Obama as Road Runner versus Wile E. Coyote: article from back in October (hint: he won)

For all of you who are massively worried about President Obama's supposed naivete with reaching across the aisle to the Repubs, this article by Andrew Sullivan is worth considering. Written during the final stages of the presidential campaign, it turned out to be an acute observation of Obama's style, and prophetic of the outcome. Reminder: This is the SAME MAN who is now dealing with the Repubs in Congress.

Recommended reading.

Hekate

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article4925049.ece

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<snip>
Obama? He lollops along with a calm smile and a physical fluency that is hard to mock or copy. If he were a boxer, he’d be the kind who keeps moving but hangs back. He waits for his opponents to take a swing, ducks and comes back into the game. He sticks to a game plan and rarely deviates. And he waits for his opponent to make an error. Watching his autumn fight with McCain reminds me of the Wile E Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Every elaborate attempt to blow Obama up leaves his opponents with sooty faces and a trail of smoke rising from the tops of their heads.

Remember the Clintons? They assumed this young liberal black man from Chicago was unelectable. They assembled their massive armoury, cashed in their chits and awaited the victory parade. Obama quietly but ruthlessly followed a stealth caucus and primary campaign that brilliantly leveraged Hillary’s inevitability against her. He made the first potential woman president look like the past. By the beginning of March, she was toast, although it took her a few more months to come to terms with it.

McCain never seemed to learn from the Clintons’ misjudgment of their rival. A key element of Obama’s strategy is classic rope-a-dope. He gets his opponents to splutter with irritation as “that one”, as McCain contemptuously described Obama in last Tuesday’s debate, glides towards them in the polls. He does his thing, raises masses of money, keeps his staff in perfect order and focuses on issues and themes. He can segue from the inspirational agent of change of the spring to the reassuringconventional pol of the autumn without anyone really noticing the seams. That takes political skill. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.

Obama rarely directly attacks. He subtly baits. His most brilliant rope-a-dope of the entire campaign was against Bill Clinton in the spring. In a newspaper interview, Obama cited Ronald Reagan as the last transformational president. He didn’t mention Clinton. The former president was offended by being implicitly dissed, took the bait and unleashed a series of unwise public scoffs at the young Democrat, culminating in a dismissal of Obama as another Jesse Jackson. Suddenly, black Democrats abandoned Clinton’s wife, and the Clintons’ base collapsed. Obama merely stepped out of the way as the Clintons self-destructed. He didn’t just end their campaign; he helped to bury their reputation.
<snip>
Obama has not been a saint. He resurrected the long-buried Keating Five scandal that tainted McCain in the 1980s. He has used language that resonates with the notion that McCain is senile: “erratic”, “uncertain”. He has played a little class warfare. But nothing too dramatic, nothing too angry, nothing too risky. The polling around the country is now more emphatically Democratic than ever before. Obama is now ahead in every battleground state and, by most estimates, could lose all the currently close states and still win the election.

And still he’s calm. Not too cocky. A little aloof, but very professional. He learnt all of this as a black man in a white country: no sudden moves; no anger. That’s how he managed his white mother in adolescence. That’s how he manages a white electorate increasingly at ease with him. And, by a massive stroke of luck, that’s what voters want now. In an economy that is melting down, with two wars still raging, they want calm above everything else. They want to know that the man in charge will not panic, will not be flustered, will not blow up.
<snip>
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Love the image of RWers with smoke rising from the top of their heads - or perhaps only the smoking boots being left.

I think Obama is a whole lot smarter and a whole lot more devious than we give him credit for. His comment about Limbaugh was no accident, and it has the Repubs in a tizzy: if they deny Limbaugh's influence, that undercuts the racist portion of their base; if they acknowledge Limbaugh's influence, they highlight the racist portion of their base.

Lovely.

Hekate

:applause:

:hi: