Brand "O"

Posted by Robert Zimmer on 03.28.2008

The Machine Behind Obama's Mystique -- Barack Obama's campaign may claim to be about a new brand of politics, but behind the scenes, the machine that has carefully controlled Brand "O" is anything but.

Next month's issue of Fast Company magazine will include an article entitled "The Brand Called Obama." It's about time.

The mystique surrounding Obama reinforces a sort of mythology that suggests to supporters that their messiah figure rides around on a magic carpet, with perhaps only a single lucky acolyte to assist, the candidate occasionally descending to deliver impromptu spirit-reviving speeches and raise the dead at town hall meetings. This mystique is not an accident. The unusual talent of this first-term Illinois senator is real, but so is a machine designed to ensure its dimensions appear transcendent and larger than life from every angle. The Obama candidacy and campaign, while undeniably substantive, are the result of a very intelligent strategy driven by old-fashioned product marketing techniques and political machinery. That the strategy has been both innovative and successful does not change the fact both components of Obama's campaign are very calculated. Contrary to the brand ID of effortless authenticity, Brand "O" has been masterminded by some very smooth operators who are among the usual suspects in political media consulting.

David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, is a media consultant and 20-year veteran of high-level political campaigns, including Senator Clinton's (!) successful 2000 Senate run, Sen. John Edwards' unsuccessful 2004 bid for the presidency, and consulting work for the muscular Daley family political machine in Chicago. Axelrod also owns a lucrative strategic marketing firm called ASK Public Strategies, that "discreetly plots strategy and advertising campaigns for corporate clients to tilt public opinion their way," according to a recent BusinessWeek article called "The Secret Side of David Axelrod." Oddly, Axelrod considers ASK's client list to be top secret – apparently not feeling the same enthusiasm for self-disclosure as he demands of Senator Clinton. But public records indicate ASK's clients include AT&T and Illinois public utility behemoth ComEd. ASK masterminded a 2005 Illinois ad campaign crying that ComEd would be faced with bankruptcy and consumers without electricity -- unless politicians approved a rate hike on consumers' utility bills. In a seeming triumph for Axelrod, the company is very much alive; ComEd and its employees have donated over $180,000 to Obama's presidential campaign. Media giant Cablevision paid ASK a whopping $1.2 million in 2005 to stop the New York Jets from building a stadium next to Cablevision-owned Madison Square Garden, in what LegislativeGazette.com, which covers New York state politics, termed "the biggest lobbying contract of the year."

David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, is a partner in Axelrod's firm, having joined up after helping raise an astonishing $95 million for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in 2000. He took a leave of absence to serve as a senior advisor to Rep. Dick Gephardt in his unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2004, then returned to the lucrative safety of his consulting work with Axelrod before they both joined the Obama campaign.

I'm not suggesting that Axelrod and Plouffe are criminals, or that they care more about money than principle. What I am saying, though, is that Axelrod and Plouffe are hardly innocent idealists who took a leave of absence from graduate school to volunteer unpaid for Senator Obama. They are highly paid political and marketing professionals who know how to raise obscene sums of money, shape public opinion, and create brands, which may come as a surprise to those Obama supporters who have drunk that peculiar Kool-Aid that deifies the good Senator with a cloak of heavenly Teflon. Senator Obama is a thoughtful, profound, and inspiring man, but he too is a political professional, whose ambition has never graced him with the patience to stay in any elected office long enough to amass a record which might show that he knows how to translate his penchant for profundity into serious policy accomplishment. Plouffe and Axelrod know this and have chosen to market Obama as a brand – an idea, a movement, a vision – all maddeningly ephemeral abstracts that help obscure the fact that though impressive, Obama's resume is a bit underwhelming for a man who wants to be president so badly. It's a smart strategy, because criticizing "hope" is sort of like sucker-punching your grandmother. Though selling hope and change is the campaign's ostensibly noble motive, the campaign is rarely above a little cynical sucker-punching of its own in order to preserve the integrity of the brand. The mainstream media, whether due to their fawning favoritism or lack of sophistication, have failed to report the fact that the Obama campaign has perfected the art of painting its candidate as a victim whenever criticism, fair or not, comes his way. Given Obama's natural abilities, this is a shame as it draws pointless attention to the color of his skin. But Axelrod and Plouffe regularly spin valid criticisms into signs of dirty campaigning, or worse, of racism. It is a slimy bit of tactical triumph that they managed to paint as a racist President Bill Clinton, beloved by African-Americans for his authentic, passionate championing of their plight, when Clinton dared called Obama's Iraq record "a fairy tale." Axelrod and Plouffe were at it again when they smugly deployed Obama surrogate General Tony McPeak to compare Clinton to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. McPeak ripped Clinton for allegedly questioning Obama's patriotism during a town hall meeting, when a fair view of Clinton's actual words show no such thing. It was as dumb as Hillary Clinton calling Obama a plagiarist, with even less merit and elegance. But this nonsense is old hat to Plouffe and Axelrod, the latter of whom publicly glorified dirty campaigning, writing in the Chicago Tribune once that "Insults have always been a staple of Chicago politics. The town has a rich history of name-calling. Charges of thievery, homosexuality and dementia all have been part of the high-level political debate in recent years." Axelrod may be good at this sort of thing, as good as he evidently is at selling unneeded utility rate hikes to consumers. It is neither the greatest sin, but neither is it anything to be proud of; it is political business as usual. The stench comes, however, when you marry these sort of mercenary hit jobs to a candidate whose brand success depends on his appearing to be above this sort of tired politicking. Senator Clinton, at least, doesn't pretend to be holier than everyone else while dipping her hand from time to time into the sleazy cookie jar that is American political campaigning. That Obama's campaign pretends they don't indulge is utterly hypocritical. Both sides believe in fighting dirty for the greater good. One side simultaneously pretends otherwise.

