Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Obama’s Biggest Problem Is….

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He is pulling his punches on the Clintons – bitching about their distortions (and this repeating them) instead of going on offense.  The man has two weeks to learn that before FEB5 and if he doesn’t go after them harder – not answering their critiques or dancing around the issues – he will go down.  This insightful article from the Politico shares more.

He has wandered into a tactical battle – over who is behind what radio ads or robocalls, or over the correct interpretation of stray quotes – with the best tactical politicians in the business. The Clintons have assembled a team that has thought through plausible defenses to virtually every vulnerability. They turned the practice of fast and forceful response into an art form.

Meanwhile, Obama has confronted the strategic question – do the Clintons represent the Democrats’ best chance of returning to power and successfully governing? – in a glancing, tentative fashion.

His vague, spacious rhetoric hardly indicates he has a coherent critique of the Clinton administration or clear ideas about his own alternative. Here is an area where his appeals to a new style of politics could stand more substance.

Obama can’t just play the victim – he has to take it to em. Risky, yes, but at this point he has to take some big risks.

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Comments

  1. This from TPM story about why Obama is winning the spin war on who is the bigger victim:

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    p>

    But I’d argue that a more complex dynamic is at play. Whatever the media’s role in this, the fact that this narrative is taking hold can be chalked up to two other factors. The first is that the Obama campaign’s very conscious efforts to frame the race this way are working. The second is that this Obama effort has gotten a big assist from the strategic downside of having Bill play such a prominent role. In short, Big Dog’s entry, whatever its upsides, has made it far easier for Obama to carve out the role of victim for himself.

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    p>What Obama has to do is turn the victimhood into righteous self-defense and then from there go into offense.  I don’t think playing the victim card alone is enough because you are still essentially on defense.

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    p>He has to blunt:

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    p>- We had eight years of Clinton spin and distortion in the White House, do we want to make it 12 years of that?

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    p>- Hillary had eight years in the White House and got nowhere on health care, didn’t seem to learn anything about national security because she voted for the war in Iraq.  She says will be ready from day one.  Seems like she wasn’t ready the first time or for eight years on for that matter.

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    p>- Now she’s returned to the politics of personal destruction, which she herself has decried in the past, so tell me what did she learn from all those years in the White House.  Experience only counts if you learn from it.  She doesn’t seem to have learned much other than how to use lies and innuendo to divide America.

    • Maybe being a nice guy could win the nomination in the Democratic primary, but ask how well being “above it all” worked out for Gore and Kerry in the general.  Next we’ll here how lots of people “have his back” which they will demonstrate with an avalanche of indignant blog posts.

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      p>It’s a strategy of unilateral campaign disarmament.

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