What should keep the McCain campaign up at night is not Obama’s financial advantage or even his poll lead but his ability to command the news agenda almost at will. Two events in recent days have underlined what a potent tool this is going to be for Obama between now and November.
First, there is Obama’s coming tour of Europe and the Middle East. McCain has been on a couple of foreign tours and drawn some decent coverage. But now the Obama campaign is thinking about having their candidate deliver a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the same place where Ronald Reagan delivered his justly famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech. The attention that this will receive will be off the charts and Obama will be able to parlay it to his political advantage. In the speech, Obama will probably throw in some warm words about Reagan as well as Kennedy, generating a whole slew of articles about him being ‘a new sort of Democrat’—regardless of the fact that his voting record is that of a fairly conventional Democrat. Columnists will agonise about whether he is the next Kennedy or Reagan. Second, after all these years of Bush being protested, seeing an American president receiving a rock-star reception is going to impress voters especially as Obama will refrain from saying anything that could be seen as winning applause through criticising the US; the sight of Germans waving the Stars and Stripes will reinforce Obama’s message that he can restore America’s lustre in the eyes of the world. Third, Obama will almost certainly call on the Europeans to step up to the plate in Afghanistan. This will allow his advisers to endlessly parrot the soundbite that ‘he went to Europe and told the Europeans they had to do more in Afghanistan and they listened.’
The other example of Obama’s ability to almost dictate the terms of his coverage is his decision to move his acceptance speech at the convention from the 17,000 seater hall to a 70,000 plus stadium. There’s little doubt that Obama will be able to fill the place and the sight is going to be mighty impressive; the Obama campaign will hope that it will set a bar that McCain cannot pass at the Republican convention the next week.
This advantage for Obama isn’t going to go away unless the McCain campaign can successfully bring him down from his pedestal, they have made some strong attacks so far but nothing has really stuck. The advantage this gives Obama is that whenever he has a bad few days of coverage, he can pull off an event—the largest rally of the campaign to date, his first appearance with Bill Clinton, a speech at Faneuil Hall—which he knows will put him back on the front page and plays to his strengths as an orator and a historic figure. This ability to turn the page whenever things get rough for him is one of the reasons that Hillary Clinton could never catch Obama after he got ahead.
PS If you haven’t watched Reagan and Kennedy’s famous Berlin speeches, do go and see a bit of them on YouTube–Reagan’s speech is here and Kennedy’s is at this link. They are examples of oratory at its best.
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