Rove Unimpressed

Karl Rove has an interesting article in the WSJ discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Obama's campaign and using the term "chameleon" to describe the speed and volume at which Obama is changing positions. There is also an interesting post discussing Obama's fund raising problems at The Next Right, a new blog by Republican former Republican activists Jon Henke, Patrick Ruffini and Soren Dayton aimed at helping reform the Republican Party and move it back to its conservative roots.
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This from Mr. Rove writing in the WSJ, gives us an insight into the organization of national political campaigns, as well as the strengh and weakness of the Obama's organizations and practices. The strength he finds is that Obama has tried to copy the Rove playbook for a Presidential campaign. The weaknesses are that they have not copied the whole playbook and the chameleon like quality of the candidate:

. . . Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.

Sen. Obama's organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille's plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros's 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran "virtual precincts," using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.

The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP's "microtargeting" program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help. Another Obama adaptation of a 2004 Bush campaign technique is a stepped-up, rapid response effort. Charges do not go unanswered, the campaign stays relentlessly on the offense, using every channel of communication.

The Obama campaign has also copied the Bush strategy of broadening the general election map. In 2000, the Bush effort targeted not just the traditional battlegrounds, but also West Virginia (last won by the GOP in an open race for the presidency in 1928), Tennessee (Al Gore's home), Arkansas (Bill Clinton's home), Washington and Oregon.

Hoping for a breakthrough somewhere, Mr. Obama also wants to force John McCain to play defense. So in addition to traditional battleground states, he's running TV ads and organizing in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota. And where Mr. Bush targeted Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and education voters to narrow Democratic margins, Mr. Obama is going after evangelicals, veterans and values voters with ads and outreach to trim the GOP's margin.

There are problems, however. Mr. Obama's people admit they want to sucker Mr. McCain into spending money. To be successful, a bluff must be credible. In places like Nebraska and North Dakota, Mr. Obama can't rely on local issues – like Mr. Bush did with coal in West Virginia in 2000 – to unexpectedly win a critical state. Organization alone won't suffice. And putting Obama dollars into Texas, for example, to help win five state House seats may simply cause Texan Republicans – not Mr. McCain – to raise money and work harder to counter.

Democrats don't have the same large volunteer pool the GOP does with its Federated GOP Women, College and Young Republicans, and local party committees. In the primaries, Mr. Obama instead moved hordes of volunteers from state to state. It was a brilliant tactic, but Nov. 4 is different. The volunteers adequate for primaries held over five months will simply not be enough to compete in 51 separate elections (all 50 states plus the District of Columbia) all on one day.

Mr. Obama's biggest problem is . . . substance. . . Mr. Bush won the general election on the same themes and positions as in the primaries, including compassionate conservatism, the faith-based initiative, tax cuts and Social Security reform. There was no repudiation of past positions, no chameleon-like shifts in positions.

. . . In the primary, Mr. Obama supported pulling out of Iraq within 16 months, called the D.C. gun ban constitutional, backed the subjection of telecom companies to expensive lawsuits for cooperating in the terror surveillance program, opposed welfare reform, pledged to renegotiate Nafta, disavowed free trade and was strongly against the death penalty in all cases. But in the past few weeks, Mr. Obama has reversed course on all of these, discarding fringe liberal views for relentlessly centrist positions. He also flip-flopped on accepting public financing and condemning negative ads from third party groups, like unions.

. . . Mr. Obama is assuming such dramatic reversals will somehow avoid voter scrutiny. But people are watching closely, and by setting a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions, Mr. Obama may be risking his reputation for truthfulness. A candidate's credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built.

Read the entire article. Also an interesting read, At The Next Right, Sean Oxendine wonders whether Obama is about to run into fund raising problems.

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The Chameleon Candidate On Iraq

Asked today in a Town Hall meeting about accusations that he was flip-flopping on Iraq, Obama responded: "The people who say this haven't apparently been listening to me."

No. They have been listening. Closely, as this new ad from the RNC documents.



