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"Rock Band: U2" sermon series

"If you don't enjoy highly breezy homiletics you may be put off initially, but from what I've sampled there's some very good stuff once you get past the breeze -- Pastor Bert Crabbe is obviously much better informed about the band than many people who attempt a sermon series based on U2's work (able to quote from Flanagan, for example, and full of funny imitations of Christian comments on the band in the late 80s); further, he has heartfelt points to make that relate to his U2 material more than superficially."

07/27/2008	Pastor Bert Crabbe	Rock Band: U2 - 4
07/20/2008	Pastor Bert Crabbe	Rock Band: U2 - 3
07/13/2008	Pastor Bert Crabbe	Rock Band: U2 - 2
07/06/2008	Pastor Bert Crabbe	Rock Band: U2 - 1

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U2: Saints or sinners?

Transcendent, spiritual, stadium-sized music with the power to change the world or dreary, overblown, bombastic, vacuous, self-satisfied rubbish? On the eve of the re-issue of their first three albums, long-time U2 watchers Stuart Bailie and Hugh Linehan exchange thoughts on the world's biggest band

Dear Stuart

Let me start by attempting to be reasonable.

As a world-domination project, you'd have to accept that U2 have been extraordinarily successful. You can't gainsay their business acumen, or the force of will which took them to the top of the pile at a time when most of their contemporaries shied away from commercial success. And you'd have to give them considerable credit for the fact that they remained based in Ireland, at a time when everyone else was scrambling to get out of the place. And yes, I acknowledge that lots of people love them. But lots of people love golf. There's no accounting . . .

Personally, I can't stand their horrible, overblown, clodhopping music.

Those bombastic stage shows. Those bloody "anthems" (if I want an anthem, I'll go to a football match). For more than 30 years, the U2 sound has been an irritating and persistent bluebottle in the room of my life.

Okay, there were a couple of songs on Boy that were just about tolerable.

And Achtung Baby had some listenable moments. Apart from that, it's been a long, long, dreary ride, from the mulletted histrionics of the early 1980s to the ersatz Americana of Joshua Tree and the Spinal Tappery of Rattle and Hum, on to the hyper-extended post-modern jokes of the 1990s, and the carefully calculated snooze-rock of the past decade or so.

I've tried to be open-minded. Having avoided them like the plague for decades, I went to one of the Slane concerts a few years ago, and to Croke Park more recently. On both occasions, all my worst prejudices were confirmed: vacuous, self-satisfied stadium rock garnished with trite sloganeering. Never again.

And there's something creepy about how coverage of U2 in Ireland resembles the sort of political journalism you'd find in the softer sort of totalitarian state. Their doings are charted dutifully - a few darts may be allowed at their pomposity - but is there a popular music critic in the country who has come out to declare that he/she can't stand them? Can it be that none of them has noticed how rubbish U2's music is? Over to you.

Best wishes, Hugh

Dear Hugh

Interesting that you believe there's some kind of media conspiracy at home which forbids criticism of U2. I would argue the contrary, that Irish hacks are forever trying to score points and to raise their petty reputations by tilting at Bono. Occasionally, the likes of Eamonn McCann may hit the target, but mostly you get the creaking jibes and a few local observations, when the baby photos are fetched out and the debate gets hopelessly parochial.

A few years ago, I was asked to write something for a Dublin broadsheet about the band. A secondary brief from the editor revealed that he wanted dirt, dishonour and disparagement. His suggestions were lazily conceived and entirely motivated by begrudgery. What is it with your city? Sorry pal, but U2 are an astonishing band.

They did in fact deliver the worst gig I have ever witnessed - the Popmart launch in Las Vegas, 1997, when they combined an unfinished album with an over-cooked production. It sucked so badly that I would pay huge sums just to revisit the awful details. Conversely, I have seen a handful of U2 performances when Bono has willed something exceptional out of the band, his audience and his own modest proportions. On such a night, he can summon up the transcendent - a place out of linear time and rational thought. Van Morrison can take you higher into that place, but U2 are still looking for different ways to get there. When they fail, it's mostly forgivable.

