The co-editors of The Democratic Strategist are all very strongly associated with the view that, to create an enduring Democratic majority, Dems have to win the support of a substantial minority of working class voters.
In a Brookings Institution study early this spring TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira provided an up to date analysis of the underlying population demographics that support this view and last month TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg led a team from Democracy Corps that conducted a sophisticated survey and focus group analysis of Macomb county, Michigan seeking to understand the attitudes of working class voters in this election and to find the best ways to win their support.
The objective of winning working class support was clearly evident in the Democratic convention. As Ron Brownstein noted yesterday:

Democrats sought to segment the voters by class. They presented Obama (the “son of a single mom”) and running mate Joe Biden (the “scrappy kid from Scranton”) as working-class heroes who would defend the middle-class because they are products of it. The Democrats portrayed McCain as an out-of-touch economic elitist who doesn’t understand the interests of average families.

The Republicans, in contrast “sought to segment the voters along cultural lines”

They presented McCain as the personification of timeless values–honor and duty. Far more importantly (and effectively), they introduced vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin as an embodiment of small-town America who champions conservative social values not only in public life but also in her private life. They completed the picture with tough national security messages that usually resonate loudest with the same traditionalist voters most attracted to conservative social positions. Meanwhile, the Republicans portrayed Obama as an out-of-touch cultural elitist who belittles small towns like Palin’s Wasilla as not “cosmopolitan enough.”

On the surface, national economic conditions would seem to favor the Democrats. But, as Brownstein notes, “The first post-convention polls suggested that the Republicans succeeded more than the Democrats in dividing the electorate along the lines they prefer.”

An array of surveys released this week show McCain dominating among economically pressed but culturally conservative (and generally hawkish) white working-class voters, just as President Bush did in 2004.
In the Diageo/Hotline daily tracking survey this week, Obama was winning just 30 percent of white men without a college education, even lower than the meager 35 percent share that exit polls recorded for John Kerry in 2004. Among white no college women, Obama was attracting just 37 percent, down from Kerry’s 40 percent. Among “waitress moms” (married white women without college degrees), Obama was polling just 33 percent in the Diageo/Hotline survey, no improvement on Kerry’s anemic 32 percent.

To be sure, this is very disappointing (and there is reason to think that these numbers may improve somewhat between now and Election Day). But there are, in fact, entirely reasonable explanations for why the Democratic convention did not produce the movement toward Obama that was hoped for – explanations which suggest how Dems can do substantially better in the future.
(In fact, after the election, The Democratic Strategist will launch a major initiative to bring together Democrats from every sector of the party to develop an organized and coherent three-year strategy for peeling off a significant number of the more “middle of the road” members of the Republican working class coalition in time for the 2012 election.)
But right now, Obama and the Democrats face a difficult strategic choice. As Brownstein notes:

…some analysts wonder whether Obama might be better served by shifting his focus toward upscale voters more likely to recoil from a Republican ticket that wants to ban abortion and has praised the teaching of creationism.
Obama recently dipped his toe in that water with a radio ad presenting McCain as a threat to legalized abortion. This week, Biden also lashed the GOP platform’s opposition to stem-cell research. But [the campaign needs] a more concerted effort from Obama to convince socially liberal constituencies (such as single women or infrequent churchgoers) that McCain and Palin don’t share their values.

In fact, there is actually an even an broader group who may be an even more important target in the next six weeks — not just the members of specific, relatively liberal constituencies but the much wider swath of reasonably thoughtful, middle of the road voters who have not voted Democratic in recent years but who deeply desire a higher, more intelligent level and quality of political leadership than the myopically partisan and ideologically driven Bush administration has provided.
McCain has utterly abandoned these voters in this campaign – both with his cynically dishonest advertising that literally insults their intelligence and with his choice of a running mate whose function is to play the role of a Rush Limbaugh attack dog on the campaign trail rather than demonstrate any capacity to be a potential leader of the Republic.
In the long run there is no question that Democrats must develop a strategy for winning a substantial group of working class voters if they wish to create an enduring Democratic majority. But, in the next six weeks, it may be that the heaviest emphasis should be put on winning the growing number of thoughtful middle of the road voters who were initially attracted to John McCain but who are increasingly appalled by the kind campaign he has chosen to run.

