"Good Campaign"

Obama revamped campaign tactics

by Lisa Van Dusen

In a post-primary analysis in the New York Times the other day, erstwhile Clinton strategist Mark Penn ended an exploration of what went wrong with the kicker, "And sometimes your opponent just runs a good campaign."

From the day after Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus and attention was turned to the differences between his campaign and the frontrunner's, it was clear that he and Hillary Clinton were running very different operations.

Those differences were apparent in the candidates' own public pronouncements, in the messaging from their surrogates, in their spending decisions, in their street-level tactics and, most of all, in the apparent difference of opinion in the two campaigns on the exact location of the lines you just don't cross.

For the past three decades, at least since television became a major factor and especially since the 24-hour cable cycle has taken over, there has been a list of unofficial campaign rules that cover a multitude of landmines from Supreme Court appointments to pancakes: Never wear hats, never operate heavy machinery, never, ever wear a hat while operating heavy machinery, never play a game that isn't fixed, never come out against a tax break, all fast food is political . . . there are about 30 more.

These have been compiled through so many self-immolations that they've become gospel. Obama has not only knowingly broken many of them (most recently, he recklessly flouted that no-pancake rule, based on Gary Bauer's unceremonious triple-gainer off a stage in New Hampshire in 2000 while trying to catch a rogue, airborne flapjack), he has done it with such grinning disregard for the rule book and everything it represents that million-dollar-a-month consultants such as Penn must be wondering what the weather is like in some of the friendlier emerging democracies.

In South Carolina, the Obama campaign sent white foreigners door-knocking in black working-class neighbourhoods and black volunteers into wealthy white areas. They put Upper East Side socialites and Harvard students on the phone banks to sell an African-American candidate to rural white Southerners wary of outsiders. They refused to buy votes and pack rooms with "street money," especially for the black community, despite the fact that that's how it's always been done.

Obama won South Carolina partly because the old-style, tactical campaign he was up against was derailed by those tactics when Bill Clinton started pushing race buttons. It didn't happen in every state, but at other key points along the way, there were moments when one campaign behaved the way campaigns have always behaved, only this time it backfired.

The superdelegates who put Obama over the top last week were declaring a preference for a new kind of politics even, or maybe especially, as practitioners of the old kind. They know that to millions of young people who've become involved this time, the new kind is the only kind they know, and the old kind already looks like history.

Hillary Clinton did run a good campaign, according to the old rules, and if it hadn't worked, especially in certain states, she could not have stayed in so long or finished so impressively.

Of all the explanations for what went wrong, from the neglect of caucus states to the deliberate aura of incumbency to the huge consultant bills, it may be that the changing definition of "good campaign" covers most of them.