Three Things Obama Should Do If He Wants to Win

Emphasize this.

Photo: Answers.com

Tone this down.

Photo: StLtoday.com

Wave goodbye to them at the Denver Airport -- for good.

Photo: DailyMail.com

Now that the political "silly season" is drawing to a close it's time to focus on the two campaigns in this dead heat race as the conventions are about to commence with the Democrats leading off next week in Denver. Since clinching (presuming, of course, that all the superdelegates go his way) the Democratic nomination in late spring Barack Obama's presumptive stroll to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has seen a stumble into a couple of potholes that have erased most of the early lead he had over Sen. John McCain. I would still put odds on him being the nation's next president but that prospect seems less sure now than it did three months ago for a variety of reasons. If he wants to regain what former president George H.W. Bush referred to as "big Mo'" here are three things he needs to do now and in the two months remaining in the campaign.

1. Tone Down the Coronation in Denver

As is well-known by now, the Democratic Convention will see its culmination with Obama's acceptance speech at Denver's Invesco Field before a crowd possibly approaching 75,000. Not coincidentally that speech will come on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 here in Washington which marked the kickoff of the push for integration and full civil rights for black Americans. In my view it was a huge mistake to move the speech to the outdoor stadium but what is done is done and to backtrack now would be pounced upon by the press as a sign of weakness in the campaign. That said, Obama's speech in Berlin (as I commented upon at the time) was a boondoggle of immense proportions and was the first sign of a less than surefooted Obama campaign apparatus after a carrying off in splendid fashion the capture of the nomination for their man. The gassy prose delivered before 200,000 Europeans (with no doubt a smattering of Americans thrown in) given at a time when his opponent was sitting down with voters at local venues in Ohio simply reinforced the image of Obama as some sort of mushy world messiah. There can be no doubt it played well before Europeans who see the United States as as much of a threat to world peace as nations like Iran or non-state actors like al Qaeda but those people don't have a vote in US elections and it flopped spectacularly here at home and gave Senator McCain much ammunition for advertising suggesting that Obama is a hubristic narcissist out of touch with the concerns of average Americans. And on the viral front in the campaign battle it gave birth to one hilarious parody that has now been viewed by hundreds of thousands on YouTube.

So what to do about this conundrum on the night of August 28th? The speech should go light on the self-reference to the candidate himself and long on the traditions of the Democratic Party on whose shoulders Obama now stands. Now no doubt, health permitting, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy will play a big role at the convention and Obama should take the occasion of his acceptance speech to praise Sen. Kennedy and most especially the Kennedy legacy both in the muscular foreign and defense policy of President John F. Kennedy but also with regard to the concerns for the poor expressed by his brother the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. And despite the clearly bad feelings still emanating from the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party Obama should use the convention and his speech to praise President Clinton and Senator Clinton and make pointed reference to the former's leadership in the Balkans in the late '90s which should segue into a section of the speech emphasizing the United States's continuing support for the former captive nations of Eastern Europe and Eurasia at a time of growing Russian revanchism. And all of this leads me to my second point as regards the Clintons.

2. Say Thanks, But No Thanks to the Clintons

I believe that it is no longer an arguable point that Bill and Hillary Clinton really do not wish Barack Obama well in his quest to become the nation's forty-fourth president. Anyone who has followed the Clintons' careers over the past thirty years knows that first and foremost the Clintons are about the Clintons and if Barack Obama loses this fall Hillary Clinton by default becomes the leading candidate for president among Democrats in 2012. Yes, Obama should give Sen. Clinton and her supporters and President Clinton their due at the convention but that should be that. I would not encourage either of them to campaign actively for me if I were Obama because somehow, some way the two will find a way to make those appearances primarily about themselves.

There are other surrogates who can be used without the mixed messages the Clintons will no doubt send out. Missouri is an important battleground state and Sen. Claire McCaskill can serve Obama quite ably there. In other areas, Obama should call on former Clinton officials like former UN ambassador and chief Bosnia negotiator Richard Holbrooke to make his case in the foreign policy arena especially as regards Russia and sideline the hackish Susan Rice who so far has been his leading surrogate in this area. On the ecomomic front (now that he's "refined" his position on offshore oil drilling) the best thing he can do is to put pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to get off the dime as well and reopen the debate on this issue when Congress comes back from its August recess.

3. Give the "Fifty State" Strategy a Rest

Much was made and rightly so of the Obama team's "fifty state" strategy during the nominating fight with Senator Clinton which shrewdly exploited the rather byzantine system put into place by party chairman Howard Dean which apportioned out delegates based on formulae playing to the party's near fetish for "diversity" politics. But in the general election if Obama thinks he can win by carrying such states as MT, the Dakotas, NV, GA and the Carolinas over the traditional battlegrounds of FL, OH and MO he's whistling Dixie. This election will rise or fall exactly where the last two have been decided and that's in the latter states and not the former.

Yes, some of these states like my native Virginia have "purpled" in the last four years but not sufficiently in my view to give the Obama people good reason to believe that they can carry them. Campaign efforts in these states should concentrate primarily on a ground game strategy of voter registration drives but save the big television buys for the traditional battleground states and also concentrate Obama's "retail" appearances in these states as well. And if I were Obama's Davids (Axelrod and Plouffe) I would have my man appearing before as many audiences of older voters as I could find given the candidates problems with this demographic and the fact that the "kiddie korps" element's turnout (which Obama carried handily in a more higly concentrated pond of the primaries and caucuses) would have to rise dramatically to offset the weight of older voters and if a report on likely turnout of younger voters I saw Sunday afternoon on CNN is any indication the same will hold true this cycle. "Retail" politics has kind of gone out of style in today's media dominated elections but McCain has used retail appearances, combined with the local television coverage it demands, to erase much of Obama's early summer lead. Obama should not lose sight of this lesson.

Any readers who have read my column or commentary over the past two months know that I've largely eschewed discussions of the nitty gritty of the day to day sturm und drang of the campaign trail so far because I simply do not believe that much of anything we've seen to date will prove probative come November as to who wins or loses. Now the race really begins and to paraphrase the late, great Bette Davis, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

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