I wrote the other day (in a post that was reprinted by RealClearPolitics) about the motives of the Clinton campaign and the Right-Wing Noise Machine in inflating a few ambiguous remarks made by Barack Obama about rural voters in Pennsylvania into a major feeding frenzy. But now it appears every political writer on earth feels constrained to use “Bitter-gate” to expound on some Big Theory or other about elitism or the future of the Democratic Party.
Consider Michael Lind’s vast article in Salon today. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mr. Lind, let me just say that the two adjectives his work most often conjures up are “brilliant” and “cranky.” He is indeed one erudite dude, but he has chosen to deploy his intelligence and learning in the obsessive service of various Big Revisionist Theories, invariably served up in a tone of anticipatory anger towards the fools and knaves he knows will mock or ignore him (he was briefly a Charter Blogger at TPMCafe, but bowed out quickly when he predictably got barbecued in the comment threads).
One of Michael’s big obsessions is the ethnic dimension of political allegiances. He once wrote an entire book that was ostensibly “about” George W. Bush, but was actually an elaborate and passionately rendered reinterpretation of Texas political history through the lens of the ethnic rivalry between Germans and Scotch-Irish (the Scotch-Irish were the villians of this tale, as in much of Lind’s earlier work; that makes it even odder that he’s now treating this evil group as part of a virtuous anti-Yankee coalition essential to Democratic victory).
Given his ethnic preoccupations, it didn’t particularly surprise me to learn that Lind’s take on “Bitter-gate” is to associate Barack Obama with the sneering elitism and moralism of the Greater New England Yankee diaspora, whose landing-points across the country more-or-less coincide with those lily-white states where Obama has done especially well in the nominating contest. And this association, he says, is politically disastrous.

The question, then, is not why Greater New England progressives would vote for Obama. He presses all their age-old buttons: opposition to war, nonpartisan reform. The question is why anyone would assume that such a candidate would appeal to other Democratic constituencies, other than blacks (voting in this case for the favorite-son candidate).
Indeed, the Greater New England moralist culture has been rejected by practically every other substantial subculture in the United States: Irish-Americans in Northeastern cities, Appalachian white Baptists and now, evidently, Mexican-Americans. And this has always been the case.

So: the unwilliingness to vote for Barack Obama by some working-class white voters isn’t about race and isn’t about Hillary Clinton, really. It’s about the instinctive knowledge of these voters that Obama represents the hated New England ethic, which his “bitter” comments simply illustrated.
Lord-a-mercy.
As it happens, the Greater New England Theory is hardly novel. It was one element of Kevin Phillips’ ethnic-based analysis of political trends in The Emerging Republican Majority, nearly forty years ago. Lind’s version of the theory superimposes an ethnic take on the famous “wine-track, beer-track” distinction that is so often used to distinguish the followings of Democratic presidential candidates
The problem with Lind’s exposition, and many others that share its fundamental premise if not its ethnic bitterness–if you will excuse the term–is that it endows one group of voters with almost supernatural political power not necessarily justified by their size or strategic importance. Sure, Obama’s relative weakness–at least in Democratic primaries–among white working-class voters in Appalachia or heavily Catholic areas would be a problem for him in winning states like Pennsylvania and Ohio in a general election. But Hillary Clinton’s relative weakness in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa would be a problem as well. And you know what? It’s really not all that accurate to assign whole states to ethnic categories. One of the successful non-Yankee Democrats Lind cites as a role model was a guy named Jimmy Carter from my home state of Georgia. His appeal to southern regional pride helped him a lot, not only in the South, but in southern-inflected areas of the midwest. But he damn near lost Ohio, and the presidency, because of his relative weakness in the heavily Yankeefied Western Reserve area of the state.
A vote is a vote; the Democratic Party is at present a coalition party that includes both “wine-track” and “beer-track” voters, and Yankees and non-Yankees. Even if Michael Lind is entirely right about the ethnic underpinnings of the current Democratic nominating contest, attributing moral or political superiority to one element of the coalition at the expense of another represents exactly the sort of contemptuous type-casting that Obama has been accused of in “Bitter-gate.”
It is time, folks, for Democrats and the chattering classes to calm themselves about the Greater Meaning of this or that demographic group’s preference for one candidate or the other in the nominating contest. Lest we forget, the whole “identity-based” pattern of voting we have seen is to a large part attributable to the scant policy differences separating Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton, and also to the historic nature of both candidacies. The idea that “losing” groups are going to migrate en masse to John McCain in November is not only a dubious proposition, but one that Democrats should fight like sin. Burn off all the chaff of “analysis,” and the fact remains that Barack Obama has a much better idea (as Mark Schmitt usefully points out today) of how to help those “bitter” working-class white voters than John McCain, while Hillary Clinton offers a much better prospect for the reforms desired by “wine-track” voters than any Republican, including McCain.
The endlessly discussed idea that either Democratic candidate represents one element of our coalition at the definitive expense of the other is frankly the best and perhaps only hope for a Republican victory in November. The persistence of these manichean assumptions about our candidates, whether delivered as horse-race analysis or as Big Theories like Lind’s, are beginning to make me feel–yes–bitter.

