The Virtues of a Long Campaign

A Relook At A Long Campaign:
Commentators, including me, have been inclined to decry the extraordinary length of the 2008 Presidential election campaign. As it moves on, seemingly endlessly, for up to two years, we all become fatigued by the sheer repetitiveness of listening to the same candidates say the same things, over and again. To a considerable extent, the arguments of the candidates, no matter how meritorious, lose some of their merit with their restating, and the speeches lose their luster when repeated hundreds of time. Eventually, we decide whom we prefer and we start to “tune out” most of the rest of the campaign as noise.

I believe that most of this is true. However, I have begun to understand that a candidate like Senator Barack Obama would have had absolutely no chance in a short campaign, and I think we would have been the poorer for it.

For example, a shorter campaign would have required all of the candidates, including Obama, to rely almost entirely on the big hitters and special interests for their campaign funding. In effect, none of the more traditional Presidential candidates can even get to first base unless they sell a portion of their campaign to people who will own them afterward.

In this instance, Barack Obama started very early, with little more than seed money, and his campaign will have, when it is over, changed the face of American politics forever. What he did is to plant a really big idea that will bedevil entrenched incumbents for years to come. The big idea is this: a really smart, talented and charismatic candidate, without established funding, can start early, working smaller groups, and build up an online campaign that can eventually out raise and out spend the big hitters and the special interests. That is what Obama did!

A long campaign has another important virtue, which is becoming apparent as we proceed through the month of October. The Republicans of the Karl Rove School have perfected the mid to late October last minute smear campaign, launched when it is nearly impossible to counter. The Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a perfect example in 2004.

In this election, Senator Barack Obama is facing much of the same kind of nasty assault, with the Internet underground effort by Republican client groups to label him a Muslim and question his patriotism; the advertising attacks to link him to Rev. Wright and William Ayers; and the overall attempt to paint him a “left wing”, tax and spend “liberal”.

But it is not working, and it is not going to work, and we can all thank the long campaign for that. Everyone has now heard Senator Barack Obama for 18 long months, and many of them have already bought into the negative campaign and will not consider him. However, all of these attacks by the McCain campaign have become “old news” for everyone.

If you take a relatively less well known candidate like John Kerry, Ross Perot, and even Sarah Palin, and you smear them at the last minute, the strategy works because the voters lack the strength of context and exposure with which to ignore the slime. It creates “doubt” where prior knowledge cannot defeat it.

The long campaign has insulated Senator Barack Obama to a remarkable degree from the last minute Karl Rove slime tactics. Almost all of the voters have a thorough knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. The voters have heard it all before, hundreds of times and discussed both by Obama and commentators almost endlessly. Whatever effect this has had on voters has been had, and the voters will not give you a second shot at them on these issues raised so long ago. It is now “old news,” very old news, and no one is listening or interested – friend and foe alike.

The second problem is painting him as a left wing, flame throwing, radical liberal, or as someone “who really doesn’t understand,” or as a defeatist who wants to “lose” at any cost. We have all heard Senator Obama way too many times. He is way too smart, articulate and well informed to claim repeatedly that he doesn’t understand. It fell completely flat in the debate because it defied the obvious reality of Obama.

A flame throwing left wing radical: Obama tends to be at times excessively intellectual at times, given to eloquent and very positive language, in a tone of moderation and optimism. How do you paint this guy into something that he is so clearly not? It just doesn’t stick in this October.
Finally, how do you succeed in making him into a “military defeatist” when his primary “sin” is that he agrees with the American people that the War in Iraq was a mistake, to the detriment of the one that we needed to win in Afghanistan?

Finally, the long campaign has trained and prepared Senator Barack Obama: it has allowed him to collect a strong cast of senior advisors; he has honed his message, his tone, and his delivery; and he has weathered the worse, long ago, that they were going to throw at him.
We are going to see “long campaigns” proliferate in American politics, and maybe more “Barack Obama’s” will emerge to challenge the entrench incumbents backed by the big buck special interests who in the past have purchased public policy wholesale through campaign contributions.

And to John McCain, George Bush, and the “Karl Rove Strategists,” get ready for the big night because it isn’t going to be your night, this time.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black