If Barack Obama committed a mistake in how he rebutted Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of his rhetoric, it wasn’t because he “plagiarized” off his friend Deval Patrick, but that he missed a golden opportunity to sound the second note of his candidacy.
The Obama campaign’s communications team has been highly successful at branding Senator Obama as the inspiring candidate of change. This is a remarkable feat given that Barack Obama’s rhetorical style easily drops out of the stratosphere and into the pedantic weeds of legal academia. So the decision to stay general was, in part, a tactical one, staying away from the candidate’s weaknesses.
At the same time, staying general was also a strategic move, grounded in the same belief that drives the entire campaign: America isn’t short on new ideas but rather lacks a vibrant common vision and values. Articulating intricate policies for universal health care won’t get anything done because there’s no underlying commitment to realizing them, the thinking goes.
Obama executed this first phase of the communications strategy brilliantly: no one, not even his critics, doubts his inspirational powers (even glum arch-conservatives perversely argue otherwise because they see which way the wind is blowing). In the past week, Obama has attempted to sound a second note, in harmony with the first: putting solid plans on the table.
It’s a brilliant strategy if he can pull it off, because while supporters carry on the baseline (“hope, change”), Obama himself can finally freestyle on policy with a lower risk of putting audiences to sleep, as he’d been doing before he latched on to the “hope” message. The YouTube masses have certainly found the beat; will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video project has now spun off into a full audience-participation project.
Now the challenge for Obama seems to be whether he can fit his substantive policy into soundbite format. And this is where I see a missed opportunity on Saturday in Wisconsin: Obama could easily have crammed a whopper of wonkish policy-talk into his “just words” rebuttal:
Don’t tell me words don’t matter. “Nine million children will have health care under my plan” — just words. “Universal health care” — just words. “I have a dream” — just words?…
By sandwiching it in between the “big ideas,” the (not-so) little idea — quasi-details — might have slipped into the soundstream.
I don’t doubt that Obama can carry on for hours talking policy details — I know how law professors are. The real question is whether he can fit those details into the soundbites on which the media thrive.
Or, has the era of YouTube has finally ended the lamentable age of soundbites? Even I don’t have that much hope.
