Throwing an Elbow

Writer Peter Ognibene has a great post on HuffPpo this morning of Obama’s handling of McCain’s involvement with Charles Keating in the S&L scandal in the ‘80s, describing a short YouTube video the Obama campaign produced in early October as a “shot across the bow”, that may well have had a hand in reinforcing McCain’s principles in not campaigning on Rev. Wright any more than he did.

The YouTube video was very effective, and Obama's campaign has been extraordinarily deft at this stuff, doing a brilliant job of dealing with the four essential stories that Ognibene's fellow HuffPo blogger Drew Westen speaks of in his book The Political Brain (and applied to this election in this post on Monday). For those who haven't read it, the four stories are: the story you tell about yourself, the story you tell about your opponent, the story your opponent tells about himself, and the story he tells about you.

In order to manage the stories your opponent tells, you have to make some consequences clear for telling lies. Aaron Sorkin wrote a West Wing episode that captured the essence of this skill very well with a sports analogy. If you don't want to get mugged all the way through a game, throw an elbow early. It's worth taking the foul if you get one, and whether you do or not, it's worth establishing that you have elbows and will use them.

Obama managed all four stories very well, and I hope we Democrats remember that lesson for years to come, both in future campaigns and in working to get a progressive agenda enacted.