The recent announcement of a coordinated $350 million election-year effort by independent liberal and progressive groups — including MoveOn, the AFL-CIO, Change To Win, Women’ Voices, Women Vote, the National Council of La Raza, Acorn and Rock the Vote — is profoundly impressive. Together with the Democratic candidates’ tremendous success in direct small-donor fundraising this year it raises the hope that Dems might actually come close to matching or surpassing the Republicans in overall funding.
Lurking in the background, however, is the ominous fact that pro-Republican independent groups – led by Freedom Watch which by itself already has a $250 million war chest — will still probably far outspend pro-Democratic independent groups. As Freedom Watch’s treasurer bluntly told one reporter recently, in 2008, “money won’t be an object”. Moreover, because the large liberal-progressive organizations are generally more oriented toward grass-roots and GOTV organizing than big-money advertising campaigns, it is probable that in the specific area of TV and radio advertising by independent committees the pro-Republican advantage will be even greater. This is particularly disturbing because independent committee money – free from the need for the candidate to directly endorse its message – is the best tool for the most dishonest and scurrilous type of attack ads.
Behind the myriad minor variations, the basic strategy of the “slime attack” or “character assassination” category of advertising is usually to dishonestly associate a Democrat with some kind of deeply negative stereotype or schema that is already strongly embedded in the voter’s mind. Barack Obama provides a particularly rich target in this respect. Because of his unconventional personal history and background, it is almost trivially easy for a skilled ad designer to slyly imply that he is (or once was) anything from a “secret Muslim” to a “Black militant”, a “60’s radical”, an “inner city crack user”, an “ivy- league liberal snob” or a “corrupt Chicago pol”. (The comparable attack on Hillary Clinton would focus on activating negative schemas involving liberals and professional women – the “anti-family women’s libber,” the “snotty, rich do-gooder”, the “affluent limousine liberal”, and the “bitch”, “witch”, or “man-hater.”)
These subtle forms of character assassination work best when they are not consciously analyzed by the audience but absorbed in the background. This takes advantage of the unconscious assumption many people now make that while all political ads are untrustworthy, they are also all roughly equal in their degree of mendacity (e.g. “all those political ads are crap”, “It’s all just a bunch of B.S.”). This unfortunately common mental short-cut enhances the credibility of attacks that are based on slander and innuendo and diminishes the credibility of those that are more factually based.
There are two standard Democratic responses to attacks of this kind – (1) directly defending against the specific accusation or (2) making a comparably slashing counter-attack. Both have major drawbacks.
On the one hand, political strategists universally dislike simple responses to attacks because continually “playing defense” is considered ultimately a losing strategy. On the other hand, liberals are handicapped in playing tit-for tat with conservatives because of their generally less ruthless political outlook (it is hard, for example, to imagine any of the leading liberal independent committees producing material suggesting that a Republican fathered an illegitimate Black child–as pro-Bush operatives suggested about McCain at one point in 2000–or presenting patently phony “witnesses” to dishonestly discredit a soldiers medals, as the swift-boaters did to John Kerry in 2004).
However, in trying to match the provocative, infuriating and attention-getting effect of conservative “slime attacks” without resorting to outright lies and dishonest innuendo, liberal independent committees often find themselves making attacks that come across as exaggerated, strident or shrill to undecided voters. The “General betray-us” New York Times ad, for example, was popular with highly partisan anti-war Democrats because of its’ bitter, “in-your-face” expression of anger and disrespect, but it had a zero or negative persuasive effect on other voters.
There is an alternative strategy Democrats can consider, however – one based on research conducted during the 1950’s on how people can best be taught to resist “brainwashing” techniques like those used on GI’s in the Korean War. Two important findings were the “inoculation” effect (that prior, controlled exposure to propaganda significantly reduces its effectiveness) and the “ulterior motive” or “hidden agenda” effect (that awareness of a message source’s manipulative intent reduces its persuasiveness) On the surface both notions seem so self-evident as to be trivial, but the demonstration that they were empirically measurable phenomena made it possible for communication specialists to argue that it could sometimes be worthwhile to allocate scarce advertising dollars to messages that employed them.
The possible strategy that flows from this research is simple – allocate some part of the pro-Democratic ad budget to directly and explicitly attacking the “independent” conservative committees like Freedom Watch and their commercials.

