Why Barack Obama won

Although the first black President of the USA is a huge and meaningful step, welcomed with a surprising dignity by John McCain and George Bush, this is not because of his being black that Barack Obama was elected, which is probably even more meaningful, but because of the precision and the impressive hard work of his campaign, in which every single detail was thought.

The Obama campaign's program was deliciously well prepared. Vague enough to allow a large target to identify, when Hillary Clinton' s program was too precise not to be boring and segmenting, it determined the keys points and brought really bright answers, turning the flaws of his proposals into strong qualities.
His being black and his lack of experience, which could have been his main handicaps, were connected to this powerful need of change after what is perceived as a failure by the Bush administration and used as a symbol to proove his ability to get the country to a new era.
His vote against the war in Irak was well used and completed by his willing to renforce the troops in Afghanistan, which avoided the risk of making him sounded as a weak pacifist and outlined the failure of Bush in those two wars.
His health care plan was not ambitious enough to scare the independent and republican voters.
His tax plan was well thought to speak to the middle-class, of which he took such a care since the financial meltdown, while John McCain remained silent about them, not even mentioning them during the debates.
Otherwise, he remained uncomfortable on moral issues, being unable to take a straight to the point stand, probably too afraid to take the risk to alienate voters. His positions on the death penalty, the gun control, the gay marriage, god, abortion, were confused, weak and coward as we saw on the faith forum. We may ask if he was disguising his point of view. His "blunder" about people "getting bitter and clinging to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" sounded way more frank and sincere and was really more interesting. But the campaign is not conceived to let candidates being sincere and honest anyway and a brighter opponent than John McCain would have used this weak point of Obama's wanting to keep both parties happy.

After this program, he also worked on the form.
He took advantage of his beautiful skill of speech. He used it to rebound after Hillary Clinton's attacks about Jeremiah Wright during the primary and calm it down when it made him sounded too intellectual and elitist after his speech in Berlin, where he was not that convincing, probably because he has no good reason to be there and was smartly weakened and mocked by McCain.
He was able to mix up different levels in his speeches. Composed with touches of facts and symbols, politics and emotions, determination and attention, promises and compromises, all his speeches are build with the same technical pattern. Each of them is a story made up to allow people to identify and to hope.

His campaign did not forget the fundamentals of an election: the ground game.
They spin a tight web throughout the country: "The Obama campaign has broken the country into a collection of battleground states, which are dissected into precincts that are parceled one more time into neighborhood teams. (Ohio, for example, is divided into 1,231 neighborhoods.) And each of these teams, if the recruiting is up to speed, has a leader who, ideally, lives just down the block from all those doors that need to be knocked on." They deploy lawiers to control the polls (Kerry neglected this point in 2004). His rejecting the public financing allowed his campaign to raise a amount which has reach an unprecedented level. And they used the most aggressive marketing strategies and the opportunity of the new technology to do this: social networks, mobile phones to keep people tuned and get them involved.
They offered for instance to win a dinner with Obama or a backstage pass on Election night to encourage donations; they reveal the choice of the running mate by texting those who would give their names, collecting this way plenty of contacts; they made up contests, counting the events hosted, the calls made, the doors knocked, the amount raised to motivate the members of my.barackobama.com, as at McDonalds; and they strongly encourage registration of new voters...

We may notice that if the Obama team spent such an energy to work on every single detail, they avoided the negative campaigning, despite the asks of a lot of democrats in August to fight back (the memory of a Kerry too weak was persistent). They launched a site to fight against the rumors (the members of my.barackobama.com were frequently asked to send disclaimers emails to every kind of people) but mostly refused the low blows, saying, for instance, that the issue about Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy was "off limits".
After the financial crisis, Obama's image of seriousness, dignity and calm turned out to be reassuring in storm times and gainful for him.

This campaign was a really beautiful deployment of skill and hard work. We may regret that in those times where probably any democrat would have been elected, as Bill Clinton was close to suggest in The View, Barack Obama's program is so shy and not ambitious enough, not taking enough advantage of this republican tiredness.

