Pat Dollard

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The Swamp:

by Jim Tankersley

Has Barack Obama become his own campaign message? And if so, is he undermining his campaign?

That’s the possibility raised by a pair of thought-provoking commentators today, who both, in different ways, question whether the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is running a dangerously image-based campaign.

“I know that Barack Obama is a near-perfect political package,” columnist Richard Cohen writes in his piece “Obama The Unkonwn” in the Washington Post. “I’m still not sure, though, what’s in it.” Jay Cost, a data-whiz blogger at Real Clear Politics, argues in a detailed analysis of campaign messaging that “Obama’s organization is built around a politically risky meta-narrative… (which) often seems to be: this great man will unify a divided America around himself.”

Cohen’s main point is this: He can name major accomplishments of Obama’s presumptive opponent, Republican John McCain. He can’t do the same for Obama – and he believes many Democrats can’t, either. (He explicitly discounts Obama’s early Iraq war opposition as an accomplishment.)

He goes on to warn against underestimating Obama, with reminders that similar criticisms were once leveled at presidential candidates Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. “My guess is that Obama will make a fool of anyone who issues such a judgment about him,” he writes. “Still, the record now, while tissue thin, is troubling. The next president will have to be something of a political Superman, a man of steel who can tell the American people that they will have to pay more for less — higher taxes, lower benefits of all kinds — and deal in an ugly way when nuclear weapons seize the imagination of madmen.”

Cost takes a different approach, arguing that Obama’s elevation of his image to the center of his campaign – and the borderline angelic imagery on his Web site – undermines the economic message that should be the Democrat’s slam-dunk pitch to voters.