I normally don't even read Brooks OPED column in the New York Times, but this mornings headline (Playing by Clinton Rules) grabbed my attention because I thought it might be a comment on something fellow NYT columnist, Paul Krugman, talked about a while back.
It turns out, he was writing about something else altogether. The opening graphs read thus:
Barack Obama had a theory. It was that the voters are tired of the partisan paralysis of the past 20 years. The theory was that if Obama could inspire a grass-roots movement with a new kind of leadership, he could ride it to the White House and end gridlock in Washington.
Obama has built his entire campaign on this theory. He’s run against negativity and cheap-shot campaigning. He’s claimed that there’s an “awakening” in this country — people “hungry for a different kind of politics.”
Brooks goes on to comment on the current state of the contest, how Hillary's stepped up attacks are forcing to Illinois Senator to respond in kind, to "take the gloves off" as pundits are fond of saying. Brooks warning to Obama is that he needs to be careful and try not to look too much like his opponent, or else risk losing the very thing that appears to distinguish him from the competition:
The Obama campaign is now making a big issue of Hillary Clinton’s tax returns and dropping hints about donations to President Clinton’s library and her secret White House papers. It’s willing to launch an ethics assault. “If Senator Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate,” the Obama strategist David Axelrod told reporters the other day.
These attacks are supposed to show that Obama can’t be pushed around. But, of course, what it really suggests is that Obama’s big theory is bankrupt. You can’t really win with the new style of politics. Sooner or later, you have to play by the conventional rules.
I could have told Senator Obama that going after Clinton's financial dealings is a lost cause. She and her husband are, and have been, one of the most scrutinized couples to ever come down the pike. Ken Starr went after their finances for years and finally had to settle for a side issue - something about a blues dress or something...
A lot of what Brooks says makes sense (surprisingly, in fact). His ending paragraphs sum it up nicely:
In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.
Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.
If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.
Check out the column here.