Ron Fournier’s “Why (and How) Romney is Playing the Race Card” at the National Journal takes a perceptive look at the GOP candidate’s dog whistle strategy. It’s about stoking the insecurities of white working-class voters with racially-charged code words. Fournier relates a conversation with two old friends back in McComb County, Michigan, in which they express opinions that African Americans (“they”) in the area are no angry because the get “subsidization” in the form of a “magic card they can swipe” to pay for things. Fournier adds:

A poll this spring by the Pew Economic Mobility Project underscored how minorities and whites see their divergent economic trajectories. Whites earning between $25,000 and $75,000 per year were more than twice as likely as blacks in the same income range–and nearly twice as likely as Latinos–to say they had already achieved the American Dream. A majority of Latinos and a plurality of African-Americans say they expect to be making enough money 10 years from now to live the lifestyle they desire. A majority of whites consider that a pipe dream.
Working-class whites, in other words, are already more prosperous and secure than working-class minorities, but they’re less optimistic because they don’t believe they’re climbing anymore. They’re simply trying to hold on to what they’ve got, and see others grabbing at it.

Further, adds Fournier,

Thanks to Romney, they see minorities grabbing at their way of life every day and all day in the inaccurate welfare ad. It opens with a picture of Bill Clinton (a man obsessed with Macomb County and Reagan Democrats) signing the 1996 welfare reform act, which shifted the benefits from indefinite government assistance to one pushing people into employment and self-reliance.
A leather-gloved white laborer wipes sweat from his forehead. “But on July 12,” the ad intones,” President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send your welfare check and “welfare to work” goes back to being plain old welfare.”

As for the effectiveness of the ad, Fournier notes:

…First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush and Romney. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
Furthermore, a senior GOP pollster said he has shared with the Romney camp surveys showing that white working-class voters who backed Obama in 2008 have moved to Romney in recent weeks “almost certainly because of the welfare ad. We’re talking a (percentage) point or two, but that could be significant.”

Fournier goes on to roll out a little polling history that reveals that a substantial percentage of white workers embrace racial stereotypes. He concludes that “Romney and his advisors stand by an ad they know is wrong – or, at the very least, they are carelessly ignoring the facts. That ad is exploiting the worst instincts of white voters – as predicted and substantiated by the Republican Party’s own polling.”
That may be why Romney looked pleased when he got booed at the NAACP gathering back in July for saying he would repeal the ACA. It was likely a case of a planned gambit that worked just the way he wanted.

For some insightful comments about the Democrats approach to discussing the ACA at the Convention, read Ed Kilgore’s “Talkin’ Obamacare” at The Washington Monthly. Among Kilgore’s observations:

…Yes, ACA doesn’t poll that great, at least as an abstraction. But as we’ve known for a long time, a sizable chunk of those expressing disapproval of the legislation are people who think it should have been much stronger and/or more “public” than it was–i.e., people with zero sympathy for the GOP point-of-view on the law. And more importantly, polls have consistently shown solid majority support for most of ACA’s key provisions, with the exception of the individual mandate. Given the Republican Party’s ironclad decision not to offer any glimpse of what if anything they’d replace ObamaCare with if they succeed in repealing it, Democrats had little to lose and a lot to gain from dramatizing what Americans would lose if the law goes away–including, very crucially, provisions that have already taken effect…The potential power of this way of discussing ObamaCare was pretty clearly shown yesterday by Stacy Lihn’s speech about the lifetime cap on insurance payments that ACA outlawed, and that if reimposed could rob her of the ability to secure for her daughter life-saving heart surgery…

You can read the rest of it at this link.

In his New York magazine column, “Obama’s Non-Disappointing Presidency,” Jonathan Chait takes on a common complaint of many progressives that President Obama’s first term failed to meet their lofty expectations, and finds his liberal critics awash in political myopia. Chait begins by conceding the part of their argument that is correct:

…Plenty of things have gone wrong. Most of them are outside Obama’s control: a worldwide economic collapse, a brilliantly executed Republican strategy to withhold cooperation for everything, and a series of self-defeating bungles by the Democratic Congress (which has somehow escaped the endless orgy of liberal self-recrimination.) What’s more, Obama has screwed up plenty of things himself, most notably his doomed strategy of trying to secure a deficit agreement in 2011, his failure to keep pressing on financial reform, and his broad acceptance of the Bush administration’s civil liberties rollback.

