Part 3: Joining the Chess Club: Understanding Obama-style Campaigning

Political victory today is fueled by ideas and dialogue, not legislative or policy obstinance or arguments. Hypocrisy is punished only when presented as unacceptable violation of the dialogue. Otherwise, it's just pols acting like pols...everyone does it!

The lesson is to learn how to build, frame and present political views within the new American political discourse idiom.

Modern American voters are generally not well-informed because facts in the media are glossed, spun and subordinated in both presentation and thought to the overarching message – a green, non-confrontive and peaceful globe. Until conservatives understand the tilt and build the message within the idiom, it will be buried as “inappropriate.”

Here is a comment left recently on theblacksphere.blogspot.com that speaks volumes:

“As a university professor at a major, but not Ivy League, college in the northeast, I can assure you that indoctrination and intimidation is alive and well. My freshmen history students exhibit little knowledge of any real facts but know multiculturalism chapter and verse. They've been brought up on a steady dose of the belief that all cultures are equal and no answer is ever wrong, except for the one that challenges the concepts they've been brainwashed with.”

In foreign affairs, young Americans clearly aren’t comfortable with the United States as the sole global superpower. They have increasingly become wary of our projection and use of military power. Slogans like “Blood for oil” resonate because they strike at this concern that our “unfair advantage” is often used against banana republic tinhorns and second-tier thugocracies in selfish, nationalistic pursuits – or even profit.

“Bloody shirt” arguments are dismissed. In the minds of many young Americans the USA has become the global bully – “Support the troops, not the war.” Young Americans have no recollection that countrymen were ever held hostage in Iran. They have increasingly come to rationalize that 3,000 American deaths in New York city were caused by American cultural hegemony “offending” another culture, if not some tortured conspiracy or another. It doesn’t matter whether young America is that offensive culture – another culture expressed offense and thus one could understand, although not endorse, their action.

So, what can we do to regain our prestige abroad, end the “Death to America” demonstrations? Let's go back to grade school conflict resolution...let's talk...no preconditions...Obama will do what we'd do by opening a dialogue. Meanwhile Republican politicians whine in the background about the “message” that such meetings would send. Young America sees the promise of a message of peace going to a long aggrieved party, and see a conservative political party apparently opposed to world peace...change the idiom!

One sees the same phenomenon in Israel, which now accepts occasional rocketfire, negotiates meaningless ceasefires, executes abortive invasions, and elects peace politicians to its Knesset. Internationally it is thought a bully when the IDF crosses into Gaza or Lebanon with superior forces to quell such attacks. It is “unreasonable” when it will not allow Palestinians their claimed right of return, or cede militarily strategic ground. What was once admirable has become “proof” of the state’s ill-intentions towards a legitimate grievance by suffering people. Whoever anticipated that turn of events and opinion?

Contrarily, when has anyone witnessed a demonstration against American involvement in Kosovo, where our forces keep Christians and Moslems apart, and ended “ethnic cleansing.” No one seriously questions American involvement there because it’s seen as a good use of our military power, serving under international auspices, keeping the sides apart pending eventual resolution of their conflict.

In this political and social milieu, empty platitudes draw support because they’re inoffensive, strike an indisputable, uplifting chord, and are wholly defined by each individual with her own aspirations. The McCain campaign was for change, too. Who was against “change?” But the McCain campaign defined its change with various detailed position papers. You’ll not find one shred of meaningful definition from the Obama campaign. Hope? Was the McCain campaign peddling hopelessness? Of course not, but it wasn’t oozing “hope,” either. It’s easy to support and difficult to dispute amorphous pleasantries.

The future is apparent: When something goes awry, a difficult political decision made that will disappoint some followers, criticism will be blunted by assertions that criticism is politically motivated (Bully alert!), a distraction from the movement’s goals (It’s all baseless and a lie.), an attempt to disrupt the movement (Back on task!). The administration will deny any “hoodwinking” or “okie-doke” on its part because there was no bait-and-switch – Obama never said – and dissenters need to re-tune their thinking or be out of this movement. Those collected 13 million e-mail addresses will be more used for internal cohesion than pressuring Congress.

Which again raises the social proof specter. Like the six million said by the Obama inaugural committee to be coming to the inauguration – a number still quoted by the media - the numbers offered are very likely enthusiastically inflated, but they nonetheless provide “proof” that friends and neighbors are on board – and you’ll be left off if you don’t hop on.

Please read and comment on the earlier posts in this series. They are presented below, so please scroll down.