Obama: Time To Shake It And Start Moving

My Top 3

There’s nothing worse than backseat drivers. They drive me nuts when I am at the wheel, but unfortunately I can be the worst of them when I am a passenger. The same goes for campaigns. When inside, the last thing the staffers need is a bunch of outsiders telling them how to strategize. When I was part of the decision-making, it drove me nuts when everyone and his brother would tell you how to run the campaign. This time around, I am going to do my best not to be a backseat campaign manager but it doesn’t hurt to convey to the management what you are hearing, feeling and sensing.

And what I am sensing, feeling and hearing is a real unrest among ‘the troops’ that John McCain right now is setting the tone and pace of the campaign. That we appear to be on the defensive. That McCain, through unequivocally inaccurate and borderline smarmy measures, might be defining Obama in a way that we later will have to take great pains to correct. Perhaps we are still sensitive from the ‘Swift Boat’ experience in the last election when a fine candidate had his war record diminished by the soulless Republican attack machine. Maybe the fear that we can’t stem the horror of the last eight years, no matter how lofty our ideals, has made us serial second-guessers. But the fact of the matter is that many of us want Obama to hit hard and often about the issues and set the pace, tone and issues for this campaign. The danger here, of course, is how to accomplish the feat: Obama made his name on running a "different kind of campaign", and he can’t be seen as getting down and dirty, using negative attacks as his weapons of choice. He has to seem above the fray - yet not smug - by driving home the intellectual and moral inconsistencies innate to the newly unimproved John McCain.

There is no question but that the great hope we have for an Obama Presidency makes us want even more for this to work out. The thought of eight more years of war, a possible economic depression, Constitution shredding, threats to Roe V. Wade, Neanderthal views on social issues, and our environment being totally destroyed is unimaginable. But here we are imagining it. So with great respect to the talented folks running this show — it’s been a brilliant grass-roots campaign arguably unparalleled in American history - I’m here with several others in the backseat yelling up to the front: "Time to shake it and start moving!"