Comparing Obama’s first term accomplishments to president Clinton’s much-trumpeted achievements, however, Chait explains:

I expected Obama’s legislative record to exceed Clinton’s, but by less than it actually did. The domestic reforms embedded in the stimulus alone — the scope of which is described in Michael Grunwald’s book The New New Deal — did more to reshape the face of government in areas like education and energy than Clinton managed in eight years. Then you had health-care reform (which I hoped would pass, but would not have been shocked to be filibustered to death), financial reform (which I expected to fail completely), gays in the military, and so on. It is true that, as stimulus, Obama’s economic recovery bill was not nearly large enough to restore full employment. But for some perspective on its scale, recall that Clinton (facing a sluggish recovery from a far milder recession) proposed a $19.5 billion stimulus as his first major legislative measure, negotiated it down to $15.4 billion, and finally saw the whole thing collapse. In that light, Obama’s $787 billion bill looks like a fairly impressive political achievement.
Now, perhaps comparing Obama to Clinton’s record is setting the bar too low. Yet you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson to find a Democratic president who effected as significant change as Obama has, and L.B.J.’s presidency was not exactly an unmitigated blessing.

Chait then notes the shortcomings, as well as the major achievements, of every Democratic president of the post-World War II period, including some of the unsavory compromises they had to make. Regarding the sainted JFK, Chait adds:

…After his assassination, Americans came to look back on Kennedy’s presidency through a golden-hued nostalgia, which is what allows writers…to present Kennedy as a glamorous poet-king who represented something larger than the pedestrian struggles that actually consumed his presidency…That feeling, more than a legislative record, is the missing quality so many people long for in Obama — the sense of a presidency filled with glamour and purpose, not tedious negotiations with the Senate Finance Committee…The Kennedy myth perfectly embodies the amnesiac quality of that longing. Kennedy’s presidency was experienced as a frustrating series of half-measures and moral compromises.

More the sober realist than the Democratic myth-polisher, Chait explains, “There can be fleeting moments of inspiration, but the lived reality of politics can never feel inspiring…I’m not disappointed in Obama at all. His first term has actually exceeded my expectations.”
It’s another eye-opening column by Chait. I would only add that in this context, the Affordable Care Act, its significant shortcomings notwithstanding, is an historic accomplishment that provides more health security for millions of Americans. If Democrats will now rally behind the president and lengthen his coattails, it can be amended and made even better.

A few days before the Republican convention The London Economist ran an editorial titled “So, Mitt, what do you really believe? Too much about the Republican candidate for the presidency is far too mysterious.” The editorial’s quite startling conclusion was that, if Romney continued on his current “evasive, needlessly extreme” approach, “America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper.. ”
It’s a really stunning slap-down. For the self-proclaimed “businessman’s candidate” to get trashed so dramatically by the leading business magazine on the planet blows a gaping hole in his entire case for election.
But don’t believe us. Read these excerpts from the Economist’s editorial (italics ours):

