Dear Barack,
The time is ripe for a few changes to your campaign strategy. If you are out of ideas here is what I recommend you do ASAP.
#1. CHANGE, stick to the message but explain why “your opponent is more of the same”. Change is the key topic of your campaign and ultimately that is the reason you can win. In theory this campaign theme is fundamentally rock-solid. Over 70% of Americans disapprove of the way their country is heading. That suggests they want change. Nevertheless, it is now time for you to shift away from your “cynics cum Washington politics” line, which has yielded what it could already, and adopt a more specific rhetoric of why your opponent is more of the same. E.g.: remind them that the IT bubble grew under B. Clinton, that Bill Clinton was the embodiment of hypocrisy in the White House. A notch more aggressive, run an add with original footages of Bill and Hillary in the White House and ask the American people if they deserve another run of the same, Hillary’s ultimate weak spot is the “dynasty thing”; exploit it. By the same token, do not hesitate to link the Clinton dynasty with the Bush dynasty and invite the voters to think about the consequences. Finally, if all of it fails, you can always make the argument that the Clinton administration has failed to see the national security threats early enough (which is true, after all 9/11 barely came 9 months into Bush’s presidency the security issues pre-dated his arrival).
#2. The ECONOMY, link it to the change message in more details: let us face it, the US economy is in disarray. You can point at the unemployment, the house prices, the infrastructure, the addiction to energy imports, the inflation, and the recession. You should not find it all too difficult to tell the voters what you plan to do about it and why your opponents are partially responsible for the historic crisis of the US economy. Hillary Clinton voted for the war, and by implication for its costs. Bill has failed to grasp the full consequences of the free trade agreements he passed, which have in due time exacerbated the US current account balance.
#3. NATIONAL SECURITY and FOREIGN AFFAIRS EXPERIENCE, make a trip around the world after Mississippi. On national security, pundits are fast to note that you have no experience and that you might therefore not be the best candidate. The problem here is that they have a point. You will always be something of an unknown quantity, but so are your opponents, though to a lesser extent. But you can demonstrate your argument of “experience is nothing without judgment” by going on a world tour. TAKE YOUR PLANE AND GO TO EUROPE, IRAK, AFGHANISTAN, and as many American military bases as you can during a tour around the world. You will have 5 weeks after Mississippi, use them to go abroad and look and act super presidential. Meet Manuel Barroso in Brussels, Angela Merkel in Germany, Abdullah Gul in Turkey. Stop-over in Bagdad, and then go to Amman, Nairobi (shake hands with Kibaki and Odinga, talk peace and reconciliation), and Kabul, continue to Beijing and get Hu Jintao to tour you around the Olympic city (tell him how nice it is, but how important it is to re-balance the economic relationship between both countries), continue to Indonesia and the Philippines were you can talk tough about Islamic fundamentalists and the fight on terror. Make sure that all the media and appearance details are right, make sure that you get some photo-opps with David Petraeus and the “boys”, make sure you look super-capable of handling national security issues. Nurture allies, and chastise enemies. Talk tough on Iran, sweet on Israel, but do it using reasonable non-dogmatic arguments. Show how different you are by shaping the debate outside the manicheist frame of Bush. Back to the US. Give Hillary a beating: ask her where is her record on Rwanda, Somalia, and Al Qaeda.
#4. Live the change: you have promised change, time has come to demonstrate you can do it. Engineer situations where you can demonstrate how it will be like when you will be president (the foreign trip is one, go to disaster/accident scenes, maybe a special add, etc…). Just make sure that your actions do never deviate from your message of change.
Give me a call if you want to discuss
polibel
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