Letter to the Editor, Laurel Leader, February 19, 2009

Let’s replace gambles with serious, honest debate

During the House debate on the stimulus package Feb. 13, Rep. Steny Hoyer, admitted that he was taking a trillion-dollar gamble on something that he couldn’t say would work. Gee, thanks, I feel so much better.

Hoyer said he prayed that it will work, and so do I. I don’t deny that something must be done to end our current recession, but name-calling, outright lies and other distortions of the truth serve no one well. What we needed was serious and honest debate, especially when you’re gambling everybody else’s money.

Instead, Hoyer and his loyal henchman allowed for a mere 90 minutes of debate on the largest appropriation bill in history, one that not a single congressman had had the opportunity to read and thoroughly comprehend. In fact, most congressmen had not received a copy of the legislation as of midnight Thursday, Feb. 12. However, Democratic lobbyists in Washington apparently had been given a copy hours earlier. Even news organizations knew more about the bill than Congress did. It made for quite an effective coup d’etat.

Well, for our country’s sake, I hope that the coup, organized by Mr. Hoyer, President Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party, works out because it reeks of partisan politics and political payback, not enlightened debate and serious solutions.

Jason Papanikolas

Laurel

The Nebulous Victory: The Obama Transition from the Campaign Trail to the White House, Part II

Team Obama expected to be able to continue what had essentially become a perpetual campaign into the White House into order to accomplish Barack Obama’s goals.  This, I believe, is where many of his current problems lie.  Unfortunately, running a campaign based on nebulous slogans is not the same as running the government.  Team Obama is swiftly learning that with the stimulus package and the various problems that his nominees are having in the confirmation process.

As you recall, we basically narrowed the Obama victory to three very basic concepts.  These concepts are obviously interrelated, but any one concept could have achieved victory, all three together just raised the “death toll” on the Republican side of the aisle.

The problem for Team Obama is that these concepts have very different meanings when it comes to leading the nation.  Moreover, I believe that Barack Obama’s undoing is more influenced by the tactics of his victory, by his own lack of experience and leadership, and by failing to realize that his enemy has changed.

As we have previously seen, Obama’s victory was characterized by the very lack of definition as to what hope and change mean.  Now that Obama is in the driver’s seat, it is no longer sufficient for him to tell Congress to send him a vaguely-defined “stimulus” package.  He must have a clear concept of what such a package looks like, what it’s core features are going to be, and what he willing to “spend” to achieve it.  It seems pretty clear that Team Obama hasn’t considered any of these issues yet.

Obama’s victory was also helped by his confidence, which borders on and often spills over into arrogance.  Obama thrives on the set-piece act of political theater.  He is at home amongst large, friendly crowds where he can allow his confidence to show through without becoming arrogance.  This is his home field advantage.  Where he gets himself into trouble is in intimate settings or amongst diffident or hostile crowds.  This danger was best characterized by his remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser last summer where he accused working-class whites of clinging to guns and god.  The arrogance displayed in the comment could very easily have cost him the election had Republicans been able to properly exploit it.

The problem, of course, is that the set-piece speeches will no longer occur in front of adoring crowds of committed followers.  In fact, to a large extent, the only set-piece speeches are found in the State of the Union Addresses to Congress.  Obama will not find the ladies and gentlemen of Congress to be as pliable as his campaign followers.  Certainly, his Republican opponents will cause loud and raucous interruptions that have, in the past, thrown off his timing and disrupted his confident aura.

More importantly, he is hampered by a lack of experience.  Republicans made the their best pitch when they questioned whether or not Barack Obama had the experience necessary to be a great leader.  It resonated with the American people, even if they were willing to overlook it during the campaign.  While it is true that many Presidents lacked executive experience before assuming the Presidency, none lacked leadership experience.

Barack Obama lacks any formative leadership experience.  He has never been a governor or a businessman.  He never served in the military and led men in combat.  In fact, he hasn’t even been all that influential in setting his party’s priorities and strategies, or in leading any of it’s initiatives.  This lack of experience shows up in his attempts to drive the legislative agenda.  The ham-fisted way in which he tried to convince Congressional Republicans to support the stimulus reveals a lack of the skills of personal persuasion.  In order to move your agenda, you must be able to persuade lawmakers on a personal level.

This is, I think, why he wants to continue the perpetual campaign.  He appears to lack the essential qualities of a good leader, but he has the necessary qualities of a good campaigner.  As a campaigner, Obama can rely on lofty rhetoric and the mobilization of his three million plus followers to achieve his goals.  Campaigning is what he knows.  His entire story has been one of grassroots advocacy and running for elective office.  He hasn’t even stayed in an elective office long enough to become a good legislator!

