Redstate

Heck of a thing when you have to hope that your staff's just incompetent.

By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Kneel Before Zod | Obamafiles | The Best Democratic Primary EVER — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

You have to wonder whether these are rhetorical questions coming from Daniel Henninger:

This week we learned the limit of a dream in American politics. At Barack Obama's darkest hour, not one prominent ally came forward to support him. Everyone abandoned Everyman.

No prominent black clergyman came forth to make even the simple point that Jeremiah Wright's notion of the "black church" is but one point on a spectrum of faith. Rev. Wright, now written off as a virtual nut case, got more support from black clergymen than did Obama.

Barack Obama was bleeding by Monday and needed cover. Where, when he could have used them, were Obama's oh-so-famous endorsers: Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Oprah, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Jay Rockefeller, John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Roger Wilkins, Eric Holder, Robert Reich, Ted Sorenson, Alice Walker, David Wilhelm, Cornel West, Clifford Alexander, Donald McHenry, Patricia Wald, Newton Minow?

Where were all the big-city mayors who went over to the Obama camp: Chicago's Richard Daley, Cleveland's Frank Jackson, Atlanta's Shirley Franklin, Washington's Adrian Fenty, Newark's Cory Booker, Baltimore's Sheila Dixon?

[H/T: The Campaign Spot]

...or, at least, questions that can be answered by perusing the data found here. But then again, possibly not.

Read on.

Jim Geraghty's two links - one to Marc Ambinder, and one to Robert Novak - suggest one possibility. Noting the somewhat different accounts (Ambinder gives Tuesday morning as being the point where Obama was really apprised of the Wright meltdown; Novak suggests that damage control started on Monday), Geraghty states:

If Ambinder's account is accurate, Obama's staff failed him. Wright's press conference was completed about 10 a.m. eastern on Monday morning. Nothing Obama was going to do on Monday (and arguably this week), short of rushing into a burning building to rescue trapped orphans and puppies, was going to be bigger news than his reaction to Wright's appearance. (It's not like Obama's staff can claim ignorance; Wright's appearance had been carried live by all of the cable networks!) At the very least, somebody on Obama's staff needed to get a transcript in the candidate's hand as soon as possible on Monday.

And that, in fact, may be the answer to the larger question. While Henninger is correct to state that "Even at the crudest level of political calculation and cowardice, there's a point in a presidential race when a candidate's supporters are all in", it's not surprising that those supporters may be a touch reluctant to simply barge in. It's even arguably legitimate; a situation like this can easily be made worse by the over-enthusiastic "help" of a supporter with no message discipline - which, come to think of it, describes the original problem. Probably best to let the campaign itself tell you what help it needs.

Note: "campaign," not "candidate." This isn't an attack: if a candidate could run for office successfully without a staff, no candidate would use one. They can't, so they do, and thus it is the responsibility of the staff to do all the things that the candidate would do, if only he or she had the situational awareness or the time to do them. What this all leads up to is that while you can repair the damage done by crises like these (you can repair the damage caused by almost anything), you will need good coordination, and that means good staff work. And if the staff is not up to handling an emergency situation, it is entirely possible that it is also not up to handling even the most obvious forms of damage control*. Put another way: possibly nobody thought to actually circle the wagons.

If true, this is actually good news for the Obama campaign: it means that he merely has to fire his staff, instead of his Democratic Establishment supporters. Trying to do the latter rarely ends well.

Moe Lane

*This assumes, of course, that the staff is even aware of those forms. The Obama campaign seems to attract the type of political operative who opposes the current ways of doing politics; whether or not they have realized that there may be good, pragmatic reasons for those ways is undetermined, although I have my suspicions. There are going to be a lot of books written about the 2008 election.