Hillary Clinton: slogans producer

After her "no way, no how, no McCain" at the DNC, here is the fresh slogan Hillary Clinton made up with her talented easiness of producing them by the dozen : "don't ask who are you for, but instead ask who is for you"... Enjoy it at the end of this well-prepared and straight to the point interview :

Are candidates free of speech?

There's something you surely do when you watch and pick up so carefully every single word or act, jokes or mistakes of both candidates, as this screen behind McCain, Joe Biden's saying Hillary Clinton "might have been a better pick than (him)" or now this "pig with lipstick" affair... You question the freedom of speech. And this is more serious than it sounds through these dishonest quarrels.

DNC : Day 2 : Hillary Clinton's stylistic composition

Something enabled me to recognize a political meeting today, more easily than the day before. Something, which happens in every political meeting throughout the world, in democracies as well as in dictatorships : the compulsive repetition of watchwords.

Dozens of people came, thus, to say at some moment in their speeches, for instance : "McCain more of the same".

Those different slogans ("Unity", "Hillary", "Obama", etc.) were supported by thousands of signs raised in the public in a very well organized perfect timing.

So, Hillary Clinton's speech was a really talented moment of stylistic composition, as it happens to be a must-do in every political carreer.

Does Hillary Clinton suffer from stammering?

It's not so much that we sneak around the hustle-bustle of Hillary Clinton Campaign's kitchen with those memos and e-mails provided by The Atlantic, because we don't give a... dime, but to see clearly this feeling we had so far taking shape : her inability to make decisions underlined by the newspaper:

"Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton has competed on the basis of its management skills, his ability, as she likes to put it, 'do the job from Day 1. In fact, it has never behaved in-chief and his own team has proved to be its Achilles heel. "

This careful analysis delivered by the journalist follows the contradictions, the power struggle in this divided team of advisers, never arbitrated, except once - about the airing of the famous 3:00pm call ad - and this is not Hillary but Bill who decides between the two camps.

But beyond this analysis after the fact, which talk sometimes about the notes informed by the defeat, proving that an "a posteriori" can also be an "a priori", it is quite another question that these stolen memos inspire me...

Whether this profusion of ideas in these notes are all deliciously circumventing Policy, to focus on communication, it is obviously the least marketing advisers can do. Policy is an entertainment like cinema or reality TV, and this is only to shock extremists purists, whose nostalgia makes them forget the immense boredom and the vanity of discussions which want to change the world. Purists will continue to die of boredom if they enjoy it, this is not our problem. What seems wonderful in this positioning crisis is how it reveals the collapse of the relationship of Hillary Clinton to her speech.

Because if this team argues over the best positioning to take, that means there is no clear, obvious, necessary positioning.

That's the confusion we felt, seeing Hillary Clinton hesitating between the emotion and the bossy cards, as she tore up in january or strongly attacked Barack Obama during their last debate, for instance.

What these few notes thus outline, since the sketch of a naive image that begins in 2006, when Mark Penn takes Margaret Thatcher as a fantasized reference point, to the invasion of doubts in the team about the choice of a single, clear message, is the krach, the complete sucking up of a speech by itself, its withdrawal and its insane tetany.

What we do not know, what we can not know is whether the speech of Hillary Clinton has been, during this campaign, a stammering, where the thought erupts and stumbles against the slowness and poverty of the communication, or a confused silence, vague or embarrassed, which gives back the floor she couldn't stand up on. Did she have too much to say or was she talking to say nothing?

Anyway, what is perfectly fine to see in these exchanges of notes, beyond a problem of management and beyond a deficit of communication strategy, is, suddenly, someone stumbling against completely arbitrary rules, as all standards, where at this times, the one who will be elected to the head of a country ought to be the best soap seller.

Barack Obama : a marketing strategy

It has been almost 18 months that Barack Obama declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination and therefore as many months that we are expecting with an impatient curiosity the slightest sign of an early concrete proposal.

While some assume the blur of his speeches is due to a strategy of the primary, promising a presidential campaign more precise, the last 2 months seem to be at least as vague as the primary which preceded.

