Starting Gate: Politics As Usual

Win the nomination by appealing to the base, then run to the center for the general election. It's one of the most overused and tired clichés in presidential politics and is obviously an oversimplification of very complicated political calculations.

George W. Bush won two terms in the White House with a strategy of mobilizing the base of his party for November more so than finding ways to reach toward the middle (although even his campaigns did feature some of those elements – think "compassionate conservative"). Like any cliché, there is some generic truth to the need for candidates to broaden their appeal coming out of a primary campaign. The question is whether Barack Obama's is a generic campaign.

Starting in Iowa and extending through every single primary and caucus contest on the calendar, Obama did more than win a contest against the most formidable Democratic political family in a generation, he created a movement that has him positioned as the front-runner for the fall campaign. He has built an unprecedented fund-raising machine that could allow him to raise over half a billion dollars for the entire cycle and inspired notoriously fickle young voters to pat attention to politics.

But now he's taking heat from the very corners of his party which helped fuel his victory over Hillary Clinton, leaving some unhappy about his recent veer toward the middle. Since winning the nomination, Obama has toned down his rhetoric on trade, toughened his stance on Iran, shied away from criticizing the Supreme Court decision on DC's gun ban, ratcheted up his patriotic appeal and launched a vigorous effort to woo evangelical voters.

For most candidates, this is politics as usual, knowing that in a general election, broadening appeal is necessary to win. But having won the nomination on the wave of a movement, we're about to see what happens to that base of support when it turns into a by-the-numbers political campaign. As the Politico's Roger Simon points out today, Obama "has decided to run as a candidate for president and not as the leader of a movement."

What will the "Netroots" and YouTube communities think of Obama following the seemingly safe script after a primary campaign that seemed anything but traditional? The reactions are beginning to trickle in, started by Arianna Huffington who recently wrote an open letter to the campaign titled, "Moving to the middle is for losers." Noting that Obama has created a brand of "change," Huffington warns, "watering down that brand is the political equivalent of New Coke. Call it Obama Zero."

If political campaigns are all about addition, there's at least the hint of danger that Obama's new shift to the center could also result in some subtraction as well.

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