What’s the point of giving a candidate’s spouse a place on the campaign website for his or her favorite recipes? It’s a tradition that I just don’t understand or appreciate.
It seems fraught with peril. What if voters don’t enjoy your food? What if it makes them sick? What if an intern steals a couple recipes from the Food Network, adds them to your website verbatim, and calls them family favorites?
Turns out that last thing is exactly what just happened to John McCain:

This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network’s site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain’s campaign site.

At least 7 recipes that the campaign once said belonged Cindy McCain were taken from celebrity chefs (including 30 Minute Meal star Rachel Ray who — bless her heart — immediately invited the Republican candidate and his wife onto her show). The unpaid intern fingered with the plagiarism has apparently been “dealt with” by the McCain higher-ups.
This is obviously only a scandal at the height of silly season. (Let’s just see if FarfalleGate gets the same kind of media play as BitterGate!)
Still, it does allow me a chance to reiterate a point about the Internet — Authenticity matters more than anything else.
If you simply must share the recipe for the candidate’s favorite apple cobbler, for the love of Julia Child, make sure that it contains a list of ingredients that has been in your family since well before Mario Batali got on television.
For instance, way back in the fall of last year, John Edwards organized a little fundraiser for his birthday using his mother’s pecan pie. Joe Trippi and Jonathan Prince made a little video about it. That was cute.
But if even your interns won’t invest the time into doing this kind of thing the right way, then there is just no reason to include a culinary corner on your website. Because let’s face it, the fate of a restless nation does not turn on a passion fruit mousse.

Apparently the media image of Pennsylvania as the emblematic “white working-class” state is somewhat over-stated, according to William H. Frey and Ruy Teixeira in their “The Political Geography of Pennsylvania: Not Another Rust Belt State,” a Brookings Policy Brief published this month. This is not to say that white workers are not a large and important constituency, explain the authors. But the tagging of PA as a “rust belt” state is highly simplistic, given the surging populations of minorities — especially Hispanics — along with white college graduates, in the eastern and south central regions of PA.
Teixeira and Frey point out that white workers are still very much a thriving demographic in the Harrisburg and Allentown areas. But they also note that a growing “upwardly mobile” segment of the white working class, defined as having ‘some college education’ is an increasingly influential constituency that tends to favor Democratic candidates. The GOP still dominates in the declining western part of the state, but the east is blue, lead by the Philly ‘burbs and has delivered state-wide wins for Democrats in the last four presidential elections.
The Brookings report provides the best demographic analysis of the PA battleground yet published and paints an encouraging picture for Dems looking toward November. This one is required reading for reporters who like to know what they are writing about, as well as the Clinton and Obama campaigns

