Obama, Rudd, and the Politics of Cool [A response...]

As a quick response to politics.tom ...

I wonder whether Rudd still has that 'game', that slight aura of 'cool' that he managed to scrape together during the campaign. More and more, I'm getting the impression that he ended up with a lot of reflected cool, simply by being cooler than his opponent.




Since coming to office the sense of humour, energy and inventiveness that characterised aspects of the Kevin07 campaign seem to be missing. Some of this is simply the difference between campaigning and governing, between being a challenger and a leader.

Joe Trippi, at a public lecture at Melbourne Uni last night, talked about the ability of the insurgent to be interesting, to take risks in order to grasp power. In his conception it is the the challenger who [even if only through desperation] can afford to be inventive, interesting and different. For Trippi, billed last night as "the man who invented internet politics" this was behind the strategy he planned for Howard Dean in the 2000 US election, and the bottom-up campaign style of Obama.

But as politics.tom points out, Obama hasn't lost it since coming to office - and I can't help but wish Rudd had tried a little harder to hold on to it.