The late Bill Graham once remarked that Bono, like Bob Geldof and Phil Lynott, was a tireless overachiever. He needed those qualities to rise out of Dublin, a city that lacked a music industry, that was primarily grey and dowdy - that couldn't even muster up a decent punk band. Bono and Gavin Friday went off and created an imagined village, a place that celebrated the odd and the uncomfortable. They gave themselves peculiar names and took mime lessons. Their early songs were studies in innocence, ecstasy and corruption, which is why Boy still sounds like an immensely bold effort.

Rock'n'roll bands tend to be random blooms that wither quickly. The survival of U2 is a fascinating aspect. Edge has been able to parlay with Bono's flitting imagination, allowing his own art to prosper. Larry has a signature rattle on the snare and, wisely, Adam plays the straight guy. It works perfectly. And yes, they have a moral dimension that keeps their singer motivated and makes those stadium-sized platforms a necessary place to deliver the pitch. What's not to admire?

Yours, Stuart

Dear Stuart

Your point about Dublin's inferiority to points north and south when it comes to musical creativity is undoubtedly true. But I don't see what it has to do with the subject at hand. Tilting at Bono is indeed a minor national sport, but that's also off the subject, which I thought was supposed to be the music.

I'm intrigued but not particularly surprised that disliking the U2 canon is seen as a sign of begrudgery and moral turpitude. Does that only apply to people from Dublin, or is it universal? As I've already said, I admire their will to success, and I acknowledge the contribution they've made to this country. But I'm sorry - what you see as transcendence, I hear as bathos. What started out as a mildly interesting post-punk band rapidly became a grandiloquent exercise in religiosity as mass entertainment. Then it got worse.

And call me bigoted, but as far as I'm concerned, anyone who sets out to change the world by taking mime lessons has already taken a wrong turn in life.

Yours, Hugh

Dear Hugh

Let's talk about spirituality, the engine that drives the U2 machine. In the early days, it was viewed as a freakish aspect with no place in punk rock and the era that followed. I think it's fascinating that Bono, Larry and Edge were informed by charismatic Christianity and the Shalom group in particular. In the early days, U2's friends in the media were protective of this aspect. They feared that the cynics would scoff, and in time they did.

The second album, October, found Bono at his most preachy and the songs at their least interesting. Soon after, the band broke from their religious community and have been much more ambivalent since then. Achtung Baby is the classic expression of faith in turmoil, and I think you appreciate this.

I also admire the themes of renewal and jubilation of All That You Can't Leave Behind. While rock'n'roll has just about used up all its fuel, Bono has put the accent on one last positive push, allied to collective responsibility. The spiritual notion of unconditional love - agape - has something to do with this.

Bono's lyrics are rich with the Psalms and the Gospels. He uses characters such as Judas and Noah to creative ends. Coming from an island where dogmatic religion has been used to disgraceful ends, I'm wary of any form of Bible-thumping. But Bono, like Nick Cave, can still make the old book sing.

Yours, Stuart

Dear Stuart

You may have helped me put my finger on one of the reasons why the whole thing doesn't work for me: it's not the aspiration towards transcendence, it's the literalness with which that aspiration is couched. I have some sympathy for the friends of the band who tried to conceal the Shalom connection, because in the tribal wars of the late 1970s/early 1980s, it would have been used to give them a ferocious kicking. But there's no escaping the fact that at times there is a strong whiff of the happy-clappy Folk Mass about U2.

Am I applying a double standard? Possibly. I may be an atheist, but I've never really had a problem with the overt religiousness of, say, the Wailers or Al Green. That said, for me there's a world of difference between Nick Cave's Old Testament Gothick (which teeters precariously but productively on the brink of self-parody) and Bono's preachiness.

And yes, one of the reasons Achtung Baby works better is because he goes over to the Dark Side a bit more, albeit by plundering other people's back catalogues (but hey, where would any of us be without plagiarism?).

