Michael Barone notes a very interesting fact today. Every, single candidate, regardless of party, is exactly the same in one major respect: all of their initial campaign strategies failed outright. No exceptions. He details each candidate and their failed strategies then asks why this has happened.
For a decade from 1995 to 2005, we operated in a period of trench-warfare politics, with two approximately equal-sized armies waging a culture war in which very small amounts of ground made the difference between victory and defeat. It was pretty clear what the major issues were, what strategies were necessary to win a party's nomination, how to maximize your side's turnout on election day (and, increasingly, in early voting).
But times change. Somewhere between Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006, I believe we entered a period of open-field politics, in which voters and candidates are moving around — a field in which there are no familiar landmarks or new signposts.
Democrats entered this cycle assuming that cries for immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be rewarded. But the success of the surge has penetrated even Democratic skulls; Mr. Edwards, the precipitate withdrawer, is out and Mrs. Clinton, the most cautious of the withdrawers, is ahead. Mr. McCain's surge in the polls owes something as well to his advocacy, going all the way back to 2003, of an Iraq surge strategy. His standing in the polls nationwide, and in key primary states, rose over the Christmastime polling pause — a gain that may have to do with voters' response to the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27, when polling resumed.
Mostly absent from political coverage, and even from many of the candidate debates, has been discussion of public policy. Voters lacking signposts in this open field have responded in ways that don't make much sense: Republicans concerned about the economy tilted toward Mr. McCain, who once said he didn't know much about the economy, and Democrats eager to withdraw from Iraq tilted toward Mrs. Clinton. The ideas vacuum in campaign 2008 still remains to be filled, and opinion may still take sharp and unpredicted turns.
If Barone is right – and I rather suspect that he is in many ways – then the game has changed in a fundamental way. At the start of the Second World War, the French hunkered down in the bunkers of the Maginot line, expecting that the old rules of the Great War and trench warfare would repeat. That didn't exactly turn out to be a winning strategy.
It would be a good idea to start thinking outside the trench, so to speak.
