Readers of this and other political websites can be excused if they don’t feel like reading yet another post on what Dems can do to win more white working class votes, so numerous are published opinions on the subject in recent weeks. But Mark Schmitt nevertheless has a worthy read on the topic at The American Prospect. Schmitt’s post, “Did Hillary Crack the Working-Class Code?” makes the case that HRC’s messaging tone in speeches and ads later on in the primary season was exceptionally well-crafted for winning working-class votes. As Schmitt explains:

Where she won with a wide margin, her speeches and ads positioned mostly unsurprising policy proposals in the context of an argument about economic opportunity and fairness…If Clinton’s advantage did not come from what she said, it must have come from how she said it… I found two salient features: balance and modest aspirations. “I still have faith in [the American] dream. It’s just been neglected a bit,” Clinton said in a Pennsylvania TV ad. “They’re not asking for anything special,” she said of working-class voters in Zanesville, Ohio. “They’re just asking for a fair shake. They’re asking for a president who cares about them.”
Her language created a sense of order in the world, which she described in terms of mutual responsibility, symmetry, and a return to a better past: “We’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute Wall Street; you’ve had your president. Now we need a president for Main Street,'” she said on April 14 in Pittsburgh.

Schmitt posits her messaging in sharp contrast to Edwards’ harsher tone:

Note how different this language is, not just from Obama’s, but from the hard populism of John Edwards. Edwards depicted a permanent struggle against a relentless enemy: the corporate special interests themselves, who “will never give up power without a fight.” For Obama, there is a similar permanent challenge but also the hopeful idea that a lasting grand breakthrough might be possible.
For Clinton, the hurdles are lower — there’s a fight but no enemy. She argues that government has had its finger on the special interests’ side of the scale for seven years, so change is merely a matter of moving the weight over to the other side. Hence her constant theme, used in almost every ad and speech since March 4, of returning to balance — seven years of this, now seven years of that. Fairness for Clinton is not about resentment, equality, or even equality of opportunity. It’s about a return to an imagined normal order, where individuals’ thrift is matched by a comparable sense of responsibility on the part of their government. At other times, she uses the metaphor of a recent “detour,” arguing that we need to get back onto the “main road” of economic policy.

Although Edwards may have overemphasized the rhetoric of class conflict, I felt that Obama’s message tone was generally in the same ballpark as Clinton’s. Obama’s campaign can profit, however, from understanding the more nuanced messaging that characterized Clinton’s successful appeals later on in the primary season. Although a quick stop in any gas station can provide evidence that there is rising anger among working people, it hasn’t yet morphed into full-blown rage at U.S. corporations. It’s not to say that Edwards was wrong about the destructive impact of corporate abuse and corruption; he was stone cold right. it’s that voters seem to be looking for a more positively-stated, solution-oriented message. Thus Schmitt contrasts Clinton’s nostaligic “millworker’s grand-daughter” ad in Scranton with Edwards’s angrier “milworker’s son” pitch as a good example of her more positive tone in message-crafting. There seems to be a subtextual theme here of “hey, we don’t need an all-out class war here. But we urgently need some critical reforms to restore America’s greatness.”
As media coverage of the Iraq war receded during the primaries, the revealed differences between the social and economic policies of Clinton, Obama and Edwards were comparatively small. The Obama campaign’s challenge is to adapt some of Clinton’s successful messaging approaches to working people, while drawing sharp contrasts with the policies of McCain.

After reading a dozen post-mortems on Senator Clinton’s historic presidential candidacy, which granted, aint over until the lady in the pantsuit says so, the one I would recommend to future generations trying to understand the impact of Clinton’s run is Katha Pollit’s “Iron My Skirt” in The Nation. One of the venerable Nation‘s strongest voices for both feminism and peace, Pollitt offers one of the more insightful graphs on Clinton’s run yet published:

Some think Clinton’s loss, and the psychodrama surrounding it, will set women back. I think they’re wrong. Love her or loathe her, the big story here is Americans saw a woman who was a serious, popular, major-party candidate. Clinton showed herself to be tough, tireless, supersmart and definitely ready to lead on that famous Day One. She raised a ton of money and won 17.5 million votes from men and women. She was exciting, too: she and Obama galvanized voters for six long months–in some early contests, each of them racked up more votes than all the Republican candidates combined. Once the bitterness of the present moment has faded, that’s what people will remember. Because she normalized the concept of a woman running for President, she made it easier for women to run for every office, including the White House. That is one reason women and men of every party and candidate preference, and every ethnicity too, owe Hillary Clinton a standing ovation, even if they can’t stand her.