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To this point, Obama’s big speech on race yesterday is getting widespread praise for its unexpected honesty and candor. Watching MSNBC, I heard it called unprecedented and brilliant, and was actually compared to Martin Lugher King’s “I Have a Dream” address.
If you do a quick survey online (and ignore The Corner) the criticism, such as it is, boils down to one simple thing — the speech was too long. It offered too many opportunities for negative soundbites. In fact, as I was watching the speech, one of the very first headlines that MSNBC put up read:

Obama: Racial anger is “real”

But that only remains true if the one way that people hear the words of Obama’s speech is in a 20-second clip. The thus-far remarkable thing about this election is that it no longer has to be that way.
The campaign put the video of the entire speech on YouTube before lunch. Twenty-four hours after Obama walked off the stage in Philadelphia, this 37-minute address has already been viewed more than 1,000,000 times. As I write this post, 20 additional people are watching the speech, it’s currently the “most-viewed video” at YouTube. ‘d bet my lunch that another 1,000,000 people will watch this speech before the week is out.
The New York Times posted a transcript of the speech in full online, and by 3:00, it was among most popular stories on the website. Formatted for the web, Obama’s remarks spill over seven pages, but the article has already been emailed and shared by thousands of NYT readers.
And the web isn’t the only nontraditional outlet for the speech either. Minutes after Obama walked off stage, I got a call from a college buddy who was driving through Richmond on the way to North Carolina. He was flipping through the radio dial, heard the speech, and stopped to listen. As soon as Obama wrapped up, a DJ cut in to explain why the station had stopped playing music to carry the speech live. My buddy thought he was listening to NPR, but it turns out this was a local hip-hop station.
I’m sure millions of people watched clips from Obama’s remarks on the network evening news. But millions more are experiencing the speech outside the mainstream media. They’re reading, watching, and listening to this speech in full, then discussing it and sharing it. The evening news is still important, and the cable shows still matter. But the filters are no doubt becoming less important, and that in turn means that the soundbite might lose some of its stranglehold on political communications.

Daily Kos’ DHinMI has a very informative post about independent expenditures on behalf of the Democratic candidates in OH and TX. It’s basically a tale of the competition between three groups who have been supporting HRC almost from the beginning–the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Emily’s List, and the American Federation of Teachers–and two who have more recently endorsed Obama–the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers. Looks like SEIU in particular is really kicking out the jams for Obama in OH and TX:

Through the Wisconsin primary, the three groups backing Clinton spent about $4.4 million. In Ohio, they have continued the model of what worked well in the early states—lots of direct mail, probably directed at women, followed up with phone calls. In Ohio, they have boosted their program. Whereas in most states they appear to have sent about 6 pieces of mail, it appears that in Ohio their target audience has received up to 8 pieces. They have also run a small amount of media, and are now following up the mail with phone calls. The total expenditures come to about $500,000.
FEC reports indicate that SEIU will probably spend over 5 times as much as AFSCME and EMILY’s list in Ohio. They’ve spent $400,000 in mail, almost matching AFSCME and EMILY’s List. In addition to the mail, they have also spent $200,000 on phones, $425,000 on a paid canvass program, and $1.4 million on electronic media. All together, with staff, production and other expenses factored in, SEIU has spent over $2.6 million in Ohio.
Obama will benefit from other expenditures. While EMILY’s list has spent $140,000 in media in Texas—such a small expenditure suggests it’s probably Spanish language radio, or possibly cable ads on networks that focus on women, like Lifetime—SEIU has dropped over $1.7 million in to that state. They have spent $700,000 on media, almost $500,000 on a canvass program, $300,000 on phones and almost $300,000 on mail.
The amount SEIU has spent just in Ohio and Texas now equals the combined spending of AFSCME, the AFT and EMILY’s List from the start of the campaign through the Wisconsin primary.

If Obama manages to pull off wins in these two states, he’ll owe a lot to his new union friends.