Another Axelrod/Plouffe masterpiece of spin is the Obama-favoring media narrative of Clinton's so-called "Tonya Harding" strategy, named after the infamous ice skating champion who arranged to break her opponent's kneecaps at the 1994 Olympic trials. The Obama snake-oil sales team wants us to believe that part of Clinton's allegedly fratricidal nomination strategy is to render Obama unelectable by bludgeoning him into unelectability. This is another piece of terribly disingenuous piece of faux-victim propaganda that obscures the fact that Obama's own campaign mistakes, not Clinton's, will render him unelectable if it comes to pass. Senator Clinton's moments of triumph thus far have sometimes seemed to transpire despite her campaign and because of her personal qualities, not vice versa. It is therefore somewhat absurd for Obama sympathizers to ascribe to Clinton staffers like Mark Penn the skill, much less the intent, to destroy Obama. The real question should be this: How in the world could Obama's campaign not have known that the incendiary content of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's sermons would not come back to haunt him? Though the Obama campaign has been a largely efficient machine, they continue to make both strategic and tactical blunders, such as failing to realize that a hell of a lot of white people would freak out when they heard "God damn America!" and "AmeriKKKa" shouted from their TVs or computer screens.

In keeping with the pattern that both candidates are better than their campaigns, Obama seems to have cauterized the Rev. Wright wound by delivering a magnificent speech on the problem of race in America last week. Lost, however, in the largely positive media coverage of the speech, was the fact that Obama changed his story about whether he'd ever been present in church during one of Wright's inflammatory sermons. At first, when the Wright story broke, Obama claimed he hadn't; in the speech, he admitted that he in fact had been present during an (unspecified) number of occasions when Wright lobbed a number of his cultural hand grenades.

So what we see is Obama as an imperfect man who is no more or less prone to fudging the truth when it suits him than any other politician of his caliber, which is to say not too often, but sometimes. But which is worse, Senator Clinton "misspeaking" about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, or Senator Obama "forgetting" that he'd heard some of Rev. Wright's whoppers firsthand? I'd say the latter is more disturbing, because though both lied, Senator Obama was actually present when the sniper fire started.

Pennsylvania is up next in the great Clinton-Obama clash. Current polls show Clinton leading Obama by 10 points (Rasmussen) to 26 points (Public Policy Polling). Say what you will about delegate math – and I will say a lot about it in next week's column -- but Plouffe and Axelrod will have their spin work cut out for them if their boss gets blown out in one of the key swing states in the general election. Admittedly, the latest poll trends in North Carolina are extremely troubling for Clinton, but is anyone supposed to believe it's more impressive to carry North Carolina, Idaho, and North Dakota rather than Pennsylvania and Ohio? There's still three weeks until the primary, but from where I sit, Pennsylvanian's aren't quite buying the brand. Pennsylvania is quite representative of America, and Americans, despite their penchant for silly distractions, have an innate common sense that smells funky cheese when it's around. Marketing, in a consumer capitalist system, is too often about selling us something that isn't really what it claims to be, or doesn't really do what it says it will do, and worse, convincing us we want something that we really don't need. Barack Obama is no more an omniscient, infallible savior than Hillary Clinton is a scheming old witch, despite his campaign's attempt to counter-brand her as that cartoon.

Unfortunately for Plouffe and Axelrod, the presidency, and presidential candidates, are an order of magnitude more substantial than products like toothpaste, designer clothes, or utility rate hikes to line the pockets of greedy corporations. Truth matters, in advertising and reality, so next time somebody tries to tell you Obama is better than all of this political sewage, you may want to ask why his campaign isn't. If we are to hold the Clinton campaign accountable for its clumsy maneuvering, we should certainly do the same for the Obama campaign -- particularly when it has sold us Brand "O" as a shiny new car.