Hillary-haters — and there are many — probably won’t get this. But Clinton’s campaign may indeed have a profound and enduring legacy, equal in the long run to Obama’s.
Pollitt rolls out a very disturbing litany of media sexism directed against Clinton, and it was more widespread and appalling than I had realized. (Pollitt names the women perps, as well as the men). Yet Pollitt doesn’t attribute Clinton’s loss to vicious sexism. Instead she cites Clinton’s Iraq policies, strategic blunders and Obama’s remarkable political skills as pivotal factors. Pollitt nonetheless concludes with the warning that future women candidates for high office “better have the hide of a rhinoceros.”
To put Clinton’s candidacy into context, it may help to consider a recent Brookings study “Why Are Women Still Not Running for Public Office?” conducted by Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox. The study, based on surveys conducted in 2001 and 2008, concluded that the gender gap in political office-holders in the U.S. has more to do with with women’s lower levels of political ambition than discrimination-related factors. Reading between the lines, however, it’s hard to dismiss pervasive societal sexism as a potent force behind what the authors call “the gender gap in political ambition.”
The authors acknowlege that HRC’s candidacy, along with the examples of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other women office-holders may yet shatter the political glass ceiling. Pelosi had a tough time of it, but what she experienced was a cakewalk, compared to what Clinton has endured. My hunch is not many male politicians could have run that guantlet of personalized attacks and emerged standing, dignity intact. And that example alone may empower women candidates for decades to come.

Much of the political news over the last few days has involved a tide of endorsements of Barack Obama for president by Democratic superdelegates, and increasingly, by previous supporters of Hillary Clinton. The big endorsement is due on Saturday, by Clinton herself.
But one bit of news concerns a de-endorsement of Obama that will be greeted with considerable joy in the presumptive Democratic nominee’s HQ: by the Palestinian group Hamas, motivated by Obama’s speech yesterday to a gathering of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Breaking no new ground, Obama repeated his support for a Palestinian state but only on condition of maintaing Israel’s character as a Jewish state, within “secure and defensible borders.” His exact language, however, seemed to enrage Hamas:

“Obama’s comments have confirmed that there will be no change in the U.S. administration’s foreign policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters in Gaza.
“The Democratic and Republican parties support totally the Israeli occupation at the expense of the interests and rights of Arabs and Palestinians,” he said.
“Hamas does not differentiate between the two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, because their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us, therefore we do have no preference and are not wishing for either of them to win,” Zuhri said.

The earlier “endorsement” of Obama in April by Hamas “adviser” Ahmed Yousef has been a staple of Republican attack emails and McCain fundraising missives. It will be interesting to see if these attacks now stop.
Meanwhile, Obama’s nomination victory was greeted with considerable excitement just about everywhere else on the planet. Karl Blumenthal has a good sampling of the global reaction at OpenLeft.

In all the early speculation about the contours of the general election campaign, one factor that surprisingly gets little attention is another historic aspect to Barack Obama’s candidacy: he will be the first Democratic nominee since LBJ to enjoy a major financial advantage over his GOP opponent.
And the word “major” may significantly understate that advantage.
In the Politico today, Jeanne Cummings puts it bluntly:

With Hillary Clinton’s campaign coming to an end this weekend, Barack Obama’s rise as the Democratic nominee brings serious bad news to a new group: John McCain’s finance team.
A review of campaign finance data offers not one ounce of good news and barely any hope for the McCain campaign’s ability to compete with Obama’s fundraising prowess.