As you get ready to follow tonight’s election results (unless you’ve decided to get a good night’s sleep and just read it about it tomorrow), there are some media “story lines” to look for as the evening progresses, which may have as much impact on the nomination races as the actual results. I’ve compiled a handful of these after spending far too much time watching and reading the pre-Super Tuesday analysis on the networks and in the papers and blogs.
1) Turnout: early network coverage of Super Tuesday usually features some characterization of turnout, particularly on the Democratic side, where past 2008 primaries and caucuses have shown record turnouts in every state. Keep in mind, however, that (1) a lot of today’s primary states have heavy early/absentee voting (viz. California, where half the total vote may be cast that way), which means that official turnout estimates will be more reliable than anecdotal evidence of long lines or high percentages of voters showing up at a given precinct; and (2) the states holding caucuses obviously won’t know anything about turnout til the events themselves.
2) Exit Polls Show This or That: Given the confusion we’ve seen earlier this year over leaked exit polls, “early” exit polls, “adjusted” exit polls, and so forth, it’s a good time to read Mark Blumenthal’s timely primer on exit polls, posted today. Mark is mainly talking about the “horse-race” aspect of exit polls, which badly burned news networks have gotten more cautious about. But you can still expect promiscuous use of exit poll data to analyze voter demographics, which will affect several of the story lines discussed below.
3) Expectations: As I said yesterday, political media types love expectations games like a wino loves zinfadel-in-a-box. At present, the prevailing expecations line on the Democratic side is a close outcome in terms of delegates and state “wins,” though there’s a bit of a trend towards an expectation that Obama will win at least one or two of the big states where polls have been tightening (e.g., CT, MA, NJ, AZ or CA). If HRC wins the close states, she may be adjudged the “winner” despite a lot of talk that a “tie” benefits Obama in the long run. On the Republican side, the prevailing expectation is that John McCain will all but wrap up the nomination tonight. Anything Mitt Romney can do to place that conclusion in doubt will be considered a “win,” even if it’s a stay of execution. BTW, one of the guaranteed cliches you’ll hear if McCain does well is: “It’s Mardi Gras for John McCain, and tomorrow, Mitt Romney will face an Ash Wednesday.” Count on it.
4) Racial/Ethnic/Gender/Partisan Voting Patterns: Two big continuing story lines in the Democratic contest have been the “racialization” of voters (e.g., Obama’s getting increasingly large percentages of the African-American vote, but a declining percentage of the white vote), and HRC’s advantage among Latino and female voters. At present, the fact that Obama is likely to win several primaries and caucuses (e.g., KS, AK, MN, and WA) in heavily white states may get attention, or the talking heads may instead focus on relatively low Obama tallies among white voters in the South (AL, AR, and GA). The struggle for Latinos will dominate coverage of NM, AZ and most of all CA. And as always, evidence in any one state that HRC has won because of very strong showing among women will get significant attention. In both parties, expect some analysis of how candidates are doing with independents and partisans; there’s a lot of media interest in the idea that Obama and McCain have special appeal to indies, and//or are weak with partisans. Keep in mind, BTW, that although you’ll be hearing about “open” and “closed” primaries that invite or reject independents from participation, some states have EZ re-registration rules that make participation by indies in “closed” primaries possible.
5) “Tune In Tomorrow”: Though political media truly hate irresolute results, and demand thumbsucking total analysis before signing off at night, there are some things we are just unlikely to know tonight. I did an extended discussion yesterday of the situation in CA, where a slow count and a vast number of absentee ballots may make choosing a winner impossible tonight, unless the exit polls show a big winner. A buch of too-close-to-call races could lead the punditry to either call it a night, or impose a meanng on what they know. That would certainly play into the Obama-wins-ties story line on the Democratic side, or the Romney Death Watch story line on the GOP side.
There are other story lines that may develop, some of them subsidiary, such as the impact of various Kennedy endorsements on the Democrats or the crisis of anti-McCain talk-radio conservatives among Republicans. And as always, there could be an event that surprises everyone.

