Nate Cohn reports at The New Republic that “Obama’s Problem With White, Non-College Educated Voters is Getting Worse“:

…over the last four years, Obama’s already tepid support among white voters without a college degree has collapsed….Since February, 25 state and national polls from Quinnipiac and Pew Research disaggregated Obama’s standing against Romney by educational attainment. The dataset has weaknesses, as the Quinnipiac state polls sample six somewhat unrepresentative East Coast states. Even so, the degree of consistency across the six states and the six national polls is striking: Of the 25 polls, 22 show a larger drop-off among non-college educated white voters.
On average, Obama has lost nearly 6 percentage points among white voters without a college degree. Given that Obama had already lost millions of traditionally Democratic white working class voters in 2008, this degree of further deterioration is striking. In the three national polls conducted since April, Obama held just 34 percent of white voters without a college degree, compared to 40 percent in 2008. Thirty-four percent places Obama in the company of Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and the 2010 House Democrats. These are landslide numbers.

Cohn reports that the same polls show Obama holding his own with educated white voters. He adds, “If Obama’s enduring strength among educated and non-white voters keeps Obama competitive in traditionally Republican states like Virginia and North Carolina, but Romney doesn’t get his end of the bargain in Democratic-but-white-working-class states like Wisconsin, the electoral map starts to look a lot better for Obama.
Moreover, notes Cohn, Romney is having trouble sealing the deal with less educated white voters. “In all but one of the 25 polls, less educated whites were more likely to be undecided than college educated whites. In the six national polls, 5 percent of college educated whites were undecided compared to 9 percent of whites without a college degree.”
As for messaging, Cohn sees Romney’s image as a potent Obama asset. “Depicting Romney as a plutocratic corporate raider seems likely to resonate with working class voters, especially since many traditionally have voted for Democratic presidential candidates.”

Tired of all the campaign 2012 jabber? Take a peek at America’s longer-range (12 year horizon) political future at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, where some of America’s top political visionaries share their insights in a forum on “Decision 2024: Our Parties, Our Politics.”
Included in the forum are: “Demography and Its Discontents” by Ruy Teixeira; “Can the GOP Evolve?” by David Frum; “The Browning of America” by Gary Segura; “The Center Must Hold” by Christine Todd Whitman; “Yes, Labels!” by Nancy L. Rosenblum; “The Millennials Grow Up” by Andrew Baumann & Anna Greenberg; “The Importance of Philosophy” by Felicia Wong; and “The Coming Resource Wars” by Kevin Drum.
A couple of teasers from the editors’ introduction:

…Being Democracy, we told them not simply to tell us–and you–that this demographic would have more electoral power, or that interest group might shift allegiances. We asked them all to describe the impact such changes would have on governance and policy-making.
Electoral demographer Ruy Teixiera, one of the country’s leading experts in this field, espies a progressive opportunity created by new demographic realities–but only if we shift our economic policy priorities from security to opportunity. The writer David Frum sees a Republican opportunity in the years ahead, but only if the party becomes more like conservative parties in other countries. Gary Segura of Stanford argues that that the growing Latino population will move our politics to the left and force the GOP to make some tough choices…Pollsters Andrew Baumann and Anna Greenberg take up the issue of young voters and find that while they are in general more liberal and will shift our politics leftward, they may well force the Democrats to change their posture on a bedrock progressive issue. Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute worries that the middle class will keep sinking, and calls on progressives to articulate first principles more effectively to keep that from happening.

As pivotal as the 2012 elections are to America’s future, it’s also important that we mine the insights of the nation’s more perceptive political visionaries about the longer haul. This Democracy forum is a good start.