And now Obama is trying to figure out how to rewrite his position on Iraq. Good luck with that. Unfortunately, the undercarriage of the bus looks to be overflowing at the moment.

(H/T Gateway Pundit)

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The Chameleon Candidate & Mr. Dionne's Confusion

E.J. Dionne, the leftist aparatchik who doles out his pablum at the Washington Post, is unable to distinguish principle from expediency, nor cynical opportunism from reacting to changed circumstances. Nonetheless, he indadvertently gives us the perfect moniker for Obama, a man who has flipped and flopped so much that he has transcended the act and now is more appropriately referred to as the Chameleon Candidate.


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Mr. Dionne's confusion about Mr. Obama is perfectly understandable. It is difficult indeed to claim any color of principle for an individual who changes those colors with the speed and seamlessness of a chameleon. This from Mr. Dionne, writing in the Washington Post today:

When a candidate calls a second news conference to say the same thing he thought he said at the first one, you know he knows he has a problem.

Thus Barack Obama's twin news conferences last week in Fargo, N.D. At his first, Obama promised to do a "thorough assessment" of his Iraq policy in his coming visit there and "continue to gather information" to "make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable."

You might ask: What's wrong with that? A commander in chief willing to adjust his view to facts and realities should be a refreshing idea.

But when news reports suggested Obama was backing away from his commitment to withdrawing troops from Iraq in 16 months, Obama's lieutenants no doubt heard echoes of those cries of "flip-flop" that rocked the 2004 Republican National Convention and proved devastating to John Kerry.

So out Obama came again to reiterate his timeline. "Apparently, I wasn't clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq," he said. "I intend to end this war. My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war -- responsibly, deliberately, but decisively."

The unsteady moment suggested that Obama has not figured out how to slip the trap John McCain's campaign is trying to set for him. As Michael Cooper and Jeff Zeleny shrewdly put it in the New York Times, Republicans want to place Obama "in the political equivalent of a double bind: painting him as impervious to the changing reality on the ground if he sticks to his plan, and as a flip-flopper if he alters it to reflect changing circumstances."

That Mr. Dionne sees this as a simple trap from the McCain campaign speaks of the depth of his confusion. The problem here is not that Obama wants to change his mind. There are few Americans outside the America hating far left who would not embrace that. Indeed, a good leader is one who remains true to his principles while maintaining flexibility to change plans to most effectively persue those principles as facts on the ground change. Mr. Obama's problem is not with a lack of flexibility, its with a lack of principles beyond his own ambition.

Obama has been embracing defeat loudly and clearly for a long time. Obama even went so far as to say that genocide would be an acceptable outcome in Iraq as opposed to staying in that country to win the war and stabilize the country. Despite clearly changing facts in Iraq, Obama has been consistent in his calls for withdrawal and consistent in his utter refusal to acknowledge both military and political success in Iraq - until now when it is expedient to do so.

Thus, when Obama gives indication that he will now "refine" his othewise crystal clear position - a position never heretofore tied to the situation on the ground - the problem he faces is larger than the issue of Iraq itself. It is not that he is reacting to a changed situation. He is clearly moving to the right because of votes. As to whether any actual principles beyond ambition are underlying that move, it is an open question and one which America needs answered. Dionne sees this as a tactical political problem and is apparently unable to discern that this is a core issue that goes to the character and judgment of a politician who is asking us to trust him with the most powerful position in the world.

To continue with Mr. Dionne:

The flip-flop charge may be of limited use to the GOP this year because McCain has changed his own positions rather promiscuously on matters such as taxes and offshore drilling. Even on Iraq, one of McCain's signature issues, the Straight Talker has shifted his emphasis.

Let's assist Mr. Dionne with some definitions.

A flip flop is a change in political positions based on pure political expediency, irrespective of the changing conditions. It is an act of opportunistic cynicsm that shows a lack of principles and an overabundance of disingenuousness and ambition. That is Obama's problem on essentially every major issue in the race, and in particular on Iraq.

