<NOTE: This item is a post from TDS Co-Editor William Galston>
TO: SEN. BARACK OBAMA
FROM: WILLIAM GALSTON
SUBJ: ADJUST OR LOSE
I’ll get right to the point: You are in danger of squandering an election most of us thought was unlosable. The reason is simple: on the electorate’s most important concern – the economy — you have no clear message, and John McCain has filled the void with his own.
This is more than my opinion. The Democracy Corps survey released yesterday proves the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Backed by a wealth of persuasive detail, here is the nub of their conclusion:

In the absence of a coherent change message from Obama, many voters are accepting McCain’s definition, particularly since they want to change Washington and clean up government. As a result, Obama has lost his double-digit advantage over McCain on the right kind of change.

When I say you have no message, here’s what I mean:
First, you are not offering a coherent account of what has gone wrong with the economy – why it is no longer working for average families. People are anxious and bewildered; they want to know why jobs are disappearing, why incomes are stagnating, and why prices are soaring. If you don’t offer an explanation, McCain’s will carry the day by default: the problem is the corrupt, self-interested politicians in Washington; the solution is getting them – and government in general – out of the way.
Second: you are not offering a focused, parsimonious list of remedies for the economic ills you cite. As a result, few if any voters can actually cite a single signature economic proposal you have made. It’s not that you don’t have ideas. If anything, you have too many. At some point, more becomes less, and you are well beyond that point. You need to decide which three or four economic proposals are most important and repeat them relentlessly for the next seven weeks.
Your campaign already contains everything you need to do this. You could offer a focused economic message with four elements: rebuilding the United States, with an infrastructure bank, generating millions of good jobs that can’t be outsourced; creating millions more jobs by leading the world in environmental innovation; significantly reducing the tax burden on average families; and offering health insurance to everyone at a price they can afford. If you say that about your economic plan – and nothing else – from now until November, there’s a good chance your message will get through.
Third: you are not drawing crisp, punchy contrasts between your plans and McCain’s. An example: the centerpiece of his health care plan is the taxation of employer-provided health care benefits. Pound away at that, and let him explain why throwing workers into the individual health insurance market unprotected is such a wonderful idea. And by the way, while your plan would increase coverage, his would do the opposite. Is that the change Americans want?
Fourth: your stump speech is too long and discursive. It shouldn’t last more than fifteen minutes, it should focus on your agenda, not today’s news story, it should feature short, declarative sentences, and it should leave no doubt about what you care about the most. Right now, regrettably, few Americans believe that you feel real passion about their economic plight and are willing to wage a tough fight on their behalf. It’s your job to convince them otherwise, and you don’t have much time to do it.
A message is a thought not only sent, but also received and understood. If your hearers aren’t getting it, it’s not a message. The essence of political speech is functional, not aesthetic. It is a tree judged by its fruit, and the fruit is persuasion. Right now you’re not persuading the people you need to persuade, and nothing else matters.
Fifth: there’s no coordination between an economic message and the rest of your campaign. If you want the focus to be on the economy, that’s what your paid advertising and your surrogates should be doing as well.
Attacking McCain for employing lobbyists is a waste of precious time and resources; it plays on his turf and accepts his definition of the problem. Moreover, It diverts attention from the core issue – a Republican approach to the economy, shared by Bush and McCain, that shafts ordinary Americans and does nothing to help them deal with the challenges of global competition. So far, while the McCain campaign has gone for the jugular, you’ve gone for the capillaries.
Some Americans won’t support you because they think you’re too young and inexperienced to be president, or that you’re too liberal, or not patriotic enough, or because you might raise taxes, or because you’re African-American. That’s inevitable. The good news is that by themselves, these Americans are not a majority. The bad news is that they might become part of a majority if they are joined by the many Americans who are open to supporting you but are turning away because they don’t hear you speaking to their concerns in a manner that they can understand.
This is not about you alone; it’s a matter of political responsibility. Millions of Americans have invested their hopes and dreams in you, and you owe it to them to campaign effectively, which isn’t happening right now. Yes, the McCain campaign is replete with exaggerations, evasions, and outright fabrications. It’s your responsibility to defeat them, not complain about them. If this means listening to advice you don’t want to hear, and getting out of the “comfort zone,” so be it.
Three months ago, when you were riding high, the McCain campaign was flat on its back. But give McCain credit: when he was told that to win he had to change, he did. He focused, and he accepted a kind of discipline that he had previously resisted. Now it’s your turn.

It is to be profoundly hoped that health care becomes a significant issue in the balance of the presidential campaign, and that due attention is paid to John McCain’s health care plan. Here’s the conclusion of an analysis of that plan in the policy journal Health Affairs:

Achieving Senator McCain’s vision would radically transform the U.S. health insurance system. His plan would alter the nature, source, and financing of coverage for the nearly 160 million Americans who now receive health insurance through their employers. We estimate that twenty million Americans–about one in every eight people with job-based coverage–would lose their current coverage as a result of the change in the tax treatment of coverage. Initially, this loss of job-based coverage would be offset by an increase in coverage in the nongroup market (although not necessarily for the same individuals). Within five years, however, the net effect of the plan is expected to be a net reduction in coverage relative to what would have been observed if the tax treatment of employer-sponsored coverage remains as it is now. The decline of job-based coverage would force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system–the nongroup market–where cost sharing is high and covered services are limited. Senator McCain’s proposal to deregulate this market would mean that people in it would lose protections they now have. These changes would diminish the security of coverage for most Americans, especially those who are not–or someday will not be–in perfect health.

Be forewarned.