This article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Everyone who watches politics pretty much agrees that last week was Obama’s roughest week yet in this campaign, and I am not going to argue that point for a moment. But I see some potential silver linings in the mess that was last week, one of which may well be seen after this election as the most important messaging turning point in this campaign. If Obama and his team take the right lesson from last week, they will put themselves on a course toward victory.
I see two smaller rays of light, and one potential very big one. In terms of the first, I hope last week definitively ends the over-confidence factor among Democrats. Given how embarrassing the GOP primary process was, all the mistakes Romney has already made, and all the talk from the campaign about the five paths to Electoral College victory, a lot of Democrats have been making the mistake of being relaxed about this campaign, which is crazy when you look at the economy. A wake-up call, especially now as opposed to having a rough week in September, is exactly what the doctor ordered for my fellow Democrats. Romney is still a terrible candidate who is completely out of touch with middle-class voters, but in this economy that factor alone will not win this race.
The second silver lining is that all the talk about Bain that has resulted from pro-Wall-Street Democrats attacking the Obama team for daring to criticize how a Wall-Street firm makes its money is keeping the issue alive. The more people talk about Bain, the more curious voters are about what all the controversy is about, and the better for Obama. If people take time to learn how Bain made its money — sweetheart deals, tax loopholes, loading companies up with debt and siphoning off their profits, slashing jobs and wages and benefits — the more they will understand that Mitt Romney is not who we want as president. As irritated as I am with Clinton and other Democrats, they are keeping the issue in the news, which is good for us.
The biggest silver lining, though, might be because of the president’s worst mistake last week. I can tell you that as someone who has been arguing vociferously for months now that the president should stop saying the economy is getting better, my heart sank when I heard him say his line about the private sector being fine, and I immediately knew it would become the subject of innumerable Republican attacks. The silver lining is this is that perhaps the reaction to this mistake will finally convince the Obama campaign that they are playing with fire when they try to make the argument that the economy is getting better. As a recent Democracy Corps memo eloquently puts it:
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance — and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle — and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way — not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.
It has been clear to me for some time in looking at all kinds of polling and focus-group data that voters are way ahead of the elites about the nature of this economy. The middle-class voters who will help decide this election understand to the bottom of their toes that this economy is not just in a typical downturn, that something big, fundamental, and historic is going on. They feel every day the way the middle class is getting hammered, and they are coming closer and closer to becoming less “middle-income” and more “low-income.” They are far less worried than elites about the month-to-month upticks and downticks of an economy in deep trouble. And they know the problem isn’t so much the politicians as the wealthy and powerful economic special interests that are pulling the strings.
In this context, it makes no sense for the Obama campaign to keep arguing that things really aren’t as bad as they seem, or that things are getting better. Presidents and the people close to them always feel a need to do that, but in this context, it just doesn’t work. What does is to be straight with the American people, fully acknowledging the pain they are feeling and making it clear that their instinct is right, that the economy is in a deep hole because of decades of having our priorities screwed up. We are at a make or break for the future of America’s middle class, and we need to put government back on the side of that middle class. Here’s the paragraph Greenberg tested in the DCorps focus groups that worked the best:
We’ve got to do everything possible to get people back to work. Unemployment is too high and we know that new jobs pay less and offer fewer benefits. It is really a struggle. That’s why we have to address not just the recovery but the fact that the middle class has taken it all on the chin for years and that’s got to change. We’ve been exporting American industries and outsourcing American jobs. The cause of healthcare, college, groceries and gasoline keep going up but the middle class can’t catch a break. They’ve taken on more debt and can’t save for education or retirement. At the same time, Wall Street’s big banks and the richest got big tax breaks and oil industry got special interest subsidies. This election is about the future of the middle class. We will put tax rates for those earning over $200,000 back up to where it was under President Clinton, eliminate special interest subsidies and cut our deficits over the long term. We have to protect retirement by securing Social Security and Medicare, expand support for education, training and innovation, American industries and make college affordable. We need an America where the middle class can proper again.
We are going to be seeing Obama’s private-sector-doing-fine quotation over and over in Republican TV ads. But if the president and his team internalize why people are reacting so negatively to what he said and pivot decisively away from the things-are-getting-better message and toward a message about fighting for the middle class in historically bad times, this week will ironically come to be seen as the turning point that headed President Obama toward reelection.

