Obama’s 21st century campaign stuck in a mid-20th century program
By: Michael Barone
Special to The Examiner
March 18, 2009
One set of the numbers that I keep coming back to in the 2008 exit poll: Voters under 30 voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 66 to 32 percent. Voters 30 and over, in contrast, favored Obama by just 50 to 49 percent. Never since the onset of exit polling has there been such a difference between the young and the rest of us.
Since Republicans obviously can’t raise the voting age to 35, they need a strategy going forward to win over a generation of voters who will be a larger share of the electorate as time goes on. I think that strategy can be found by exploiting what I believe is a tension between the Obama campaign’s operations and the Obama administration’s policies, between a 21st century campaign that not only allowed but encouraged interaction and individual initiative, and a mid-20th century program that aims toward standardization and centralized command and control.
There is widespread agreement that the Obama campaign used 21st century technology and tapped into a 21st century sensibility better than any other campaign — far better than Hillary Clinton’s campaign, far better than anything the floundering Republicans were able to come up with. The Obama campaign used the Internet to raise vast sums of money and to allow Obama supporters to interconnect with one another, to create MyObama pages, and to enable like-minded people to work together for common purposes, with light and metric-minded supervision from the Obama headquarters. It was a very nimble 21st century organization.
Sometimes things got out of hand, as when an Obama office in Houston put a photo of Che Guevara on the wall. As soon as that appeared on the Web, I imagine that someone from Austin or Chicago got on the phone or sent an e-mail and explained, gingerly, that actually Che, even if he was almost as handsome as Obama, was a bloody murderer who helped set up a ruthless dictatorship that persecuted poets and homosexuals — and that it would be a good thing to get the poster off the wall, pronto. But overall the creativity unleashed and stimulated by the campaign’s 21st century operations produced results that more than compensated for an occasional embarrassment.
Contrast that 21st century campaign with the mid-20th century program unveiled in the Obama budget.
Rather than give you choices in health care, Obama wants to slam you into a national health insurance program, one that, as the intended health czar Tom Daschle explained in his book, would save money by denying care. That would take us some distance toward the British system, under which, if you want a hip replacement at age 57, well, you’re just too old. Or toward the old Soviet system, which saved money by placing its cardiac clinics in a fifth-floor walkup.
Rather than give you choices in your workplace, or allow the joint management-worker cooperative system that has enabled foreign auto companies to achieve better quality and productivity than the unionized domestic automakers, Obama wants to slam you into unions whenever organizers can muscle 50 percent of workers into signing cards and then, when employers resist union demands, let federal arbitrators set wages and working conditions that you’ll have to live under whether you like it or not.
Rather than let you accumulate money for investments or self-improvement, Obama wants to tax high earnings at higher rates, and allow you to channel less of what you have made to charities and nonprofits where you can help determine how it’s spent, and send more of it to government where centralized mandarins can use it as they want.
The Obama program would have been well suited to the mid-20th century America, where people were happy, after the success of World War II, to work as small cogs in giant organizations run by big government, big business and big labor. But it is not well suited to 21st century America, where people, especially young people, are used to making their own choices, setting up their own networks, taking their own initiatives. Republicans should stop channeling Ronald Reagan — a remote figure to the young — and start offering young Americans policies that are in line with our times.
