At the end of last month, a controversy was created around some comments by Gen. Wesley Clark concerning whether or not John McCain’s military experiences were, in and of themselves, qualifications for the office of the presidency. Clark’s words were, of course, plainly factual, as his main point was that John McCain has had no executive responsibility in matters of defense or national security, and that, therefore, McCain’s campaigning on his military experience reveals a weak argument for his candidacy. These are things Clark had said numerous times before, but the firestorm came when he asserted that “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” also does not qualify one to be president. Again, this statement itself is indisputable.
But let’s leave aside the absurdity of the media reaction to these comments. Indeed, this happened nearly two weeks ago, an eternity in the election cycle, and it is now simply old news. However, it is interesting to look at the initial statement from the Barack Obama campaign regarding Clark’s words and the subsequent reaction from Obama’s supporters to that statement.
First, Obama. Shortly after this blew up, his campaign released this statement:
“As he’s said many times before, Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”
Additionally, Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, went on MSNBC to make clear that Obama’s campaign disagreed with Gen. Clark’s comments (although it’s uncertain what, exactly, they disagreed with). So this was unquestionably the stance they decided to take initially, despite the fact that the next day Obama more or less refused to denounce what Clark had said.
There was a decent bit of outrage in the blogosphere about the Obama campaign’s first words on this, although the two main theories of why Obama sent out this statement seemed to be these:
1) This was just part of Obama’s move to the “center.”
Disregarding my own attitude that the “center” is a mythical construct (I’ll get to that another time), this appeared to be the most popular explanation for why Obama’s campaign made this statement, and also an explanation that seems flimsy to me. Obama’s “moving to the center” has been a popular theme over the past couple of weeks, but the facts don’t exactly bear this out. He’s shifted positions on only one issue, the FISA amendment bill (his vote on which I consider to be his only massive failure so far as a politician), and simply expressed his long-held moderate-to-conservative positions on a number of other issues– namely, the death penalty and gun control. Much of this “move to the center” turned out to be little more than progressive Obama supporters not being informed about what their candidate actually believes on particular issues and, I suppose, assuming that he agreed entirely with them on everything. This was simply foolish.
It’s also not exactly clear how Obama rejecting Clark’s comments is evidence of any kind of shift on positions at all. It does not seem to be any more or less progressive, or any more or less conservative, to take this stance, so that part of the argument doesn’t quite follow. It did seem that some were concerned that Obama was ceding ground on military issues and that this might make him appear weak, but it’s not entirely apparent that either of these things was true. At any rate, expressing moderate positions does not, by itself, equate to “appearing weak,” so whether or not he did, in fact, appear weak by positioning himself in this way would seem to be irrelevant when considering whether he was “moving to the center.”
2) This was all part of Obama’s master plan.
I really didn’t buy this at first, although I admit it became a bit more attractive after Obama danced around the issue the following day instead of simply denouncing and rejecting Gen. Clark outright. The idea is this: Obama and his campaign wanted to get this point out there, but it would be ugly and damaging for Obama himself to come out and say it, so they sent Clark, one of Obama’s “surrogates” to float this idea to the media to get people talking about it, and then in the event there was an overly negative reaction, Obama could distance himself from Clark and the comments while still getting people to talk about it. You can’t unring a bell.
It is a fact that surrogates are used in much this way during campaigns, so this notion is not unfounded, but some attribute an omnipresence to political candidates that just doesn’t exist. I just don’t believe that it is always the case that the campaign has complete control over all of its supporters and what they say. Sometimes, it really is just a guy saying things on a talk show all on his own.
3) Obama actually does want to be omnipresent.
This third explanation is my own, and one I was surprised not to see anywhere else. Simply put: Obama’s campaign distanced itself from Gen. Clark’s comments because, whether or not Obama agreed with them and regardless of how they were received, they were not part of Obama’s overarching plan. Clark really did go out on his own and say these things, and they deviated too far from Obama’s strict message discipline. It wasn’t that they were politically “dangerous,” necessarily, or that Obama was afraid of bad press– they just weren’t part of the plan. Barack Obama has already demonstrated that he wants complete control over anything and everything surrounding his campaign, so it can’t be surprising that this would be another instance of the same.
This message discipline exhibited by Obama has been unrivaled during this campaign season and has been one of the most important differences between winning and losing both the media wars and recent elections. Soon, I’ll look at both Obama’s impressive ability to keep his campaign on message and how it relates to the Clark controversy, the election of this year, and the political narrative of recent history.
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