It's over. At long last, it's over. The longest, wildest and most historic presidential election of my short lifetime just concluded yesterday, and my mood mirrors what I imagine is the attitude of the entire country: relief that, one way or the other, we've finally decided this damn thing and can move onto the business of taking this country forward. For many young Americans like myself, who first became politically aware in the chaos of the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle in Florida, the concept of a post-Bush political world is a tough one to comprehend. And even before that, when we were little kids running around our parents' living rooms, there would be the Clintons on our TV screens, the eternal faces of the Democratic Party. It is fair to say that for the vast majority of Tufts students, a Bush or Clinton has inhabited the White House for every moment they've been on this earth.
No longer. Obama's impending presidency will mark the end of 20th-century politics and usher in the first wave of a 21st-century political system. It will be one that embraces technology, courts and mobilizes the young, and confronts problems and issues completely foreign to our parents and grandparents. Clinton, and even Bush (whose presidency was nominally in the 21st century) were the culmination of the post WWII baby boomer generation. Obama is of a different generation, literally and figuratively, and may represent our best chance to move beyond the culture battles of the '60s that every other president has lived through. To grossly oversimplify, Obama will be the first president not to look at an iPod and wonder how it works.
OK, enough with the high-minded stuff and on to the nitty gritty. How did Obama pull this thing off?
There are a thousand and one reasons why Obama, not McCain, won the presidency last night. But they all boil down to two things: message and machine. I guarantee you that every factor the pundits mention in the weeks to come will fall under the broad heading of those two themes.
The Obama message, like all great political themes, was stunningly simple: Change. From Day One — Day One — the Obama team made the decision to focus, laser-like, on a theme of change. They understood better than anyone else how dissatisfied the country was with its present course and knew that an open-ended promise of "not this" would allow them to appeal to the vast majority of the electorate. The fact that Obama had been beating the "Change" drum since the start of his campaign allowed him to own that theme in a way the McCain folks, who lurched from message to message 5 or 6 different times, could not.
A great message is only half the battle. Running a top-notch campaign, your machine, is what gets that message to the voters and turns them out on Election Day. I will have more to say on this next week, as I don't like talking nuts and bolts before all the numbers come in. But suffice it to say that the Obama '08 operation has been one of the most finely tuned, excellently managed and well-funded campaign machines in the history of American politics. What the campaign's architects, chief strategist David Axelrod and (especially) campaign manager David Plouffe did was, essentially, the equivalent of building a nation-wide, $600 million dollar corporation in the space of a year and a half. Oh, and Obama & Co. had to be built while conducting business (the primaries were a national election in and of themselves), and it had to compete with the established players: Clinton, Incorporated, and the Republican Party Company. Also, the product they were selling for president was a black liberal with a nutty pastor, a funny name that evoked two of America's worst enemies and the least political experience since Kennedy.
Would YOU have invested?
The successful marriage of penetrating message and well-oiled machine won this election. I look forward to really taking apart the nuts and bolts of the Obama operation next week, as well as providing an autopsy on the McCain campaign's doomed bid for the White House too. I hope you'll stick around even though the election's over — what else is there to do until Inauguration Day anyway?
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Michael Sherry is a senior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Michael.Sherry@tufts.edu.