The following memo is cross-posted from Democracy Corps.
What is clear from this fresh look at public consciousness on the economy is how difficult this period has been for both non-college-educated and college-educated voters – and how vulnerable the prevailing narratives articulated by national Democratic leaders are.[1] We will face an impossible headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualizes the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class.
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle – and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way – not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.
We are losing these voters on the economy, but holding on because Romney is very vulnerable. They do not trust him because of who he is for and because he’s out of touch with ordinary people; he is vulnerable on the Ryan budget and its impact on people; he is vulnerable on the choices over taxes. But in the current context, it produces a fairly diminished embrace of Obama and the Democrats, the lesser of two evils, without much feeling of hope.
But we underscore the sentiment they expressed in the postcards to the President they wrote at the end of the exercise: overwhelmingly, these voters want to know that he understands the struggle of working families and has plans to make things better.
With the economy faltering, we conducted fairly open-ended focus groups among white non-college-educated voters in Columbus, Ohio and college-educated suburban voters in suburban Philadelphia. We excluded strong partisans from both camps. These were all independents or weak partisans and ticket-splitters–swing independent voters–and the groups included an even mix of 2008 Obama and McCain voters.
Job losses have left them struggling to pay the bills.
The discussion always begins with discussion of their experience with job losses for themselves and their families — and how that has left them struggling to pay for groceries. Most have jobs now, but speak about their lower wages and benefits. Because wages are down, there has been a dramatic rise in discussion of very basic pocketbook issues. And this does not seem like some passing phase.
This has not been a pocketbook-level recovery for ordinary Americans. This is especially true for non-college-educated voters, who have been uniquely hit by this economy. They, their families, and people they know are on food stamps, on unemployment, and on disability.
We’ve had a lot of layoffs in our family and my husband just got over that. He drew unemployment for a year and a half. (Non-college-educated woman, Columbus, OH)
I had to go in for hernia surgery on Friday. I’m unemployed, you know it’s expensive, they don’t care. Nobody cares. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH)
They have trouble finding work that will pay the bills. And for many older workers, it is difficult to find work at all.
I’m getting paid $7.70 an hour …I’m 53 years old…If I want a job, that’s what I’ve got to do. And actually… I’m having problems trying to get a full-time job because people are looking at it and saying, you know, we’ve only got a couple years. Most companies are looking and saying, we probably got a couple good years out of you, possibly less, that’s about it. And I mean, they all – used to be the laws were there that says, actually, you’re supposed to get two, 10-minute breaks… and a half hour lunch. Laws have changed now, companies don’t have to give that… And they’re working us to the bone. It’s like, wow, we’re back in the 1900s, you know…Because you’re just slave labor, you know. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH)
Things are really tough, I’m self-employed, I’m just drumming up work and it’s just, like, living, like, from pay to pay, from job to job. And you know, I can’t buy things for my kids or my grandkids like I – like I was before. And it upsets me, because you know, come Christmas time and stuff like that, their birthdays and stuff like that, you know, I can’t give them what I want to get them. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH).

Read more…

(Editor’s Note: We are extremely pleased to publish this significant strategic analysis by noted political analyst and TDS contributor Alan Abramowitz, the Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University)
With five months to go until Election Day 2012, all indications are that the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is going to go down to the wire and that the outcome will ultimately be decided by voters in 10-15 battleground states where neither candidate has a significant advantage.
In deciding how to allocate money and other resources in these battleground states, the key question facing the Obama campaign is how much emphasis to give to voter registration and mobilization versus persuasion of undecided and weakly committed swing voters. The conventional wisdom about the 2012 presidential election, trumpeted by most pundits and media commentators, is that the outcome will be decided by the swing voters and that the candidate who is viewed as closest to the center will have the best chance of winning their support. However, the evidence presented in this article, based on recent polling data from the battleground states, shows that Democrats have little chance of winning over many swing voters but a much better chance of winning the votes of the unregistered if they can get them on the voter rolls and turn them out on Election Day.
Swing Voters: Unhappy with Obama but Unenthusiastic about Voting
In order to compare the potential payoffs of a strategy emphasizing mobilization compared with one emphasizing persuasion, I analyzed data from a March 20-26 Gallup Poll in twelve key battleground states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. This was the most recent battleground state polling data available for analysis. A total of 1046 adults were interviewed on landline and cellular telephones including 871 registered voters.
One important finding from Gallup’s battleground state poll is that there were relatively few swing voters in these swing states. Among registered voters, 49 percent supported Barack Obama and another one percent indicated that they leaned toward Obama while 41 percent supported Mitt Romney and another two percent leaned toward Romney.
The March 20-26 survey was conducted at a time when Mitt Romney was still battling with Rick Santorum for the Republican nomination. Now that Romney has locked up the GOP nomination, Obama’s lead in these battleground states may very well be smaller. What is striking, however, is that as early as March, relatively few registered voters were unwilling to state a preference in a Romney-Obama contest. Even combining leaners with the undecided, swing voters made up less than 10 percent of the electorate in these twelve states.
Still, with the race between Obama and Romney expected to be very close, even a small group of swing voters could decide the outcome. So who were these swing voters? To answer this question, I compared the characteristics and political attitudes of swing voters (those who were undecided or only leaning toward a candidate) with the characteristics and attitudes of registered voters who were supporting either Obama or Romney. The results are displayed in Table 1.