For me, rock'n'roll's fuel tank ran dry a long time ago, and the world is all the better for it. I've never bought into the notion of rock music as some sort of redemptive act of mass consciousness - the concept is creepy. The best stuff has always been awkward, angular and beautiful in a way that goes against the grain of whatever the received wisdom of the age happens to be. You might argue that U2 do all of those things. But the very virtues which you see in the later work - the positivity, the unconditional love, etc - remind me of something on the Hallmark Channel.

Yours, Hugh

Dear Hugh

We recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast, and of a lesser-known event that copper-fastened the politics. I'm talking about that May 1998 Waterfront Hall gig which featured U2 and Ash, with David Trimble and John Hume. The two politicians had never shaken hands in public, but it took a rock gig and Bono to make it happen. In a week that support for the agreement was dropping off to a terminal degree, this symbolic moment swung the polls by three per cent and won the day.

That's one instance when Bono has been able to make a pragmatic difference. It almost wipes out the memory of Sunday Bloody Sunday. Bono is interested in what happens up the road. Few other acts from the Republic have shown any such concern. Therefore we've had songs such as Please, Peace On Earth and Staring at the Sun to document the changing times. In Belfast, the song One always resonates, a rogue song that mutates according to the emotions of the occasion.

I'm not an expert on African issues, but my guess is that Bono has given it socks, and that the politicians have often abused his concern and his proposed solutions. There are gaping contradictions in his liberality, but we probably all have a few stray lepers in the head.

Yours, Stuart

Dear Stuart

I have serious reservations about the dichotomy between U2's shiny Dutch tax shelter and Bono's lectures to the rest of us about why our governments should raise their aid budgets as a proportion of their expenditure (funded for the most part as it is by the poor, tax-unsheltered masses). But I don't have any great problem with the decent positions the band has taken over the years.

But yes, the fact that Bono has been prepared to engage politically with some of the big issues is no bad thing, and that he hasn't minded making a spectacle of himself in the process stands to his credit.

Yours, Hugh

Dear Hugh

There's a lot of U2 stuff we may never agree on. Where I get a thrill from the Big Music, you hear a charmless ballyhoo. My radar is veering towards the mystic, but you suspect a vacuum. My heart tells me that Bono is working to the dictates of his conscience, but you may suspect the disease of conceit.

Two thoughts to sign off with. Firstly, we probably wouldn't have the interest to sustain this argument about another such band. That's an indication of U2's cultural presence. Secondly, if we ever got to sit together with the band's collected works, we'd probably agree on a dozen songs that are incontestably great. We're one, but not the same.

Yours, Stuart

• Stuart Bailie is a music journalist, BBC broadcaster and a former Assistant Editor of NME. He is currently chief executive of Oh Yeah, a dedicated music centre in Belfast. www.ohyeahbelfast.com

• Hugh Linehan is Features Editor of The Irish Times and former editor of The Ticket

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Iraq in Review: Is there anything left of the antiwar Left’s criticisms of the Iraq war?

Many commentators on Iraq had no strong ideas about the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein, but often predicated their evolving views on the basis of whether we were perceived as winning or losing — and later made the necessary and often fluid adjustments. So in light of the changing pulse of the battlefield, it is time once again to examine carefully a few of the now commonplace critiques of the Iraq war.

1. We took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan by going into Iraq, thereby allowing the Taliban to regain the advantage.

Any two-theater war can result in less resources allotted to one of the two fronts. But such multiple-front wars, whether in World War II or the Cold War, have never stymied the United States military. More importantly, if we are truly in a global war against Islamic extremists — as al Qaeda itself reminded us when it announced that Iraq was the key front in their jihad against infidel crusaders — then the problem is not necessarily fighting the insurgents in Iraq, but whether it is a theater conducive to our aims and resources — and can be won.

In other words, Iraq simply upped the ante of a larger war, promising disaster if we lost, and enormous advantages if we won. Progress in Iraq is already having positive effects in Afghanistan, where an experienced American counterinsurgency force is fighting extremists who know that their kindred are on the verge of losing militarily and politically in Iraq, and are afraid that the same bitter calculus now applies to them.

