Apparently, Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe's
well-organized press presentation this week had its intended
effect, creating an impression of inevitable victory among the
liberal media elite, including Eleanor Clift:
I watched David Plouffe, Barack Obama's no-nonsense
campaign manager, give a Power Point presentation to a roomful of
reporters at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in
Washington on Wednesday afternoon. . . .
Plouffe put up a series of electoral maps and with surgical
precision illustrated a variety of ways Obama could reach the 270
electoral votes needed to win the presidency. "We're not going to
wake up on November 4th with our campaign worrying about one
state," he said, harking back to Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.
"We will have a lot of states in play … a lot of ways to get
to 270." Were he any other partisan strategist, I would discount 50
percent for spin. But Plouffe is convincing, and here's why: He ran
a brilliant primary campaign, and Obama will have the money and the
technology to pursue every last vote he thinks might be
his.
Of course, it's not just liberals who are impressed with
Plouffe. Philip Klein
also cites Obama's operation in the Democratic primaries as
evidence that Plouffe isn't just talking out the side of his head.
Having
watched Team Obama's ground game in operation one night last
month, I don't deny that their grassroots organizing efforts are
impressive, and I've seen no evidence of any effort by John
McCain's campaign to build anything to match it.
However, a state primary campaign is not like (and a state party
caucus is even less like) a nationwide general election campaign.
There were 112
million votes cast in the 2004 presidential election. Between
them, Obama and Hillary Clinton mustered about 35 million votes in
this year's Democratic primaries. The larger the scale of the
contest, the more the election turns on voters' generalized
perceptions of the candidates, and the less impact the
phone-bank/canvass/get-out-the-vote "ground game" will have.
This was a major reason why Obama repeatedly came up short in
the big states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, a point that Hillary's
handlers kept harping on in their appeals to super-delegates. And
there was nothing Obama's organizational strength could do to help
him win Kentucky and West Virginia.
So for all the "surgical precision" of Plouffe's PowerPoint
display, there is still cause for skepticism about his optimistic
Electoral College scenarios.
Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano might have said it
best:
During a session with reporters at the Democratic
National Committee's Washington, D.C. headquarters this afternoon,
Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe made a pretty
interesting prediction: Obama could win Alaska in November. I
wasn't there, but I imagine Plouffe's projection was greeted with
the sound of every hack in the room scribbling "crazy" in his
notebook. And underlining it. Twice.
topics:
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Alaska
