Barack Obama

Obama is the star of McCain’s campaign

4 août 2008 – 5:52

Obama is the star of McCain’s campaign
By CRAIG GILBERT
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

There are at least two ways to explain the summer offensive John McCain has launched against Barack Obama, highlighted by last week’s “Britney Spears” ad belittling the Illinois Democrat as “the biggest celebrity in the world.”

One is that McCain, running in a lousy year for Republicans, needs to make this election about Obama.

The other is that this election already is about Obama - that whatever McCain says or does, the subject of Obama is going to dominate the coverage and conversation.

“It appears the McCain people are so frustrated with Obama’s star appeal, and their sense that he is harder to criticize, (that) they’ve made the judgment they have to somehow tarnish him, rough him up, so that he doesn’t look so great - even at the risk of making (McCain) himself look not so great,” says Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, who supports Obama, but is a longtime Senate collaborator and friend of McCain’s.

“I don’t think it’s very pretty. I hope it doesn’t work. But I think they’ve made a professional judgment that in order to win, this is what they have to do,” Feingold said.

Matt Dowd, a key strategist in President’s Bush’s 2004 re-election race, said that the 2008 election is “either about Obama or about Bush. If it’s about Bush, McCain loses. If it’s about Obama, he has a possibility to win.”

In the view of many inside and outside the campaign, this is an Obama-centric race: the judgments that voters form about Obama in the next three months will have more to do with who wins than the ones they form about McCain.

In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 51 percent of voters said they find themselves focusing more on what kind of president Obama would be, compared with 27 percent who said the same about McCain.

Related to that is an iron rule of politics: The candidate who is less familiar and established in people’s minds is the one far more likely to be discussed - and defined - by the campaign. The battle over that candidate’s image becomes the central struggle of the election. One Republican media consultant interviewed last week termed this a “law of physics.”

That law certainly guided what happened in 2004, when George W. Bush was the incumbent president running for re-election, but Democrat John Kerry was the overwhelming focus of TV ads by both candidates.

Of the ads aired by the two nominees, 16 percent focused exclusively on Bush, while 61 percent focused exclusively on Kerry (the rest focused on both candidates), according to data gathered by the Wisconsin Advertising Project. Put another way, Kerry was featured in 84 percent of the candidates’ advertising (Bush in less than 40 percent). Public attitudes about Bush were so entrenched and polarized that both campaigns more or less gave up on trying to really change them. They spent their money trying to define Kerry.

While the dynamics are different this time (no incumbent on the ballot), something similar could happen in 2008, with McCain stepping up his attacks on Obama, and Republicans believing their hopes for victory rest on public doubts about an untested Obama.

“Barack has not closed the deal yet,” former Gov. Tommy Thompson, an honorary chairman of the McCain campaign in Wisconsin, said in an interview last week. “As long as he has not closed the deal after all the love affair that you the press has given him, and he still hasn’t put it away, that’s a pretty good indication there are lot of undecideds and a lot of people are still making up their minds about him. That’s going to be to McCain’s benefit.”
Obama is the star of McCain’s campaign

In the same NBC/WSJ poll mentioned above, 55 percent of those surveyed said Obama was the riskier choice, compared with 35 percent who said McCain.

Of course, there are risks for McCain in how he goes after Obama, with some Republicans and old advisers second-guessing the tone and content of his attacks, and worrying out loud about whether McCain is putting his vaunted personal image and nonpartisan appeal at risk by sounding negative on the stump. The “Britney Spears” ad, which one former McCain aide called “childish,” splices images of Spears, Paris Hilton and adoring German crowds at Obama’s recent Berlin speech, declaring, “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world. But, is he ready to lead?”

Some Democrats also question the notion that an election in the middle of an unpopular war and at the end of an unpopular Republican presidency can be made into a referendum on the Democratic challenger.

“At the end of the day, I think this election will not be simply about Barack Obama,” says Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, though he adds: “Two out of the three elements that help define the campaign want that to be the case - McCain and the press. The press, because Obama’s a far more interesting fellow. McCain, because he knows that’s his only chance.”

One clue to watch will be the tone of Obama’s own advertising in the home stretch - whether it remains largely focused on promoting himself or whether he makes a sustained effort, backed by a potentially major money advantage this fall, to go after McCain by linking him to Bush.

“He is just going to beat that drum,” predicts political scientist Tom Holbrook of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who says he is a little surprised Obama hasn’t already put a bigger share of his advertising budget behind attacking McCain as an extension of Bush (though he has certainly made the argument on the stump).

“I expect to see him do a lot more of it,” said Holbrook, calling it a natural move in this political climate. “Given the fact that McCain is not the incumbent president, there is still a lot of room to define him.”

Through last Tuesday, McCain’s ads were measurably more negative than Obama’s. Nationally, less than 10 percent of Obama’s ads criticized McCain, while about a third of McCain’s advertising criticized Obama, according to the Wisconsin ad project. In Wisconsin, about a quarter of the Obama ads have criticized McCain, while 40 percent of the McCain ads and 100 percent of the Republican Party’s ads have criticized Obama.

“This campaign is about Barack Obama, not John McCain,” said Ken Goldstein, the UW-Madison professor who runs the ad project.

Still, the mix of positive and negative messages in McCain’s ads was nowhere near as lopsided as it was in the Bush ad campaign of 2004, which featured an early and sustained effort to sow doubt about Kerry’s credibility and consistency. By the second month of the ad wars (April), 86 percent of the Bush advertising was devoted to attacking Kerry.

McCain aides said last week that they were drawing a legitimate contrast in the “Britney”ad.

“Do the American people want to elect the world’s biggest celebrity, or do they want to elect an American hero?” said McCain strategist Steve Schmidt.

The effectiveness of this new tack may become apparent in the coming weeks.

Similar tactics were widely seen as having worked for Bush and his supporters in ‘04: make the election a referendum on the other candidate; try to turn that candidate’s perceived strengths (in this case, an ability to draw big crowds) into weaknesses; dominate the media coverage with provocative ads; and knock the opponent off message.

McCain aides believe that happened last week when Obama warned his supporters that Republicans would try to scare them by saying he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

McCain aides immediately accused Obama of “playing the race card,” a charge Obama denied. The exchange over race, on top of the “Britney” ad, seemed to push the contest in a suddenly more acrimonious direction.

Dowd, the ‘04 Bush strategist, said McCain was really faced with two strategic choices in this anti-Bush election landscape.

“Either go after Obama or go after Bush,” said Dowd. “He has to do one or the other, or maybe some of both, to win. Right now he’s chosen to go after Obama. I would be spending more time on his part showing his separation with Bush. If he waits too long to do that and tries to do it at the very end, it just looks totally ridiculous.”