From The Times UK
By Andrew Sullivan

There are two core aspects to fighting wars and winning campaigns: tactics and strategy. Tactics allow you to seize opportunities or maximise your underlying strengths. But strategy matters more for the long haul; without it, you can be brilliantly successful from day to day and yet lose your direction and focus as time goes by.

So far, in the short time that we have had a real general election campaign in the United States, one team has shown some brilliant and daring, if occasionally crude, tactical skills. The other has shown a willingness to forgo sudden decisions or short-term strikes in favour of long-term goals. John McCain has been the tactician and Barack Obama the strategist. McCain has been the risk-taker, Obama the cool conservative.

Last week revealed this contrast again. Obama’s strategic skills have been obvious for quite a while. He is perfectly prepared to hang back in a campaign, to allow attacks to pummel him and to lose news cycles or primaries to a media-centric opponent. Last autumn he refused to shift his message, even as Hillary Clinton’s massive double-digit lead did not budge for months. He focused on a plan based on delegates and caucuses, conceding that the Clintons controlled much of the rest. He took several blows – the Wright flap, the Texas and Ohio primaries, “bitter-gate” – but stuck to his game plan, which had always predicted a very narrow delegate win. And he won, slowly, carefully but unmistakably.

Over the past six weeks, against a Republican opponent this time, the pattern has repeated itself. In my view, Obama lost most of the weeks during July and August after his Berlin speech and before his convention. He allowed McCain to portray him as an inexperienced, celebrity narcissist, constructing a cult of personality on a welter of insubstantial rhetoric. The attacks worked, as they often do. They reached fever pitch last week as rumours of a “Greek temple” hosting the Obama godhead at Denver’s Invesco stadium were leaked to the press.

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