Does Barack Obama deserve all the credit for where his campaign is currently positioned, or should we give a chunk of credit to random chance? Should Obama and his advisers and consultants get the lion’s share of applause, or do the plaudits belong to the grassroots organizers and volunteers? For me, these are false dichotomies. Everyone deserves credit, even random chance. But there is something that is bothering me.
There’s a strain of analysis, most ardently promoted by Open Left, that focuses on what I like to call the ‘Lakoff Jackoff’. This is an analysis that focuses way too much on what candidates say and not nearly enough on what they do. George Lakoff is most famous for his important work Don’t Think of an Elephant, where he explains that using your opponent’s frames has the effect of validating their arguments. There is much to be learned from Lakoff’s work in cognitive science but, in the hands of amateurs, his work is misused and misunderstood. Al Gore didn’t lose. He won, and was robbed by a confluence of fraud and misfortune. But Al Gore underperformed, not because he used the wrong frames, but because he wasn’t likable. It didn’t help that he surrounded himself with hacks and crooks like Tony Coehlo and Joe Lieberman, and ran a centrist campaign that was at odds with Bob Schrum’s message of the ‘People vs. the Powerful’. Gore didn’t have message discipline and he didn’t inspire people to work for him.
John Kerry ran a much better campaign in a much tougher environment. But John Kerry ultimately lost because he didn’t connect with enough people. John Kerry got 14 percent of the white vote in Mississippi, which is about what Barack Obama is getting, according to recent polls. Kerry didn’t lose because he did a poor job of framing his arguments. He lost because he allowed himself to be defined as an effete liberal.
Barack Obama is on course to win this election, and to win it by a big margin. But he isn’t winning because he framed his arguments better than Al Gore and John Kerry. He’s working in a favorable environment, yes, but the real change is his ground game. He has built an organization that is able to take all the spontaneous energy of the left and put it to directed use. Some people, like Zach Exley and Sean Quinn, have been documenting Obama’s unprecedented use of self-organizing community team-leaders. But the media and most of the blogosphere is missing the story. It is Barack Obama himself, not his advisers like David Axelrod and David Plouffe, who deserves the credit for his ground game. Obama learned how to do community organizing first-hand, and he has applied those lessons to his campaign. Coupling the age-old lessons of community organizing with the latest in technological innovation (including lessons learned from Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign and his 50-state strategy) has led to a ground game more fearsome than anything this country has ever seen.
Part of the effect of this ground game is already captured in the polls, which show Obama leading nationally, and in almost every battleground state. We won’t know how much, if at all, his ground game will help him to exceed polling expectations until election day. But we do know that his ground game has infinitely more to do with his current success than the framing of his arguments. It’s very important that Obama repeat endlessly that he intends to cut taxes for 95% of the American public, but not important at all that he justify the raising of taxes on the remaining 5 percent. He won’t win or lose based on the strength of his framing of the tax issue. He’ll win if his ground game identifies every supporter he has in Ohio and Virginia and gets them to the polls. It’s not what he says, but what his organization does, that will decide this election. His volunteers deserve a lot of credit for their tireless work, but Obama is the one that created a network within which these volunteers work with ruthless efficiency. And we can’t ignore Obama’s ability to inspire these volunteers, either. He inspires them to volunteer and then provides a framework for them to be effective. That, more than any egghead work on framing the issues, is what will make Barack Obama the next President of the United States. Those that have been focused almost exclusively on what Obama says have misjudged the historical moment. What Obama has said has had a minor effect on his success, and it tells us little about how he’ll actually govern. The size of the victory and the organization he has built will be the real telling factors in what he can do as president.