In response to my Wednesday post on messaging decisions, a chap/chapette with the handle ‘cvh1789’ offers an interesting soundbite idea (first suggested by frequent TNR commenter roidubouloi):

An intelligent comment I read at the New Republic website suggests a particular line of attack: describe the Republican Party as “the bridge to nowhere.” That would work for Palin and McCain.

Here’s an excerpt of the riff from roidubouloi:

The Republican party didn’t just try to build the bridge to nowhere at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, the Republican party is the bridge to nowhere. It cannot protect us from our enemies. It cannot protect us from falling behind in global competition. It cannot protect us from the storms and natural disasters the result from climate change. It is not just the party of the past, it is the party of no place, no program, no values.”

I like it. Stir in the notion that today’s GOP is “not your father’s Republican Party” and we get a nifty little bumper sticker:

Today’s GOP: The Real ‘Bridge to Nowhere

Or a speech/interview/ad zinger:

The Clinton administration gave us peace, prosperity and a bridge to the future. McCain and Palin are offering us a bridge to nowhere.

It may not be as catchy as ‘where’s the beef?’, but “bridge to nowhere” is a familiar phrase that resonates with voters. And it makes the point that the Republicans have no vision or program, other than wielding power.

John McCain did two noteworthy things in last night’s aggressively low-key Forum on Service event. First, as Steve Benen at Political Animal points out, McCain rediscovered a national service proposal that he had somehow lost during the last few years. It’s no mystery: most conservative activists (with some honorable exceptions like the late William F. Buckley, Jr.) hate the idea of government-enabled non-military service, either on ideological grounds, or because they identify it (and particularly the AmeriCorps program that McCain’s now praising) with Bill Clinton. Now that conservatives have been definitively propitiated by the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate, it’s apparenly safe for him to indulge in a few of his old heresies, however mildly.
More strikingly, McCain expressed all sorts of admiration for “community organizers”–you know, those useless busy-bodies and agitators that drew so much mockery at the recently-concluded Republican National Convention. McCain deflected his running-mate’s derisive dismissal of community organizers as reflecting an understandably defensive attitude towards criticism of her own experience as mayor of a very small town. This does not, of course, offer much of an excuse for Rudy Giuliani’s nasty, sneering references to community organizers in his “keynote” address the same night as Palin’s speech.
The idea, of course, that McCain can shrug off attacks on Obama and his background made at the RNC as something he had nothing to do with is an insult to anybody who understands how modern party conventions work. His campaign controlled every word said from the podium. And in the extremely unlikely event that Giuliani or Palin somehow ad libbed the remarkalby well-coordinated sneers about community organizers, McCain didn’t have to wait more than a week to make it clear he didn’t agree.
There’s plenty of grounds for suspicion that we’re seeing a pattern here of McCain pretending to take the high road while his surrogates and campaign take the low road. At least with his nasty series of recent attack ads, he’s been forced by law to “approve the message” explicitly. But make no mistake, he’s approved every message, implicitly or explicitly, uttered in his name.

