Political skill #3

[cleveramerican]

peaking at the right moment.
There is no more handy skill to posses.
All the best politicians do it.
Its sort of mysterious to the rest.


Nixon was the best at this one.
But Obama seems to be pretty good too.

[Radical Activist]

1. He's also good at raising money and getting media coverage.

Its disappointing to see how self-defeating the left can be. Someone does what it takes to be a winning progressive candidate and people call him a conservative just because he does a good job of raising money and getting in the news. Some people would rather lose and play the righteous martyr.

[H2O Man]

2. I respectfully disagree

with the idea that Nixon was the best at this. His political career does not support that, or we wouldn't have Nixon to kick around anymore.

[cleveramerican]

3. who would you say was/is best at it?

[H2O Man]

4. That's a great question.

I'd say the example of Nixon in the '68 primary is an outstanding illustration of a politician who came from a crowded field by use of timing. Jimmy Carter's entire 1976 campaign stands out among recent history for a primary and general election example. My favorite is, of course, JFK in 1960. But the single best, in my opinion, has to be Bill Clinton in '92.

The topic is an outstanding one, and I hope this thread stays active. DUers saw how timing made Kerry the party's nominee in '04, and there is a fair chance that although one campaign has been trying to convince the party/nation that their candidate is a sure thing, that "timing" could change that perception.

Back to Nixon, briefly: in '68, his primary victory was in many senses a better example of timing than the general election. The deaths of MLK and RFK, along with the violence in Chicago, damaged the democrats. This created a ball & chain that cannot be attributed to Nixon's strategy. But the primary was strategy.

Clinton unseated an elected president, something that JFK, Nixon, and Carter didn't do. That is an impressive part of his victory. Reagan unseated Carter, but Carter was not popular, and faced a divisive challenge from Ted Kennedy. Bush1 had been coming off a very high national approval rating from the Gulf War, and had a Washington machine that was extremely strong (compared to the opposite in Carter's case). While I have some mixed feelings about Clinton's presidency, his 1992 campaign stands out as one of the best in the past century.