Kevin Drum is amused by a historical comparison:
THEN AND NOW….In 2004, everyone complained that John Kerry was an old-media plodder who didn’t react quickly enough to conservative attacks. What a dunce! In 2008, everyone is praising Barack Obama for keeping his composure and not letting conservative attacks knock him off his message. What a cool customer!
It depends a little on which part of 2008 you’re talking about, of course. If you troll through the recent archives of liberal political blogs, you won’t have any trouble finding dozens of posts wailing and moaning about the fact that Obama wasn’t being aggressive enough in going after McCain on some point or another.
Everyone’s on board with the “cool customer” thing because it seems to be working. If McCain manages to pull off an improbable victory, expect to see the “should’ve attacked more” thing resurface.
It’s worth noting, though, that I’m not sure how much choice Obama really had in this.
I’m not saying that the “cool customer” approach is a put-on, or anything crazy like that– from all reports, Obama’s campaign style is an accurate reflection of his personality.
The fact is, though, that a more aggressive, attacking style would’ve been awfully risky, given the racial dynamic in this campaign. Going on the offensive too much would risk appearing Angry. With the Republicans taking great pains to remind everyone that Obama is Black, that slides very quickly into “Angry Black Man,” which is not a good place to be, if you’re a candidate for national office.
John Kerry probably could’ve made some gains in 2004 by hitting back faster and harder. Sad though it is to say, I think Obama would’ve been taking a major risk had he gone that route. It might’ve worked, but then again, it might well have played right into the slimy politics perfected by Atwater and Rove. There have been a lot of creepy racist undertones to the Republican campaign this year, but that stuff has been muted because Obama didn’t give them anything to hang the worst stereotypes on. Attempts to paint him as a dangerous radical fail (outside of the squalid racist segments of the population) because he’s so damn calm and unflappable.
But think how ugly this whole thing could’ve gotten if he had tried to fight fire with fire (as some in the blogosphere were calling for at various points in the campaign).
So yes, by all means, let’s applaud Obama’s natural temperment, and the relatively classy path he’s chosen to take with his campaign. But let’s not ignore the fact that his choices were somewhat more constrained than those available to a white candidate.
Although the press’s treatment of the issues was still deplorable, it was a huge improvement over that of any election in my memory. Obama’s classy campaign worked in part because a significant fraction of the press (after quite a bit of badgering) evtually responded positively to Obama’s efforts to keep the campaign focused on issues that were actually relevant to people’s lives. For example – try re-reading the 2004 debates and imagine Obama and McCain had gotten the sort of grotesquely idiotic questions that dominated the 2004 debates. I doubt Obama would have fared much better than Kerry did in those debates. The relatively poor economy was surely a strong driver behind this.
Kerry was campaigning on policy – at a time when the economy appeared to be much, much healthier (unless you were poor), and with a press that made a near-universal effort to say as little as possible that was relevant or substantive about either candidate. (Note that I don’t disagree that Obama had fewer choices than Kerry, nor do I disagree with those who feel Obama is more charismatic.)
Remember also that blogging was still in its infancy in 2004. Directly counterattacking was the only available strategy for overcoming the right wing noise machine, and Kerry sealed his fate by avoiding direct counterattacks. That’s changed: now partisans can point to YouTube and the like to show what is really going on. Obama doesn’t have to counterattack because he can let the netroots do that for him.
And I think that is part of why, as llewelly pointed out, the press has done so much better this time around than in 2004 or 2000. Blogging has changed the relationship between the press and its readers/viewers. In 2004 the press could impose misleading balance on the coverage. But as Colbert has pointed out, the truth has a well-known liberal bias, and the press is now forced to move closer to the truth.
Do you want your candidate to represent you, if that means burning with righteous indignation?
Or would you rather have someone extremely well equipped to calmly pull people together and just get stuff done?
I think you’re right- it was not a tough strategic decision for Obama given his personality and the climate (you put that much more diplomatically than I would have).
However, I never really thought much about “temperment” before this campaign, and I really wonder how it plays out more generally. This campaign may be a special case.
I think when it comes to temprament Mccain lost a ton of credibility with his two decisions of picking Palin for VP and when he made a big show of putting his campagin on hold for a few hours (and I’m not buying that he actually shut anything down during that time period) so he could go to DC to pretend to help fix the ecnomic crisis. Those were two defining moments to show what kind of decision maker – potentially impulsive and irrational.
I think Obama’s approach has been very canny to respecting the intelligence of his constituents. When McCain or Palin would make an attack he wouldn’t just refute it, he’d add in that they were making some baseless character attack becuase they were desparate for attention.