At the height of the Clinton impeachment, a pair of software entrepreneurs designed a website which hosted a one-sentence petition asking Congress to “immediately censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country.” The couple — Joan Blades and Wes Boyd — then put a link to the site in an email and sent the message to fewer than 100 friends. Somehow, their message struck a chord with the nation’s progressive psyche, and had an impact far greater than anyone could have foreseen.
Within weeks, the couple’s petition had more than 250,000 signatures. Boyd bought an ad in the New York Times and began to use the website and its list of email addresses to organize volunteers to lobby against impeachment. The list of supporters continued to grow, and after the impeachment proceedings sputtered to a close, Blades and Boyd turned their energy to new causes, like campaign finance reform.
Then, in the wake of September 11th, a twenty one year old kid named Eli Pariser working for a nonprofit in Boston built a new website and hosted another petition — calling on world leaders to use “moderation and restraint in responding to the recent terrorist attacks.” Pariser sent an email with a link to the site to his friends and family, just as Boyd and Blades had done three years earlier. And just as with the Move On petition, something tipped — within weeks, Pariser had collected signatures from more than 500,000 people. Wes Boyd was one of those who saw the website. He immediately recognized the political potential of this peace movement and asked Pariser to join forces.
At that point, MovOn.org became something entirely new in politics — mobilizing millions of volunteers with every email; raising millions of dollars through a network of small donors and sympathetic millionaires; endorsing candidates, running ads, and generally making a whole lot of noise about the issues of the day.
There are definitely some Democrats who wish that MoveOn would be a bit more discrete, but there are plenty of Republicans who want an organization just like it.
Too bad they fundamentally do not get the MoveOn concept.
Last year, a group of conservatives launched an organization called Freedom Watch to much fanfare. They hired a cadre of former Bush staffers to run the operations, they leased 10,000 square feet of expensive office space in DC, and discussed an operating budget of $200 million. They talked openly about being a conservative counterweight to MoveOn.org. Now, the results:

[A]fter a splashy debut last summer, in which it spent $15 million in a nationwide advertising blitz supporting President Bush’s troop escalation in Iraq, the group has been mostly quiet, beset by internal problems that have paralyzed it and raised questions about what kind of role, if any, it will actually play this fall.

Turns out that much of the group’s financial support came from a single wealthy donor — Sheldon G. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Sands Corporation. The casino mogul has given generously to Republican candidates and causes — including 527s and nonprofits — and many conservatives quietly began to hope that he would be their George Soros, opening his checkbook year after year.
But Freedom Watch burned through Adelson’s initial contributions of $30 by spending freely on stuff like expensive media buys, and he seems to be unhappy with the result. Thinking they had it made, staffers for the organization never cultivated relationships with other donors who might be willing to see this project take off. Their executive director has resigned, their board is unhappy, and they are reconsidering their mission.
Most importantly, they never conducted any significant infrastructure building, and that is exactly why Freedom Watch will never be MoveOn.org. Say what you want about the liberal organization, but it has very carefully built and nourished a powerful network of activists. Its contact lists represent millions of progressives who are ready to be engaged in a mission of change. Despite support from some big-dollar-donors, it is that bottom up support which makes MoveOn.org a real force in politics — not a single contributor and a couple of veteran operatives.
As James Vega said here recently, Freedom Watch and organizations like it pose a real potential danger to Democrats. But that’s only if they can get their act together. Right now, they simply don’t get it.

One week out of the PA showdown, the rags and blogs are overflowing with advice for Senators Clinton and Obama as they seek the political holy grail — the votes of the white working class. As Mark Weisbrot puts it in his Alternet post “The Audacity of Populism“:

The white working-class voters that will swing Pennsylvania in the Democratic primary will probably also be the swing voters in the general election (if it turns out to be a close election)….But there is one way that Obama can reach those white working class voters who are currently — without consciously recognizing that it might have something to do with race — groping for excuses not to vote for him. It may be old fashioned, but he can appeal directly to their class interests…But he needs to do more. He needs to convince these voters that he will do everything in his power to protect them from the impact of this recession.