Listening to conservatives right now is a fascinating exercise in cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, many of them are convinced that Sarah Palin has revolutionized not only this election, but American politics and even our cultural life. She’s said to have single-handedly reversed the terrible prospects of congressional Republicans, for example. John McCain can barely stand to be out of her presence.
But on the other hand, she’s still a poor, downtrodden victim, “the object of the most vicious and concerted smear campaign in modern American history,” as one of the bloggers at PowerLine puts it. And the latest whine, predictably articulated by Michael Gerson in his Washington Post column, is that “liberals” are smearing her religion, making her not just a victim, but a martyr.
Like most of the whining about poor (yet triumphant) Palin, Gerson’s piece does not deign to offer a single example of or source for the alleged attacks on Palin’s faith, beyond a sneer about “reporters” asking Palin’s pastor if she’s ever spoken in tongues. “[L]iberals have been drawn, helpless and mesmerized — like beetles to the vivid, blue paradise of the bug zapper — toward criticizing Sarah Palin’s religion,” he says. And then Gerson is off to the races, with several hundreds words of abuse for the “secularists” who don’t know that charismatic Christianity is a big deal these days. The clincher is Gerson’s identification of these unnamed liberals with those who derided the early Christians.
Who? Where? Can we get a name here? A direct quote? Has Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Nancy Pelosi, or David Axelrod mocked Palin’s religion?
As for those “reporters” who asked if Palin had spoken in tongues, how, exactly, does this represent persecution? Sarah Palin is the first self-identified Pentecostal Christian to appear on a national party ticket. Simple questions about the nature of her faith are no more unnatural than the questions asked of Jimmy Carter back in 1976 about his “born-again” evangelicalism, or the questions posed to John F. Kennedy in 1960 about his support for church-state separation. And if Gerson’s right, and pentecostalism is far more typical of Americans than the “liberal Episcopalianism” he sneers at, why should she be offended by non-derisive questions, and hide her light under a bushel?
Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running-mate touched off some of the most excited celebrations on the Christian Right that we’ve seen since the election of Ronald Reagan. Fine, but they can’t have it both ways, touting her as a revolutionary, redemptive figure in American politics and then complaining the minute someone notices that her views on the nexus of politics and faith seem to be central to her appeal to conservatives.
As a Christian myself (though one of those “liberals” that Gerson and other conservatives contemptuously dismiss, in what I might choose to construe as a vicious attack on my religion), Gerson’s column and many others like it exemplify one of the most unsavory characteristics of contemporary conservative Christianity: self-pity combined with vengefulness. The best example is the ludicrous annual rite of “War on Christmas” whining, where Christians who have never suffered a moment of real discrimination in their lives complain about department store signs and launch boycotts to force compliance with their tender sensibilities.
Throughout the history of the Christianity, people have actually suffered and actually died for their faith in Jesus Christ. I seriously doubt that many conservative Christians in America share the phony sense of persecution that their “spokesmen” like Michael Gerson encourage them in, or view themselves as martyrs. Nor should they or anyone else buy into this effort to turn Gov. Sarah Palin into St. Joan of the Tundra, even as she is said to vanquish all foes in her colossal path.

Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s opinion piece, “Democrats Need to Shake The ‘Elitist’ Tag” in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal had a couple of insightful nuggets, including,

If Barack Obama loses the presidential election, it may well be the result of a public perception that he is detached and elitist — a politician whose expressions of empathy for hard-working Americans stem more from abstract solidarity than a real connection to the lives of millions of citizens….
While Obama supporters attempt to dismiss the charges about their candidate’s perceived hauteur, they confuse privilege and elitism. Elitism is a state of mind, a view of the world that cannot be measured simply by one’s net worth, position or number of houses. Throughout American history, there have been extremely wealthy figures who have devoted themselves to genuinely nonelitist principles. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt is probably the best-known example.) At the same time, many from modest backgrounds, like Harry Truman’s foil, Thomas Dewey, personified elitism.

De Rothschild likens Obama to Adlai Stevenson, explaining,

…while Stevenson’s stylish, articulate, high-brow manner thrilled the nation’s intellectuals, he could never connect with large numbers of working-class Democrats who found him aloof and aristocratic…The “new politics” Democrats have found their new, improved Stevenson in Mr. Obama…It is ironic that the candidate who comes from a more privileged background — John McCain — can genuinely point to at least one crucial moment in his life when elitism went by the boards.

The author goes on to overstate her case with more debatable broad-brush generalizations about both the Democratic Party and Senator Obama. But in these excerpts she does suggest a concern that merits consideration. For three election cycles now, Dems have nominated brilliant policy wonks, highly able, accomplished men of exceptional integrity and compassion, who have trouble getting traction in the white working/middle class. The three nominees have often been out-manuevered by two upper-class, make that ruling-class Republicans who were somehow able to project a persona that resonates better with the middle class. Quite bizarre, when you think about it.
Even more ironic, Senator Obama, who lived with his grandparents for seven formative years, has more real-life experience living in the white middle-class than Bush, McCain and several other recent GOP presidential candidates put together. That he doesn’t try to affect a folksy persona in his interviews and speeches speaks well of his integrity and seriousness of purpose. How much it helps him will be determined on Nov. 4.
McCain, for all of his character flaws, is very comfortable and relaxed enough to affect a ‘regular guy’ persona. One of his strengths as a candidate is that he is a naturally-gifted actor, who can do crocodile tears about bipartisanship or project a self-effacing persona on Saturday Night Live with equal panache. And to give McCain and Bush due credit, they both have a good ear — they can talk the talk of the middle class, though neither has ever walked the walk. No doubt McCain’s ‘Hanoi Hilton’ experience gives him additional leverage.
Candidate character and persona are always important, in some elections more than others. And yes, there are millions of “low information voters” who vote based on such criteria. But I agree with Ed’s Tuesday post, “No Issues, Please“, that issues still trump such considerations with millions of voters. In this election cycle in particular, Dems have a very strong advantage in this regard, and that has to come across loud and clear over the next seven weeks. If you had to boil the republican’s grand strategy down into one word, “confusion” would do as well as any. It’s up to us to insure that they don’t prevail.

