The Post-Game Show...

Over the coming weeks, there will be terrabytes of pixels and forests of column-inches dedicated to analyzing how Barack Obama has turned the 'traditional' political campaign on its ear, but I'd like to point out a couple of blog posts that do a good job of summarizing the incredible job done by the Obama campaign.

Greg Sargent at TPM Election Central (who did far and away the best coverage of this campaign, BTW) points out that Obama won by running against and defeating both sides of the 60s Culture Wars, by first beating Hillary Clinton (the DFH side of the Culture War) and then McCain (the Military-Industrial Complex side). It's a great point - by winning the long primary against an icon of the Democratic party, and then taking the General Election away from a representative of the 'We could have won Vietnam' Republicans, Obama may have put a stake through the heart of a campaign template that deserves to be left in the 20th Century.

And Steve Benen looks back at all of the 'questionable' decisions made by the O campaign and concludes that they actually did know what they were doing the entire time. While Obama drove his supporters absolutely crazy at multiple points over the entire year, it's now evident that they mapped out a game plan and stuck to it, even in the face of Democrats second-guessing them every step of the way. While many Democrats got caught up in obsessing over daily tracking polls and the shitstorm of negative campaigning from McCain's side, Team Obama foresaw it all and had plans in place to deal with all of it.

I'm happy to say that I recognized the unique genius of David Plouffe and David Axelrod pretty early on, and while people staged their daily freakout over whether Obama was 'fighting back' or responding quickly enough (or at all!) to the rank idiocy that passed for a Republican campaign, I trusted Obama and his senior staff. I've been saying since practically the beginning of the primaries that Plouffe and Axelrod were running a different kind of campaign from any Democrats before them - a campaign that responded on its own terms, in its own time, no matter how urgent the situation may have looked to those of us on the outside. And by running that type of campaign, they dictated the terms and tone of the campaign.

There was a reason that McCain's 'Celebrity' ads only met with limited success - because the Obama campaign treated them like the vapid trivia that they were. There's a reason that Sarah Palin became a net negative for the GOP ticket - the Obama campaign went over her head and stayed on the attack against her boss, while letting her prattle on and reveal her Inner Idiot. They wisely chose not to lift a finger against Yukon Barbie, because they knew that by letting her say whatever she wanted she would do more damage to herself than they could dream of doing to her. This kept Obama-Biden 'clean' as far as negative campaigning was concerned and kept the focus on the top of the ticket - and that, in turn, defined Palin as the total lightweight she's seen as today.

The team of Plouffe and Axelrod came into this long race having analyzed both the ill-fated Gore and Kerry campaigns as well as the successful Clinton campaigns, as well as taking pointers from Karl Rove and his winning campaigns for Bush. They made a list of the possible pitfalls and studiously avoided them. They studied the Bush camp's steely message discipline and adapted it. They looked at the 'War Room' strategy of James Carville and Paul Begala, and they improved upon the model.

Whether their grand strategy would have worked with a less-gifted candidate than Obama is debatable. It was their luck that they were working for a man who is an absolute natural for the political arena, but it was their genius that they devised a campaign strategy that fit their candidate like a glove.

To toss out a couple of gratuitous musical comparisons - if Barack Obama is the Elvis Presley of candidates, then David Axelrod and David Plouffe are The Beatles of campaign strategists. Much as Elvis and the Fabs re-wrote the book of popular music, Plouffe and Axelrod have re-written the book on political campaigns by glomming on to what works and making it their own.