The national media have pretty clearly decided that John McCain is now the front runner in the GOP primary. With strong performances in New Hampshire and South Carolina, he has won two of the three traditional, nominee-deciding states. That fits a narrative that is easy for journalists to describe and analyze.
And it’s not just journalists projecting a McCain victory — Sen. John Edwards raised the specter of running against McCain in the last Democratic debate, and the McCain camp is reporting that they raised more than $7 million dollars in the month of January. To me, that looks like lots of Republicans are buying the hype as well.
But if you’re a McCain booster, there are some underlying issues that have to make you worry.
For starters, the nominating process is a race to win delegates, and McCain isn’t actually ahead. In fact, he’s well back in third place — the Arizona senator has 36 delegates, while Mike Huckabee is second with 40 and Mitt Romney leads the pack with 59.
At this point, Huckabee’s appeal is probably limited to his core group of evangelical supporters, and more importantly, he’s out money. He’s probably done. But Romney has been strong everywhere, winning contests in Michigan and Nevada, placing second in Iowa and New Hampshire (both of which added to his delegate totals). Earlier in the month, his campaign reported that they’d managed to raise $5 million, and of course, the multimillionaire can always give his campaign another infusion of cash.
As Ed has said before, there is a history of deep-seated distrust for John McCain among the GOP establishment. McCain has been a champion of campaign finance reform, outspoken critic of torture, and he acknowledged the threat of global warming when many said it was a myth. For whole lot of conservatives, no amount of stumping for Bush or speaking at Liberty University can make up for his earlier sins.
That conservative uncertainty has definitely played itself out so far in the election. After the New Hampshire Primary, former Sen. Rick Santorum was interviewed on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, and two questions in, he launched into criticism of McCain:

[O]n the economic side, he was against the President’s tax cuts, he was bad on immigration. On the environment, he’s absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues. He was…I mean, on medical care, I mean, he was for re-importation of drugs. I mean, you can go on down the list. I mean, this is a guy who on a lot of the core economic issues, is not even close to being a moderate, in my opinion. And then on the issue of, on social conservative issues, you point to me one time John McCain every took the floor of the United States Senate to talk about a social conservative issue. It never happened.

After South Carolina, when there was serious discussion about rallying around McCain as the most electable candidate in the GOP field, Rush Limbaugh launched into a diatribe:

We are supposedly damaging the conservative movement. We should just shut up. Just sit by and watch all this stuff and let it happen and just be quiet. What is the point? By the way, it’s aimed at people in talk radio. Why should we in talk radio “just shut up,” and start supporting the front-runner of the moment? Especially when you realize that’s what the Drive-By Media wants! Why should we in talk radio sit here and take our marching orders from the Drive-By Media and others in our movement who write what they write, for liberals in the Drive-By Media. Why should we do that. McCain, frankly, has shown conservatives little but contempt over many years.

At this point in the race, there is still deep opposition to McCain’s presidential campaign in the Republican Party, and it’s not just among opinion leaders, either.
John McCain has yet to win a majority of self-described conservatives. In New Hampshire, he lost them by 7 points to Mitt Romney; in Michigan, he lost 23 to 41, again to Romney; in South Carolina, it was 26 to 35, this time to Huckabee. McCain’s victories, when they’ve come, have been delivered by self-described moderates and Independents, and it’s no coincidence that both his wins have been in states with open primaries. He has also received a huge boost from the fractured state of the GOP field, but his success has served to drive his rivals out of the race.
For Republicans, the last test before Super Tuesday is Florida, and it’s a closed primary — if McCain is going to win, all of his supporters will have to be registered with the GOP. Immediately after South Carolina, polls there showed him ahead. Now, Romney has serious traction, and going into this weekend, it’s anyone’s guess who’s actually in the best position to win.
If McCain loses, his candidacy is in serious trouble. It will be an indication that he can’t compete without additional support from independents. And on Super Tuesday, that could spell disaster in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, and West Virginia — where the primaries are all closed.
If McCain can’t solve his conservative problem, then the person with the most money and the best organization will become the GOP nominee, which will leave Democrats running against Mitt Romney in the fall. And like many conservatives, most Democrats would be happy with that contest.