When Mitt Romney was governor of liberal Massachusetts, he supported abortion, gun control, tackling climate change and a requirement that everyone should buy health insurance, backed up with generous subsidies for those who could not afford it. Now, as he prepares to fly to Tampa to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president on August 30th, he opposes all those things. A year ago he favoured keeping income taxes at their current levels; now he wants to slash them for everybody, with the rate falling from 35% to 28% for the richest Americans.
All politicians flip-flop from time to time; but Mr Romney could win an Olympic medal in it. And that is a pity, because this newspaper finds much to like in the history of this uncharismatic but dogged man, from his obvious business acumen to the way he worked across the political aisle as governor to get health reform passed and the state budget deficit down….
But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character… [Romney] has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper…
In theory, Mr Romney has a detailed 59-point economic plan. In practice, it ignores virtually all the difficult or interesting questions (indeed, “The Romney Programme for Economic Recovery, Growth and Jobs” is like “Fifty Shades of Grey” without the sex). Mr Romney began by saying that he wanted to bring down the deficit; now he stresses lower tax rates. Both are admirable aims, but they could well be contradictory: so which is his primary objective?
Mr Romney may calculate that it is best to keep quiet: the faltering economy will drive voters towards him. It is more likely, however, that his evasiveness will erode his main competitive advantage. A businessman without a credible plan to fix a problem stops being a credible businessman. So does a businessman who tells you one thing at breakfast and the opposite at supper. Indeed, all this underlines the main doubt: nobody knows who this strange man really is. It is half a decade since he ran something. Why won’t he talk about his business career openly? Why has he been so reluctant to disclose his tax returns? How can a leader change tack so often? Where does he really want to take the world’s most powerful country?

The Economist editorial concluded by saying that Romney “has a lot of questions to answer in Tampa.” As we now know, his acceptance speech didn’t answer any of them. So, as of right now, the London Economist is on record as saying “America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper…”

The Democratic convention in Charlotte is beginning to generate some decent coverage of political dynamics in the southern states. When President Obama won the electoral votes of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, along with 47 percent of the popular vote in Georgia back in 2008, his victory provided a compelling rebuttal to the “skip the south” strategy going forward. As a northern refugee now living in the sunny south, however, I’m not sure that the scope and pace of the demographic transition now underway even in the deep south is yet well-understood.
Fortunately, some good reportage on the topic has recently emerged. Start with Chris Kromm’s Facing South post, “As Goes the South: Your convention guide to Southern politics 101,” which explains:

…while states in the Mountain West had similarly large percentage increases, Southern states are bigger and had larger increases in total numbers. That trend appears to be continuing: The Census Bureau estimates that the states adding the most people between 2010 and 2011 were Texas (529,000), California (438,000), Florida (256,000), Georgia (128,000) and North Carolina (121,000)…Southern states gained eight Congressional seats and Electoral College votes in post-Census redistricting and reapportionment. Today, nearly one-third of the total Electoral College votes needed to be elected president come from Southern states — and that share will likely grow in the future.
In other words, bypassing the South (for Democrats) or taking the region for granted (for Republicans) is not an option for any party interested in a winning political strategy.

With respect to the explosive growth of Latinos in the 13 southern states, Kromm adds:

Nine of the 12 states with the fastest-growing Latino/Hispanic populations in the 2010 Census were in the South. The political clout of Latinos is clear in a state like Florida, where Latino eligible voters increased by two-thirds over the last decade and now make up nearly 17 percent of the state’s voters. But the Latino electorate is also growing in North Carolina, with registrations doubling since 2008 and making up two percent of voters — enough to sway a close election…The key here is a registration gap. In North Carolina, for example, about 60 percent of eligible Latino/Hispanic citizens aren’t registered to vote. (For great information on the Latino vote, visit www.latinovotemap.org.)

And, the African-American vote is pivotal for Dems, especially in the south, As Kromm says:

Half of the nation’s African-Americans live in Southern states. An under-reported story of the 2010 Census was the growth of black communities in the South — including an acceleration of return migration from cities in the North and Midwest. The growth is especially clear in cities: Six of the 10 urban areas with the biggest increase in African-Americans were in the South, including Charlotte (number six, 121,500-person increase) and two in Florida (Miami, where the black population grew by 191,700, and Orlando, by 100,600)

In a recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aaron Gould Sheinin noted that,

In January 2001, Georgia’s electorate was 72 percent white and 26 percent black, while Hispanics made up less than two-tenths of 1 percent, according to data compiled by the secretary of state. As of Aug. 1, those numbers had changed dramatically.
Blacks now make up 30 percent of active registered voters while whites are at 60 percent. Hispanics make up nearly 2 percent of the electorate after seeing their registration numbers increase from just 933 in 2011 to 85,000 as of Aug. 1.

