Welcome Message | Contact OKR

Saturday, October 4, 2008

guess who's getting desp-er-ate?

Wow: Palin says Obama friendly with terrorists.

Just smirk as you watch the McCain/Palin campaign try to get out of a hole by deciding to dig faster.  This over-the-top approach to character assassination will surely backfire with the 10% undecideds.   This is what happens when the "
B team" gets desperate. 
Obama has established a deep lead and it's going to take much more savvy and clever attacks to turn the tides.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

McCain's Hail Mary Pass

McCain's Palin Pick has been widely seen as a gutsy, risky and effective (to date) decision to jump-start his campaign and give him a shot to win. I am not the only one who uses the "hail mary" pass (in football) analogy, but I do want to offer a unique extension to this analogy for insiders:

The "hail mary" pass that is the Sarah Palin pick for VP is merely in mid-flight. The coach (Rove & the Republican Machine) made the call that the team was not going to win playing conservatively, so he instructed the quarterback (McCain) to throw the long pass with the hopes of a huge upset.

As with any hail mary pass in football, it is quite exciting to watch no matter which side you're on. It's gripping, it's gutsy, and by golly it's what being alive is all about. But, it comes with quite a low chance of success. And all indicators are pointing to the fact that, in this analogy, Team Obama has plenty of defensive men down field to scuttle the lone Team McCain receiver.

The point of all this? We can use the hail mary pass as a universally accepted analogy, but when we talk about it, we should be advancing the notion that they are usually unsuccessful, and that the pass is still in mid-air. We don't yet know how the decision will play out in the end, but it's looking grim when you see just how desperate Team McCain was to pin all of their hopes and dreams for a win on a rookie, cocky, untested wide receiver.

Obama is a conservative in all the right ways

In this editorial, written by the former publisher of the conservative National Review, Wick Allison advocates that Obama is a conservative in all the ways that are important to America right now.

And I agree. But the problem with this meme is that our population is programmed to think two-dimensionally about politics -- left vs. right. And all the issues seem to pile up on one side or the other. Sometimes with no real cohesive rationale beyond that of raw political power management.

Meanwhile, Obama is actually advocating this idea of change. And, big surprise, the vast majority presume it's a change from right to left. Don't tell your liberal friends, but that's really not the kind of change Obama is peddling. It just sounds that way. Obama is actually advocating a change from the left/right axis to the managerial/ideological axis.

The truth is, George W. Bush has been a radical liberal in just about every sense of the term. Liberally advocating Utopian ideology overseas (and spending our money liberally in this pursuit) and liberating the markets domestically to do whatever it is they would like to do with the Utopian trust in the markets to serve society as they should in the traditional conservative ideology. In a nutshell, Bush is an ideologue, and has been liberally executing on his ideology.

Obama, in contrast, will most likely disappoint many of his current liberal fans. Despite the descriptions cast upon him (by both liberals and conservatives), Obama is the ultimate pragmatist. He's the negotiator-in-chief. He's the calm hand on the wheel. All conservative approaches. Obama is a profile of conservatism in personality. Sure, he believes in progressive causes, but that doesn't much matter. What matters more is how he goes about implementation.

Contrary to our entertainment-disguised-as-issues culture, we don't need drama in order to have meaning. With Bush for the past 8 years (and, lets' face it, Clinton for the prior 8), it seems as though the nation believes that only through hair-raising drama does anything get accomplished in Washington.

Things are about to change for America once Obama becomes President. The White House will be boring and effective. It will have meetings with smart people who know how to solve problems. And with competence comes little drama. With competence and intelligence, there is no need to "massive bail outs" and "strategic re-framing press conferences" in order to prove to America things are getting done when they actually aren't. A bail-out is huge news that someone is going to want a metal of honor for, but the bail-out itself is a sign of failure. A "surge" to save a war is not something to be proud of, John McCain. A "surge" is a last-ditch effort to save a project that has been a collosal failure.

So there are two realities that the insiders need to know:

1. The general public is wired to think two-dimensionally about politics, and Obama's campaign understands that he needs to fit into this schema in order to win.
2. The Obama campaign is running a fascinating play -- running on 'change' as they define it (administrative vs. ideological) while at the same time mapping it to the conventional notion of what change means to the general, 2-dimensional public view of left. v. right.

This means that the change we need that Obama is peddling will not be the change we expect.

And, I, for one, am quite pleased about this. Apparently, the wise conservatives also get this.

This is why Obama will win in November. McCain's philosophical support within his own party's infrastructure is crumbling. I know it's hard to correlate votes on the ground with a party's Illuminati, but there is a connection. It might be only psychic, but those who ignore the psychic impact of the ideasphere do so at their own risk.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Inside OKR: Blogging "Our Karl Rove's" Brain

Hi all -

Our Karl Rove is where I regularly gather my thoughts, organize and frame them, and ensure they are compelling, relevant and reasonably pungent. Good readership combined with favorable peer reviews has powered and sustained this "blog" for years.

However, Our Karl Rove (OKR) barely qualifies as a blog. Over time, it has evolved into a series of succinct position papers, or, in Countdown with Keith Olbermann parlance, a place for my Special Comments. This means that only the most developed concepts appear on OKR -- at the expense of regularity.

A Blog for a Blog? Well, sort of.
As I observed Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall post as little as a sentence (and as much as a few paragraphs) many times a day with a top-of-mind opinion or comment, I realized that I was missing out on actually having a real blog for OKR -- I was missing a place to more easily share as-it-happens, stream-of-consciousness and timely ideas for discussion.

This is why I'm launching Inside OKR -- The inside track into how OKR looks at our continually changing world, and engaging visitors in a dialog around these topics.

I can't promise daily posts, but sometimes there will be multiple posts in a day. I can't promise cunning, but I'll aim to be interesting. I can't promise impeccable grammar or spelling (I will not be editing these posts), but I can promise readability. Most importantly, posts to Inside OKR will hopefully be catalysts for discussion with the politically-connected and active OKR readership to flesh out the most compelling, strategic and effective political ideas.

Note: Now that OKR seems to be an accepted on-line acronym, I feel I can safely abbreviate Our Karl Rove as OKR as a step in the brand evolution process (kind of like how Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC).

Welcome to the blogging of OKR's brain. It's time to redefine how the Democratic party, philosophy and candidates are viewed by the American people. And that means re-thinking things that haven't been rethought for far too long.