Barry got lucky
By MIRIAM GRACE A. GO, Newsbreak | 11/11/2008 6:19 PM
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Washington, DC - “I don’t judge a campaign by messaging and crowd size,” Mark Naymik of The Cleveland Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, told us a day before the US presidential election.
John F. Kennedy, he cited his newspaper’s account, held a rally there in 1960 that drew a crowd of 250,000. Yet, he lost Ohio to Richard Nixon, although Kennedy won the presidency.
We were exchanging notes about Barack Obama’s rally of some 50,000 supporters in the city the night before, the favorable coverage that the media has given him during the campaign, and the possibilities of John McCain closing in on him. Naymik has been covering the political scene for a decade, and at the time had just spent two weeks on McCain’s campaign bus.
“But,” Naymik said, “when organizers themselves sound nervous,” which he felt the insiders at McCain’s campaign were, it was a signal that they knew the Obama camp was getting the upper hand.
Around two weeks before the November 4 election, our group was convinced that Ohio would be a good place to watch McCain play catch-up to Obama, who was ahead in the various polls. It’s one of the traditional battlegrounds between republicans and democrats. And, as we would later learn from Naymik, “no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio.”
Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes and a voters’ population that’s evenly split between different political leanings, “had gone wrong with a president only twice in 100 years—the first was in the 1890s, the second was in 1960,” he said.
In 2004, the race between then re-electionist George W. Bush and Democrat John Kerry was very close. Kerry lost Ohio to Bush by only two percentage points.
This year, the democrats didn’t take chances and “borrowed [from] the Bush [campaign] strategy” that clinched Ohio in 2004.
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Democrats learned from the Republicans what we usually call in the Philippines “grassroots” organizing. So this year they did that for Obama in Ohio and, not unlikely, in other battleground states, too.
In 2004, Naymik recalled, the Democrats focused on the urban centers, while Bush went to the rural areas of Ohio. In 2008, Obama’s campaign placed field officers in the state’s 89 counties against McCain’s 47 or 48.
The Democrats borrowed as well the Bush 2004 strategy in those counties of having a point person who would be in charge of shepherding five other persons. Campaign organizers stayed in touch with those point persons.
And as the Bush campaign did, the Obama campaign established a database where voters’ list in every area was crossed-referenced for whatever purposes it would serve the campaign.
Frankly, I was smiling to myself: So the Republicans did this innovation only in 2004? And the Democrats found it so effective and amazing that they copied it only now? For a moment there I thought the Obama campaign should have asked me instead for a copy of the Philippine book How to Win An Election: Lessons from the Experts.
Accuse me of self-promotion, if you wish, because that book was co-authored by journalist Booma Cruz and myself, and edited by Newsbreak board member Chay Hofileña. (And it’s been sought by politicians and campaign planners since its publication in 2006.) I just can’t believe that the basics of organizing a vote delivery system that experts in the Philippines have been doing for four decades are news to political parties in America.
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Obama’s campaign had its own innovations, too, largely with the use of the Internet—receiving campaign contributions, signing up volunteers, coordinating activities and campaigners across the country online.
In effect, said Johnathan Holifield of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, Obama “used the Internet as organizing tool, as opposed to others who used radio as organizing tool,” which was very traditional.
Stanley Miller, executive director of the Cleveland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, didn’t take it against Obama that he campaigned not on the basis of the color of his skin. He didn’t seek the endorsement of the power brokers in the black community either.
“He broadened his base [by doing that],” Miller acknowledged. If Obama didn’t divert from the traditional way of how black candidates campaigned, “he would not have gotten past the [Democratic] primaries.”
David Frum, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, said that Obama successfully established a coalition of the lower and top segments of society.
Speaking in Washington, DC, last Thursday, at a post-election briefing by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research where he’s affiliated now, Frum said the lower segment—the poor, the blacks, and other minorities—had traditionally leaned toward the democrats. All that Obama’s campaign had to do was to get them out to vote.
And it did. In the last few days of toward November 4, Obama’s speeches always thanked those who had voted and urged them to call family and friends to go out and vote as well. His supporters who had voted were wearing button pins to that effect. His campaigners were saying “Make your voice be heard” and “Your vote counts” as much as they were saying “Obama-Biden.”
The approach to the top segment—the college-educated and those who have pursued higher studies—was to change their mindsets. This segment used to be a Republican base, but its increasing liberalism had been clashing with the Grand Old Party’s social conservatism.
The highly educated are also seeing that the Democratic has been nominating more of their kind in the last several elections. “Since 1998, all Democratic nominees [for president] had a Yale or Harvard degree,” Frum said, “while the Republican nominates the likes of George W. Bush.”
