Post-Rational

I sat with some devout Barack Obama supporters recently for dinner.  They’re just my friends actually, but they’re all basically Obama supporters.  It’s funny to think about, looking at your flawed friends and thinking about how they are the change they seek;  that they are the kinds of people who can bridge the divisiveness of modern politics; that these are people who believe there isn't a Red State America and a Blue State America, there is just America.  It’s funny to think these things when you look at your friend’s face across from you and it still has pimples.  That’s not really the change I seek.
 
Sitting with them, I thought it was an opportunity to learn more about their candidate.  They did little to illuminate their thought process until, as a mild joke, I told them I was going to vote for John McCain.  Then they did a lot.

Barack Obama wants us to believe that a vote for him is post-racial, and post-partisan.  But if you look at it, he promises almost the exact same things that Hillary Clinton promises but with none of the Washington experience to accomplish it.  From that point of view a vote for Obama sounds post-rational too, because it doesn't make any sense.
 
Believing in things that make no sense is not a new thing.  The dominant faith-based movement over the last thirty years has been the Evangelical Christians.  These are people who seem scared of reason.  Their beliefs, unlike the new Post-Rationals are pre-rational.  Obama supporters are not scared of reason.  They're the opposite.  They're bored of it.

But the biggest difference isn't fear and boredom. Evangelical Christians have a well-defined set of irrational events to believe in. Water turning into wine, curing of a leper. Obama supporters do not. Barack Obama's supporters, a group that is educated and wealthy are generally skeptical of religion and organization. They're certainly wary of miracles that happened in the past, miracles that can be analyzed and debunked. Apparently though, if the miracles are promised in the future, they're quite agreeable.
 
But what are these miracles? What does it mean to place your faith in Barack Obama?  For the answer to this question, the best we can do is study the campaign he’s run against Hillary Clinton.
 
The difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has consistently been painted as the difference between substance and style.  Over and over Obama runs up against the criticism that there is no meat to go along with the kool-aid.  But what exactly does that mean?  Like Hillary Clinton, Obama has laid out clear, detailed policies on every issue that concerns the presidency.  Their policies are so similar it’s almost not worth discussing. The difference, what is worth discussing, lies in their approach.
 
Hillary Clinton's stump speech is full of policies.  She has prescriptions about, health care, immigration, predatory loans.  You name it, she has a policy response to solve it.  The key is, her campaign promises no more or less than fighting for these policies.
 
Barack Obama’s stump speech has policy prescriptions addressing all the same issues as Hillary.  The difference is that his speech is not full of his policies like hers.  It's half-full of them, or half-empty, depending on your perspective.  The other half of his speech is what illuminates their differences.
 
The other half of Obama’s speech is devoted to energizing listeners into believing in a political system that they feel is broken.  The broken political system is an over-arching issue that Hillary Clinton does not address so effectively.  Because for her, it is the impetus for just another policy paper to sit beside all the other ones.  This misses the point, because the broken political system, it can be argued, is not a policy problem it is a philosophy problem.  (Of course, maybe she doesn’t miss this point.  Maybe she realizes that her experience is in navigating this broken political system.  Fixing it, as Barack Obama promises, would diminish her clout and reduce the value of her experience.)
 
Regardless, this is the difference between the two campaigns.  Hillary Clinton is promising a change in policy. Barack Obama is promising that and a change in philosophy.  He is promising to get the same policies passed, all while staying above the fray.
 
Hillary Clinton’s promise is that she soldiers well in the trenches of modern Washington warfare.  Barack Obama’s promise is that just by his sheer willpower he can transform Washington into the more gentlemanly battlefield of yesteryear.  He promises that unlike Hillary, he can stay clean.  The reason people question his substance, is the same reason Barack Obama is a religion.  It lies in that difference. Because when asked how he plans to do that, how he plans to stay clean, his response is essentially the same as any faith.  Just believe.
 
