For the Barack Obama Campaign, Reading Can Be Fundamental

One of my favorite books is One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer. The basic premise of the book is that when you want to improve an organization or your life you start with small changes rather than complete overhauls.

One Small Step the Obama Campaign Can Make

Put Barack Obama’s 64-Page Blueprint for Change: Barack Obama’s Plan for America in the hands of every American. Well, at least right now in the hands of every Nevada and South Carolina voter. Make sure it is in all Nevada Democratic voter mailboxes.

Most importantly, at those rallies where the lines are wrapped around the building three times make sure volunteers are handing out that 64-page policy booklet for the people who are out there waiting. Some of them will have been waiting for two to five hours just staring out into the open with nothing to do. You might as well put that booklet in their hand so they can be reading and learning about the senator while they are waiting.

If you really want to get them reading, tell them there will be a $1000 giveaway before the rally based on a trivia question derived from the policy booklet.

Get precinct captains and volunteers to memorize the book so that when they are talking with voters they can not only talk about Obama’s hope but also about the meat that people want to see out of him. “He was a community organizer” is not a sufficient rebuttal to “I’m worried about Obama’s experience” given his many legislative accomplishments in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate.

He should also mention in his powerful televised speeches that he has such a plan/record and invite voters to go to his website to read it.

Why?

One challenge for the Obama campaign is to create a quasi-Iowa experience for the rest of America. Iowans were able to”kick the tires and lift the hood” by learning about Obama, attending his foreign policy and rural policy forums, asking him his positions on gun control and social security, picking his policy positions apart, and comparing his positions to other candidates.

Unfortunately, the rest of the country hasn’t had that experience. While a lot of people know his name right now, I don’t believe a lot of people know a lot about him other than that he is a hopeful, visionary who can give a good speech. They don’t know that he’s passed more progressive legislation in his lifetime than either Clinton or Edwards. They don’t know that he was the first of the Democratic nominees to lay out a detailed exit plan for Iraq. They don’t know that’s he’s spent more time in political office than either Edwards or Clinton. Thus, I hear people calling into CSPAN saying, “Well, Obama talks about change but he doesn’t say how he’s going to bring change” or “Obama is inexperienced.”

Hope wasn’t enough to gain my unswerving support. It was not until I dug deeply into his background, record, and policy proposals that I realized he was the real deal and a superior candidate to Clinton and Edwards. Most people aren’t going to have time or energies to do that though. The Obama campaign must then bombard voters with the ways in which his record is superior to Clinton and Edwards and with the policy details for how he wants change.

The upside is that Obama doesn’t have to deal with the electability argument as much any more since he won Iowa and did well in New Hampshire. Now he just needs to tackle the substance/experience argument head-on.

Oh yeah, and the campaign should work as if the media aren’t going to give them one ounce of help in getting out that message, because they probably won’t.