Obama 2008: An Intuitive Campaign

If I were president and a highly ambitious, driven individual with my iron fist inside the velvet glove, how would I choose my staff and cabinet?

I would first turn to friends with whom I have a high comfort level, to smart and capable people who have proven themselves over the years and have remained personally and professionally loyal. Then, I would look outside, to a mix of new blood and veterans. I would want diversity in my administration, because I would feel that the different backgrounds, expertise, personalities, and voices would keep me grounded in reality: the mix would keep the dialogue fresh and intellectually stimulating. Working in concert, we would all be able to come up with innovative ways to deal with the challenges the country faces, to govern efficiently and effectively, and to move the nation forward with a progressive agenda.

This is precisely what Obama has done with his selection of Rahm Emanuel to become his chief of staff. It is something of a good cop-bad cop partnership, an extremely smart and pragmatic choice. As president, Obama should strive to remain above the fray and to continue the discipline and discretion that was the hallmark of his victorious campaign. He needs his enforcer, and Emanuel has worked with him in the trenches of Chicago politics, is a seasoned Washington veteran from the Clinton administration, a straight-talker, and is intensely loyal to Obama.

Obama’s election, in large part, is the handiwork of Chicago’s vaunted political machine, no longer just a machine but now a talented network of politicos and supporters that have made their mark in the Windy City. Obama’s Chicago-based team includes David Axelrod, the chief campaign strategist, a University of Chicago graduate and former journalist from the Chicago Tribune with a background in television advertising, David Plouffe, the campaign’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and the queen of all media herself, Oprah Winfrey. 

Axelrod and Obama are a perfect pairing. Axelrod crafted the soaring message and tone of Obama’s campaign. According to his website, “David Axelrod is one of the pre-eminent political media consultants in the United States, having produced winning media and messages for over 150 campaigns at the local, state, and national levels. Since opening the firm twenty years ago, Axelrod has been attracted to candidates and causes that offer more humane policies and progressive change.”

The Obama campaign was something the world had not seen before: this is the first time the public has seen a presidential campaign waged using poetry and psychologically intuitive methods. The Camelot comparison during the Kennedy era and the Reagan presidency had parallels, but neither achieved this artful, insinuating level of conquest. Everything was pitch perfect—from the innovative use of the internet to reach a global audience, to the sub-text, the prose, the symbolism, the images—in a way that conventional writing and logic cannot inspire. Obama and his team won the election because the campaign transmitted emotional nuances and chords that touched and resonated at a deeply profound, human level…perhaps a long-forgotten memory. The language of symbols, images, and memory is timeless, with no worldly boundaries. As the audience, we all became part of something larger than ourselves, a global community, the human family. President-elect Obama has engendered copious goodwill because of this emotional buy-in, which he can wisely use to establish his historic presidency.

Certainly, my own world and experiences have been populated by direct and personal contact with people of vision, creativity, and imagination: educators, poets, MacArthur fellows, and Nobel laureates. What Obama has done at a political level, I have practiced for over a decade in my literary writing. I recognized early on that there was a more direct way to touch the soul and the spirit than through plot and characterization. Perhaps because my creative writing professor was also a poet and essayist, my literary output was nonlinear, compact, dense, and encoded; my first literary novella was just over 100 pages long. It may be that my writing style and the ascendance of the Obama era merged at some point: if this is so, then perhaps the world may see for the first time a new form of literary writing to coincide with the rise of this historic, new world order.