In Ohio, Miller remarked that racism played out in this year’s election not in terms of white voters not supporting a black candidate. It surfaced in the two parties’ selection of presidential candidates. “This is what my father had told me: [as a black person], you can get to where you want, but you have to be twice as good [as the whites]. Obama had to be a Harvard [graduate] professor to be the candidate of the Democratic Party, while the other party can choose anybody.”
Obama, a community organizer in Chicago before he entered politics, also found aggressive and organized campaigners in the sectors that are set to benefit from his proposed policies, like the labor unions that expect much easier and advantageous (grossly advantageous, I should say) organizing under his administration.
Saturday before November 4, union members and their families were manning many Obama campaign quarters ’round the clock. They were dispatching campaign leaflets, surveying undecided voters by phone, calling known supporters to remind them to cast their vote.
***
So Obama ran an intelligent campaign. It’s interesting to know, however, that a string of luck also caused his star to rise so quickly since his breaking into the political scene in 1996.
Luck No. 1: Alice Palmer, the state senator from the 13th district of Illinois, wanted to seek a congressional seat and picked Obama to replace her. Palmer lost in the Democratic primaries, but when she decided to just reclaim his State Senate seat, Obama had declared his intention to seek the party nomination and refused to back off. Unfortunately for Palmer, she had, by then, already introduced Obama to campaign funders and powerbrokers in Illinois. He was elected to the State Senate and was reelected in 1998 and and 2002.
Luck No. 2: For his 2004 run for the US Senate, Obama was behind Blair Hull in the Democratic primaries. But Hull got embroiled in a domestic abuse scandal, so Obama overtook him and earned the party nomination.
Luck No. 3: His Republican rival was Jack Ryan, who quit the race after records of his divorce and child custody case containing ugly details were released by a California court to the Chicago Tribune.
Luck No. 4: The Republican Party replaced Ryan with Alan Keyes, who suffered from the fact that he’s not really from Illinois and had moved there only weeks before the election.
Luck No. 5: Obama was well ahead of Keyes in the surveys (the vote later turned out to be 70 percent versus 27 percent in favor of Obama) that Obama could afford to go to other states to campaign for the party’s congressional candidates while his own campaign was going on in Illinois.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry noticed Obama and had him invited to deliver the keynote address at the June 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. That was when he started to rise in the party.
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Luck No. 6: For the presidential race, Obama’s closest rival in the Democratic primaries was New York Senator Hillary Clinton. The former First Lady in effect won Florida and Michigan after the names of her two rivals were not included in the ballot. However, the primaries in those states were held earlier than scheduled, violating party rules. The party then decided not to count the votes from these states, a move that boosted Obama's standing.
Luck No. 7: Running against Republican John McCain, Obama was leading in the polls. However, McCain’s numbers started picking up that, according to a report in The Washington Post, Obama got nervous. But just as he was getting worried about McCain catching up, Wall Street collapsed, giving him a strong issue on which to peg his campaign—the economy.
Luck No. 8: Practically the entire US media was so enamored by Obama that their coverage had been favorable to him. “All partisans think their candidates are treated unfairly by the media, but the US press coverage of the elections this year has been one-sided [for the Democratic ticket],” veteran journalist Lou Cannon said in a lecture at the University of Hawaii. “Obama may be inspiring, but the media doesn’t need to give him the service of cuddly coverage.
Most journalists that our group talked to dismissed the criticisms about their objectivity. They explained their clear bias for Obama as “bias for [anything] new.”
Luck No. 9: Well, I’m not saying that candidates should pray for some old relative to fall ill or die in the homestretch of the campaign. But Obama sure earned a lot of sympathy votes after his grandmother fell ill, forcing Obama to pay her a visit two weeks before the elections, and when she died the night before election day, which sent Obama crying in his final campaign rally.
Luck No. 10: While Obama had his traditional support base—the blacks, other minorities, and unionists—it was broadened by those who were just so angry with President George W. Bush that they would vote anybody against him without thinking. So regardless of who was the Republican candidate, these anti-Bush voters would have voted against him. Regardless of who the Democratic candidate was, these voters would have voted for him.
Luck No. 11: Frum pointed out that since World War II, the economic cycle has always been that after a downturn, recovery follows. The Republicans, he said, are “afraid” that this cycle will benefit Obama.
“[The economic] depression in 2009 and 2010 will be a preview to great recovery and result in generation of jobs in 2011. So 2012 will be an ugly year for the Republicans if they don’t say [their message] louder,” Frum said. The next presidential election will be in 2012.
Obama has this superstitious belief that if he played basketball in the morning of any major contest, he would win. It happened on the day of the Iowa caucus that clinched him the party nomination this year. It happened on November 4.
Surely, though, running the most powerful country in the world is not a job that anybody wants hinged on a basketball game?
Good luck, America.
The author is in the US to observe the election season as a Jefferson Fellow of the East-West Center.
