Post-mortems, #2

A reader alerted me to this article in the WaPo, with yet more detail about how Obama won with his targeted-delegate strategy.

The insurgent strategy the group devised instead was to virtually cede the most important battlegrounds of the Democratic nomination fight to Clinton, using precision targeting to minimize her delegate hauls, while going all out to crush her in states where Democratic candidates rarely ventured.
. . .
The surprise was how well his strategy held up -- and how little resistance it met.
. . .
"We kept waiting for the Clinton people to send people into the caucus states," marveled Jon Carson, one of Obama's top ground-game strategists.

"It's the big mystery of the campaign," said campaign manager David Plouffe, because every delegate counts."

The more I think about it, the less I am surprised. I have felt for a long time that the Democratic party has an anti-heartland bias. I've heard far too many liberals who are from either or both coasts dismiss people from the Midwest as stupid. I've actually heard that word used - "stupid." Many people in the "flyover" states are aware of this. This is why they don't like elitists, and it's a big part of why John Kerry and Al Gore lost. As much as Hillary tried to portray herself as a regular person, she's still the Senator from New York who lives in Washington.

What I learned from this article is that Obama capitalized on this arrogance, and this is a big reason why he won. Hillary and her campaign did not think places like Idaho and Kansas mattered. And by that, I mean that they did not think those places "mattered" in several respects. They don't matter culturally, they don't matter financially, and they don't matter politically. I think Obama did well in part because he was paying attention to people who were starved for it.

The Obama campaign also had this insight going for them:

The message -- of unity and hope -- did not come out of nowhere. David Axelrod, a Chicago campaign consultant, long ago hatched the idea that Democrats' campaigns should revolve more around personality than policy.

I agree with this. I mostly agree with Obama on policy, obviously, but I couldn't tell you a lot of specifics. And I'm a person who likes policy discussions.

At its most basic, voting for a candidate is a matter of relating to another human being. We do not base most of our human relations on matters of policy. Not with our friends, our significant others, our coworkers. We may associate with them because of a general agreement, but not because of specifics. We choose our friends, our lovers, and our colleagues in large part on things like trust and empathy. Do they have our sense of humor? Do they see the world the same way? Do we admire them?

Beyond the strategy of targeting specific districts and crunching the numbers for the delegates, the Obama campaign had a unique strategy for empowering voters:

From May through the summer of last year, more than 750 volunteers learned the do's and don'ts of canvassing, working phone banks and recruiting others to help at what came to be known as "Camp Obama"

I went to a Camp Obama, and I learned some things. It was great. It was based on at least one simple premise: inspiration takes hard work. It's like that saying from (I think) Thomas Edison: genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The Obama campaign knew that it was not going to be enough to inspire lots of voters. They knew they were going to have to turn that inspiration into perspiration.

There's one point in this article that I somewhat disagree with:

"It's the story that hasn't been written yet, how Obama did everything right, targeting caucuses, targeting small states, avoiding the showdowns in the big states where he could," said Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, who watched the strategy play out in microcosm in his own state, "and how in the end Clinton did so much so wrong."

That's true, insofar as it applies to this campaign. But the real story that hasn't been written yet is how that strategy will play out in the general election, and then in politics in general after January 20, 2009.