Hillary: Cloud over Obama’s convention
Decisions by Obamas’ campaign have more to do with worries over a Clintonian revolt than any other single item.
Obama’s final night is being contrived to avoid any possible chance of an uprising of the masses who are angered at the treatment of Hillary.
There not all universal peace within Democrats ranks.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/is_this_thing_on.html
If McCain presents an accurate comparison with Obama, he has a clear advantage – or should have.
Obama has zero experience in management, administration, or even having to hold down a real job.
McCain has not only a vastly superior record of experience in the US Senate, his military career trained him well to manage and administrate.
Obama spent less than 150 days on the “job” in the US Senate.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/how_mccain_could_win.html
McCain predicts Obama will do another flip flop on Iraq once he goes there and actually learns some real facts about it.
Obama has shifted, dodged, and changed his position on Iraq over and over.
Originally, Obama pledged to his radical left wing supporters, that, as president, he would demand and achieve immediate pull out.
As he has to address more normal voters than he faced in the Democrat primaries, Obama has scrambled to a position in which he is vastly changing his plans, pledges, and promises.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/07/mccain-suggests.html
Opinion:
Obama and his effort at the grass roots
In the old days, political campaigns were successful in identifying their voters then getting them to the polls on election day by using massive telephone banks that called voters all day long until they confirmed they had voted.
These days, caller ID and other devices have made such phone bank tactics as impotent and as great a waste as voter direct mail, victory squads and the other tactics of yesteryear.
Looking for an easy fix, some Democrat candidates in the past have attempted to substitute low wage temps and others for volunteers. Someone working for minimum wage hardly will be as effective as those who are enthusiastically working for a candidate they honestly support.
Political strategists are hard at work trying to identify a modern substitute for the ole phone banks, and for the victory squads concept that once sent supporters into the field by using volunteers.
Volunteers willing to go door to door today are rare commodities – far too rare to be of real use in turning out the vote on election day.
McCain’s best hope for matching the Obama grand game, probably lies in Obama himself. Most potential McCain voters see Obama as not “just another political opponent” but as anathema – a candidate for president who has embraced, endorsed, and supported racism and hatred of America for 20 years.
Thus introducing the real Barack Obama to as many normal American voters as possible becomes McCain’s greatest asset for mobilizing his potential vote. Once they see the real Obama, even if they are cool to McCain himself, throngs are willing to claw and drive to prevent Obama and his extremism from getting to the White House.
There are times when voters wake up to a realization that this is not just another election – that the alternative is unthinkable – that the barbarians of left wing extremism are actually at the gates of the city and must be stopped.
On that reality does McCain’s potential for victory rest.
Buddy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121564804985640977.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Barack's Brilliant Ground Game
By KARL ROVE
For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.
For starters, Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.
Sen. Obama's organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille's plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros's 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.
Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran "virtual precincts," using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.
The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP's "microtargeting" program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help. Another Obama adaptation of a 2004 Bush campaign technique is a stepped-up, rapid response effort. Charges do not go unanswered, the campaign stays relentlessly on the offense, using every channel of communication.
The Obama campaign has also copied the Bush strategy of broadening the general election map. In 2000, the Bush effort targeted not just the traditional battlegrounds, but also West Virginia (last won by the GOP in an open race for the presidency in 1928), Tennessee (Al Gore's home), Arkansas (Bill Clinton's home), Washington and Oregon.
Hoping for a breakthrough somewhere, Mr. Obama also wants to force John McCain to play defense. So in addition to traditional battleground states, he's running TV and organizing in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota. And where Mr. Bush targeted Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and education voters to narrow Democratic margins, Mr. Obama is going after evangelicals, veterans and values voters with ads and outreach to trim the GOP's margin.
There are problems, however.
Mr. Obama's people admit they want to sucker Mr. McCain into spending money. To be successful, a bluff must be credible. In places like Nebraska and North Dakota, Mr. Obama can't rely on local issues – like Mr. Bush did with coal in West Virginia in 2000 – to unexpectedly win a critical state. Organization alone won't suffice. And putting Obama dollars into Texas, for example, to help win five state House seats may simply cause Texan Republicans – not Mr. McCain – to raise money and work harder to counter.
Democrats don't have the same large volunteer pool the GOP does with its Federated GOP Women, College and Young Republicans, and local party committees. In the primaries, Mr. Obama instead moved hordes of volunteers from state to state. It was a brilliant tactic, but Nov. 4 is different. The volunteers adequate for primaries held over five months will simply not be enough to compete in 51 separate elections (all 50 states plus the District of Columbia) all on one day.
Mr. Obama's biggest problem is that when it comes to substance, he's following the playbook of a Republican other than George W. Bush. In 2000, Mr. Bush won the general election on the same themes and positions as in the primaries, including compassionate conservatism, the faith-based initiative, tax cuts and Social Security reform. There was no repudiation of past positions, no chameleon-like shifts in positions.
Instead of consistency, Mr. Obama has followed Richard Nixon's advice, to cater to his party's extreme in the primaries and then move aggressively to the middle for the fall.
In the primary, Mr. Obama supported pulling out of Iraq within 16 months, called the D.C. gun ban constitutional, backed the subjection of telecom companies to expensive lawsuits for cooperating in the terror surveillance program, opposed welfare reform, pledged to renegotiate Nafta, disavowed free trade and was strongly against the death penalty in all cases. But in the past few weeks, Mr. Obama has reversed course on all of these, discarding fringe liberal views for relentlessly centrist positions. He also flip-flopped on accepting public financing and condemning negative ads from third party groups, like unions.
By taking Nixon's advice, Mr. Obama is assuming such dramatic reversals will somehow avoid voter scrutiny. But people are watching closely, and by setting a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions, Mr. Obama may be risking his reputation for truthfulness.
A candidate's credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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