Drew Westen: Lessons Learned from the Election of 2008 ... Looking Back and Looking Forward
As the dust settles from the remarkable election of 2008 and the Obama transition is in full tilt, it is worth taking stock of lessons learned so they can inform not only campaigns that follow but the way Democrats and progressives pursue their legislative agendas.
From the standpoint of political scientists and their statistical models of electoral outcomes, the election was in the bag by the end of August, if not the end of June. My colleague at Emory, Alan Abramowitz, has developed one of the simplest and most powerful models, which predicted the popular vote within a percentage point or two (predicting roughly a 54 to 46 percent rout). In this model, every major factor that predicts electoral success--the popularity of the incumbent (the lowest in the history of Gallup polling), the state of the economy (measured in terms of gross domestic product), and"incumbent fatigue" (the same party had been in power for two terms) was running against John McCain. Other models from political science add the presence of an unpopular war--a fourth strike against McCain.
So perhaps we need look no further. All Democrats need to do is to wait until a corrupt, incompetent, reckless Republican President gets two chances to collaborate with an ideologically extreme Republican Congress and makes such a mess of the country and the world that even suburban white Republicans vote Democratic. But hopefully that will be a long wait.
Harnessing People and Technology
Two additional and interrelated factors not included in these models clearly stand out that reflect the particular skills of the Obama campaign and its chief architects: their extraordinary capacity to organize people and their equally extraordinary understanding of how to use cutting-edge technology.
In her speech to the Republican Convention, Sarah Palin mocked Obama's work history, suggesting that the difference between a community organizer and a small-town mayor was that a mayor has responsibilities. Today, I'm sure John McCain wished he had instead selected a community organizer for his running mate. Watching the Obama"ground game" in action--and the fact that the election was well on its way to over in many states with early voting days before November 4--reminded me of research on ant and bee colonies I had read in a college course on the evolutionary biology of social behavior. The trio of Obama, Axelrod, and Plouffe knew how to organize people in a way that makes Karl Rove's mobilization of ten million new voters (largely fundamentalist and evangelic Christians) that delivered Bush the presidency in 2004 look like a trial run.
Equally important was the fact that Obama was the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt (who used radio to reassure the American people and maintain a personal connection with them) to command a substantial technological advantage over his opponents. Ever since Eisenhower spent over a million dollars advertising on the newly emerging medium of television, Republicans have consistently had the edge on technology, including voter databases that were as essential to Bush's victory in 2004 as to Obama's in 2008. John McCain never learned to use that large system of tubes youngsters in their 50s and 60s know as the Internet, whereas the Obama campaign used new media to stay in constant contact with their supporters, to spread the word to potential supporters, and to amass huge sums of money that gave them the edge in voter mobilization and every form of campaign advertising.
Mobilizing Emotion: The Message and the Messenger
Yet none of these factors--the Bush legacy that bedeviled McCain, which he had to embrace to win his party's nomination but ultimately tightened like a noose around his political neck as November approached, or the Obama team's ability to mobilize people and technology--can explain what happened between mid August, when McCain had caught up to Obama in most polls (and early September, when McCain took his first clear lead) and November 4, when Obama achieved a decisive victory. Nor can these factors explain why Obama, who was steadily losing ground to Hillary Clinton from the summer of 2007 through early November of that year (when she broke 50% in the national polls among Democratic voters and seemed, according to many commentators,"inevitable"), suddenly took off after his speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa, which many observers described as a turning point in the Democratic nomination process.
To understand what happened in November and December of 2007 and again in September and October of 2008 requires an understanding of what ultimately moves voters: the emotions that motivate virtually all human behavior. In October of 2007, the Obama who had tried to win the traditional Democratic way--by focusing on the relative merits of his 10-point plans, using language that was often more nuanced than moving--was running neck-in-neck with John Edwards for second place. The reality is that there wasn't much difference between his 10-point plans and those of his rivals. But there was an enormous difference between him and his rivals when he chose to use it: a capacity to inspire that we see only four or five times a century in American history. In November of 2007, the Obama who had captured the imagination of the nation with his 2004 address to the Democratic Convention (and rekindled that imagination on a blustery day in Springfield in early 2007 with an awe-inspiring address announcing his candidacy for the Presidency) re-emerged at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa and never looked back. Obama found hope, and he began to inspire it again.
