Writing on TPM, Reed Hundt notes how Barack Obama's campaign lacks actual issues:
Obama’s campaign has a good offensive position on the all-important “change” issue. But the campaign has apparently been reluctant to articulate in detail how Clinton does not stand for “change” in policy terms... Obama’s campaign this fall has plainly been willing to go on the offense. But to my eyes, they have not yet selected the battleground of policy difference where they will fight their last and perhaps winning fight.
Of course, policy debates in and of themselves are not definitive in campaigns. However, policy distinctions are the language of good offensive campaigns
Josh Marshall agrees:
What's the premise of Obama's campaign? I hear less triangulating, more principle (which basically means the same thing), change, etc. But those are slogans. To make these work politically I think Obama would have to say, Clinton is the cautious Democratic politics of the past. It was good in its day. And I respect all that Sen. Clinton has accomplished for our party. But I'm about something different and that's why X, Y and Z. Perhaps it's something dramatic on climate change. But that's not the point. I'm not running his campaign. But I think you need policy specifics that demonstrate the point.
So Obama says we Democrats know X, Y and Z is necessary. And I'm going to propose and commit to passing legislation in my first two years in office. And you can see I'm different because watch, Hillary won't follow me.
As it is, at the beginning of the last debate when they both made their basic pitch for their candidacy, it was Hillary's poll-tested platitudes and then Obama criticizing Hillary's establishmentarian platitudes with platitudes about change and other platitudes about avoiding platitudes.
Marshall then elaborated:
Many have made the argument about what I think Marc Schmit has called the Dems policy literalism. And it's a point I agree with. Strongly. But saying shared values doesn't make it so. And it's very easy to get led astray by a lot of jargon and nonsense. I probably should have been more clear. The point is not to beat Hillary on the issues. But if Obama's angle is to show he's more principled, less likely to sway in the political winds and so forth, he needs to ILLUSTRATE IT and not just assert it.
In other words, Democrats need to be convinced why they should cast aside their default choice, and Obama has failed to provide substantive issue-based reasons for doing so. Unlike Hundt, I'm also much less sanguine about new policy differences magically appearing that Obama could use. I don't know that they exist.
Update 11/19 12:57 PM: One more elaboration from Marshall gets to the heart of the matter (my bold):
My disappointment with Obama's campaign to date is that it's really, ironically, been pretty old politics to me. And I mean that in this sense. Going back several cycles, you've often had some version of the Gore v. Bradley campaign in 2000. One candidate who's the establishment party figure and another who talks about new stuff and change and principle and generally whets the appetites of the party's cerebral types but then never quite delivers with anything specific and gets crushed by the well-oiled campaign of the establishment candidate. I've seen different versions of this in Mondale/Hart, Clinton/Tsongas, Gore/Bradley. And the same result every time.
The reason it seemed like it might be different this time is that Obama was raising the kind of money that would allow him to match Hillary dollar for dollar in ads, foot soldiers and infrastructure. But so far I haven't seen a case made for Obama over Hillary behind the fact that it'd be cooler to have him as president than her -- a point I concede, but one I doubt is sufficient to get him the nomination.
And the truth is that however we got to this point, he needs to take the initiative and change the dynamic of the race. Or else the conclusion we're headed toward looks pretty clear.
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