Introduction
George W. Bush took oath of office as the 43rd US president on January 20 2001. This was following a successful campaign against his Democratic Party rival Al Gore. In the Republican Party primaries, Bush managed to garner 90% of the total votes cast to emerge as the Republican Presidential candidate. His success in this can be attributed to a well executed campaign headed by Karl Rove as the chief political advisor/strategist and a convincing campaign platform that won the heart of many voters. The man retained the same political strategy and won again the 2004 presidential elections thereby being sworn in again in office for his second term on 20th January 2005. This time round, he won against Democratic candidate John F. Kerry, then senator of Massachusetts. With the nearing of the end of his term, America welcomed Democratic and Republican Party primary elections. In the various primary campaigns, President Barack Obama, then Senator of Illinois emerged as the man with a record breaking campaign. Assisted by his campaign manager, David Plouffe, he easily won the 2008 presidential election and took oath of office as the 44th president of the US.
Main body
By tracing the campaigns of these two men, one is capable of identifying some major differences in the execution and planning of their campaigns. This paper will thus discuss the main differences between two winning political campaigns.
One very interesting factor is that Bush was soliciting for votes from very rather satisfied citizens after a satisfying term from Bill Clinton, a Democrat. As such, Bush had to be very convincing in his campaign in order to sway voters from a Democratic position to a Republican one. On the other hand Obama had to have the ideas to convince voters to sway from a republican government to a Democratic one. This thus sets the “parent difference” in their campaigns guided by differences in the manifestos of their parties.
During the 2004 campaign period, Bush had stressed on the need to make education affordable. He concentrated much on changing the existing policies such as Medicare also. Obama on the other hand based much of his campaign on criticizing the policies implemented by Bush. As such, his message of change was more appealing and understandable to the masses. On one hand, Bush promised during his campaign to develop more comprehensive policies on existing ones made by his predecessor Bill Clinton. Contrarily, Obama concentrated much of his campaigns on criticizing the Bush administration’s policies instead of developing and marketing his own. While he accused the Bush administration of mismanagement in the government through wrong polices, he never went into details of explaining his polices such as tax cuts during his campaigns but rather just accused the Bush administration of high taxes with him promising lower taxes but no methodology.
Moving away from the differences in policy to finances, we see that the Obama campaign was well funded from donations than any other candidate has ever achieved in the history of the US. On the contrary, Bush had to make use of more limited resources from his campaign fund. A New York Times report showed that during the intense period of the campaigns in 2000, Bush was spending up to $3 million on a weekly basis. With limited funding from the public, Bush had to volunteer around $90 million personal contributions into the campaign fund. This is completely the opposite of what was witnessed in the Obama campaigns where almost excess money was given out by the public that critics highlighted the misuse of money on excessive media advertising which was very high compared to Bush’s advertising expenditure both in 2000 and 2004. In fact, the Obama campaigns had a $7 million weekly budgetary allocation with no case of personal contribution from the candidate.
On the other hand, in the 2004 campaigns, Bush was campaigning on the basis of a proven track record and past experience from his first term in office. This contradicts to Obama’s case, a person who had no previous experience in a high office except for the one term presence in the senate. Bush had had a strong background in leadership in his own right and from family background and hence the public had more reasons to trust him unlike Obama. As such, the Bush campaigns stressed on bringing out the experience in the man and advancing on the progress associated with the Bush family.
As shown above, we see that the Bush and Obama campaigns were very different not only in policy but the basics of political campaigns and politics itself.
References
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Fromkim, J. (2008) Bush vs. Obama. Washington Post. (2009).
Health care reform comes into White House focus, Herald Tribune. (2009). Web.
THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE MONEY; Bush Campaign Rushes to Refill Dwindling Coffer. (2009).
Neuman, J. (2008) In final stretch, it’s Barack Obama vs. George W. Bush… John who?
L.A. Times 11:56 AM PT, 2008.