I would take campaign retrospectives with a grain of salt. In hindsight, a loser's campaign always seems to have been chaotic, devoid of clear strategic direction, and riven by internal divisions. The campaigns of winners, by contrast, are typically well-functioning operations staffed by cool-headed operatives. There is bound to be some truth to this -- in this case, I think, quite a lot -- but the sources of these narratives are campaign staffers, and when you win, there's no blame to apportion, but if you lose, everyone is scrambling to lay the fault at someone else's feet, so things are likely to look worse than they might have been at the time. In the case of Obama's campaign, you can easily imagine someone building a counter-narrative of chaos around the campaign's lowest points (Wright, Power, Goolsbee-in-Canada, "bitter," etc.), which no doubt would have been done if he had lost.
Generally, these dissections miss two important things -- issues and chance. It's an old criticism, but it remains true that political reporters feel at home when writing about strategy. This is what they're best equipped to do, so strategy becomes the prism through which all events are interpreted. Never mind, say, the candidates' positions on Iraq. On the other hand, there are always a host of conditions and occurrences that are essentially arbitrary and that, if different, could have altered the trajectory of the race. (What if New Hampshire had been a week before Iowa, rather than the other way around?)
This isn't to say that journalists shouldn't write campaign post-mortems. It's just that for a variety of reasons things are always a little tidier -- a little easier to explain -- when you know how the story ends.
Crossposted