Although for months pundits continued to frame the race as a battle between Obama and"the Clintons," the reality was that it more like a contest between Bill Clinton (or JFK, or FDR) and Hillary Clinton--a candidate with an extraordinary capacity to inspire versus a candidate with many gifts except that one. No doubt, the capacity to organize and mobilize people was one of the decisive factors in the election of 2008. But that capacity itself was dependent upon not only the skills of the Obama team but upon the rare personal qualities of Obama himself. For the next several months, many political commentators called for Obama to move beyond his message of" change" and toward the approach to campaigning that has been the downfall of Democratic politicians for generations: peppering voters with facts, figures, and policy positions and assuming they will make a rational choice between bundles of plans. But we don't choose any of the important people in our lives that way, whether our spouses or our Presidents. Obama beat Hillary Clinton the same way he beat John McCain: by out-inspiring them, boxing them into the role of the candidate against hope, and defining himself as the candidate of change in a year in which Americans wanted nothing more desperately than to put our nation on a different track.
But hope and inspiration, by themselves, are not enough to win the White House. No one has ever won the presidency without making a case against his opponent, and no one has ever won who failed to address attacks from the other side (as Michael Dukakis and John Kerry would now be the first to acknowledge). As I argued in The Political Brain, Democrats' ambivalence about aggression has been as much their downfall in prior elections as their irrational commitment to rationality--their belief that good ideas sell themselves, irrespective of the way they are presented and by whom. If the Obama of November and December of 2007 began to channel voters' hopes, the Obama of September and October 2008 began to channel and address not only their hopes but their fears--about the economy, about John McCain, and ultimately about himself.
As an article in the New York Times put it in early September,
A new character is making a debut at Senator Barack Obama's campaign rallies: His name is John McCain. It began quietly on Monday in Michigan, but grew in volume as Mr. Obama made his way from Flint to Farmington Hills, carrying over to a speech on Tuesday morning in Ohio. By the time he arrived for an evening stop in the southwestern tip of Virginia, Mr. Obama's sales pitch contained nearly as many references to Senator McCain as to himself, suggesting how the McCain campaign has been driving the recent dialogue of the presidential race."John McCain says he's about change, too--except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics," Mr. Obama told his supporters here.
By early September, the Obama campaign had discovered that hope--and even substance, of which he had provided plenty over the course of twenty-plus debates and hundreds of stump speeches--was not enough. The constant body shots from his opponent--that he was elitist, outside the mainstream, too full of himself (read: uppity), not really"one of us," the kind of guy who eats arugula and"pals around with terrorists" (whichever is worse)--had taken their toll, and although Obama had given Americans plenty of reasons to vote for him, he hadn't offered them any clear narrative about what would happen if they voted instead for McCain.
But in the closing eight weeks of the campaign, Obama controlled the four stories that matter most in an election: the story you tell about your yourself (that he was the candidate of change, fleshing out what he meant by change in his address at the Democratic Convention and in every major speech thereafter), the story you tell about your opponent (that he was four more years of Bush), the story the other candidate is telling about himself (McCain the maverick, which Obama countered by citing McCain's proclamation that he had voted with Bush over 90% of the time and parrying,"That's not a maverick, that's a sidekick"), and the stories McCain was telling about Obama (that he lacked the experience and judgment to lead, which events transpired to allow Obama to counter with the entire nation watching). Obama did it his way, not resorting to the kind of gutter politics he clearly abhorred, but laying out a coherent narrative about what a McCain presidency would mean to a nation that had endured eight years of George W. Bush.
No doubt, the financial meltdown that began in the middle of September helped seal John McCain's fate. But in electoral politics, stories don't write themselves. One of the major mistakes Democratic candidates have often made is to assume that voters will connect the dots for themselves (e.g., about the draft-dodging W attacking the war hero Kerry) or that the media will do it for them. In this case, Obama wisely chose not to let facts speak for themselves (as they clearly had not done two months earlier when McCain succeeded in spinning a stunningly successful Obama tour of Europe and the Middle East into a beauty pageant allegedly bespeaking Obama's narcissism, empty celebrity, and appeal to foreigners). In a speech in Colorado on September 16, Obama began to tell a story about the financial crisis and John McCain's place in it that would have made it difficult for McCain to take a coherent position on the economic crisis even if he had one to offer:
Now I certainly don't fault Senator McCain for all of the problems we're facing, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. Because the truth is, what Senator McCain said yesterday fits with the same economic philosophy that he's had for 26 years. It's the philosophy that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down. It's the philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise. It's a philosophy that lets Washington lobbyists shred consumer protections and distort our economy so it works for the special interests instead of working people.We've had this philosophy for eight years. We know the results. You feel it in your own lives. Jobs have disappeared, and peoples' life savings have been put at risk. Millions of families face foreclosure, and millions more have seen their home values plummet. The cost of everything from gas to groceries to health care has gone up, while the dream of a college education for our kids and a secure and dignified retirement for our seniors is slipping away. These are the struggles that Americans are facing. This is the pain that has now trickled up.