The data in Table 1 show that compared with voters supporting a candidate, swing voters were disproportionately white and female. They were also much more likely to describe themselves as completely independent and much less likely to describe themselves as Democrats or independents leaning toward the Democratic Party than other voters. But the most dramatic differences between swing voters and voters supporting a candidate involved their opinions about President Obama and their enthusiasm about voting in 2012.
Swing voters had much more negative opinions of President Obama’s job performance than other voters. In fact their opinions were almost as negative as those of Romney supporters. Only 11 percent of swing voters approved of Obama’s job performance compared with 6 percent of Romney voters. In contrast, 92 percent of Obama voters approved of the President’s job performance.
But while swing voters were similar to Romney voters in their evaluation of President Obama’s job performance, they were much less enthusiastic about voting. Only 19 percent of swing voters described themselves as extremely or very enthusiastic about voting in 2012 compared with 47 percent of Romney supporters and 50 percent of Obama supporters. And 58 percent of swing voters described themselves as not too enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic about voting compared with only 27 percent of Romney supporters and 21 percent of Obama supporters.
These findings suggest that efforts by the Obama campaign to persuade swing voters are likely to be unproductive and could even backfire. These voters have a decidedly negative view of the President and are very unlikely to vote for him. The best the Obama campaign can hope for is that most of these swing voters will stay at home on Election Day.
The Other Unknown in the Equation: Unregistered Voters
In addition to swing voters, there is another group in the electorate whose behavior has the potential to influence the outcome of a close presidential election–those who are not currently registered. In fact, in the Gallup battleground state poll there were almost twice as many unregistered voters as swing voters.

Not only did unregistered voters outnumber swing voters, but their characteristics and political attitudes were very different from those of swing voters or those of registered voters. Table 2 compares the characteristics and attitudes of unregistered voters with those of registered voters in the Gallup battleground state survey. Unregistered voters were disproportionately young and nonwhite and, in marked contrast with swing voters, had more favorable opinions of President Obama’s job performance than registered voters. Most importantly, when asked about their presidential candidate preference, unregistered voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a better than two-to-one margin.
These findings suggest that the Obama campaign would be well advised to focus its efforts in the battleground states on voter registration and turnout rather than on trying to win over swing voters. However, unregistered voters, like swing voters, were rather unenthusiastic about voting. Getting them registered and to the polls could be challenging.

But while unregistered voters in general were unenthusiastic about voting, unregistered Obama supporters were considerably more enthusiastic than unregistered Romney supporters. This can be seen very clearly in Table 3. Fifty-nine percent of unregistered Obama supporters were at least somewhat enthusiastic about voting compared with only 34 percent of unregistered Romney supporters. These results suggest that a strategy that emphasizes turning unregistered Obama supporters into Obama voters could pay significant dividends for the President’s reelection campaign in the swing states.
A Note on the Results of the Wisconsin Recall Election:
Turnout Key to Walker Victory
The level of overreaction to the Wisconsin results, even by some usually sensible folks like Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent, is excessive. This one election does not mean that we are now in a new, “post-Citizens United” era in American politics. It is not necessary to diminish the importance of the Supreme Court’s decision to recognize that, empirically speaking it is simply not why Barrett lost. He lost because, as the exit polls revealed, a lot of Wisconsin voters were uncomfortable with the idea of recalling a sitting governor in the absence of evidence of misconduct in office and because the Republicans turned out in larger numbers than Democrats. Massive advertising certainly played a role in the election but it wasn’t the key factor.
An examination of the voting patterns and exit poll results in Tuesday’s Wisconsin recall election indicates that, in fact, turnout was a key factor in incumbent Republican Scott Walker’s victory over his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. While there was a heavy turnout for a special election, the final total of just over 2.5 million votes fell well short of the nearly 3 million votes cast in the 2008 presidential election. And Republicans appear to have done a better job of getting their voters to the polls. Turnout for the recall election was 91 percent of 2008 turnout in suburban heavily Republican Waukesha County, the largest GOP county in the state, but only 83 percent of 2008 turnout in Milwaukee County, the largest Democratic county in the state.
The same pattern was evident in the exit poll results. The 2012 recall electorate was noticeably older, whiter, more conservative and more Republican than the 2008 electorate. Voters age 65 and older outnumbered those under the age of 30 by 18 percent to 16 percent on Tuesday. In contrast, four years ago, 18-29 year-old voters outnumbered those 65 and older by 22 percent to 14 percent. Most significantly, on Tuesday Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 35 percent to 34 percent according to the exit poll. Four years ago, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 percent to 33 percent.
Despite Scott Walker’s fairly easy win on Tuesday, Democrats apparently were able to retake control of the state senate by defeating one GOP senator. And Democrats can take heart from one result from the exit poll. Even with a Republican-leaning electorate, Barack Obama led Mitt Romney by 51 percent to 44 percent when exit poll respondents were asked how they would vote in the presidential election. These results suggest that, Obama should be considered a solid favorite to carry the state again, especially if Democrats turn out in larger numbers in November.

