Newsweek Cover Story: Sit Back, Relax, Get Ready to Rumble - Team Obama

How do you know if Barack Obama is unhappy with what you're saying— or not saying? At meetings of his closest advisers, he likes to lean back, put his feet on the table and close his eyes. If he doesn't like how the conversation is going, he will lean forward, put his feet on the floor and "adjust his socks, kind of start tugging at them," says Michael Strautmanis, a counselor to the campaign. Obama wants people to talk, but he doesn't want to intimidate them. "If you haven't said anything, he'll call on you," says Strautmanis. "He's never said it, but he usually thinks if somebody is very quiet it's because they disagree with what everybody is saying … so Barack will call on you and say, 'You've been awfully quiet'." There are no screamers on Team Obama; one senior Obama aide says he's heard him yell only twice in four years. Obama was explicit from the beginning: there was to be "no drama," he told his aides. "I don't want elbowing or finger-pointing. We're going to rise or fall together." Obama wanted steady, calm, focused leadership; he wanted to keep out the grandstanders and make sure the quiet dissenters spoke up. A good formula for running a campaign—or a presidency.

It worked against Hillary Clinton, whose own campaign has been rent by squabbling aides and turf battles. While Clinton veered between playing Queen Elizabeth I and Norma Rae, Obama and his team chugged along with a superior 50-state campaign strategy, racking up the delegates. If the candidate seemed weary and peevish or a little slow to respond at times, he never lost his cool. But the real test is yet to come. The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities. The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower- and middle-class whites in industrial and border states—the Democrats' base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but "Reagan Democrats" in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as "the other"—as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.

Obama says he's ready for the onslaught. "Yes, we know what's coming," he told a cheering crowd as he won the North Carolina primary last week. "We've seen it already … the attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences to turn us against each other for pure political gain—to slice and dice this country into Red States and Blue States; blue-collar and white-collar; white, black, brown." Hillary Clinton was not above playing on those fears. Refusing to concede defeat last week, she cited an Associated Press poll "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again." As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote: "Here's what she's really saying to party leaders: There's no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you'll be sorry." A top Clinton adviser, speaking anonymously so he could be more frank, says the Clinton campaign has actually been holding back, for fear of alienating other Democrats. The Republicans "won't suffer from such scruples," this adviser says. Sen. John McCain himself has explicitly disavowed playing the race card or taking the low road generally. But he may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism. And the real question is whether he can—or really wants to—rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet and fund the "independent expenditure" groups who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech.

For Obama, the challenge will be to respond quickly and surely—but without overreacting or inviting an endless cycle of recriminations. Team Obama has been a model of tight, highly efficient organization, certainly in contrast to most presidential campaigns. The few tensions that have emerged have been between those who want to stick to the high ground and those who want to fight a little dirtier. (Such debates could intensify in a hard-hitting general campaign.) The campaign has at times been a little slow to fight back. Some of this deliberation is a measure of the candidate's personality. Obama disdains cable-TV talk-show shoutfests as trivial sideshows, and he tends to discount the seriousness of campaign gaffes and flaps. As a result, he was slow to denounce the most recent round of tirades by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. By failing to alert Obama to the gravity of the Wright fiasco, "I don't think we served him well," admits his chief strategist, David Axelrod.

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Obama's almost preternatural equanimity has helped keep his campaign on an even keel. Although he can seem slightly humorless on TV, as he is fencing with an inquiring anchorperson or debating an opponent, he has a light touch in the office, and he can laugh off adversity. Obama has shown signs of exhaustion, and he has appeared increasingly gaunt. Mocked for not finishing his waffles, he has made a joke about his newfound willingness to drink beer in blue-collar bars and sop up the gravy at working-class diners. After he lost the Pennsylvania primary to a beer-swilling, whisky-downing Hillary, Obama mordantly announced to his staff, "OK, now I'll eat anything."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/136440

:spray:

My only worry with Obama is that he would turn out to be a more animated John Kerry. Looks like my worries were unfounded.

shoot some hoops, jog, or whatever he does (he's apparently into some fitness stuff) this weekend.

Guy needs some downtime once in a while.