Given what’s happening on Wall Street today, it’s a good time to take a fresh look at the economic thinking of “maverick” Republican John McCain. And as Jon Cohn reminds us at The New Republic today, virtually the only evidence that McCain’s economic policies would be better than those of George W. Bush is his campaign’s habit of renouncing advisors who are honest about them, the latest example being an economist who suggested there was no reason to worry about Americans without health insurance (they can go to emergency rooms for care!). Generally, McCain’s pattern is to express sympathy for people struggling to make ends meet, while advancing policies that would do absolutely nothing to help them.
Cohn’s piece is useful in no small part because it offers a good, succinct analysis of McCain’s health care plan, which would probably destroy the current system of employer-based health insurance while actually making it easier for insurance companies to deny coverage to people with health problems. Check it all out.

So if you’re like most Americans, and are watching with semi-comprehension and growing horror the financial crisis that built up over the weekend, the New York Times is offering a live-blog today that assesses the damage as it unfolds. At this particular moment, stocks have plunged, people on Wall Street are nervous, but the sky’s not falling just yet.
Meanwhile, you can imagine that John McCain’s campaign isn’t terribly happy with the self-parodying investment analyst Donald Luskin, who penned a happy-talk op-ed for the Washington Post yesterday trumpteting the health of the economy while advertising himself as an advisor to McCain. Luskin does note unhappily that McCain himself doesn’t seem to get it that concerns about the economy are fraudulent, but blames that on Barack Obama. Seriously.

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.

Most of us have heard and laughed at Stephen Colbert’s neologism “truthiness,” defined by him as “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” and defined by Merriam-Webster Online as “”the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”
Well, check out this quote from “Republican strategist” John Feehery in today’s Washington Post, referring to the demonstrably false claims that Sarah Palin fought and slew the “Bridge To Nowhere:”

The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.

How truthy!

As expected, the McCain campaign’s addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket is being used to double-down on its highly deceptive claim that it offers some sort of repudiation to the Republican policies of the last eight years.
The latest McCain-Palin ad, dubbed “Original Mavericks,” is a small masterpiece of mendacity. Aside from the fact that it trumpets one heavily documented lie (that Palin “stopped the Bridge to Nowhere”), the idea that McCain and Palin can best be understood as warriors fighting Republicans and corporations is breathtakingly dishonest.
The best response yet made to this whole line of argument was yesterday’s Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post. It shows McCain and Palin standing outside the White House, with McCain hurling this threat:

Look out, Mr Bush! With the exception of economic policy and energy policy and social issues and tax policy and foreign policy and Supreme Court appointments and Rove-style politics, we’re coming in there to shake things up!

Rebutting the Republican ticket’s “maverick” claims is the most urgent challenge for Democrats between now and Election Day. If they are truly “mavericks” in any respect, it’s because they’d take the country in an even more extreme direction than the Bush-Cheney administration.

It’s not unusual for presidential candidates to have elaborate “whip” operations at conventions, to ensure communications and coordination among widely scattered delegations.
But Hillary Clinton’s convention team is “whipping” its delegates for an unusual purpose: to repress any anti-Obama signs or gestures.
Headed by longtime Clinton operative Craig Smith, the 40-member whip team will work closely with Obama campaign officials to “help foster the image of a unified front during a roll-call process Clinton herself has described as an emotional ‘catharsis’ for her disappointed supporters.” As one Clinton staffer put it:

“If people get down there on the floor and want to start blowing kazoos and making a scene we want to make sure we’ve got people who stand in front of them with Obama signs,” said a person involved in the planning.

Apparently, the lure of convention floor passes helped ensure that plenty of people signed up for the Clinton whip team.

At Politico today, Jonathan Martin has a good roundup of the very unhappy reactions of cultural conservatives in key battleground states to John McCain’s suggestion earlier this week that he might choose a pro-choice running-mate (see J.P. Green’s analysis from yesterday).
McCain was specifically speaking of former PA Gov. Tom Ridge as a man who was still on his short-list, but the comment was interpreted as possibly referring as well to Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has a consistent pro-choice voting record that includes opposition to the so-called partial-birth-abortion ban.
Here’s a sample of the reaction:

“It absolutely floored me,” said Phil Burress, head of the Ohio-based Citizens for Community Values. “It would doom him in Ohio.”
Burress emailed about a dozen “pro-family leaders” he knows outside Ohio and forwarded it to three McCain aides tasked with Christian conservative outreach.
“That choice will end his bid for the presidency and spell defeat for other Republican candidates,” Burress wrote in the message.
He and other Ohio conservatives met privately with McCain in June, and while the nominee didn’t promise them an anti-abortion rights running mate, his staff said they could “almost guarantee” that would be the case, Burress recalled.
Now, Burress said, “he’s not even sure [Christian conservatives] would vote for him let alone work for him if he picked a pro-abortion running mate.”

Meanwhile, over at National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez refers to a potential Ridge pick as “bad news,” but to the choice of Lieberman as “a disaster” that might even spark a floor revolt at the Republican National Convention. And also at NR, Rich Lowry has a column referring to the choice of Lieberman as a “desperate move” that could touch off a “Republican civil war.” His suggestion to McCain? If he’s going to choose Lieberman, both candidates should take a one-term pledge, taking Lieberman off the table for the 2012 presidential nomination.
Now that would be an inspiring message: a ticket offered to the public with an early expiration date.

So on a day when Democrats could use some good news, they got it: contradicting earlier reports that he’d be in an undisclosed secure location, Republicans announced that Vice President Dick Cheney will join George W. Bush in speaking on the first night of the GOP Convention next month.
Know what this may mean? McCain’s revealing his running-mate choice some time that afternoon.