Since the Democratic Primary really got underway, I’ve been trying to come up with a proper analogy to apply to the Obama campaign’s methods. I guess my visceral reaction to their messaging and branding got in the way of piecing together that analogy, but after kicking it around with a couple of our readers, I think I may have stumbled onto one.
In the 90s, I managed to talk my way into a job at a decent-sized independent advertising agency in San Francisco. They were transitioning from a roster of traditional clients to one almost solely comprised of tech and dot-com companies. Online advertising was in its infancy, and since I had done it before, I became the point man, as well as holding down a spot on the new business team pitching prospective clients. Time after time I found myself in a conference room listening to a marketing VP talk about how his company was going to turn a profit despite losing money on each sale, because “the internet was changing everything.” My favorite was the online drugstore (a distant second to market) who thought that people would start buying shampoo and razors online, not worry about shipping charges or whether the packages would fit in mailboxes, not to mention counting on them to plan ahead rather than just going to the corner store when something ran out. Heckuva business model!
Every day, Obama’s campaign seems more and more like a late 90s dot-com. Everything seems geared towards generating media coverage, one or two news cycles at a time. The VP selection is the latest and best example. In late July, word leaked that Obama’s announcement would come before his vacation and the beginning of the Olympics. This made a lot of sense because politics doesn’t shut down for sporting events or vacations. Had a VP been named, that person could have filled the vacuum and battled back against McCain’s attacks. But Team Obama apparently just wanted to string everything out for the whole month. And if media coverage was the goal, they scored. The political press dutifully reported each name floated, the text message announcement plan was pondered, all building to a fever pitch. Then the McCain-as-land-barron story hit, pushing everything back right into the convention. Had a VP been in place, there would have been another strong Dem voice pounding away on the biggest break of the cycle so far. But they got too cute with the timing, and then got scooped by CNN and had to send out their text message in the middle of the night. Joe Biden. As I said at the time, picking Biden is not exactly in step with the text message generation.
So for all of their efforts to win news cycles and generate hype, they picked the most establishment candidate under consideration, and received absolutely no polling bounce whatsoever. No wonder Kos said:
This has been the best veep rollout EVER.
Oh, he was being serious? Never mind. It’s not that Biden is a bad choice, but if you can’t get a bounce from a month of press and gimmicks, maybe you’re doing it wrong.
And speaking of doing it wrong, here’s Obama campaign manager David Plouffe doing his best Karl “I have the math” Rove impression.
He repeated, with emphasis, that the campaign does not care about national polling. Instead, the campaign’s own identification, registration and canvassing efforts provide the data he uses to determine where to invest money and resources.
If McCain doesn’t win Colorado, “he has a 5% chance to win the election.”
He said Obama is underperforming only among working class whites over 70 and pointed to a poll showing that Obama is over performing John Kerry with working class white voters under 50.
Said that the campaign’s target in Georgia is about 47% of the vote, owing to Ex-Rep. Bob Barr’s ability to siphon votes away from John McCain.
Just like the dot-coms who talked themselves into believing that old economic rules didn’t apply, Plouffe, like Rove in 2006, apparently thinks we’re in a new political paradigm. It’s true that the election is decided by the Electoral College, but Plouffe ignores national polling at his peril. Horse race numbers are the basis for the media narrative, and as retarded and juvenile as the political press is, that narrative is hugely influential, even more so due to the fact that the Obama campaign hasn’t bothered to produce one of their own. He can chop up his numbers any way he chooses, but Obama has a white working class voter problem to go along with problems on the left and right flanks of his own party. It’s as if Plouffe thinks that Obama is magic, that he can attract certain voters while simultaneously not repelling others. I imagine he’s in for a nasty shock when their African American turnout plan is subject to unintended consequences.
You don’t have to like the current rules to accept that they can’t be broken on a whim (to any degree of immediate success) because one person in an ecosystem decides it’s to his advantage. I don’t like pointing this out because over a longer term, this is really the only way change ever comes. But there may not be a longer term if Strangelove McCain gets to run foreign policy, and I don’t think anyone supported Obama to trade a short term fiasco for long term change. For every Amazon.com, there were a thousand Pets.com, and it’s no solace to the losing shareholders that eventually someone figured out how to make a profit online.