The Lion and Gun

What does Barack Obama's campaign strategy reveal about his thinking?

While a Presidential election may be a zero-sum game, the decision to smear resembles a Prisoner's Dilemma: if neither side goes negative there can be an uplifting campaign of ideas which increases the political capital of both winner and loser. If both sides go negative the electoral results may be a wash but the political process is debased and both candidates have their reputations severely tarnished. Yet if one side manages to broadside the other with little or no effective retaliation a path to victory might be cleared: thus the incentive to defect.

In his now-classic work The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist and game theoritician Robert Axelrod examined a number of competing strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and determined that the most successful and robust, which he called 'Tit for Tat', cooperated initially and then repeated whatever action the other player had taken on the previous turn.

Axelrod identified in Tit for Tat four properties of success. First, it avoided unnecessary conflict by cooperating for as long as possible; second, it was provocable, always responding with swift and equal force to another party's defection; thirdly, it was forgiving and willing to cooperate in spite of past defection; and, finally, it displayed a clarity of behavior that encouraged cooperation and discouraged defection.

We can see this strategy clearly employed in Obama's campaign. Axelrod and Plouffe, Biden and Michelle, Obama's media surrogates and of course Obama himself, all have been reluctant to go on the attack (often to the chagrin of the Kossacks among us). As many times as the gloves have come off, beginning almost a year ago, they've usually quickly gone back on. Throughout Obama has maintained his almost preternatural cool. In debates, in speeches, in rallies and ads, when many lesser politicians might savage their opponents, Obama has generally stood back and kept his eye on issues and his message, where possible, upbeat. Even after the (surprisingly large) Palin/convention bounce in the first half of September Obama's advisers insisted that they were satisfied with internal state polling and registration efforts and refused to go on the offensive. They didn't act like they were in second place because, of course, they weren't.

And yet nobody would accuse his campaign of being gun-shy. They had their response to Clinton's first '3AM' ad literally within hours. They pounced on McCain's Sunni/Shia mix-up. In the past few days they've produced hard-hitting spots on McCain's plan to tax health insurance and accused him of being erratic and out of touch. With the exception of the weeks surrounding Jeremiah Wright's March roll-out they've rarely found themselves on the defensive for long.

This is made all the more remarkable by watching the thirteen-minute Keating Five 'documentary' the campaign released online a few hours ago. Its production values suggest that it's been in the can for a while, but Obama's strategists were careful not to jump the gun. They waited until they were well ahead and McCain's campaign (almost inevitably) resorted to guilt-by-association tactics; now they've struck back hard. The message is clear: you mess with us, you'll get back as good as you give. McCain has as much as or more to lose from this most recent gambit and Obama is now free to bring up the Republican's own salubrious associations without significantly undermining the promise to bring a new kind of politics.

The analogy is imperfect. There is, for example, a clear end point to the game -- election day -- which should, in theory, encourage defection from day one. Obviously there are plenty of other factors which strongly influence campaign tactics. Nevertheless, I'm confident that history will show Obama's strategy to be as winning as it was in Robert Axelrod's study. Perhaps more importantly, it gives us a clue as to the way an Obama administration would work, not just politically but in terms of American Grand Strategy in the wider world. It reflects the kind of pragmatic realism that's attracted conservatives like Andrew Sullivan to Obama's cause. And after eight years of ideological and idealist foreign policy it's exactly what America needs.