Nothing says leadership faster than a calm leader who knows he has the power, but doesn't need to flex his muscles to impress anyone with it.

Outstanding article.

K and R

K & R

Axelrod and Obama huddle backstage before speaking to supporters in Erie, Pa.

Excellent.

I want him answering the 3:00 am phone call, goddammit! :)

What an amazing team and such a streamlined operation! Can't wait for this GE process to begin.

Obama is certainly one cool dude, he's unflappable. He just has that "IT" intangible that no amount of money can buy.

ability to make it to the whitehouse. Obama is super intelligent and seems like a genuinely really nice guy. :-)

and to pave the way for a new era in politics and social change.

Now, if Hillary would just get out of the way completely. She's like this little dark cloud.

8 yrs of nothing but Conservative bs to be aired

The fact that he rarely yells, rarely flies off the handle is a good sign. I did notice how thin he is though, he is working really hard. Take care of yourself Barack, the nation needs you.

cool with aides and staff, I lose respect for them. Clinton, Bush... both supposed to have awful tempers. All that says to me is "lack of self-control, and way too high an opinion of himself".

This is more like it.

activists, organizers, volunteers, voters--the people who have defeated the political establishment's chosen candidate and have created Obama's success?

I suppose it's inevitable, given that our emperor has the power to exterminate all life on earth, that obsessive focus on the personality of presidential candidates and presidents will occur. But it is also part of fascist ideology that it's all about the "great leader" and not about the people.

Beware of this subtle fascist imagery even when it seems to praise.

Yes, Obama's style is interesting--as a corporate news monopoly read; it is also heartening (a leader who listens, a leader who is able to able absorb multiple points of view, a leader with real self-confidence, not "codpiece" invention), and it is evidence that he is worthy of the grass roots revolution that has catapulted him to power. But where have these Newsweek fuckheads been while psycho Bush and his puppetmasters slaughtered 1.2 million people in Iraq to get their oil, tortured prisoners for fun and profit, shredded our Constitution and drained our treasury unto the 7th generation, into their own and their corporate pals' pockets?

Never forget. They are not just toadies to the powerful; they believe in the fascist ideology of their corporate masters, and, in praising a leader who is beholden to the people for his power, are seeking the power to make or break him, at their will.

Beware of this "warm, fuzzy" feeling you get, when Newsweek draws a positive portrait of the leader YOU chose and empowered.

I've been following events in South America--and corporate news monopoly coverage of those events--for some time, and what I have found most notable about the coverage here is the complete failure of our corporate press to credit the real creators, movers and shakers of the peaceful, democratic, leftist revolution that has swept South America--the People. They don't want you to know that it's the People--the peasants, the indigenous, the grass roots, the civic groups, the community organizers, the union organizers, the believers in democracy, the leftists (majorityists), and the voters. They focus on the LEADERS that the People have elected--as the result of decades of work on democratic institutions, transparent vote counting, and grass roots organization--and describe their leaders as "strongmen," or "dictators," in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that they are not (evidence that is mind-bogglingly absent from news stories on South America across the entire spectrum of corporate news outlets). If they can build up your notion of the leftist political revolution in South America as all about "strongmen" and "dictators"--Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, Morales in Bolivia, and others--then, when the Bush Cartel's dirty tricks, black ops and war plans come to fruition, and if they succeed in destroying democracy in South America once again, YOU won't notice or care very much. ('Oh, it's just that dictator Chavez...')

The corporate news monopoly tools like Newsweek want that power to shape your perceptions about particular leaders, so they can break any leaders they want to break, for whatever reason, and also to disempower you--to make you feel it's all about "rock stars" and their corporate stamp of approval, and not about YOU and your hard work as a citizen, and not about the People and our rebellion against the crap and the evil they've been shoving down our throats for eight years now (and all the way back to Reagan).

This article sucks you in. It sucked me in, I have to admit. It's not that what the article says is not interesting. It's what the article leaves out. You. The most important part of the story. You, and YOUR calm demeanor in the face of this fascist coup that has overwhelmed our democracy, and YOUR determination to undo it--peacefully, methodically, collectively. YOU are the story--one of the most important stories in the history of our country, possibly THE most important. Where are YOU in this article?