sure seems to have reduced
McCain’s options on this issue that had been quite central to his expected
strategy.
A similar story can be told when it comes to oil drilling where the Democrats
may have pulled off some effective jujitsu after struggling to find an effective
response to the Republican position. Obama lead by following. Obama’s
endorsement of the approach of a bi-partisan group of Senators and Representatives
who would allow new offshore drilling under some circumstances has placed him
squarely in the middle ground on energy. After weeks of calling Obama, “Dr.
No” McCain now must either choose to join Obama in the compromise, or
reject progress on the issue in the near term.
We want touchdowns!
But as much as there is to respect in Team Obama’s moves over the last
few weeks the low single-digit national poll leads, with some polls showing
him trailing, are disconcerting. The campaign is blunting McCain’s attacks
but it has not been successful in moving the ball downfield, and articulating
a compelling vision of what America would be like under Democratic control of
the White House. With the announcement of Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential
nominee, the Obama campaign continues this strategy. Biden’s policy vision
was not compelling enough to win him delegates to this convention, but he is
gold start when it comes to shoring up Obamas weakness when it comes to experience,
foreign policy gravitas, and appeal to working class, Catholic voters in middle-America.
For team-Obama to bring in Biden, it is like a good defensive football team
trading to bring in a pro-bowl linebacker.
In nominating Obama Democrats thought they were selecting the 1989 San Francisco
49ers who beat Denver 55 to 10 in Super Bowl XXIV, not the 1990 Giants who beat
the Buffalo Bills 20 to 19 on a missed field goal ending Super Bowl XXV. We
need to be far ahead because we do not know what surprises or dirty tricks are
in store and we cannot let this come down to a decision in this Supreme Court.
We already know how that would come out.
The authors are co-editors of CenteredPolitics.com.
Allan Rivlin is a Partner with Peter D. Hart Research a Public Opinion Research
firm in Washington, DC.
