Barack Obama is not going negative. He put the nail in that coffin with comments over the weekend. The incredulity of McCain over Obama's "backing out" of an agreement to stick with public funding. The paraplectic response of the Clintonites to the idea that mountains of favors earned are not destiny. These stem from a fundamental truth: The Obama campaign has won already. Not the Presidency, that is yet to come. But the battle to change how voters think about campaigns, and how politicians run them.
It is true that in Obama agreed early on (with some important nuance and limitations that, of course, never get reported) that if the Republican in the general election accepted public financing, so would he. It is also true that he seems reluctant to stick with that agreement. I hope his reluctance sticks, because that agreement came from a fundamental error: Obama may have had the audacity of hope, but when he agreed to public financing, that audacity was not coupled with a belief he could pull it off quickly enough. Somewhere deep inside he was still playing on the old playboard. One where nobody believed the public at large, by the millions, would reach into their pockets to take command of their own destiny. He has, apparently, exceeded his expectations. And when presented with this new information, he must do what any true leader does: Change his actions to conform to the new reality.
The same is true of negative campaigning -- although on this count, he exceeded the fears of the Clintons and the Republican machine, but not his own expectations. From the outset his campaign was about speaking truth and addressing issues. Yes, he is a wonderful speaker. Yes, he is as smart and reliable in his judgment as Bush 43 is not. But few outside the Obama team thought that voters would respond to truth, honesty, and a focus not on the flaws of others but on the failures of their policy. Indeed, he has approached this campaign much as Roger Fisher (a Harvard Law professor during Barack Obama's tenure at Harvard) suggests in Getting to Yes: Be hard on the problem, but soft on the person.
Getting to Yes stresses the importance of examples, and in a strange fit of timing, I have one. I am having work done on my kitchen, and the work started while I was in Pennsylvania for the campaign. Upon my return -- from working on a campaign where the Clintons were using a "throw the kitchen sink" strategy -- my kitchen sink had in fact been removed. In what is a Democratic family dispute about which family member gets the nomination, one of the family members has decided to destroy the family house in the process. I can tell you from personal experience, no matter what benefit you get from removing the kitchen sink, it is messy and very expensive to replace -- and nobody in the family is happy while the sink is gone. The family home becomes non-functional. This is, of course, an object lesson on why we must be hard on the issues without engaging in the kind of fratricidal attacks that injure us all.
In my view, the Obama candidacy is about two very important goals: Helping move America forward from within the White House, and rewriting the rules of how we pick our leaders. While the former goal is ahead of us, we are well on our way to achieving the latter. Already Obama has proven that a campaign can be flush with cash without being flush in political debt owed to lobbyists and special interests. Obama has proven that people will participate in the process -- by the millions -- when that participation is driven from the grassroots. Obama has proven that people can rise about cynicism.
Obama may yet have the nomination stolen from him by superdelegates driven away by a campaign that is hard on the person while ignoring the issues. He may yet lose the general election to the old politics of destruction and distraction. But he has fatally wounded that old system. That system may take a few cycles to die from the wound, but die it will. And the millions of Americans who worked hard to remake America through the Obama campaign can take credit for the inevitable rebirth of American democracy that will follow.
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