In the first years, the odds were with the terrorists — given indigenous Muslim local populations, the hostile neighborhood of a Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and anti-war fervor at home and abroad. But once the U.S. military defeated al Qaeda in Anbar, the population turned on Islamic terrorists, and the elected Iraqi government gained stature, then Islamists in and out of Iraq suffered a terrible defeat.

We learned to fight a war of counterinsurgency and win hearts and minds far from home; they lost an insurgency — and with it the support of the local and once naturally sympathetic Muslim population. Note that suddenly journalists, intelligence analysts, and politicians are struck by al Qaeda’s implosion, as the Muslim street turns on radical Islamists, who themselves are torn apart by internal ideological schisms.

While many critics remain too heavily invested in antiwar positions staked out between 2003–7 to cite the war as a contributory cause, the obvious catalyst for al Qaeda’s fiasco is its terrible performance in Iraq. Remember, if Americans adjusted their own support for the war on their perceptions of the success or failure of the U.S. military, why wouldn’t millions in the Middle East do the same with radical Islamists like al Qaeda, whose fortunes on the battlefield have only gone from bad to worse?

2. Bush lied about the war and entered it under the false circumstances of fears of WMD and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda.

Bush erred in focusing on WMDs when the Senate and House approved over 20 writs for war, all of them as valid now as they were in October 2002. That said, it is hard to find a single prominent congressional critic of the war who has made the case that the administration itself altered intelligence information, doctored reports, or had substantially different assessments than those provided to Congress or offered up by foreign governments. The reason recent critics of the war such as Sen. Rockefeller are utterly unconvincing in their allegations of administration malfeasance is that the record shows that they themselves had access to the same information, and often outdid the President in their prewar rhetoric and saber-rattling about Saddam.

But again, the battlefield, rightly or wrongly, colors these controversies. In a world in which there is no longer a Saddam Hussein (who would now have had his hands on trillions of dollars in oil revenue), a Libyan WMD program, and Dr. Khan’s nuclear export business, the proliferation issue is becoming less contentious. (If one were to believe the National Intelligence Estimate, Iran ceased its weapons-grade nuclear track opportunely right after Saddam’s capture). Since 2003, thousands of Islamic extremists and al Qaeda’s notables have been killed, and the organization routed and discredited; it is hard to see how Iraq has not had positive effects in curbing proliferation and damaging the organization that was responsible for 9/11. Moreover, disputes about Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s post-Afghanistan odyssey, assorted terrorists in Saddam’s Baghdad in 2003, or al Qaeda in Kurdistan during Saddam’s rule become less contentious with the knowledge that al Qaeda, between 2003–7, tried to win, and then lost, Iraq.

3. Mistakes in Iraq were legion and irreversible.

It is better to see such controversies in terms of long- and short-term consequences. Examine the two most discussed — the Iraqi army and troop levels. Disbanding the Iraqi army without providing temporary financial support for young males with military skills was disastrous. Yet in the long-term, building a new army without tens of thousands of hard-core Baathists — as was true of the de-Nazification program with German army in 1946–7 — offered a greater chance for eventual success.

Did we send too few troops? Apparently we had enough manpower to take out Saddam, which we did brilliantly in three weeks — a force determined partly in reaction to the first Gulf War, when current critics then alleged that we had needlessly sent over far too many troops, both our own and those of the unwieldy coalition.

Evaluating the surge is more complex, since in a vast theater the size of Iraq, an increase of a little more than 20 percent in troop strength probably does not per se win wars. We forget now that many supporters of the surge were calling for 80,000-100,000 more troops in 2004–7. The 30,000 troops was a compromise figure, given our commitments elsewhere.

As important as the 30,000 reinforcements were, just as critical were three other factors associated with it: a signal to both Iraqi friends and enemies that we were staying on and fighting to win; a radical change in tactics from counterterrorism based in compounds to counterinsurgency intended to protect the local populations from terrorist reprisals; and the appointment of Gen. Petraeus as senior commander in Iraq who won the confidence of the Iraqis; silenced critics at home; and energized his officers on the ground with a new commitment to victory.

