Obama Basketball Comparisons Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Posted by: Baller-in-Chief in ArticlesThis from the other day, in an editorial about President Obama’s political strategy by Jamal Simmons (an advisor the Democratic National Committee and the Obama-Biden campaign) that appeared on WFAA-TV Dallas Online:
Obama summed this up when he said, “You know that I have always believed that if you are tough, you don’t have to talk about it.” Anybody who has ever played pickup basketball, Obama’s favorite sport, would recognize the sentiment here. If you shoot jump shots successfully from 20 feet with regular precision, people tend to know about it without your having to tell them. This could be applied to his entire campaign philosophy. And the first two weeks of the Obama presidency seemed to operate by a very similar creed.
I like it.
The fact is that if you have game you don’t really have to keep saying so. The game speaks for itself.
Here is the full piece:
When it comes to leading the factions of the Democratic Party, President Barack Obama is more like the supreme allied commander of NATO than the admiral of a fleet of ships. Ship captains actually have to follow their admiral’s orders.
Despite the impressive title, the NATO commander oversees forces whose first allegiance is to their home flag. That means that before he can launch a military action, he must be confident the politics of the member states have been handled to ensure the troops go along with his strategic decisions.
In Obama’s case, the labor unions, civil rights organizations, policy think tanks and online activists that make up the organized left will need regular consultation and coordination to be kept in line. And the White House is beginning to appear more comfortable leading them.
Some early friction was left over from the 2008 Democratic primaries, when many members of the national Democratic establishment supported Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s campaign was able to use these party pooh-bahs as surrogates in its very effective efforts to win the short-term spin wars of the daily news cycle.
Obama’s team did not have as many union leaders, former government officials and professional Democratic consultants to draw from during the primaries as did Clinton’s team, so it developed a different strategy: Get the work done, and people will learn your side of the story in the victory speech.
Obama summed this up when he said, “You know that I have always believed that if you are tough, you don’t have to talk about it.” Anybody who has ever played pickup basketball, Obama’s favorite sport, would recognize the sentiment here. If you shoot jump shots successfully from 20 feet with regular precision, people tend to know about it without your having to tell them. This could be applied to his entire campaign philosophy. And the first two weeks of the Obama presidency seemed to operate by a very similar creed.
For the first two weeks of this administration, Team Obama was working to find top people and draft the best policy, not to control the debate around those people and policies. Congressional Republicans took advantage of the imbalance. The GOP was able to find a few examples of questionable stimulus spending to hang around the stimulus package’s neck, combined with scattered tax troubles among Obama’s Cabinet appointments, and they hit the cable television airwaves.
A version of House Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s quip was heard from several Republicans: “It is easy for the other side to advocate for higher taxes, because you know what? They don’t pay them.”
Meanwhile, Democrats were left flatfooted and playing defense, arguing the merits of the bill, while trying to carefully navigate the trouble the president’s nominees encountered in the vetting and hearing process — without much White House guidance.
That changed last week, when President Obama went on the offensive. He did five network interviews, a prime-time press conference and returned to the town halls that served him so well in economically distressed places such as Elkhart, Ind., and Fort Myers, Fla. Add to that White House efforts to distribute talking points to Democratic operatives and to coordinate conference calls, and it was clear Obama’s inner circle recognizes that, to win in Washington, it needs good substance and strong spin putting it back on the offensive in defining its agenda. The president even called on Sam Stein of the progressive blog The Huffington Post at the first White House prime-time news conference.
Some members of the Obama team have been slow to embrace traditional Democratic organizations. During the campaign, Democratic donors were discouraged from giving money to third-party organizations to advertise and organize, and there was some debate over how much to integrate the Obama campaign lists with those of the Democratic National Committee.
Obama is the Democratic Party leader now, and after a couple of tough weeks, the White House seems more comfortable with him being the supreme allied commander of progressive forces. This is a positive development, as there are many more battles to wage if Democrats are to get the country out of the ditch George W. Bush and the Republicans drove it into.
Jamal Simmons was a Clinton administration political appointee and an adviser to the Democratic National Committee and the Obama-Biden campaign in 2008.
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