If the Supreme Court majority guts the Affordable Care Act this month, it will be ruling against the will of the American people, as indicated by a recent opinion poll. According to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’

The latest Kaiser Health Tracking poll confirms that the public is not interested in repealing the Affordable Care Act, whatever its misgivings about the law. In fact, a plurality (47 percent) say they want to either see the law expanded (27 percent) or kept as is (20 percent), compared to 39 percent who want the law either repealed and replaced with a Republican alternative (18 percent) or repealed altogether (21 percent).

Nor is the public much interested in cutting funding for the Act, as Teixeira, notes:

And the public is strongly opposed to conservatives’ pet idea of cutting off funding for implementing the law if they are not successful in repealing it. Just 32 percent of those polled support such a move versus 58 percent who are opposed.

If the High Court’s forthcoming ruling has any regard for the overwhelming support of the public for keeping the law and strengthening it, the ACA will remain in force.

Thomas B. Edsall takes some recent demographic and attitudinal trends out for a ramble at his New York Times ‘Campaign Stops’ blog, and comes across some interesting insights, among them:

In a study published in February 2008, the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life found that mainline Protestants, once the dominant force not only in politics but in the national culture, had fallen to 18.1 percent of the electorate, behind both Protestant evangelicals and Catholics – and barely ahead of the fast-growing category of “unaffiliated,” which reached 16.1 percent.
Although a majority of the American population today decisively self-identifies as Christian, at 78.4 percent, America and its politics have in fact become vastly more heterogeneous. The connection between religion and politics is very complicated, of course. On the one hand, many people do not feel their religious beliefs and their political beliefs are directly related, but for others the former determines the latter. Not to mention the fact that the tenets of Christianity are themselves subject to partisan and subjective interpretation.

That latter point comes alive in a survey by an April 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which asked respondents, “Is capitalism compatible with Christian values?” The results, as Edsall summarizes:

By two to one, 53-26, Democrats believe that capitalism and Christianity are not compatible. Republicans, in contrast, believe there is no conflict, by a 46-37 margin. Tea Party supporters are even more adamant, believing that capitalism and Christian values are compatible by a 56-35 margin.

You can imagine the field day neo-McCarthyist Republicans will have with that one. The findings are corroborated somewhat with other surveys cited by Edsall. The Public Religion Research Institute found, for example, that 70 percent of Democrats agreed that “one of the big problems of this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance in life,” compared to just 38 percent of Republicans. A healthy majority of Republicans, 54 percent, on the other hand, agreed that “it’s not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,” while only 25 percent of Dems endorsed this view. Looking at all Americans, 53 percent agreed with the more liberal view, with 40 percent also embracing the more conservative perspective.
Edsall’s take on these and other survey data he presents is that “As presently constituted, the Republicans have become the party of the married white Christian past.” He rolls out an array of questions about how both parties will adapt to the demographic changes ahead, leaving his readers with an unavoidable conclusion that there is a well-rooted altruism/compassion gap which is reflected in party identification and economic philosophy.