Again, there were tragic mistakes — focusing on WMDs as a sole casus belli, the pullback from the first siege of Fallujah, and bellicose Presidential rhetoric coupled with operational tentativeness — all of them regrettable, none of them fatal or comparable to the disastrous foul-ups of World War II, Korea, or Vietnam.

4. Democratization was naïve and bound to fail, given the realities of the tribal Middle East.

In fact, the promotion of constitutional government, however clumsy our efforts in 2003–4, was the only chance the U.S. had after the fall of Saddam Hussein to stabilize the country and hurt our terrorist enemies. No development infuriated al Qaeda more than U.S. support for elections and a constitutional Iraq that undercut the slander of a 21st-century crusade to annex the ancient caliphate, and invested the Iraqi people themselves in the fight against terrorism for their own future. Iraq is not comparable to the Hamas plebiscite, in that its elections were in concert with a ratified constitution and a result of an American-led effort to depose Saddam Hussein.

One of the most surreal developments of the war has been the Left’s caricature of American idealism and our support for a democratic Iraqi government — a brave group of reformers who have been more tarred and demonized by American politicians than have been their al Qaeda enemies.

Should we see a President Obama, and he realizes that Iraq is working, expect the Left to cease its criticisms of neocon democracy fantasies, and instead adopt Iraq’s democracy as yet more proof of Obama’s hope-and-change idealism in foreign policy.

5. The real winner of the war was Iran.

In the short-term, yes — Iran benefited from the removal of its traditional enemy, Baathist Iraq, and from the initial pan-Islamist rallying against the U.S. presence in Iraq. But in the long-term, should Iraq succeed, nothing will be more destabilizing to Iran than to have a free society next door, where Shiites say, write, and read what they wish, and do so in pluralistic fashion. Again, the ante has been raised. Should Iranian-backed militias lose in Iraq, the theocracy will have suffered a terrible defeat, at a time it diverts precious oil dollars to failed military adventures while its silenced population rations gas. Iran’s theocratic government must either incite a U.S. preemptive strike, or destroy Iraqi democracy — or it is doomed.

6. President Bush’s presidency was ruined in Iraq.

If we were to lose the war, then yes. But should we win, should a constitutional government stabilize, should al Qaeda keep unraveling, and should the hiatus of terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad continue, then historians will rank Bush in Trumanesque terms: a similarly orphaned presidency that ended disliked — even as it crafted a strategy to defeat global Islamic terror by taking the fight to the heart of the Middle East, while establishing proof of America’s good intentions by fostering constitutional government that offered Iraqis an alternative other than the usual Middle East non-choice of theocracy or autocracy.

Bush was terribly damaged by a series of poor spokesmen, his own bellicose soundbites of 2002–3, a series of tell-all defections of former intimates and officials, and an inability to cut U.S. consumption of imported petroleum. But that said, years from now, historians will look at the record and the results, not the present rhetoric, and his legacy could well be — “He kept us safe.”

7. Our military is nearly ruined and the war was never worth the cost.

We have paid a high price for our efforts with thousands of dead and wounded, and billions spent. But if the deterioration of al Qaeda continues, America is kept safe, and the Middle East at last has some alternative to the dismal autocratic norm — one that curbs future oil-fed extremism — then Iraq will be the most important American achievement since the end of the Cold War. If we lose or quit, and Iraq devolves along the lines of the badlands of Pakistan, then, yes, the losses were not worth it.

For all the wear and tear on our military, recruitments are up, we have developed the most sophisticated and experienced anti-insurgent force in the world, and we are just beginning to shake-up the entire military by promoting a new generation of brilliant officers who came of age in the cauldron of Iraq.

In the end, the U.S. military has achieved the near impossible by removing the worst government in the Middle East and fostering what has a real chance to become by far the best. In some sense, whether Iraq was worth the high cost depends on whether one thinks the present-day liberal and humane democracies in Europe, Japan, and Korea were likewise worth the past, and far more terrible, price that America paid in blood and treasure to secure their enduring freedom.

