Obama Has No Need For Blogs?

by Steve Soto

Why is John McCain's campaign spending more time reaching out to liberal blogs than the Obama campaign, which is doing no outreach at all? This, coupled with the Obama campaign's recent moves to strangle the funding of 527s and other progressive support organizations makes me wonder exactly what lessons David Axelrod and Barack Obama learned from the Kerry effort of 2004.

I can appreciate message discipline as much if not more so than most other people. But I can't understand why the campaign doesn't value a Tier One/Tier Two effort to allow surrogates to do the dirty work pinning McCain up against a wall while Obama stays above it. Nor can I understand why the campaign hasn't been more directly involved with the center-left blogosphere. Despite the cheerleading from Daily Kos, AmericaBlog, and Talking Points Memo for the Obama campaign, I've not seen a coordinated effort to use the blogs at all so far from the campaign, unlike the Kerry team in 2004. Perhaps the reason for this is what some bloggers have found out from interviewing Obama directly: he thinks Democrats should avoid being too partisan, and stop being worried about framing and messaging.

I wish I was making that up. To his credit, Senator Obama wants to communicate with facts and to have a "conversation" with the American people, and doesn't want to replicate GOP successes with political communication and framing. To that end, he perhaps sees blogs as instruments of partisanship and messaging he has no use for. But to assume that you can get past this Fox News society without a concern for framing and getting their attention is a large gamble, as is assuming that blogs cannot be a help in a street fight against McCain and the media that loves him.

Sure, I don't expect to get emails from them, given my early support for Hillary, but from monitoring blog communities, I saw far more outreach from the Clinton campaign this cycle than I've seen from Obama. Some shrewd bloggers have privately observed that Obama only reaches out to entities that can deliver votes he cannot get on his own, and prefers to keep a top-down controlled effort in place at all times. This is something he and Axelrod learned from Rove and Bush, but Rove also ran the Tier One/Tier Two effort against both Gore and Kerry to perfection and allowed a degree of separation between the campaign and the negative messaging to pin opponents up against a wall while professing no direct control over those efforts. Some of these astute bloggers also say that Obama isn't worried about the blogs now and will reconcile with them later if he needs to once in office.

Frankly, I'm becoming more worried about things way before that ever happens. Specifically, what happens inside the party if the blogs are marginalized just when we were helping it and the congressional committees achieve institutional advantages over the GOP? Even worse, what happens if Obama shuns the blogosphere to maintain total control, with the acquiescence of the party and congressional campaign committees, and then loses the general election?