Sasha Issenberg’s Slate.com post, “The Death of the Hunch,” provides a revealing look at the wonky side of campaign strategy, specifically “experiment-informed programs” to gauge the effects of messaging on different constituencies. As Issenberg, author of the forthcoming “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns,” explains,

…The strategy was put into play even before Romney emerged as the Republican nominee. There was the late-November advertising run on satellite systems that the campaign called “tiny,” and then silence until a brief January broadcast-buy across six states focusing on energy, ethics, and the Koch brothers. An isolated flight of brochures about health-care legislation hit mailboxes in March, timed to Supreme Court arguments on the subject. In voluminous (if not easily audited by outsiders) online ads and targeted email blasts, the campaign has addressed seemingly every topic or theme imaginable: taxes paid by oil companies, the “war on women,” and a variety of local issues of interest in battleground states.
If these forays seem random, it’s because at least some of them almost certainly are. To those familiar with the campaign’s operations, such irregular efforts at paid communication are indicators of an experimental revolution underway at Obama’s Chicago headquarters. They reflect a commitment to using randomized trials, the result of a flowering partnership between Obama’s team and the Analyst Institute, a secret society of Democratic researchers committed to the practice, according to several people with knowledge of the arrangement. (Through a spokeswoman, Analyst Institute officials declined to comment on the group’s work with Obama and referred all questions to the campaign’s press office, which did not respond to an inquiry on the subject.)
The Obama campaign’s “experiment-informed programs”–known as EIP in the lefty tactical circles where they’ve become the vogue in recent years–are designed to track the impact of campaign messages as voters process them in the real world, instead of relying solely on artificial environments like focus groups and surveys. The method combines the two most exciting developments in electioneering practice over the last decade: the use of randomized, controlled experiments able to isolate cause and effect in political activity and the microtargeting statistical models that can calculate the probability a voter will hold a particular view based on hundreds of variables.

Issenberg goes on to explain how the ‘E.I.P.’ process is conducted, painting a provocative picture of what is likely the most intensely data-driven presidential campaign ever. (for another interesting article on the topic, see Issenberg’s earlier New York Times article, “Nudge the Vote.”) And, if President Obama wins in November, a share of the credit may go to the rigorous empirical grounding of his message strategists.

Andrew Sullivan has some advice for the Obama campaign up at his perch at The Daily Beast:

Here’s how I’d summarize the argument I think works best for Obama:
“I inherited a financial and economic disaster and two wars that did not end in victory. I have prevented a second Great Depression, restored job growth, saved our auto industry, restored financial stability, ended one war and wound down another, but we need more. We need investments in infrastructure, reform of immigration, and continuation of my education reforms. And we need a sensible approach to debt elimination. My policy is to cut entitlements, cut defense and slash tax loopholes and deductions so we can get higher revenues from those who have done extremely well these past three decades. My opponent refuses to tax the extremely wealthy at the same rates as ordinary folk, and wants to cut the debt solely by cutting entitlements for the old and sick, while increasing defense spending and cutting taxes even further. We all know we are going to have to retrench. Would you rather do it with me guarding the core of the welfare state or with Romney-Ryan who want to end it with a solution that Newt Gingrich called ‘right wing social engineering'”?
I think you have to have this positive contrast to balance the brutal attacks on Romney in advertizing, or risk losing that critical ingredient that made Obama Obama: a sane reminder of the actual policy choices we face, and a reasoned centrist approach to solving them. Alas, after the heat of a brutal partisan pushback from the GOP from Day One, that positive vision is not so present this time around. It needs to be brought back.

Sullivan also has “three key” soundbite-sized questions he feels that the Obama campaign should pose to voters:

Would you rather cut the debt by slashing entitlements alone – or do you favor a balanced approach, with increased taxes on the wealthy, retrenchment of defense and reform of entitlements?
Would you rather a president who wants to launch a war against Iran or a president who will do all he can to avoid it?
Do you want repeal of a healthcare law that guarantees available private insurance even to those with pre-existing conditions? If you are under 26, and on your parents’ health insurance, do you want to lose it?

Keeping those questions front and center will help secure victory for Obama, Sullivan feels. Though progressive Dems will gag on some of Sullivan’s suggestions, it’s hard to argue with his concluding sentence, “Waiting for better economic numbers and pummeling Romney’s favorables is not, in my view, a superior strategy.”
Obama did OK in ’08 without Sullivan’s advice, and centrist candidates have not exactly been lighting the electorate on fire thus far in 2012. Yet there are undoubtedly centrist voters still out there in significant numbers, waiting for a clear statement of principles that resonates with them. In a close election, offering them a little encouragement with some of Suillivan’s points may not be such a bad idea.