After my last post on the Democratic presidential contest in GA, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the perhaps-even-more-pivotal GOP race there. According to the new AJC/Mason-Dixon poll, Huckabee’s romping in the Peach State, leading McCain 31-18, with Romney at 14, Giuliani with 9, and Big Fred at 8.
Sure, some of the Huckabee juice in GA is attributable to his southern identity, and/or to the prominence of conservative evangelicals in the GOP there. But it’s also worth noting that an issue which has become a Huckabee handicap in many conservative precincts, his championship of the so-called “Fair Tax,” is a positive in GA. The Bible of the Fair Tax movement is a book by Georgia congressman John Linder and the ubiquitous Atlanta-based conservative talk radio gabber Neal Boortz. Georgia Republicans have been exposed to a torrent of propaganda on this topic for a long time. Given Boortz’s well-known libertarian tendencies, it may privately bug him that the leading advocate for his tax plan is that Christian Socialist Huckabee. But hey, it sells books, and probably attracts votes as well.

Yesterday, I briefly wrote about the highly debatable theory that the Bhutto assassination will greatly affect the Democratic presidential race, and J.P. Green briefly touched on it today. But I want to return to it now in a bit more detail, after appearing on the syndicated public radio show To the Point earlier today, where speculation was rampant that the Bhutto Factor will be the ball game for the Iowa Caucuses specifically.
To be clear, it’s all close enough among the Big Three candidates in Iowa that all sorts of factors–the weather, the impact of the final Des Moines Register poll, and most of all candidate “second-preference” deals–could be decisive, And in that respect, heavy news coverage of the Bhutto assassination and its aftermath, along with candidate interaction on the subject, could have a key impact as well. But as for the idea that the assassination has suddenly made foreign policy street cred and experience an overriding factor in Iowa–sorry, I just don’t buy it.
You have to remember that Iowans have been watching and listening to these candidates for about a year, many of them through personal contact, and hearing their pithy views on virtually every topic, foreign and domestic. Most likely caucus goers are not just now “tuning in” (unlike their counterparts in later states). Yes, they will be exposed to relatively heavy news coverage of events in Pakistan and the remarks of the candidate on same, but news coverage in Iowa will be dwarfed by paid campaign media (which has reached unprecedented levels this year), phone calls, door-to-door campaigning and personal lobbying from friends and family. There are also Iowans who will go to the Caucuses undecided, and will pick a candidate based on the dynamics (and campaign pleas) in the room.
In other words, it’s the last place on earth where tangential news-cycle developments are likely to play a really major role. And come to think of it, that’s the first good argument I’ve thought of for Iowa’s primacy in a good long while.

Tom Hayden’s latest article in The Nation, “How the Peace Movement Can Win in ’08,” is an extremely important read – not only for those Democrats who want to accelerate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, but also for any Democratic political strategists who think the only coherent political strategies are those that are designed to win elections.. Hayden, one of the most lucid strategic thinkers in the peace movement, rolls out an action plan for political and protest activists, linked to key upcoming events in the political calendar, both short and long-term. It is, in effect, the plan for a parallel campaign to the 2008 elections, one aimed at mobilizing the already existing peace constituency and influencing public opinion.
Hayden sees the peace movement having “the best-funded antiwar message in history” and “an opportunity to solidify public opinion behind a more rapid withdrawal–regardless of what the national security advisers think.” He urges Dems favoring a faster withdrawal to make stronger and more effective use of the 527 committees and fully deploy financial resources in broadening the anti-war movement.
In fact, Hayden sees electoral activism as even more important than traditional protest methods. On the one hand he says:

The peace movement can succeed only by applying people pressure against the pillars of the war policy–public opinion, military recruitment and an ample war budget–through marching, confronting military recruiters and civil disobedience.

But, at the same time,

The tactics that are most likely to accelerate the process are greater efforts at persuading the ambivalent voters. [we need]..skilled organizers and volunteers across the electoral battlegrounds of 2008…to identify, register and turn out voters through door-to-door work combined with radio and television spots. A massively funded voter-identification and -registration drive and a get-out-the vote campaign have enormous potential to tip not only the presidential election but also the scales of public opinion. Rather than merely pounding away at a simplistic message–Republicans dangerous, Democrats better–such an effort would require, as a foundation, resources to educate voters and involve them in house meetings. The house-meeting approach allows for voter education and participation on a scale that cannot be achieved by hit pieces or TV spots. It is also critical for cultivating grassroots leadership capacity for election day turnout and beyond.

