5c Peyton Murphy How Politics Have Changed Since the 1950s

ONE CAN OVERSTATE the degree to which Obama has changed, of course. By the summer of 2008, his campaign had a well-oiled rapid-response effort, which included current press secretary Ben LaBolt, among others. They just didn’t call it a “war room” or practice their dark arts as publicly or zealously. The recent trend is more “an evolution, not a shift,” says one campaign official from those days. Still, this person concedes, the campaign’s Chicago headquarters is “ready to be more forceful early on” this time around. “The press is more absurd,” explains a White House official. “In part because of Twitter, things have the potential to explode faster than they did before.”

The major difference between the two after the midterms was their posture toward Republicans. Clinton went for the jugular early. By August of 1995, he had launched a major ad campaign attacking the Republican Congress for its designs on Medicare and vowing to defend the program from $270 billion in cuts. Almost daily beginning in late 1995, Clinton and his surrogates repeated their mantra of protecting “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment”—that is, the programs Republicans threatened to decimate. The White House even had a nickname for the refrain: “M2E2.” “It wasn’t elegant—I wouldn’t etch it in marble. But people fucking knew what was at stake,” recalls Paul Begala, a former Clinton strategist. When Bob Dole emerged as the Republican presidential nominee the following spring, he had little hope of separating himself from his party’s government-slashing ethos. Obama, on the other hand, spent more of his third year striking conciliatory notes as he negotiated with the GOP over the deficit. With the exception of a tough, high-profile speech that April, his White House consciously avoided flaying Republicans over their proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. He didn’t dwell on their anti-government nihilism until a speech in December, and even then he did so in broad strokes.

While such tactics can be highly effective in any given moment, the risk is that they ultimately taint the Obama brand. (In 2008, the campaign considered it undignified to spar with the RNC, as it did during the great caterpillar controversy.) Still, a spokesman says the Obama organization is very pleased with Cutter’s work. And it’s almost certainly the case that the aggressive stance is here to stay. Arguably the chief legacy of the extended GOP primary is that Romney found himself forced to embrace the Ryan budget. “I thought the most important date of the primary was the date that Romney used the Ryan budget to attack [Newt] Gingrich,” says the Obama administration veteran. “He had been dancing around the Ryan budget for the longest time.” But, having tied himself to Ryan, there’s no going back. It would be political malpractice not to seize on this. Many of Obama’s political aides have understood this for years. In fact, when Ryan proposed (and the House approved) a similar budget last spring, they had readied a p.r. assault on Republicans over the document. But they holstered their press releases when members of Obama’s economic team protested that this would blow up the deficit and debt-ceiling negotiations with Republicans.

Within Team Obama, the change is not without anxiety. Mention the comparison to Clinton, and those involved in the Obama reelection effort will instinctively flinch. As one longtime Democratic operative sympathetic to the new approach puts it: “They have their own legacies to protect, I get that, too. I don’t think [David Axelrod] ever wants to see his name in the same sentence as [Clinton guru] Dick Morris.” Some of the anxiety centers around Cutter, who oversees the daily combat operation in Chicago and is legendary in Democratic circles for her Dresden-esque tactics. Whereas the communications apparatus for the Romney campaign, like Obama’s in 2008, must simultaneously sell policies, craft speeches, and win each news cycle, Cutter has the advantage of commanding a deep bench of operatives whose only focus is the latter. “The point is, that’s all they’re doing,” says the strategist close to the White House, noting that the West Wing shoulders the rest of the workload. This creates a major resource asymmetry, which Cutter has exploited with brutal efficiency. Chicago’s preferred formulations—on everything from the “Ryan-Romney budget” to Romney’s penchant for “hiding” the truth—reliably find their way into leading news outlets.*