Not Good, Senator

by Steve Soto

It is one thing to lose an uncontested race by 20 points or so. It’s another matter entirely when you lose the same race by over 40 points, after the media has anointed you the presumptive nominee. Team Obama can spin this any way they want, but to suggest that being obliterated by that large of a margin as the presumptive nominee means little is a little disingenuous.

I am also troubled this morning by the news that Team Obama wants to control all the Democratic money this campaign cycle themselves. The campaign has apparently put the word out that Obama doesn’t want his supporters to contribute to the pro-Democratic independent committees that make up the emerging part of a counter-GOP infrastructure. The campaign may be arguing that it wants to ensure a unified message consistent with Obama’s own, and therefore doesn’t want any independent players doing a Tier Two negative campaign against McCain, especially if former Clinton people head those groups. However, a successful Democratic candidate at the national level needs a Tier One/Tier Two effort to win, whereby the candidate stays on the high road pitching voters a positive message himself while Tier Two organizations pin the GOP opponent up against the wall and keep them on the defensive through surrogates that have some distance from the campaign. This is the way successful GOP campaigns have operated against Democrats for years, and Democrats had reached the point of parity with the GOP over the last several years, with better funding. It was supposed to be an essential part of the pushback effort against McCain this year, and Obama just pulled the rug out from under it, because he apparently wants to control the whole message, whatever that will be. I guess I wasn’t aware that the whole party was being taken over by the Obama movement.

Regardless of what you may think about Hillary Clinton's campaign, no one can now doubt that she would have thrown the kitchen sink at McCain using every club in the arsenal during the fall campaign. If Obama thinks that controlling everything himself through a single message from one point of attack is what the primary voters endorsed when he won all these contests, then Democrats have a right to know now what exactly that message will be this fall, and how tough and ruthless his campaign will be in carrying it out. I don't want to find out in September after Obama's defunded the progressive infrastructure through unilateral disarmament that he feels it is beneath him to go toe-to-toe with McCain and fight fire with fire.