At the heart of Obama's gospel of change is the idea that he cannot do it alone.  He's dependent on his supporters to help him effect this transformation.  This brings me back to when I told my friends that I would support John McCain.  It turns out Obama supporters don't reach across the aisle (or dinner table as the case was) and shake your hand, like you would expect, saying, "I look forward to working with you.”  No.  Obama supporters look at you weird if you support John McCain.  And one out of three of them say, "You're a Republican?  What the hell is wrong with you?"

If I'm going to believe in Barack Obama, unlike my friends, it won't be because he promises a future deliverance.  I guess, just like the Evangelicals, I need to see some miracles, yesterday. He can start by making his supporters self-aware.

Hillary vs. Change?

If you just looked at the campaign signs you'd think the two people running for the Democratic nomination were Hillary and Change.

Hillary's Giuliani Strategy

It's strange to tacitly concede primaries that have yet to pass. It's even stranger to think that after doing so you believe you can make up the lost victories with a demonstrative victory in a bigger state. This is the strategy Hillary Clinton's campaign is using. They are silently accepting their non-existent losses in upcoming primaries and banking on a strong showing in Ohio and Texas. But we don't have to wait until March 4th to get a sense of the result. There is a campaign that tested this strategy already. Former Republican front-runner, Rudy Giuliani's.

When Rudy Giuliani was confronted with his first whiff of resistance in Iowa, he immediately retreated to a stronger position. The second wave of resistance came in New Hampshire at which point he quickly pulled back to his most fortified position, thinking his supposed advantages there would not be worn away by the passage of time. In Florida, he was trounced. His eggs in one basket strategy failed to realize that Floridians would not be stuck in a time-warp that froze their opinions in the position they were in two months earlier.

Rudy Giuliani had spent so many months as the de facto front-runner that he assumed his status would carry him to victory in the larger states. There were demographic reasons to believe this to be true. His aggressive stance on national security played well to specific constituencies in Florida. His national exposure and publicity translated well to the broad diversity of people living in Florida. What he failed to account for could maybe be called momentum, but other's momentum, McCain's, Huckabee's, could not fully explain his dramatic loss of support in the state. A more traditional explanation exists. Giuliani supporters did not abandon him because people in other states did not support him. They left him because his Florida strategy weakened the core pillar of his own support. Rudy Giuliani, who had staked his whole campaign on his reputation as a fighter, was not fighting.

Hillary Clinton seems to be falling into this same trap. Clinton has staked her whole campaign on her own reputation as a fighter. Yet at a time when the winds seem to be blowing against her, she seems to be standing down. Waiting, not fighting. This is a mistake and Hillary can look to the other Republican candidates to see how she can fix it.

The fundamental reason Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race wasn't his perception that it was good for the party. It was that Mitt Romney did not know how to run a campaign without spending many millions of dollars, far more than he could fund raise. That difference in money had to come from his own pocket and he did not feel comfortable parting with any more of it. On the other hand, it's doubtful Mike Huckabee would know what to do with that much money.

After John McCain's victories, Romney had become an insurgent for the Republican nomination and he had no experience in that role, and apparently none of the will to cultivate it. Hillary Clinton is drifting towards a similar position. Her inevitability has been removed, her vast resources exceeded by her opponent. Does she have the will that Romney did not? Does she have the fight of a Mike Huckabee?

If anything, Mike Huckabee's campaign is proving that it's not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog. That is how people perceive what he's doing. They think he'll lose, but they perceive him as a fighter. He is a fighter. He concedes no voters before they've voted. He concedes no elections before they've been held. He pays no attention to polls. He debates with media pundits and uses every opportunity to break out of the boxes in which they place him. He's made no assumptions about the electorate and has made fools out of people who have. He works overtime to tell people that he is there and that he is fighting for their vote. His strategy is based on the belief that he can win. Her strategy it seems is still based on the belief that she can't lose.

Rudy Giuliani believed he couldn't lose. Americans don't like people who can't lose. They like winners. Hillary Clinton needs to start believing she can win. She needs to put the Arkansas back into her New York, she needs to go down swinging. People need to see her working tirelessly to gather support in the upcoming states where the public thinks she won't win. If she doesn't start fighting now, a month from now, after Texas and Ohio, she may have more in common with Rudy Giuliani than just being from the same state.