Does Obama Have a Cunning Plan?

There's a persistent meme floating around about the almost mystical wisdom of Obama's campaign. When his latest burst of ads was released, he was widely lauded for his cleverness in "riding out the Palin surge" and playing superb rope-a-dope. Over at Open Left today, Chris Bowers made a post about Obama's recent dropping of gratuitous deference to McCain's character, and several commenters are proposing that Obama's former use of those compliments (which many on the left, including the guys at OL and TPM, winced at) was a calculated set-up to make the impact of his not using them greater. And all throughout the dark days of earlier this month, when McCain's bounce had him at double-digit national leads in some polls and we were thinking about going to whatever the left's version of Defcon 3 is (steaming latte bombs? clogging NRO's servers with mashed arugula?), bloggers and commenters solemnly recalled the lessons of the primary and concluded that Obama was playing chess while the rest of us were playing checkers.

How much validity does this image of Plouffe, Axelrod, and Obama as strategic savants have? As with almost all these questions, I'm guessing the answer lies somewhere in between brilliance and dumb luck. I really doubt that Obama and Biden were complimenting McCain with an explicit plan to drop the practice later, and I have a hard time believing that the guys in the war room in Chicago weren't at least a little bit panicky at the uncanny results of the Palin pick. On the other hand, the overall savviness of the campaign thus far is pretty hard to deny, and for the most part I trust that they know what they're doing. With the constant influx of polling data and new 24-hour scandals, it's easy to lose sight of the fundamentals, and I have confidence that the top minds at chez Obama are more in the know than the rest of us.

This does remind me of another point, though, and that's the enormous amount of Democratic good faith that Obama garnered from winning the primary. The fact that he beat the Clinton machine is brought up time and time again as evidence of his unflappability and long-term clearness of thought, but it needs to be remembered that Obama didn't so much win the primary as Clinton lost it.

True, his Iowa victory was spectacular, but it was also a gamble, and one that could easily have failed and consigned him to obscurity. Essentially, he made a bet that the country was more in the mood for inspiration than for the "git 'er done" Clinton philosophy, and Iowa proved him right. But after that, it was more Hillary's campaign's incompetence, combined with the fundamental gap between the Clintons' vision and that shared by Obama and just over half of the Democratic electorate, that carried him through.

The caucuses thing was just a damn no-brainer; Wolfson/McAuliffe/Penn deserve huge dopeslaps for not thinking about it, but it's not like Plouffe and Axelrod demonstrated uncommon insight by understanding the basic mechanics of the selection process. Likewise, the strategy of running up big margins in Obama-favorable primaries and keeping Hillary's margins low in the rest was definitely smart, but once again, the reason that won the thing for them is that the Clintons didn't do it. Remember Wisconsin?

The Clinton campaign was plagued by overconfidence, poor crisis management, and occasional bouts of extreme dumbness, while the Obama campaign had the advantages of striking the right tone at the right moment, having better people than the Clintons, and a charismatic and unique candidate. That's the long and short of it.They deserve a lot of credit for doing what they did, but I think it's rather dangerous to assume that they have this supernatural mastery of politics and that their wisdom will carry us through regardless of what things look like on the ground. If we slip into that complacency, we run the risk of a redo of the primary, only with the roles reversed.