Today’s 9/11 commemorations have created a temporary lull in the McCain campaign’s Fall Offensive of whining about the alleged victimization of Sarah Palin and smearing Barack Obama with tactics that might embarass Karl Rove (if it weren’t his own proteges directing the whole effort). And the Offensive is now so over-the-top that even some conservatives are having second thoughts about it.
Over at National Review’s The Corner blog yesterday, Kathryn Jean Lopez, usually among the most reliable cheerleaders for the ideological and party Cause, expressed unhappiness over the Victim Card, recalling that Palin herself hadn’t liked what she called the “perceived whine” over media sexism by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Lopez’ piece concludes with this interesting prophecy:

[B]efore this election is over, some 25-year-old press aide, or political ally, or candidate is going to innocently refer to the Obama campaign with the phrase “the pot calling the kettle black.” And if GOP complaints about Democrat sexism continue, by then we’ll have lost the moral high ground in the whining wars.

Later in the day, at the same site, Ramesh Ponnuru echoed Lopez’ revulsion:

[T]he Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mongers. Don’t they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness?

On the other hand, there seemed to be no particular concern at The Corner about Team McCain’s broader campaign of substance-free smears against Obama. But to his credit, Ross Douthat, as enthusiastic a Palin booster as you can find, thought the “lipstick” and “sex-ed” ads went over the line and showed weakness rather than strength:

[T]he sex-ed ad…feels more appropriate to a failing, flailing right-wing campaign than a confident, rising conservative ticket….
And even if aspects of the sex-ed claim are technically defensible, the whole thing just feels bullshitty and gross – like a parody of a culture-war ad. I have no problem with campaigning on culture war issues, and God knows Obama has vulnerabilities, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, and this ad falls into the second category.

Since there’s no particular reason to expect the McCain-Palin campaign to clean up its act anytime soon, it will be interesting to see if Whine-and-Smear continues to draw occasional expressions of conservative regret.

Juan Cole is one of the most respected Middle East specialists and a highly perceptive critic of U.S. policy and strategy in the Moslem world. In his evaluation of the threat of terrorism today, he makes several important observations.
First,

the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core….. That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.
Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. …I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.
Marc Sageman in his ‘Understanding Terror Networks’ estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far…

Cole then reviews the major categories of Moslem terrorist organizations that are currently active and evaluates the dangers they pose to the security and safety of the United States. He says:
Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:

Read more…

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, writing at The New Republic, stares at the latest batch of presidential election polls, and concludes that the number of battleground states has shrunk significantly:

This looks like it’s basically going to be a seven-state election: Ohio and Michigan; Virginia and Florida; Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Throw New Hampshire and Pennsylvania in there if you want to be conservative, and perhaps Indiana and West Virginia if you want to be aggressive. But Sarah Palin quickly partisanized the electorate, and gave us a considerably less fun map.

