Hindsight

I would take campaign retrospectives with a grain of salt.  In hindsight, a loser's campaign always seems to have been chaotic, devoid of clear strategic direction, and riven by internal divisions.  The campaigns of winners, by contrast, are typically well-functioning operations staffed by cool-headed operatives. There is bound to be some truth to this -- in this case, I think, quite a lot -- but the sources of these narratives are campaign staffers, and when you win, there's no blame to apportion, but if you lose, everyone is scrambling to lay the fault at someone else's feet, so things are likely to look worse than they might have been at the time.  In the case of Obama's campaign, you can easily imagine someone building a counter-narrative of chaos around the campaign's lowest points (Wright, Power, Goolsbee-in-Canada, "bitter," etc.), which no doubt would have been done if he had lost.

Generally, these dissections miss two important things -- issues and chance. It's an old criticism, but it remains true that political reporters feel at home when writing about strategy. This is what they're best equipped to do, so strategy becomes the prism through which all events are interpreted. Never mind, say, the candidates' positions on Iraq. On the other hand, there are always a host of conditions and occurrences that are essentially arbitrary and that, if different, could have altered the trajectory of the race. (What if New Hampshire had been a week before Iowa, rather than the other way around? What if Mayhill Fowler didn't exist?) 

This isn't to say that journalists shouldn't write campaign post-mortems. It's just that for a variety of reasons things are always a little tidier -- a little easier to explain -- when you know how the story ends.

Comments

[Shock Mouse]

This cycle the media has consistently said McCain's operation was bad, while the Romney campaign was pretty efficient.

But yes, in general, our commentariat over-lauds the skills of the winners, and finds all sorts of flaws with the losers.

[Ankush]

Shock Mouse: I think that's fair, but even in McCain's case, I think the media has actually been pretty kind to the guy and ignored how much sheer, unadulterated luck had to do with his win. Here's a telling passage from from a LAT story about his win:

The journey from that moment to capturing the Republican nomination Tuesday night was propelled by many factors beyond McCain’s control. McKinnon said it was like drawing to an inside straight over and over.

The Iraq troop “surge,” which McCain had advocated, gained support. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee emerged as a serious candidate and beat former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in Iowa. Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani essentially pulled out of New Hampshire, clearing McCain’s way. Romney abandoned South Carolina, helping McCain to victory there, which gave him the momentum to win Florida.

But before all that, McCain’s comeback was largely engineered by a team that grew out of the summer collapse, who are jokingly called the “Sedona five” because of their strategy sessions at McCain’s Arizona cabin.

An advisor to the McCain campaign says that they got extremely lucky, but, the Times says, "before all that, McCain's comeback was largely engineered." Um, no, it wasn't. His campaign stumbled to the finish line in a race that resembled, at various points, a war of attrition and circular firing squad. (How do you like that for mixed metaphors?)

[low-tech cyclist]

Another piece of good fortune for McCain was that after winning Iowa, Huckabee wasted the next few days on New Hampshire, where he had essentially no chance of doing well.

He could have gone to Michigan instead, where early polls showed him being at least competitive, and where he would have had the field (and the local press) to himself for a few days, or he could have skipped Michigan as well, leaving it to Romney, and gone directly to SC, where another 4% would have put him over the top, and made him the leader or co-leader going into FL and Super Tuesday.

We had a real chance for a Royalists (McCain) v. Roundheads (Huck) donnybrook on the GOP side, but the Huckster blew his chance.

[PTS]

But isn't it obvious that one of the more significant factors in Obama's victory was the campaign's superior organizing ability coupled with a revolutionary fundraising paradigm and a better understanding of how delegates were proportioned (remember when the Clinton campaign was shocked, shocked, in February to realize that they could win the popular vote in Texas yet lose the delegate count by a good margin?)

I grant the Clinton would probably have been the nominee if she had voted against AUMF, but Obama had to run a very good campaign to beat her even with that albatross around her neck. They banked on a long campaign and planned accordingly. Clinton did not.

[Ankush]

PTS: Oh, I do agree with you. Which is why I noted that I thought there was "quite a lot" of truth to what has already crystallized into the standard account of the campaign. It's just that the truths can get exaggerated -- and the inconsistent facts and inconvenient truths ignored -- when reporters write these kinds of stories.

In the end, this was a very, very close campaign. The outcome has been a foregone conclusion for a while, but that's largely attributable to the realities of math and procedure. Obama did run up an insurmountable lead some time ago, but it was not a huge one. So it's not like Obama ran a near-flawless campaign and Clinton ran a chaotic one. He made missteps; she (by definition, as the loser) made greater ones.

(And for the record, my reference to "math and procedure" is in no way intended to diminish the way he won. If anyone has followed what I've written about the Democratic primary system -- and why would you! -- you'll notice that I basically see no way, from first principles, to defend what was basically an arbitrary procedure. But failing a defense like that, the best we have is the old "rules are rules" standby, which I find satisfying enough.)

[PTS]

I think that's essentially correct. However, I would suggest that Obama's responses were telling and tellingly superior.

Obama had a tendency of turning missteps and problems into opportunities. His initial response on Wright, the response about meeting foreign leaders without conditions, and even to a certain extent, Bittergate all demonstrate a certain kind of political jujitsu where initial gaffes were turned into eventual advantages in a way that Clinton never really mastered. That takes a real political confidence and a belief that one's campaign will be an effective persuader (his refusal to pander on the gas tax is another good example of this). I think that does a reflect a distinctive difference in campaigning that turned out to be surprisingly effective.

[Tom]

Right. I mean, I've had a crush on Obama since 2004, so I probably can't be accused of objectivity here, but I still was pleasantly surprised and liked the guy quite a bit more this spring because of his responses to crises like Wright. His campaign, when confronted by an attack that looks like it's gaining traction, always seems to ask not just "how can we stem the damage from this" but "how can we turn this to our advantage?" It doesn't always work perfectly (how could it), but it's the right way to approach campaigning. I wish I saw more Dems doing the same.

[Sir Charles]

Great post -- I think you're quite right about the essential truth that if you are the winner you were a genius and if you're a loser -- well, you're a loser.

Having said that, I was very impressed with the early strategy memo in which the Obama campaign laid out the the way that the primaries and caucuses would likely unfold -- it's pretty impressive. And I also question the idea of paying someone millions of dollars to come up with the theme of inevitability. Talk about uncompelling.

[KathyF]

I think the point everyone is missing about Clinton and the AUMF is that if she had voted against the AUMF she would have been a quite different person. One that perhaps I and others like me would have supported. But she didn't vote against it because it was not in her nature to do so.

There's the problem with "if" statements: "if" implies a whole lot more than the one "if".