The Boston Globe has “Democrats must renew bond with working class” by Peter Canellos, who warns:

Read more…

With Senator Clinton getting most of the ink and broadcast time in her historic run for the White House, it’s easy to forget that there are a number of important congressional races with women candidates. The 16 women serving in the U.S. Senate and 74 women members in the House of Representatives represent an all-time high in both chambers. In percentage terms, however, that works out to 16 percent of the Senate and about 17 percent of the House, a less than impressive achievement for a nation that prides itself in being the world’s greatest democracy. The numbers could increase modestly after the November elections. CQ Politics‘ Greg Giroux has a round-up of many of the races where women have prospects in November. As usual, most of the women candidates are Democrats.

So here’s something to look for in the vast conservative over-reaction to Barack Obama’s comments about the economic roots of “bitterness” and cultural reaction among certain rural and small-town voters.
If you accept (as I certainly do) that economic and non-economic voter concerns are generally legitimate, then there’s more than one way to express elitist, condescending attitudes.
One way is to dismiss non-economic concerns. But the other way is to dismiss economic concerns. And that’s what many conservative pundits and politicians do every single day, by:
(1) arguing that the highly negative feelings Americans have towards the current state of the U.S. economy are delusional or even wimpish, given relative sanguine employment and inflation statistics; (2) suggesting that grievances against economic globalization or trade agreements reflect the views of “losers” who can’t or won’t adjust to economic “dynamism” and who selfishly wish to deny their fellow-citizens the benefits of a rapidly changing economy; (3) claiming that “values issues” or “patriotism” (i.e., support for the Bush administration’s national security policies) are objectively more important than mere “material” bread-and-butter economic issues; and (4) denouncing demands for even-handed economic policies or opposition to reverse-Robin-Hood tax priorities as forms of a divisive “class warfare” that threatens national unity and economic growth.
Methinks conservatives should cease and desist in all these lines of argument if they really intend to keep calling Barack Obama an “elitist.” To cite one example, there’s something pretty risible about the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal blasting Obama’s condescension towards the cannon-fodder of that newspaper’s loony and disastrous economic policies.
Let’s recall that the real elitists in this country are the folks who currently exercise most of the political and economic power, and they are not at present found on the political Left.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The Republicans are also trying to paint Obama as “elitist,” but that’s the standard GOP template (twice used successfully by George W. Bush – a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover, Yale University, and Harvard Business School, son of a former president and grandson of a former U.S. senator). It’s particularly amusing to hear that “elitist” label being thrown around by John McCain, given the fact that McCain is married to a multimillionaire heiress; that McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts that help the rich at the expense of the working class; and that he has spent weeks tweaking his mortgage assistance proposal, which originally offered homeowners the same quality of aid that Herbert Hoover extended to Great Depression victims nearly 80 years ago. (Another thigh-slapper: William Kristol – descendent of a Manhattan intellectual family, and son of a New York University professor – used his New York Times column today to argue that Cling-gate is proof of Obama’s attitudinal ties to…Karl Marx.)

Selah.

