Swoon Strategy
Matt Yglesias responds well to Michael Kinsley’s uncharacteristically obtuse piece on Wesley Clark.
For one thing, Kinsley seems to be contradicting himself here. Either Dean is "the one candidate who seems to be able to get people's juices flowing" or else people are "in a swoon" over Clark. It can't be both unless there's some subtle swoon/juice distinction I'm missing out on. More fundamentally, though, Kinsley doesn't seem to have considered the possibility that some of us are attracted to Clark not just because we think he'd be a good candidate, but because we think he'd be a good president
I don’t have much to add except that I think it’s absurd to characterize support for Clark as a “snub” of Dean. I like Dean. I’ll vote for him unreservedly in the general if he wins. At this point, I happen to believe, for a variety of reasons that Clark is the better candidate (not the least of which is that he has, in my view, a certain kind of starpower that makes it easier for the Democrats to compete against a 300 million dollar advertising campaign.)
Is it a strange new concept in presidential primaries to pick the candidate you think can win or did I miss the memo instructing us that the guy who is in 2nd place in the national polls is automatically anointed because his fervent supporters feel entitled to it? Frankly, this entire argument feels like deja-vu all over again. The McCarthy kids vs. Bobby's army. I really hope that doesn’t happen. It isn’t good for the party.
On a slightly different note, this article in the LA Times this morning makes for some interesting reading on the subject of early campaign shake-ups. Sometimes winning campaigns have some rough spots in the beginning and they manage to get beyond them and defy expectations --- even bringing over a lot of people from the opposing party.
Schwarzenegger had kept his decision to enter the race a surprise even to his political strategists. Offstage at the "Tonight Show," Gorton had stood with a press release in his pocket declaring that Schwarzenegger would not get in the race.
The surprise generated a huge media reaction, but it also got his campaign off to a flat-footed start.
[...]
Saturday, the day after his poor television showing, Schwarzenegger talked a reluctant Bob White, the former chief of staff to Gov. Pete Wilson, into running his campaign. Schwarzenegger had been chatting with White about politics for years, conversations that often involved the nature of government finance.
To make way for White, Schwarzenegger eased Gorton, a longtime Republican operative who had moved his family from San Diego to Los Angeles the previous year to help the candidate, into a more limited role as an advisor.
White immediately began hiring, tripling the staff in about a week, and he created a structure, with daily staff meetings at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.
The changes steadied the campaign but did not stop its woes. Campaign strategists largely kept Schwarzenegger under wraps, relying on proxies who hurt as much as they helped.
[…]
Two weeks in, the campaign's polls were showing a decline from the day of his announcement. And time in the short race was running out. "Every day was like a week, and every week was like a month," said Mark Bogetich, who did opposition research for Schwarzenegger.
The campaign lacked both a compelling theme and a field general. Over the middle two weeks of August, both problems would be addressed.
The theme came first. Over that first, gloomy weekend, the campaign's ad-maker, Don Sipple, faxed Schwarzenegger a memo, without telling Gorton, which outlined a populist argument that would become the campaign's centerpiece.
Schwarzenegger should portray himself as the "governor of the people," as contrasted with Davis' appeals to "special interests," the memo said. Soon phrases from the memo began appearing regularly in Schwarzenegger's remarks.
To resolve the field general issue, Sipple teamed up with White to recruit Mike Murphy, the Republican strategist who had successfully managed campaigns for governor for John Engler in Michigan and Jeb Bush in Florida as well as John McCain's bid for the White House.
Inside baseball types would have said that in a very short campaign these problems would have been fatal. And a lot of us would be saying it was immoral or something to call in seasoned pros to advise an outsider politician. Seems they got through it ok.