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Thursday November 8, 2012

Swinging wins the Obama way

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By Karim Raslan


President Barack Obama’s “ground game” in the swing states like Ohio and Colorado was as potent this year as it was in 2008.

This was supposed to be the battle of all battles. A contest that would go down the wire as Republican and Democrat operatives prepared for an electoral trench war.

Instead and within a few hours of the close of polling, Mitt Romney, the consultant-turned-PE honcho conceded to the self-effacing, but quietly confident Barack Obama.

So how was it that we were all so engrossed by the supposed “closeness” of the Romney-Obama face-off? What did we miss and how did the super-cool former Illinois Senator pull off such a dramatic victory?

First off the 2012 polls were totally media saturated – with wall-to-wall coverage both from the mainstream and social media.

With so much bandwidth dedicated to one – albeit important event – the media’s constant striving for something distinctive and unusual led to all sorts of strange and at times slightly bizarre arguments, culminating in the possibility of a Romney-Joe Biden winning combination: which would take me another half an hour to explain!

In short, ordinary Americans, and indeed the rest of us poor schmucks across the globe also became similarly obsessed by the minutiae of the contest whilst missing the big picture.

So what was the big picture? How did Obama pull off this surprise victory?

Well first and foremost, the president and his team were extremely clued in. They knew the odds were stacked against them.

They only had to glance across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe to see that incumbents were falling like nine-pins as the financial crisis stretched into its fourth enervating and destructive year.

So instead of panicking and throwing money at the population, Obama and his team strategised, devising an extensive campaign plan and then executed it. They were cool, they were calm and they were deadly.

Obama’s campaign team knew the states they had to win from very early on. They knew California and New York were in the bag and therefore did not over-spend in these solidly blue areas.

So Obama having identified his heartland nurtured it closely and then forgot about it.

Having dispensed with the heartlands, Obama threw his greatest resources at the swing-states, setting up an unparalleled network of campaign offices that tapped into local communities with a rare thoroughness. Employing the latest technology they focused on getting citizens to register and then to vote.

As pundits will tell you: Obama’s “ground game” in the swing states like Ohio and Colorado was as potent this year as it was in 2008.

More importantly however, Obama continued the Democratic Party’s remarkable evolution from a redneck, Southern party of yore to an incredible big tent encompassing the diversity that is modern-day America.

Rejected by the Republicans, racial minorities – such as the African and Latino-Americans – embraced Obama’s bold post-racial leadership and vision for the future.

This automatically gave the Democrats the advantage when you consider how much America’s demographics have changed – less of a stronghold for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) and now truly a melting-pot.

When all’s said and done though, Obama won simply because he was the more likeable candidate. For all his supposed aloofness – Obama is endowed with a passion and rootedness in the American story: of overcoming adversity and achieving remarkable things.

This helps him resonate more with ordinary American voters than establishment-types like Romney, who while likeable enough, seemed divorced from the realities of everyday life.

Obama’s victory is just the latest chapter of his remarkable story. It remains to be seen if he can deliver his promises of change and renewal to America – but no one can doubt that he has revolutionised its political scene, perhaps forever.

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