Given recent polling and turnout patterns, it appears that, if Dems can win just three out of ten white voters in Georgia, they can take the state’s electoral votes. Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, cited in Gould’s article, doubts that the demographic changes will swing Georgia to Obama this year, but the odds favoring Dems will improve significantly in future elections. Meanwhile the Obama campaign is running plenty of TV ads in Georgia, and they have 57 paid organizers on the ground in key neighborhoods in GA, reports Gould.
In his AJC article, “Democrats try to make inroads in South,” Wayne Washington quotes Republican U.S. Sen Lindsay Graham’s surprisingly candid assessment, “The demographics race, we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
Kromm concedes that the conservative rural vote is a still powerful factor outside southern cities. But the cities are where the growth is accelerating. He adds that voter suppression and anti-immigrant legislation remain potent Republican tactics to undercut demographic transition favoring Democrats. He could have added that, if not for draconian felon disenfranchisement laws, Florida (520,000 African American voters disenfranchised) and Virginia (242,000 Black voters disenfranchised) would likely be blue on political maps.
If President Obama can win two of the three southern states he won in ’08, he will probably be re-elected. Regardless of the outcome of November 6 election, however, Republicans will be unable to stop the emergence of purple and possibly blue states in the south as early as 2016.

Aside from Michelle Obama’s rave reviews, the first day of the Democratic Convention included an unusual number of solid speeches and a more aggressive than usual opening strategy, as TDS managing Editor Ed Kilgore, a veteran Dem convention insider, explains at the Washington Monthly:

..the first day of the Democratic convention exhibited two things some observers weren’t sure to expect: (1) a robust defense of Obama’s governing record, especially (and unexpectedly, as Ezra Klein notes) ObamaCare; and (2) a direct, uninhibited assault on the GOP generally and Mitt Romney specifically. On the latter front, Deval Patrick gave what might have been remembered, had Michelle Obama not blotted out the sun, as the best first-night speech. And “keynote” speaker Julian Castro provided a hefty combo platter of Latino solidarity with Obama; an implicit contrast with the laissez-faire oriented Latino outreach of the GOP convention; some good shots at Romney; and an appeal to younger voters.
As a veteran of the 2004 convention, when the word came down that speakers were not to criticize Republicans at all (based on some focus groups of independents expressing hostility to partisanship), this was all pretty amazing…

Read the rest of Kilgore’s post right here.

The following memo, by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, is cross-posted from DCorps.com:
This is a close presidential race where President Obama and the Democrats still need a good convention to get momentum and define the choice in the election to lock in their 3- or 4-point lead. In our view, that is very likely.
The reason why we think it is important to have a good convention is that the real economy is so difficult that it gives Romney and the Republicans an audience on spending and budgets, even when the country views them with disdain. In the survey we conducted just before the Republican convention, Obama maintained a 2-point lead. But because Republican-leaning independents pay more attention in this period and are a larger portion of the national survey, the survey results are tough: the President fell to 6 points behind Romney and Democrats 9 points behind Republicans on who would do a better job on the economy. That poll shows people struggling in their personal economies, which were weakening further, even as there was more churning in the job market. As a result, the president was barely winning big economic arguments in the survey.
So, we just should not underestimate how difficult it is out there and what we are asking people to do – to support re-election – despite 60 percent thinking the economy is headed in the wrong direction and so many thinking spending and deficits hurt the economy. They are ready to vote for Obama because they know how unique these times are and how much Bush contributed to the mess. They are ready to vote for him because they respect President Obama and are not focused on the past but on what the candidates will do to make things better. They are ready to vote for Obama because they worry about the Republicans’ social agenda and because they truly don’t want a new version of trickle-down economics.
There are reasons why Democrats enjoy a 6-point advantage in party identification and are at parity on who voters trust to handle taxes – both pretty amazing numbers – but revealing on why Obama will likely move back into the lead.
But Democrats need a good convention to make all those dynamics dominant over the material economy. That is why we are writing this list of things Obama can get done at the convention.
Read the full memo from James Carville and Stan Greenberg.