Many pundits have noted of late that August has rarely been kind to Barack Obama since he hit the national stage. The folks over at First Read have pointed this out numerous times. Today, Ed Kilgore kicks the idea around in The New Republic. Here’s Kilgore:
As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic—much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere.
Within ten weeks, however, Obama was elected president and joy returned to the land.
Yes, dear reader, I am suggesting that this August's sense of progressive despair feels remarkably similar to last August's. This week last year, the Gallup Tracking Poll had McCain and Obama in a statistical tie. The candidates were fresh from a joint appearance at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, which was widely viewed by progressives as a strategic error by Obama. More generally, Democratic confidence, so high earlier in the year, was sagging. "Liberals have been in a dither for several weeks now over Barack Obama's supposedly listless campaign performance following his return from Europe," influential blogger Kevin Drum summed up sentiments at that time, "and as near as I can tell this turned into something close to panic."
These doldrums dissipated by the time of the Democratic convention later in the month, but reemerged in September, when McCain actually moved ahead in some polls. And the diagnosis of the problem was typically that Obama was too passive, and wasn't articulating a clear enough message. This should sound familiar to connoisseurs of contemporary progressive concerns about Obama.
Kilgore rightly notes that lack of concrete action this month exacerbates the feeling that the president is losing control of the debate. He suggests that liberals should give Obama some breathing room, and trust in those attributes that got him through last summer: “his legendary calm ("No Drama Obama"); his confidence in his own long-range strategy; his ability to choose competent lieutenants and delegate to them abundantly; and his grasp of the fundamentals of public opinion and persuasion. There was zero sense of panic in the Obama campaign itself late last summer, because they stuck with their strategy and organization and didn't let the polls or news cycles force them off the path they had chosen.”
But is that comparison appropriate? In the election, the Obama strategy was relatively straightforward. By August, they had a clear path to victory and a strong ground operation and plenty of cash to help them achieve it. (There was also a massive financial crisis, which helped undermine the Republican case.) But other presidents have easily won elections and been felled by health-care reform. The calculus in an election is simple: will the right number of people in the right places vote for me? Hence the success of a "stay on target" approach. Does that translate to issues involving complex negotiations? One person who doesn't seem to think so is White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. He wasn't part of the No Drama Obama team last year, but he's clearly a central player now. The New York Times's lengthy profile of Emanuel from Saturday indicates that he doesn't adhere to Kilgore's recipe. He is neither Zen nor likely to stick blindly to strategy. From the Times:
His win-the-day mentality, so shunned by the Bush team, can make for a reactive White House. Where Mr. Bush’s aides prided themselves on sticking to plans, Mr. Emanuel constantly adjusts. Aides said they went home at night thinking they knew the next day’s plan, only to discover after his 7:30 a.m. meeting with top advisers that the plan had been ripped up. It can have a whipsaw effect. At one staff meeting this summer, Mr. Emanuel and colleagues discussed whether rising deficits justified scaling back stimulus spending, one participant said. A week or so later, the discussion had turned 180 degrees. Concerned the stimulus was not working, the group discussed a second stimulus plan.
Kilgore is right in thinking that the oddities of August in D.C.—the abundance of news while nothing is actually changing—can skew the picture. Come mid-September, irrational town-hall meetings may appear like nothing more than a puzzling quirk while lawmakers nut out the details of a complicated and sweeping piece of policy. But Kilgore doesn't mention that the success or failure of the endeavor doesn't rest solely with the president, or his capacity to stick to a strategy. The president can't do this without the House and the Senate (which Kilgore wonderfully describes as "a monument to inertia, pettiness, and strutting egos"). And the strategy for dealing with those bodies couldn't be more different from the election, which may perhaps prove that Emanuel's departure from the Obama model is critical to success.
