Obama’s selective willingness to ‘fight back’
Slate’s John Dickerson had an interesting item last night that seemed to summarize the conventional wisdom on intra-party criticism pretty well.
The Clinton team is setting the same trap for Obama my 4-year-old sets for her older brother. She hits him knowing that he’ll get in trouble for hitting back. Right on cue, Clinton’s senior aide Ann Lewis set it up. “I didn’t realize their version of new politics was to recycle old Republican tactics,” she said. If voters put both campaigns in the corner for a timeout, it may hurt Obama more because his claim to be a new kind of above-the-fray candidate means he’s held to a higher standard. If Obama pays no penalty for the fracas, the Clinton folks still take him for a roll in the dirt where he can’t offer his appealing message of hope, change, inspiration, and hope. Clinton, by contrast, reinforces her fighter image.
This is not a new dilemma for Obama. We’ve been talking [about] it for a year. What’s new is that he is under more pressure than ever to punch back. It’s not just that he can’t let Clinton’s attacks hang in the air. He has to show Democrats that he’s a fighter, too…. If he’s going to be the nominee, he’s going to face a lot worse from Republicans — and the barrage will be constant if he’s president.
This is pretty much what everyone knows to be true — Clinton engaged Obama, Obama tried to stay above the fray, Clinton prevailed. Obama therefore is expected to pull off a tricky move — go negative on Clinton while a) enduring Clinton’s mockery about “abandoning the politics of hope”; and b) sticking to the positive message that has gotten him to this point.
But when I read Dickerson’s item last night, I paused on a couple of points that didn’t seem quite right. Obama, for example, “has to show Democrats that he’s a fighter.” That’s true, but I couldn’t help but notice that when Republicans started treating him as the likely nominee, and McCain and Bush started taking a few shots, Obama fought back quickly and quite effectively. (The dust up over al Qaeda in Iraq last week comes to mind.) There didn’t seem to be any hesitation at all.
With this in mind, the problem isn’t necessarily that Obama is reluctant to get aggressive, it’s that he’s reluctant to get aggressive with his Democratic rival.
To be sure, Obama hasn’t exactly been playing bean-bag with Clinton, but I think it’s fair to say that Obama, especially since Super Tuesday, has been restrained in going after his Democratic rival. He had the luxury of doing so — he was winning and had less of an incentive to launch attacks. Clinton needed to catch up, so she became rather relentless. No big mystery here.
On this point, Dickerson argued that Obama has to be able to endure Clinton’s “kitchen-sink strategy,” because it’s only going to get worse. Republicans won’t hold back in the fall, and their unhinged attacks will be more belligerent than anything he’s seen from Clinton. Clinton’s attacks, the theory goes, are a test of sorts — either they’ll “toughen him up” or he’ll fail before it’s too late. If he can’t take it in March, October will be a nightmare.
But just how similar are the circumstances? Jonathan Chait makes a compelling case.
[H]er attacks on Obama are not a fair proxy for what he’d endure in the general election, because attacks are harder to refute when they come from within one’s own party. Indeed, Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is: He’s inexperienced, lacking in substance, unequipped to handle foreign policy. As The Washington Monthly’s Christina Larson has pointed out, in recent weeks the nightly newscasts have consisted of Clinton attacking Obama, McCain attacking Obama, and then Obama trying to defend himself and still get out his own message. If Obama’s the nominee, he won’t have a high-profile Democrat validating McCain’s message every day.
Second, Obama can’t “test” Clinton the way she can test him. While she likes to claim that she beat the Republican attack machine, it’s more accurate to say that she survived with heavy damage. Clinton is a wildly polarizing figure, with disapproval ratings at or near 50 percent. But, because she earned the intense loyalty of core Democratic partisans, Obama has to tread gingerly around her vulnerabilities. There is a big bundle of ethical issues from the 1990s that Obama has not raised because he can’t associate himself with what partisan Democrats (but not Republicans or swing voters) regard as a pure GOP witch hunt.
There’s no reason to think that dynamic will be at all similar in the fall. Obama’s willingness to be confrontational with Republicans seems quite healthy, and I haven’t seen any serious suggestion he’d play patty-cakes with McCain while the Republican Smear Machine is punching him in the mouth. Indeed, the dynamic may very well prove to be the opposite — the GOP will go after Clinton on issues Obama is afraid to touch, meaning she’d have to endure attacks for the first time.
Maybe Obama will effectively engage Clinton in the coming weeks, maybe not. Time will tell. But either way, looking at this as a proxy for what might happen to Obama in the fall seems like a mistake.
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