Unless you spent the weekend blissfully unexposed to every news medium, or limited yourself to Master’s Tournament coverage, you’re probably aware that Barack Obama has endured a non-stop pounding from Hillary Clinton and her surrogates, and from the entire Right-Wing Noise Machine, over comments made at a California fundraiser about his struggles with downscale rural and small-town voters in places like Pennsylvania.
The furor is over a passage in which Obama suggests that people living in chronic economic sinkholes have become “bitter” over their condition and the false promises of politicians to do something about it, and are “clinging” to religion and gun ownership, and hostile attitudes towards immigrants, trade and people of color, out of frustration.
The first question to ask is whether Obama’s remarks would have raised eyebrows significantly if they hadn’t been leapt upon by Obama’s enemies as a symbol of elitism and condescension, and indeed, on the Right, as proof that Obama is something of a crypto-Marxist (google “Obama opiate of the masses” for examples of that line of attack, or just read Bill Kristol’s New York Times column today).
I sort of doubt it. It’s hardly a revolutionary observation to note that people for whom decades-long economic trends (particularly those associated with globalization) have not been kind tend to “cling” to what they perceive as a rosier past, and to the cultural verities that endure, while expressing fear and hostility towards agents of change. On the face of it, that doesn’t mean rejecting the validity of those cultural verities, or mocking the generally sour and change-averse outlook of Americans who think their way of life is under general assault (you might want to look back at TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston’s cogent discussion in 2001 of the feeling among white men that they are history’s losers). And indeed, in his efforts to put out the fire, Obama has repeatedly argued that he was expressing sympathy towards these voters, and a determination to help them, rather than condescendingly dismissing their concerns, economic or cultural.
It’s interesting to compare the reaction to the scratchy audio of Obama’s original comments to those made in the summer of 2004 by Howard Dean: “I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays. We’re going to fight this election on our turf, which is going to be jobs, education and health care.”
Yes, Dean got challenged on Fox News for this comment, but although it arguably expressed contempt for the legitimacy of cultural issues a lot more clearly than anything said this year by Obama, it didn’t produce that much reaction. And for that matter, Dean was accurately reflecting a “false consciousness” attitude towards religion-based political issues in particular that has long been a staple of neo-populist polemics (expressed most famously and brilliantly by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter With Kansas?) for decades.
But Barack Obama has never associated himself with this brand of neo-populism. And his personal religiosity (in contrast to Dean), his high comfort-level with discussions of faith and other cultural matters (in contrast to the last two Democratic presidential nominees), and his campaign’s emphasis on the non-economic dimensions of the case for change (in contrast to Hillary Clinton), all make him an unlikely candidate for the role of sneering materialist in which his opponents are now trying to cast him.
What’s really going on here is that Obama’s “gaffe” has provided an imperfect but adequate match for the most urgent needs of his Democratic and Republican critics.
The primary worry in Democratic circles about Obama is his persistent electoral weakness among white working-class voters. But as it learned just prior to the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign has to be careful about this “electability” story-line lest it appear to validate or promote racist sentiments. So what better way to raise the subject than to seize on the idea that Barack Obama is the offender, even the aggressor, in his uneasy relationship with these voters! His “contempt” for them retroactively justifies their reluctance to vote for him.
Among Republicans, the “gaffe” has become an important data point in their efforts to undermine everything novel, interesting and appealing about Obama’s candidacy as a post-Baby Boom, post-partisan reform movement that makes a hash of the traditional left-right ideological spectrum. It’s all a hoax, they say, a mask: Obama represents nothing new; he’s actually the avatar of an old, familiar “threat:” the leftist elites who hate America, and particularly hate the sturdy folk virtues and simple piety of middle America. In much of the emerging conservative invective about Obama’s remarks, the venue gets as much attention as the content. Among the right-wing cognoscenti, Marin County, California is the Vatican City of elitist, New Agey liberalism (see Martin Mull’s 1980 movie, Serial, as the ultimate send-up of Marin County as hell on earth; cf. Sean Tyla’s roughly contemporaneous song, Breakfast in Marin).
The close interdependence of the intraparty and partisan effort to exploit this incident is beyond dispute. Clinton campaign surrogates are battening on the Right’s hysteria about Obama-the-Marxist as evidence that, sadly, unfortunately, the poor man is out of touch and unelectable. And every Democratic attack on Obama’s “elitism” provides another piece of evidence for the Right’s argument that Obama’s “mask” is slipping.
I have no idea whether this brouhaha will matter at all in terms of a Democratic nominating contest that Obama’s coming close to wrapping up. Without question, it will provide some renewed impetus to Clinton’s determination to stay in the race until she’s all but mathematically eliminated, and lots of breaths will be bated in anticipation of poll results weighing the impact of all the media hype on Obama’s “controversial” remarks. The one thing we know for sure is that the Right’s reaction is providing a full-on sneak preview of its strategy to defeat Obama if he is the Democratic nominee. And it ain’t pretty.