This passage is effective in both its narrative coherence--it tells the story of how we got to this point, who was responsible, and why McCain could not possibly be the one to lead us out of it--and in its emotional resonance. It begins with magnanimity and a sense of fairness, not attempting to blame the entire crisis on McCain but making clear his complicity in it and his ideological commitment to the causes of it. It uses language like" common-sense regulation" that appealed to a populist public that knew it had been swindled and was no longer buying Republican lines about government as the problem. It took the abstractions of a Wall Street meltdown and a credit crisis and turned them into the experience of everyday people:"You feel it in your own lives," he told his listeners, and described how the hope of a"dignified retirement for our seniors" was slipping away. You can picture the people he is describing, and they could picture themselves, their parents, and their grandparents.
At the same time, the nation watched as the two candidates showed what they were made of in confronting the economic meltdown, and the Obama campaign lightly reinforced what voters were observing in McCain with their own eyes with words like"erratic" and"out of touch." McCain had tried to make Obama's judgment and experience a voting issue. It had not worked for Hillary Clinton, and it wasn't likely to work for McCain, but the contrast between McCain and Obama's response to the unfolding economic crisis completely undercut the attempt to make voters anxious about Obama's judgment. Instead, what voters accurately perceived, using what the political scientist Samuel Popkin described as"low-information rationality," was one candidate who careened from one posture to another in a desperate attempt to appear presidential and another candidate who seemed calm and steady in the most stressful circumstances--precisely what voters mean by presidential. Nearly a week after Election Day, six out of ten voters reported that they had no idea what Obama would do to get the country out of its financial mess, but they had the confidence he could do it. McCain had succeeded in making voters anxious about a McCain presidency on the issue that worried them most, whereas Obama had allayed their fears.
At the end of the campaign, Obama returned to a positive message that emphasized his values and his personal biography in just the way that empirically wins elections but that Democrats have been slow to embrace. His 30-minute message to the nation on the eve of the election was a model of how to win hearts and minds. It was not a discourse on the fine points of policy, but it was hardy devoid of substance. It was an emotional argument for his presidency--a message that embeds reasons within an emotionally compelling narrative. He wove together his own life story with the stories of four Americans and their families who were facing precisely the kinds of problems the rest of the nation was facing. His narration was moving, personal, and laden with the values he shares with his fellow Americans (personal responsibility, hard work, compassion, fairness), yet woven into its fabric were bulleted plans that described his vision for the future and what he would do as president that emerged in brief text overlays on top of the emotional message.
Moving Voters, Moving Forward
Voters are neither rational nor irrational (although at times they can be both). They vote with their values as well as their interests, and a good candidate and a good message appeals to both.
Candidates and campaigns needn't choose between reason and emotion. A good message is one that draws people's attention, gives them pause to reflect on what has happened and what we need to do, and moves them to act.
Candidates can incite and channel both the hopes and concerns of the electorate without wallowing in the gutter of demagoguery. Barack Obama would have been derelict in his duty as a candidate if he had not made clear that John McCain's answer to the collapse of the economy--radical deregulation--was also the cause of it. Like other mammals, we evolved both positive and negative emotions for a reason, and the reasons are not redundant. In recent history, bad candidates have won elections by demagoguing fear and hate, but good candidates have lost elections by failing to elicit negative emotions about candidates who should have made the electorate anxious or angry. Just as reason versus emotion represents a false antinomy that has hamstrung Democratic and progressive thinking, strategy, and messaging for decades, so does positive versus negative campaigning. You can lie by offering false hope (e.g., promising to lower taxes dramatically while balancing the budget) just as you can lie by offering false fears.
Messages matter. Compelling narratives, carefully crafted one-liners, and pithy phrases are no substitute for carefully thought-out policy positions if you want to govern well. But carefully thought-out policy positions are no substitute for compelling narratives, carefully crafted one-liners, and pithy phrases that capture the essence of your values or vision if you want to govern at all.
And there is nothing as powerful in politics as a powerful messenger. This time, this moment, the American people found that messenger.