Above the fray

Ken Adelman, who claimed to be a staunch conservative, tells about his reasons why he’s endorsing Obama :

McCain’s temperament — leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke — and his judgment — leading him to Wasilla — depressed me into thinking that “our guy” would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.

I’d rather a competent moderate president. Even at a risk, since Obama lacks lots of executive experience displaying competence (though his presidential campaign has been spot-on). And since his Senate voting record is not moderate, but depressingly liberal. Looming in the background, Pelosi and Reid really scare me.

Nonetheless, I concluded that McCain would not — could not — be a good president. Obama just might be.

That’s become good enough for me — however much of a triumph (as Dr. Johnson said about second marriages) of hope over experience.

Essentially it is “I would rather have a competent, leftlist, liberal president than a lousy rightist, conservative president”. Well said. Decency and competency should triumph over ideology, race, religion anytime. Here lies the real strength of Obama’s campaign and how McCain is sorely missing the point. He has constantly put himself above the useless bickering over ideology and instead focus his campaign on the message of unity and problem solving. He has shrewdly elevated himself above the fray and become untouchable while our image of McCain is that he’s still stuck in the bottom doing mudslinging. I think Obama has shown how presidential campaigns can be run and won that’s not based on negativity which has caused much cynicism in the political process. But I’m not sure that there’s gonna be another Obama who will have the character, steadfastness, confidence and stature to pull another campaign like this in future. It remains to be seen. Here’s another good article describing Obama’s superb campaign strategy, the non-campaigning passive campaign.

Conservatism dangerous

After watching this unbelievable video, well, it’s now time not to be nice anymore. I think Obama is not doing enough here. He should not be so polite anymore and do the country the patriotic act of drawing attention to the evil propaganda machinery run by the Republicans and blast it all to pieces. This is precisely the thing that everyone should be indignant about and should not be ashamed of. Because all decent human beings can tell that it will only breed more ignorance, bigotry, discrimination, racism and intolerance and it’ll get passed on to future generations. It’s gotta be nuked right now and forcefully if American still wants to talk about the American dream, still wants to maintain its superpower status and still wants to be the moral and freedom icon of the world. The conservative’s agenda of fanning and harvesting the ignorance and bigotry of their supporters smacks of similarities to what the Middle Eastern Islamic mullahs are doing to their own population to keep in power. Yes, I think it is that bad and the Republican brand is now in danger of being hijacked by the forces of evil, really.

McCain’s flawed strategy

It’s bound to happen at some time. Here McCain is forced to defend Obama. McCain’s campaign has been hijacked by the team that got Bush elected and now they are using the same flawed tactics. But this time round, it has not really worked well, why ? Because if you’re up against a strong, stable opponent, this doesn’t work. The foundations of Obama’s campaign is strong enough to withstand such attacks from the McCain camp. An election strategy is like a war strategy and McCain’s camp being the side that claims to be more capable militarily obviously doesn’t have much strategic common sense here (that’s why shit happens in Iraq). If Obama’s character is somewhat flawed, yes, you can win by focusing on his character and moral judgement. But Obama is a different politician. He’s smart and he first lays the ground rules by claiming the moral high ground of running a clean campaign and from the looks of it, he has a more disciplined team who tries to avoid wrestling in the mud. Because they know getting into the mud is not to their advantage and also that kind of politics does not benefit the country at all in the first place. Instead he has tried to build his campaign on solid ground.

Now because of this, McCain, who actually should be the frontrunner in this campaign by all counts, has run into a solid Obama defence against his team’s harassment and because of that has seen him slipping into the underdog status. McCain’s team has totally underestimated Obama and misjudged the circumstances of this election. Their seemingly directionless and random assaults against Obama has not worked but instead it shows the general lack of a strategy, vision and discipline by McCain’s team. McCain himself is a decent man and he should be aware that if the smear strategy against Obama doesn’t stick, it can backfire on him like in the video above. His message has also mostly won him the white, ignorant, evangelical, and sometimes extremist segments of the population. What he needs is actually more of the liberal, educated, moderate segments of the population to tip the votes in his favor and his current strategy is totally way off the mark. He is now forced to play on Obama’s ground rules and it’s probably a little too late.

As the art of war says, take the high ground and anchor there, then watch a less capable enemy falter by their own fruitless struggles.