In 2004, Democrats relied on 527 organizations to provide a lot of the artillery fire in the race for the White House. The Kerry campaign essentially outsourced its field operation in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida to America Coming Together. The Media Fund — run by Harold Ickes — spent $57,694,580 on ads in 17 battleground states, and others like MoveOn.org spent additional tens of millions of dollars on advertising elsewhere. All told, 527s raised and spent more than $500 million in the election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Everyone fully expected that trend to continue this year. In the fall of 2007, operatives announced plans to organize a Fund for America, which would raise money to support independent organizations in 2008. The group told reporters that it planned to pull in more than $100 million from wealthy Democrats and distribute those donations to a slew of organizations targeting Republicans. To date, their efforts have fallen far short, and the Fund is believed to have raised just $3 million during the first quarter of 2008. This week, David Brock told The Politico that he plans to begin raising money for his group — Progressive Media USA — independently, with the hopes of sponsoring a $40 million media blitz against John McCain over the summer.
Dylan Loewe — who used to be the executive director of a 527 called Ballotground — wonders why 527s are struggling to raise money this year and offers a few possibilities. He asks if the mega-donors feel marginalized or unnecessary in the face of the fundraising juggernauts assembled by the Obama and Clinton campaigns, or whether they worry about the legality of the 527s in the face of the record fine that the FEC used to penalize ACT for its activities in 2004, or if they simply support Hillary Clinton and question whether they want to help Obama get elected.
Each of those things might be true for some, but I’d suggest a different theory altogether.
After spending hundreds of millions of dollars in 2004 only to come up short, the biggest donors in the Democratic party stepped back to reconsider their efforts. At the same time a political operative named Rob Stein began to make the rounds among influential Democratic circles with a PowerPoint presentation detailing the rise of the “Right Wing Message Matrix.” He convinced many of the party’s most important contributors that the tactical bets on winning elections were not contributing to the long-term health of the progressive movement. Instead he asked them to make strategic investments in infrastructure like think tanks and grassroots organizations, and the result was The Democracy Alliance. (Matt Bai outlines this story in detail in his book, The Argument.)
Now we can discuss the health and long-term prospects of The Democracy Alliance all we want. At some point, people with a stake in progressive politics probably should evaluate its success or lack thereof. But to me, it seems that there is a real possibility that donors with the ability to make million dollar contributions are going to have a different set of priorities in the fall (especially without the visceral presence of Bush on the ballot). Which means we might have to consider a different independent organization strategy for future elections.
Anyone think that small donors might be convinced to give to an amorphous organization run by Harold Ickes?

It’s been obvious for a while now that Hillary Clinton’s ability to continue her candidacy to the Democratic Convention depends on her success in at least one of three dimensions (assuming she can’t catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates without some complete collapse of his campaign): (1) an uniterrupted winning streak in the final primaries; (2) the sudden appearance of a major positive differential in her general-election poll standings from Obama’s; or (3) a plurality in the final cumulative popular vote. Number (3) is the most plausible for her right now, particularly if she can convince the media and other Democrats to choose a measurement of the total popular vote that gives her the best chance of catching up.
This last note reflects the little-comprehended fact that there’s not any sort of “official” tabulation of the popular vote; nor will there be one when the whole game’s over.
Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal has an analysis up today on the National Journal site that runs through some of the difficulties involved in figuring out the people’s choice. They go beyond the question of whether votes cast in unsanctioned primaries in MI and FL ought to “count,” along with the fact that popular vote totals aren’t available for four caucus states. There’s also the anomalous situation in WA, which held a “non-binding” primary to accompany its delegate-selection caucuses.
Blumenthal also raises the technical but politically explosive issue of “measurement error:” at some point, the margin of victory or defeat for a candidate in an extremely close race becomes smaller than the number of votes cast or counted in error.
The bottom line here is that there’s enough confusion about popular vote totals to enable HRC to at least attempt to claim a victory if she can come up with a version of the results that passes the laugh test. And that could lead to a “numbers war” that will be very difficult to resolve.
For that to happen, of course, she needs to keep winning primaries, and the underlying big question is whether superdelegates will tilt decisively to Obama if he can win in, say, North Carolina. I think that’s more likely than not.