The Games They Played

I have made this comment privately on an e-mail list, but now that the election is done, I will say it here:

When the history of the 2008 presidential campaign is written, two things will be obvious to the historians:

1. The military saying that "infantry is the queen of battles" is also true in politics. The Obama campaign had far, far more people working the streets in its campaign than the McCain campaign did. McCain tried for the flash of press coverage, campaign commercials and soundbites, Obama had the community organizers, the "boots on the ground." When McCain tried, in the last weeks of the campaign, to throw new volunteers into the fray, it was akin to sending the Volkssturm out to fight the Red Army. Politically, the results were similar.

Money is indeed the root of politics, but Obama used it for what needed to be done. With his campaign offices almost everywhere, Obama forced the McCain campaign to play defense. It showed.

2. The Obama campaign was playing three-dimensional chess against opponents who were playing checkers. A freshman senator put together a campaign that beat the Clinton Machine and thrashed the acolytes of Karl Rove. Neither the Clintonistas or the Rovians saw what was being done to them until it was too late to do more than engage in extremely negative whining, which turned more people off than it convinced.