Opinion

A plan for Barack Obama

It's been a rough week for Sen. Barack Obama, and an even rougher week for his supporters. He took his eye off the ball for a minute to attack Sen. John McCain - and Sen. Hillary Clinton pounced, throwing the kitchen sink at him. Meanwhile, the thin-skinned media, falling prey to her campaign's whining about how much "tougher" they've been on her than on him, allowed her to set the tone for the entire news cycle during the last week before the elections in Ohio and Texas. (You can fill my in-box all you want, Clinton fans, but the media has been sweeter to Clinton than you know. There's been scant mention of Monica, Whitewater, Marc Rich, cattle futures ... oh, did I just say all that?)

Those of us who admire the senator, meanwhile, are feeling wrung out and exhausted. Obama's got to bounce back. I think that he will - but he'll have to do it smartly, because for him, the race has entered its most precarious phase. If he attacks the Clintons using gutter politics, he'll lose - those are the tactics that they excel at, and he can't beat them at their own game. More importantly, he risks losing his message and his base by stooping to their level. Here's my advice for him and his supporters.

-- Ignore John McCain for now. The split results in Ohio and Texas offered Obama one advantage - it confused his eventual opponent, John McCain. McCain had started to attack Obama, but now he's got to sit tight and watch how this plays out. Putting the Republican nominee on the sidelines right now probably isn't the best thing for the Democrats in the fall - the Republican National Committee has taken advantage of the calm to outraise the Democratic National Committee by tens of millions of dollars so far - but we'll have to deal with that later. For now, Obama can - and must - focus on the battle in front of him. If he wants to mention how much stronger a president he'll be than McCain, that's cool, but only after he's reminded voters how much stronger he'll be than Clinton.

-- Be an iron fist in a velvet glove. There's no need to be impolite to Clinton. Unlike some observers, I don't think it was weak at all for him to accept Samantha Power's resignation after she called Clinton a "monster." It showed that Obama keeps his staff on a tight leash - unlike Clinton - and emphasizes positivity in every aspect of his campaign.

Besides, after the Clinton campaign has impugned Obama's patriotism, tossed out racial and religious smears, and said that John McCain would make a better president than Obama would, they're expecting Obama to go ballistic. Kill the Clintons with kindness - and, since Hillary Clinton is running on the false pretense that she was also president during Bill's years in the White House, offer calm reminders of how there were a lot of things about the 1990s that weren't so great after all.

Remember losing control of Congress in the 1990s, Democrats? Remember losing Democratic control of governorships across the country? Remember all the useless psychodramas, remember losing all chance to further any kind of political agenda for the last two years of Bill Clinton's last term because of his personal problems? Say it like that, and the voters will remember. Even if they don't want to.

-- Let your surrogates be nastier than you are - up to a point. Really, there's so much to be nasty about with this couple that it's important to remind voters only of the issues that are germane to the race. Obama should have a couple of his supporters who worked in the Clinton White House remind people that Hillary Clinton has no experience with foreign-policy crises, no experience with economic policy, and that her one experience with health care was a disaster from start to finish. Pound Clinton on the "experience" meme, and it will quickly become apparent how thin her resume really is.

-- Get on the bus. Town hall meetings in endless succession. Photo ops with his sleeves rolled up while in conference with working-class voters about their fears and wishes. Walk door-to-door talking to people about their health care and explain to them why he's the best person to actually get it done. You get the picture: Obama's got to show the skittish undecideds that he works as hard as Clinton does.

Now, for the rest of us, his supporters:

-- Chill out. I went in to see my acupuncturist a few days ago, and he asked why I was so stressed. "I won't vote for Hillary!" I yelled. "I won't!"

He looked at me impassively for a moment, then said, "I won't either. Half the country won't. But, umm, it's a long time till November, and how often do you want to be on this table?"