As a campaigner, Obama thought it would sufficient to tell Republicans that he won the election.  He accomplished his campaign goals and they’d better fall in line.  This betrays a lack of understanding of his opponents in general and how government works in particular.  Yes, he was elected by a 54-46 margin.  But, so were his opponents.  Each and every Congressman and Senator won his or her campaign in order to come to Washington, D.C.  Most of them won by as large as or larger margins than Obama did.  Just because he wills something to happen doesn’t make it so.  He and his team will have to learn to stop campaigning and start governing if they are to have any hope of maintaining power in Washington over the next four years.

As an American, I hope that he can make that transition, though it would be better for Republicans if he couldn’t.

The Nebulous Victory: The Obama Transition from the Campaign Trail to the White House, Part I

President Barack Obama has lost control of the debate over his stimulus package.  Politico details here. 

Politico details many of the problems that Obama has had converting from a campaign mode to a governing mode.  What hurt Obama in particular was what made him such as formidable candidate.  Politico mentions the success of Internet campaigning and grassroots mobilization, but all of it would not have been possible without his “blitzkrieg” offensives: literally blanketing the airwaves with his message until you could hear nothing else.

Blitzkrieg is an apt descriptor of Team Obama’s campaign.  Political campaigns derive many of their concepts from military usage.  Even the very term “campaign” is military in origin.  In military parlance, a campaign is a series of battles undertaken to accomplish a particular goal.  Obama’s campaign was characterized by three military-inspired concepts:

Flexibility. Military history teaches us that the best campaigns are the ones that are not wedded to a particular set of tactics or an overly complicated strategy.  Flexibility means that the full range of possible solutions is open to you.  You can conduct a frontal assault, turn the enemy’s flank, raid his supply lines, or envelop his armies. 

Strategic flexibility goes to the opponent with the easier objective.  Republicans were forced to defend policies that even many of them abhorred.  They had little, if any, flexibility to run away from those policies because they implemented them.  Tactical flexibility often goes to opponent who doesn’t allow himself to be pinned.  Lee lost at Gettysburg because he lost tactical flexibility.  After failing to turn the Union left, his only options were retreat or a frontal, head-long assault. 

Obama never lost tactical flexibility.  His campaign message of hope and change was so vague that it was impossible to pin down exactly what change Obama wanted and what he hoped to accomplish.  He could essentially be all things to all people.  He could promise lower taxes to working class moderates at rallys in the morning and huge spending initiatives to Democratic fundraisers in the evening.

Initiative.  Also called “getting there with the most,” initiative is as much psychological as it is about concentration of force.  It is that psychological aspect that is most useful in analyzing political campaigns.  To a large extent, initiative and tactical flexibility go hand-in-hand.  John Kerry lost in 2004 because the Swift Boaters managed to seize the initiative (i.e. force John Kerry back onto the defensive).  The Swift Boaters were able to keep the initiative because John Kerry had limited his tactical flexibility by presented himself as a war hero at the Democratic National Convention.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, through his vague campaign slogan and his “post-racial” campaign rhetoric was able to avoid being caricatured as Kerry was in 2004.  The one success that Republicans had against Obama was just prior to the Republican National Convention when they questioned his leadership capability.  Republicans, however, quickly gave the initiative back to the Democrats because of their need to appease their conservative base, which they did through the nomination of the neophyte Sarah Palin.

Massive overkill.  Largely an American concept, it has come to be seen as the seeking of a technological advantage that your opponent cannot overcome.  Massive overkill is best exemplified by the First Persian Gulf War in 1991.  The technological capabilities of the U.S. military were such that they were completely disabling to the Iraqi Army.  Our advantage was so great that it literally changed the dynamic of the campaign.  The Iraqi Army became not so much an army with tanks and missiles and men, but merely targets to be swatted like flies.

Republicans have been on both sides of the massive overkill paradigm in this decade.  In 2000 and 2004, Karl Rove’s use of data mining technologies and massive voter registration databases meant that Karl Rove quite possibly knew you better than you knew yourself.  On Election Day 2004, these massive databases helped Rove identify potential Republican voters who had not yet gone to the polls. 

In 2008, Barack Obama showed the true potential of the Internet as both a fundraising and a mobilization tool.  It is entirely possible that Obama raised a half billion dollars in the previous election cycle, almost half of it supposed came through Internet donations.  Here Republicans could probably have matched the Obama team with a better candidate.  But, Republicans were completely unprepared to harness the Internet as tool to communicate with and mobilize millions of American voters.  Obama shifted the paradigm in such a way that even if Republicans could win a few battles, they couldn’t win the war because their technology was outdated.