'Wall-E,' Pixar's surprisingly political postmodern masterpiece

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, July 13, 2008

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.

Conservatives love to complain about Hollywood liberalism, but most of the political films that shuffle through the cineplexes are standard-issue leftie hackwork that neither persuade nor succeed. You can see them coming a mile away. And then you get something like Wall-E, Pixar's postmodern masterpiece, which is one of the most subversive films I've ever seen.

But get this: If anything, its politics are traditionalist conservative (as distinct from whatever it is the Republican Party is peddling these days). To be fair, that label is too reductive. Wall-E goes much deeper than contemporary politics. It's a brilliant Aristotelian, even agrarian, critique of modernity, and the fate of man under consumerist technopoly. It's also a lot of fun. (Warning: Spoilers follow).Set in the distant dystopian future, Wall-E tells the story of a grubby little robot, the title character, left behind to help clean up Earth. Humanity, having trashed the planet with junk from its over-consumption, has lit out for deep space aboard a luxury space liner called the Axiom. When the film opens, Wall-E is plugging away on a five-year plan to clean the lifeless planet and make it fit for human habitation again; it has taken seven centuries.

Lovesick Wall-E finds his way to the Axiom chasing Eve, a sentry robot who, like Noah's dove, delivers a newfound Earth seedling to the Axiom's captain, who in turn is supposed to lead a recolonization of the planet. But why should humanity return? In their long exile, they've grown extremely fat and happy aboard the Axiom, which was provided for them by the quasi-governmental BuyNLarge corporation.

There is no material need or desire that BNL doesn't meet. BNL's sophisticated technology ferries the obese humans around the ship on floating chairs (they've lost the ability to walk), feeds them junk and keeps them entertained. The people, strangers to one another, have outsourced the raising of their children to the company-run system, which teaches them propaganda that advances BNL's interests.

These infantilized people have lost all cultural memory, having become perfect – and perfectly controllable – consumers. They are wards of a therapeutic state, of a self-chosen soft tyranny that Tocqueville called "democratic despotism."

Their idea of politics is to order their collective life around satisfying individual desires. Having no memory of the past, they've lost touch with what it means to be human. Their lack of consciousness of their own predicament is their tragedy. It's this spotless pseudo-Eden that the plant Eve carries within her, as well as her dirty little friend Wall-E, threatens to destroy.

Technology, the film's ambiguous villain, allowed for the development of Earth's consumer economy, which gave humanity the opportunity to indulge boundlessly. It also created the fantastic spaceship that allowed humanity to escape the planet it ruined by denying its own limits.

But technology also shaped humans' consciousness. It led them to break with nature and see technology as something that delivered them from work and struggle. As humanity became more technologically sophisticated, the film argues, they became ever more divorced from nature, and their own nature. They developed a culture and society that was mechanistic and artificial, as opposed to organic and natural.

Wall-E contends that what makes us fully human is cultivating our own deepest nature by working, and working together. In a stunningly iconic image at the film's end, the Tree of Life on the new earth grows out of an old work boot. Humanity renews the face of the Earth through its own labor, by people taking responsibility for themselves instead of being passive consumers coddled by the corporate welfare state.

In a twist in the usual sci-fi formula, the machines in Wall-E don't turn on man, but liberate man from enslavement to ... machines. Paradoxically, then, Pixar's techno-whiz-bang fable is a whimsical but full-frontal attack on modernity. Philosophical modernity begins, in part, with Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher of science who declared that the proper end of politics is "the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate."

But as the older Aristotelian tradition contends, nature is to be husbanded, not conquered. Man is embedded within nature and cannot know himself outside its laws and logic. Human nature withers without struggle, without cultivation, without companionship, without community.

Wall-E opens up the discerning viewer's imagination, inviting him to consider what authentic personal and communal human goods we have lost as we've gained prosperity and mastery over nature – and how we might get them back.

Wall-E is the kind of movie that presents planting a garden as a revolutionary act. One way or another, we're all living on the Axiom. Wall-E is a call to wake up, stand up and abandon ship.