Hayden touches on the pros and cons of Iraq withdrawal plans of the Dem presidential nominees and gives Edwards the edge among front-runners, while crediting Obama with strengthening his withdrawal proposal.. Hayden says Clinton’s “centrist” proposals are too vague, but he believes “bird-dogging” all Dem candidates on the trail can help move the Democrats toward faster withdrawal from Iraq.
Progressive Democrats like myself who are convinced that we should withdraw from Iraq as promptly as feasible but who also believe the most important priority for the future of America is a democratic victory in 2008 and the creation of an enduring Democratic majority will find Hayden’s article provocative reading. In fact, it forces both peace activists and Democratic campaigners alike to think more deeply about the potential conflicts and trade-offs between anti-war activism and pro-Democratic advocacy and to explicitly consider how the two forces can work as much as possible in parallel rather then across purposes. There are no easy answers to this strategic challenge, but Hayden’s article is an excellent place to start.

(Andrew Levison is the author of two books and numerous articles on the social and political attitudes of blue collar workers and other ordinary Americans)
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It is an unfortunate fact that during election years important discussions of long-term political strategy often get oversimplified and distorted in order to squeeze them into conventional campaign narratives.
This is what happened to an important Democracy Corps memo issued several weeks ago. The memo — which offered an analysis of polls and focus group data on a range of domestic economic issues including immigration and open borders — got grabbed and sucked up into the mainstream media debate about the electoral wisdom of the Republican’s “get tough”, anti-illegal immigrant posturing and whether the Democrats should follow their lead or stick to traditional progressive principles.
But this was not the specific issue the D-Corps memo was actually evaluating and its more subtle strategic analysis and conclusions should not be allowed to get lost in the shuffle. The central finding of D-Corps’ polls and focus groups was that a profound and unrecognized degree of frustration exists among average middle-class Americans regarding a wide range of economic issues, feeding an extraordinarily deep contempt and anger at the political establishment, Democratic as well as Republican. The Memo’s key thesis was that, without a proper political strategy, this deep discontent will not necessarily benefit the Democrats next year.
In regard to immigration, the memo noted three critical facts:
1. While Democrats in the survey identified Iraq and health care as the major areas where the country was going in the wrong direction, the top issue identified by independents was immigration and “unprotected borders.” 40% of independents chose this option – no other issue even came close.
2. Immigration and open borders were the top concern for those voters who want to vote Democratic but are holding back – the most attainable swing voters of all.
3. The voters who were most angry about the issue were those with a high school education and rural voters – groups where recent surveys have suggested Democrats might otherwise be able to regain some lost ground.
The first point that should be noted is that these conclusions are focused on how immigration is perceived by a specific group of voters – “ordinary middle-class” swing voters – and not how the issue will play with the electorate as a whole (In fact, when D-Corps studied national opinion as a whole, they found slightly less support for the one- sided “get tough” measures then for alternatives that included some path to citizenship).
More important, the basic problem the D-Corps memo identified is not simply that there is substantial middle-American antagonism to illegal immigration. It is that this sentiment threatens to fuse with three other attitudes among many potential democratic voters: a sense of severe economic distress; a feeling of powerlessness and of being ignored by political leaders; and a simmering sense of class resentment toward the “liberal” educated elite. This was the potent ideological package that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes used to ride to the presidency and which Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ross Perot and scores of their lesser imitators have ridden to national celebrity.
It is not surprising that Democracy Corps detected this emerging danger. Back in the 1980s Stan Greenberg, the lead author of the memo, was the first political analyst to clearly understand and map the distinct political attitudes of the “Reagan Democrats” – the traditionally Democratic blue-collar and grey-collar workers whose defection to the Republicans has arguably been the most fundamental (and intractable) demographic problem for the Democrats during the past 25 years. The clear implicit warning the recent D-Corps memo contains is that if Democrats fail to successfully confront the current challenge, these voters could be lost for another quarter-century.

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