The flip side of it all, if you will, is a refusal to change positions in response to significantly changing conditions. That can be either a mark of principle or a mark of a partisan. McCain's refusal to alter positions on the Iraq war when it clearly looked to cost him his primary bid was clearly a stand on principal. To call McCain's changed position on off-shore drilling a flip flop given that we are facing an energy crisis that could well tank our economy over the next few years is a bit partisan idiocy. On the other hand, Obama's refusal to do anything on this issue that would upset the green special interests certainly suggests partisanship.

With the terms defined, the basis for Mr. Dionne's confusion becomes a bit clearer. To continue:

. . . Republicans are pressing Obama on Iraq because they know that any new moves he makes will be interpreted, fairly or not, as a change in position and that this will hurt him with two groups: the antiwar base of the Democratic Party and independent voters, many of whom are just tuning in to the campaign.

Painting Obama as a shameless shape-shifter is a way for his opponents to dull the enthusiasm (and inhibit the campaign contributions) of the war's staunchest foes. And if this image stuck, it could also hurt Obama among independents. They might vote for a hawk or a dove, but not a chameleon.

To interject here, I have to thank Dionne. The comparison of Obama to a chameleon who changes color depending on the environment of the moment could not be more apt. Indeed, Obama has changed so much so quickly, the moniker of flip flop does not do him justice, but "chameleon" candidate hits the nail on the head. And finally from Mr. Dionne:

Over the past week, Obama has been crafty in the way he has sought the political middle ground. He has emphasized his "values" and touted his patriotism, his call to service and his faith, as he did Saturday at a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. That is quite different from backing off his core promises.

Voters accept that a president may alter the details of campaign promises. What they expect is a clear sense of the direction he will take. At the moment, voters know that John McCain is far more likely than Barack Obama to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely. Obama would be foolish to blur that distinction.

Obama's hypocrisy in touting "Christian values" and his "faith," given that it is soaked in a brand and degree of racism that should disqualify him from election as dog catcher, is beyond belief. Worse is the complicity of the MSM in burying this issue.

As to the "core promises," much like his achievements, is is possible to name one with any degree of confidence? I know of no major issue where it is possible to say that Obama has remained consistent.

[Update: Powerline also deconstructed the Dionne article, though I think they come to at least a partially erroneous conclusion. The from Powerline:

Barack Obama’s campaign grows more “refined” by the day. On issue after high profile issue – Iraq, abortion, gun control, Reverend Wright – Obama changes positions the way most people change clothes. It’s gotten so bad that even E.J. Dionne has noticed. (Dionne’s column about Obama’s flip-flopping on Iraq is called “The Stand That Obama Can’t Fudge.” Dionne thus simultaneously recognizes and excuses Obama’s fudging on everything else).

The more Obama fudges, the more he confirms his status as the true heir to Bill Clinton. As I wrote back in April:

Hillary is the nominal Clinton in this year's presidential race, but it's Obama who increasingly bears the resemblance to Bill. . . .[R]ecently it’s become clear that, like the former president, Obama is fundamentally unserious about vital issues, including even those pertaining to war and peace. For both men, issues are not at root substantive problems to be addressed on their merits, but formal matters to be navigated and, to the extent possible, manipulated. . . . How else to explain [Clinton’s] statement about how he would have voted on the first Gulf War: “I would have voted for [the war resolution] if [the vote] was close, but the Democrats had the better arguments”?

At one level, this approach to issues is post-modern -- a variation of the academic school that sees texts as infinitely malleable instruments with no fixed meaning, just waiting to be put to whatever use we find amusing. Substitute “issues” for “texts” and “expedient” for “amusing,” and you have described the essence of the Clinton-Obama political school.

Where I take issue with Powerline is their portrayal of Obama as merely a copy of Clinton. Clinton never, to my recollection, ever approached what we are seeing from Mr. Obama in sheer volume of maleable principles and daily changing positions. By comparison, Clinton was a paragon of principle.]

At any rate, as his colum makes clear, Mr. Dionne is simply unable to distinguish people acting on principles from those acting on pure ambition and expediency. That says as much about the Chamelon Candidate as it does about Mr. Dionne and his left wing compatriots.

You can find Mr. Dionne's entire article here.

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