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.

John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account

These are the never-before-seen last known photos of Sen. John McCain's Hoa Lo prison cell, images that prove that even after being cleaned up for an American historical filmmaker, the terror of the Hanoi Hilton is real. Debra Watkins, who took the pictures and video in 1993 and 1994 before this and other areas of the century-old prison were destroyed, provided them to Whispers as part of a story that appears in the Washington Whispers column. Watkins did volumes of research before traveling to Hanoi, sparked by reports the government planned to rip down most of the facility. She was able to find McCain's cell which she says is pictured in the above photos. The first shows an official opening the cell. You can clearly see old locks used presumably to hold leg irons and other torture implements on the inside. The second shot shows the inside of McCain's cell and the leg iron contraption Watkins believes he was tortured with. In 1973, McCain wrote a first-person account of his five-year captivity for U.S. News, read it here.

Barack's Brilliant Ground Game

For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.

For starters, Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.

AP

Barack Obama

Sen. Obama's organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille's plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros's 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran "virtual precincts," using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.

The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP's "microtargeting" program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help. Another Obama adaptation of a 2004 Bush campaign technique is a stepped-up, rapid response effort. Charges do not go unanswered, the campaign stays relentlessly on the offense, using every channel of communication.

The Obama campaign has also copied the Bush strategy of broadening the general election map. In 2000, the Bush effort targeted not just the traditional battlegrounds, but also West Virginia (last won by the GOP in an open race for the presidency in 1928), Tennessee (Al Gore's home), Arkansas (Bill Clinton's home), Washington and Oregon.

Hoping for a breakthrough somewhere, Mr. Obama also wants to force John McCain to play defense. So in addition to traditional battleground states, he's running TV ads and organizing in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota. And where Mr. Bush targeted Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and education voters to narrow Democratic margins, Mr. Obama is going after evangelicals, veterans and values voters with ads and outreach to trim the GOP's margin.

There are problems, however. Mr. Obama's people admit they want to sucker Mr. McCain into spending money. To be successful, a bluff must be credible. In places like Nebraska and North Dakota, Mr. Obama can't rely on local issues – like Mr. Bush did with coal in West Virginia in 2000 – to unexpectedly win a critical state. Organization alone won't suffice. And putting Obama dollars into Texas, for example, to help win five state House seats may simply cause Texan Republicans – not Mr. McCain – to raise money and work harder to counter.

Democrats don't have the same large volunteer pool the GOP does with its Federated GOP Women, College and Young Republicans, and local party committees. In the primaries, Mr. Obama instead moved hordes of volunteers from state to state. It was a brilliant tactic, but Nov. 4 is different. The volunteers adequate for primaries held over five months will simply not be enough to compete in 51 separate elections (all 50 states plus the District of Columbia) all on one day.

Mr. Obama's biggest problem is that when it comes to substance, he's following the playbook of a Republican other than George W. Bush. In 2000, Mr. Bush won the general election on the same themes and positions as in the primaries, including compassionate conservatism, the faith-based initiative, tax cuts and Social Security reform. There was no repudiation of past positions, no chameleon-like shifts in positions.

Instead of consistency, Mr. Obama has followed Richard Nixon's advice, to cater to his party's extreme in the primaries and then move aggressively to the middle for the fall.

In the primary, Mr. Obama supported pulling out of Iraq within 16 months, called the D.C. gun ban constitutional, backed the subjection of telecom companies to expensive lawsuits for cooperating in the terror surveillance program, opposed welfare reform, pledged to renegotiate Nafta, disavowed free trade and was strongly against the death penalty in all cases. But in the past few weeks, Mr. Obama has reversed course on all of these, discarding fringe liberal views for relentlessly centrist positions. He also flip-flopped on accepting public financing and condemning negative ads from third party groups, like unions.

By taking Nixon's advice, Mr. Obama is assuming such dramatic reversals will somehow avoid voter scrutiny. But people are watching closely, and by setting a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions, Mr. Obama may be risking his reputation for truthfulness. A candidate's credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.