I was thinking the other day about the poor state of the Obama Administration and how they’d managed to get so much done and yet only lose ground in the process. The problem, as I see it, is the difference between strategy and tactics when it applies to a military campaign.

Strategy is the overall scope of your battle plan. You will take that hill, then push on to the city below. Tactics are the decisions you make in battle. How will you deploy your troops? How will you send them up the hill? Should you use airpower or artillery?

Obama has a master strategy here–fix a whole bunch of problems that have needed fixing for a while, and fix them permanently. The problem is that politics is entirely about tactics, the daily ebb and flow of the battle. And they’re getting outmaneuvered on all sides by the political Right, which is fewer in numbers and shoots themselves in the foot every chance they get, but has managed to keep the Obama Administration so harried they fired a USDA executive last week without stopping to consider the story’s origin or veracity.

What does this have to do with Mayor McGinn though? Well, he has the same problem. He has a strategy, but he lacks the tactics to get it done, especially in the face of a City Council emboldened by having a political novice in the executive’s chair.

Think about his continual sputtering about the Viaduct. He does have a strategy, and it’s not a bad one. He’s pulling from the playbook of Fabius Maximus, the great Roman general who was maligned for his strategy against Hannibal. Fabius knew that Hannibal was a tactical genius: At Trasimene Lake, the Carthaginians slaughtered a far larger Roman army because Hannibal used the landscape and surprise to force the Romans out of their battle plan, rendering classical Roman tactics completely useless. Fabius knew Rome could not fight Hannibal’s war.

Instead, he took a far different approach, one of guerrilla attacks and scorched earth that left the Carthaginians only holding the ground they stood on and without enough supplies to go on. The plan worked–as the food rations shrank, Hannibal considered whether it was time to board the ships and head back south.

But the plan did not sell well at home for Fabius. He was derided in public and slurred as “Cunctator”–the Delayer. Ground down by souring public sentiment and young upstarts wanting to take it to Hannibal, Fabius would lay down the mantle of dictator a year later. Within a few months 80,000 Roman soliders would die at Cannae, a battle that’s still studied in military colleges for the genius tactics of Hannibal. Fabius was restored to honor, and his strategy–the Fabian strategy–has been used countless times over the last two millenia.

And that’s precisely what McGinn is doing. It’s a Fabian strategy. The longer he can delay on the tunnel plan, the more likely the tunnel plan will die. [Ed: Today’s McGinn quote: “It appears that Council is doing everything possible to prevent a public vote. Yet they still have not dealt with the underlying issue–who will pay for overruns given the $2.4 billion cap in state law. Until the state law is changed, Seattle remains at risk of paying cost overruns.”]

And all of us know this–the Fabian strategy seems to be how politics works in Seattle. But there are differences, mind you. A large majority of Seattleites don’t want the city to be on the hook for cost overruns, which suggests that McGinn’s strategy, while disjointed and obstructionist, would ultimately work.

At the same time, though, McGinn has no exit strategy for the Viaduct, other than going with a parkway. And then what? I’m not opposed to a parkway, but it will require a great deal of work, and expensive work at that, to improve “through-puts” on I-5 as he gave as his alternative last year.

The City Council is going to move forward on the tunnel whether McGinn is onboard or not. McGinn will keep up his Fabian strategy for as long as he can. Ultimately, though, even Fabius ended up being wrong, standing opposed to Scipio‘s plan to take the war to Carthage’s doorstep. That gamut ended with Hannibal’s defeat at Zama and a decisive victory for Rome, leaving it alone as the major power in the central Mediterranean. What if the tunnel is deemed a success in the long term? Then McGinn the Environmentalist Savior becomes McGinn the Cunctator, yet another boulder in the road and the epitome of everything wrong with politics in Seattle.

Politics are tactics. Treating politics as strategy only works if you’re not the one leading the troops.