The Lone Ranger

Obama's 50-State Strategy Is a Gamble

While Obama's team can barely conceal its optimism, the Republicans are already conducting a post-mortem on the McCain campaign. SPIEGEL ONLINE blogger Peter Ross Range points out that the Democrats' strategy still entails risks and warns that a brilliant campaign can turn into a failed presidency.

Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle during a rally Tuesday.

Thirteen days from Election Day, we are at a weird moment in the arc of the campaign. Diehard Democrats and Obama supporters like me are suspended between hope, thrill, fear -- and resignation. Our young hero could win it all -- not just the election, but an absolute landslide. Or he could still lose it all by squandering too much time and money on states that he doesn’t really need to clinch victory with 270 electoral votes.

If, in fact, Obama can pull off a 300-plus victory, he will be the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to take office with a major mandate. It would make his victory, in the words of Gen. Colin Powell, truly “transformational.” But the undertaking carries high risks. Running a 50-state strategy -- instead of one tailored to the winnable states -- is a high-risk gamble, unnecessarily show-offy.

And yet Democrats are full of barely concealable optimism. They can't help speaking in the future tense -- about how Obama must dive into the world economic crisis immediately after the election without waiting for his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009. Or, in the unfortunate words of Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, Joe Biden, about how he will be tested in the first six months of his presidency by an international crisis “just like John Kennedy.”

Some Democrats even warn against the potential overreach of a government that could be totally dominated by Democrats if Obama wins the White House, especially if Democrats achieve the breathtaking level of 60 seats in the US Senate, and pick up as many as 25 or 30 seats in the US House of Representatives. No American party is used to those kinds of margins, and it makes some voters uneasy. Naturally, Republicans are using the prospect of such dominance to thunder against all Democratic candidates. “ Washington will host one of the most liberal governments in American history,” warns the right-leaning Weekly Standard magazine. Conservatives warn of the “OPR government” -- Obama as president, left-leaning liberal Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, liberal Sen. Harry Reid as Majority Leader of the Senate.

The flip side of the guarded optimism in Obama-land is the doom and gloom in the McCain camp. Conservative commentators already speak of McCain’s campaign in the past tense, listing all its tactical and strategic errors. Worst among them, by almost all accounts, was McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as VP candidate. Though she electrified the flagging McCain brand for a week or two, she’s now become a major drag on the ticket.

Every day, it seems, Palin adds to her bad report card. On Monday, it was reported that she had used Alaskan government money to pay for her children’s travel. On Tuesday, following a barrage of criticism, she had to apologize for referring to some parts of the US as “anti-American.” On Wednesday we learned that the Republican Party has spent $150,000 on clothes and cosmetics for Palin and her family since she joined the campaign. What next?

And though the comely Alaska governor appeared to have been plucked out of nowhere, it turns out -- according to a detailed new article in The New Yorker -- that Palin had national ambitions more than a year ago. She invited conservative journalists from Washington to lunch at the governor’s mansion in Juneau, effectively launching herself into the vice-presidential pool.

I can see Sarah’s star falling right in my own neighborhood in suburban Washington D.C. A month ago, when Palin was flying high, a Republican on the corner put out several yard signs of support for the Republican ticket -- a uniquely American way of engaging in politics. But this person went farther than most: His yard included a huge, two-meter-by-one-meter cloth banner facing the traffic. On it was written, in giant letters, “Sarah.” Beneath it, in much smaller letters, “McCain/Palin.”

A few days ago, that sign disappeared.

I’ll admit that I, too, have been getting ahead of the game. I’ve begun thinking about the potential and the perils of an Obama administration. The first thing I worry about is a repeat of the failures of President Jimmy Carter. Like Obama, Carter came (in 1976) out of left field -- nobody thought a one-time Southern governor could beat the entire Democratic field as well as a sitting Republican president (Gerald Ford). But since he did, the Georgia peanut farmer and his young staff arrived in Washington with a major chip on their shoulders. They thought the political miracle they had wrought proved they could walk on water in Washington, too. This hubris soured their relations with the Congress and the political establishment in Washington from the outset.

Obama, of course, is a much more establishmentarian figure. He is already a US Senator. He likes belonging to an establishment. But he has to be careful to control his political staff if and when they move into their offices in the West Wing and the Democratic National Committee. A brilliantly successful election can still become a failed presidency. It happened to Lyndon Johnson (the Vietnam war), Richard Nixon (Watergate), and Jimmy Carter (the Iran hostages, Afghanistan invasion, double-digit inflation).

When they get to the center of power, the power-brokers from Chicago must remember one thing: Be nice. You may have run as a Washington “outsider,” but you can't govern without the Washington insiders on your side.