This article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
At my father’s funeral, the presiding minister, Ebb Munden, was a man who had been one of my dad’s closest friends. Ebb talked about how the last time he had gone to see my dad before he lost consciousness, he had been very emotional but that my dad had comforted him by gripping his hand and telling him it would be alright, that my dad was at peace and Ebb should be too. The lesson was that even at our physically weakest we could still be helping other people and making things better in the world.
I was thinking of that this past weekend when I went to see my brother Kevin back home in Lincoln, Nebraska. Kevin is one of those people who followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy would call a leech on society — Rand believed that people with disabilities were leeches and parasites on society, and that the “parasites should perish.” Kevin’s birth father broke a chair over his head and gave him brain damage, making him developmentally disabled and making it hard for him to speak clearly. He came to my family when we were both 11 years old, and has been not only my brother but one of my closest friends ever since. As an adult in recent years, his body has continued to betray him as he is hard of hearing, can’t see well, and has muscular dystrophy. Recently he had to go into the hospital for major surgery and then developed pneumonia — his muscular dystrophy makes it especially tough to recover from all this.
For all of that, though, Kevin still contributes to the world around him, just as he always has. He has always shown great tenderness to the people around him, and still does. He can’t talk right now because he is on a ventilator, but his expressive hands still say a great deal. After I was watching him go through strenuous rehab exercises, I came over to him after he was done and asked how he was doing, and he just grinned and patted me on my too-big tummy, not only telling me he was okay, but that maybe I should be doing more exercise too. Even with all the tubes attached to him, he was still up for playing catch with a plastic ball in his room. He still had smiles for, and played ball with, a 5-year-old girl who came to see him. One of the nurses at the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital told me how touched she had been when he gave her a hug even though she was doing painful rehab exercises she knew he didn’t like. He still gave me all kinds of trouble, taking delight in showing me two stuffed dogs people had given him because he had named the big dog Kevin and the little dog Mike. And when I had to leave to go the airport and had tears in my eyes as I was leaning down to hug him goodbye, he rubbed my head to comfort me. I had come to comfort him in his time of pain, and he had comforted me even more. Kevin being a part of my life has been such a gift to me, and has made me 100 times better a person.
Kevin has also shaped my values and philosophy of life, and given me a perspective on policy issues. Conservatives are obsessed with the idea that somewhere, somehow there are lazy “undeserving” welfare recipients, but more than 90 percent of government support dollars go to the elderly, people working hard but are still below the poverty line because of low-wage jobs, and very disabled people like Kevin — those whose middle-class families like mine would be plunged into poverty if we had to pay for all their medical costs on our own.
It is Kevin who I think of when I see that the Ryan-Romney budget slashes money from Medicaid and from the Social Services Block Grant, a fund specifically targeted to help states meet the needs of their most vulnerable citizens. It is Kevin who I thought about when the audience at a Republican debate cheered about a man who had no health insurance dying. It is Kevin who I thought of when an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference laughed and cheered when Glenn Beck gleefully proclaimed that “in nature, the lions eat the weak.”
A society that does not value my brother Kevin at least as much as it does the Wall Street titans who grow rich as they speculate with other people’s money, and use the tax code to write off the debt they use to buy and sell companies regardless of the consequences to the families who work there, is a sick society. A government that would cut support to middle-class families trying to support their disabled children so the wealthy can get more tax breaks — a government that actually decides to help the wealthy and powerful more than the poor and disabled — would be a government with no decency. That is what Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Republicans are proposing for us. Their hero Ayn Rand would be proud.
I have many reasons for working to oppose Romney’s policies. I think his economic policies are a disaster for an economy still weakened by allowing Wall Street to run roughshod over the rest of us for the first decade of this century. I’d like for people to have access to contraceptives, and all of us to have access to quality health care. The idea of appointing more Supreme Court Justices who support cases like the Citizens United ruling that have allowed “corporations are people, my friends” is destructive to our democracy. But even if all of that wasn’t there, I would only need one reason to oppose Romney’s policies, and his name is Kevin.