One of the more annoying facets of the Cult of Palin that’s been erected over the last two weeks has been the interminable whining by the McCain campaign and the entire conservative commentariat over the alleged “personal attacks” on the vice presidential nominee. Sure, some Democrats and some media observers challenged her qualifications for the high office, but that’s no more “personal” than the identical criticism we would have heard from Republicans had Obama chosen, say, Tim Kaine or Kathleen Sebelius as his running-mate–or for that matter, the identical criticism of Obama’s own credentials. But as part of their longstanding effort to tie the “elitist” Obama to the “elitist” media, Team McCain and its own media allies have artfully filled the airwaves with charges that Democrats and “the liberal media” have sneered at Sarah Palin, her family, her home town, her religion, and–in an unfamiliar pose for conservatives–her gender.
In a Washington Post column today, Michael Kinsley rightly describes the whole thing as a fraud, calling out David Brooks and Bill Kristol by name for making the plenary “elitist snob” charge based on nothing more than random comments by Bill Maher and Marty Peretz, hardly opinion-leaders in the “liberal media” and far from spokesmen for Barack Obama.
This effort to make Gov. Palin some sort of St. Joan of the Tundra being persecuted for her family and faith is especially galling at a time when the McCain campaign, right out in public and with the candidate’s own stamp of approval, is taking a very low road in its attacks on Barack Obama. The latest despicable ad charges him with wanting to subject toddlers to “comprehensive sex education,” referring to Obama’s suggestion that children be taught how to avoid sexual predators.
This ad was the McCain campaign’s response to a wonky Obama speech on education, in which the Democratic nominee belied conservative attacks on him as the captive of teachers unions and bureaucrats by calling for an expansion of charter schools and the institution of merit pay for teachers.
Next time a Republican politician or pundit waxes indignant about imaginary smears against Sarah Palin, he or she should be asked about that McCain ad and others like it. As the Good Book would put it, they have beams in their eyes.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The trickiest decisions to be made in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign involve the optimum allocation of candidate time, energy and money. The campaigns have to decide how much emphasis and resources they will put into four key messaging tools: speeches; ads; debates and interviews. Among the considerations:
In 2000 Al Gore delivered the best speech of his career to date, when he accepted the Democratic nomination. He looked terrific and it was well-filmed. I remember thinking “Boy, they can make great ads with clips from this speech.” But we never saw any of it again. Speeches are obviously Obama’s strong card, and he will be making plenty of them over the next 7 weeks. But it would be a shame to leave it at that. The Obama campaign should repackage his speeches into a “greatest hits” anthology and buy a fat block of TV time to show them and the huge cheering crowds to the nation, not just stump audiences thither and yon. We Dems haven’t had a speaker this good since JFK. We shouldn’t pay any attention to the McCain campaign’s snarky references to our candidate’s oratory. People want to be inspired, and Obama can deliver the goods. If we don’t make the fullest use of Obama’s speaking skills, we will flunk.
What I have seen of the new Obama ads is encouraging. On the whole, they are pretty sharp and punchy. TV is still king, but other media are critical as well, especially the internet and radio. A new and important consideration this cycle is recycling or producing ads on the internet, going viral with YouTube etc. Plus the always difficult choices to be made about money and TV markets well in advance of broadcast.
There will only be three presidential debates (see details and formats here) plus one veep debate, and both tickets will put in a lot of prep time. Here Obama should focus on soundbite-sized responses to questions, and avoid the temptation to explain things to smithereens. As PA Gov. Ed. Rendell put it, “We’ve got to start smacking back in short understandable bites.” McCain already knows this. Dems might consult with John Stewart and Bill Maher for some punchy zingers. It’s a shame ‘where’s the beef’ has already been done, since it fits the GOP ticket so perfectly. No question should elicit a long, rambling answer. If the question is off point or softball, Obama should practice seizing the opportunity to respond along the lines of “Well, the more important question/point is…”
Media interviews are free ads, as well as potential minefields. McCain may have an edge here, since he gets more free rides from MSM reporters, and his proclivity for shorter answers serves him well. Obama might try floating more zingers in his interviews. A good one-liner can become a devastating meme. A ‘Where’s the beef’ type zinger could be used here as well. Despite an occasional gaffe, Biden may be the best interview in both parties, as evidenced by his record number of MTP appearances. Using his skills more extensively than has been the case for veep nominees thus far could help the ticket.
Apart from messaging, both presidential campaigns will be at full bore in taking advantage of early voting opportunities and in registering their key constituencies before the voter registration deadlines. About half the states will close registration by October 7th, less than a month away. The key decision here is targeting the most likely swing states, and the calculations change almost daily. But the turnout mobilization has to happen everywhere. The “Movement” aspect of the Obama campaign may well provide a decisive edge in turnout — and for victory in a close election.