Obama's strength comes in October

I wrote a post on my own blog last night criticizing Obama's latest ad called "Hands," that was made especially for the Olympics. I was getting frustrated because every ad I see finishes with a policy promotion. It's reminding me of what happened in 2000 and 2004 with Gore and Kerry -- the Democratic candidate gets a lead and then plays it safe by campaigning exclusively to minds instead of guts. While I still think Obama's campaign needs to be more aggressive at playing offense, I took a break to look at the big picture this morning.

McCain had most of us debating and thinking at the lowest levels in recent campaign history, as we focused on Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and the purpose of their inclusion in McCain's "Celebrity" ad. The McCain campaign was determined to tie Obama's strength in rhetoric, his charisma, and therefore his "celebrity," to a class-based criticism. They labeled him as elitist and too inexperienced to be president. But when we zoom out of the celebrity debate and look at the state of the campaign today, we can see that we have another month to go before the last stretch and that we have been locked in a media-driven phase -- more to John McCain's advantage -- since early June, when Sen. Obama became the presumptive nominee.

The post I wrote last night argued Obama's strengths using McCain's frame. I unintentionally bowed to the idea that Obama's only strength was his rhetoric. But the truth is that his strength is not merely in his rhetoric -- that's just the only place we're able to see it now. His advantage was planted in the summer of 2007 in Iowa, and it has now bloomed into the grassroots efforts of hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, across the country. Obama has put his experience as a community organizer to use.

A post this morning on Al Giordano's blog, titled "The Movement Comes After Labor Day," helped me remember this. I think Al meant movement in a polling sense, but I took it another way. This fall's harvest will not only refer to the yield of crops, but the fruits of the most extensive presidential campaign in memory. Only after Labor Day can we begin to see the ramifications of this one-of-a-kind grassroots operation.

It's no wonder, then, that this election has seen the pundits offer less-than-stellar political commentary. In past elections we might have a fairly good idea of what might happen come November, due to coalitions that solidified over the last few decades, and major party candidates that looked alike and had generally similar stories. But 2008 is an election unlike any we've ever had in this country. The race and age dynamics are there, in addition to signs that point toward a rearrangement of the political map and a realignment of the electorate. Because political junkies like ourselves have never had this experience, we have even less of a chance of correctly predicting what happens on November 4th. The Gallup poll I wrote about previously, the likely voter screen that only calculated young voters as a 10% share of the entire sample (when they actually formed 16-18% in 2004), is an example of this uncertainty.

What we do know, again, is that Barack Obama has put together an operation that the Democratic Party and the United States has never seen before. And I believe that the size of this movement -- one that encompasses the youth vote -- is what's truly going to determine what happens on Election Day. In the meantime, the Obama campaign still needs to be more aggressive with emotion in their ads, and they need to be on the offensive far more than they have been over the past few weeks. But come October, the ads of this summer will be relics of the past. What will be much more important is the Obama campaign's mobilization. That organization is the true strength of Obama's campaign, and it's a strength we can only evaluate in October and November.