The most optimistic are probably still waiting for the official inauguration, which will take place in late August to see a program's taking shape.

Anyway, the lyrical and good intentions of his speeches seem to have been useful, compared to a rigorous, accurate and stubborn Hillary Clinton, who happens to have bored. Her mastery of issues, her experience, her answers to everything, in short all its innumerable qualities, ended up to make her look like a saleswoman teleshopping on return indeed; her Town Hall on the eve of Super-Tuesday, terribly soft, uptight, turning off, is perhaps not even the most pathetic. Not to mention the awkward Bill Clinton's assertions, which failed to denounce the emptyness of Obama's speeches, described as "fairy tale", and succeeded to tire the democrats voters of the the monster "Billary"'s coming back.

But finally, a fairly radical change happened under our eyes in recent weeks, began shortly before Obama's visits to the Middle East and Europe, which have enabled him to clarify.

First, of course, we will have noticed with amusement that he began to study the records. He seems to win slowly through his ignorance of international political issues, at the experience of an harassing effort.

If the inconsistency of his speech in Berlin seemed to prove that he did not know himself what he was doing there, it was an opportunity for him to recite his fresh knowledge of History, Geography, Institutions and Diplomacy of countries, which he didn't suspect the existence so far.

According to the profusion of details about the past of Berlin or the european commitment alongside the USA, we could almost forget the deliciously empty and frightened look of a faltering Obama, during the primary debates, unable to answer to some diplomatic questions, raised by moderators, who remained not insistent with him though. The blunder he made saying he would meet even the Iranian leaders, which the Clintons took as a proof of his inexperience, seems terribly far.

But there is an even tastier change, we can see taking shape in his Op-ed in the New York Times, then in his speech in Berlin and finally during his interview on Meet the press : a clever triangulation, developed by very smart marketing policy advisers. He doesn't only recall he always has been against the war in Iraq, without specifying that he has voted its budgets as senator, he takes a new posture, almost warmonger, to redeploy troops in Afghanistan and to harden its position against Pakistan. He uses the leitmotif of the Republicans on the war against terrorism and turns it against them, underlining their inability to win the wars they have declared. Confirming that he will do a better job on their own areas, while strengthening its position against the war in Iraq, he plays the field, with pacifist Democrats and so-called bellicose Republicans, meanwhile the CIA underscores the links between Pakistan and Al Qaeda: the brightness of the strategy is exquisite.

Even if this trick implies to feed irrational scares of terrorism, which Americans and the West are plagued by, and which we were several, and Madeleine Albright among us, hoping to see a new Presidency overcomes it, its brilliance must surely be irresistible.

The programm of the democratic nominee, which we were still looking for, not so much with curiosity that already with a certain weariness, turns up to be a talented and subtle marketing positioning.

May I ask if that kind of trick is not a trap which will limit the power of the one who will be elected at any price ?

Is Barack Obama lazy?

Hillary Clinton used the occasion offered by this waited hearing of general Petraeus to make her point and proove one more time how accomplished, rigourous and hard at work she is.



Barack Obama contented himself with asking several questions to the general, which is, after all, what senators are supposed to do during a hearing, even though they sounded nearly vague.

He may not have taken enough advantage of this opportunity. Did he study this record before?

Hillary Clinton overplays

“Several New Hampshire women, some of them undecided until Tuesday, said in interviews that a galvanizing moment in the race had been Mrs. Clinton’s unusual display of emotion on Monday when her eyes filled with tears and her voice cracked as she described the pressures of the race and her goals for the nation.
“As voters began to see the choice they have and heard Hillary speak from her heart, they came back to her,” said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist." (The New York Times)

Seeing a woman who, unlike his rival John Edwards, whose talent always intuitively tugs the heartstrings, has remained suspicious about affect, brought to use emotions, seeing that it works and that people vote for her because of that, you know that if the woman is elected, she will not be able to exercise the power her voters have entrusted her, because they entrust her with a magical power, a power of entertainment, dream and faith.