The numbers are indeed daunting for McCain. Assuming he carries out his pledge to accept public financing for the general election campaign, that will give him a budget of about $85 million between now and November. The Republican National Committee has raised another $40 million, much of which will be spent to promote the presidential ticket.
As for Obama:

[C]ampaign finance experts and Democratic fundraisers say a conservative estimate of Obama’s general election fundraising potential hovers around or above $300 million.

Cummings underscores the conservative nature of that estimate by noting that if two-thirds of Obama’s existing donor base of 1.5 million were to “max out” with a $2,300 contribution, he could raise $2.3 billion.
Moreover, the Obama campaign now has five months to tap a vast new fundraising source: Hillary Clinton’s contributors.
The conventional wisdom is that a presidential general election is the one contest where “earned media” is typically more important than paid media. But the size of Obama’s money advantage is such that it may become very meaningful, particularly in terms of enabling the Democrat to effectively respond to attack ads and generally control the tone of the campaign. Moreover, there’s no substitute for money in setting up a general election infrastructure around the country, and Obama is also likely to have a big advantage in the other leading factor, enthusiasm.
As Cummings puts it:

In the general election, Obama could afford to set up large operations in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, New Mexico and a host of other states — maybe even McCain’s own Arizona.
That would force McCain to pick the midsize-state battles he could afford while also trying to hold off a free-spending Obama in essential big states such as Ohio, Missouri and Florida.
“McCain has to make every dollar count in the general election, and Obama will have money to burn,” said Evan Tracey, co-founder of Campaign Media Analysis Group.

So in assessing a general election campaign that currently looks like a cliffhanger, add financial resources to partisan identification trends, the issue landscape, and the mood of the country, as factors that should give Obama an edge. These factors do not in any way guarantee a Democratic victory, but it sure doesn’t hurt to have so many aces in the hole.

While some Obama supporters thought it should have happened weeks or even months ago–or certainly night before last, when Obama was able to claim victory–Hillary Clinton has now make it abundantly clear she’s suspending her campaign on Saturday and acknowledging her rival as the Democratic nominee.
“Suspension” rather than withdrawal (a fairly common step among losing candidates) means she can keep raising money to retire her substantial debts. It also means, though you won’t hear much about it publicly, that in the unlikely event of some catastrophic blow to Obama’s general election prospects, she could reactivate her candidacy before the convention.
Expect a few days of careful maneuvering by the Obama camp to let Clinton wrap things up, amidst hopes that she will endorse Obama in a manner that will quell most of the pro-McCain talk you hear from some of her core supporters.

I’m not terribly inclined to weigh in on the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s non-concession-speech last night, for the simple reason that we won’t understand what it portended until she announces her next steps, which might well include precisely the kind of gracious concession she withheld at Baruch College.
To be sure, some of HRC’s supporters don’t seem interested in folding the tent, including those who chanted “Denver! Denver!” when she alluded to her future course of action.
And then there’s the always-hard-to-over-the-top Terry McAuliffe (per Michael Crowley):

When asked about the reality outside the bunker—that Obama supporters were in a minor rage over Hillary’s speech– McAuliffe looked at me incredulously. “Tonight was Hillary’s night!” he exclaimed. “We won tonight! We won in South Dakota! We keep winning!”

But aside from what she left unsaid, the only thing HRC actually said last night that needs to be questioned at this point is her final, triumphant claim that she won the total popular vote during the nominating process.
The short answer is “Nobody knows,” followed by a quick “It really doesn’t matter.” Nobody knows because four states did not report popular votes, and because one primary–Michigan–was set up in a way that obscured candidate preferences, and also disallowed a significant number of write-in votes for Obama. It really doesn’t matter because the nominating process was set up to choose delegates by a pretty close approximation of popular votes, but according to an allocation system that is not perfectly efficient. Had it been set up as a popular vote contest, then it’s reasonable to assume that the Obama campaign might have followed a different strategy.
But for those who insist on an answer to an essentially unanswerable and irrelevant question, there are some estimates out there. One last night by Chris Bowers concluded that Obama had narrowly won the popular vote based on a very inclusive definition of “popular votes.” One today by the site FiveThirtyEight reviewed eight different ways of answering the question, and concluded that Obama was the winner in seven of those eight scenarios. And pretty much everyone agrees that the only kind of count that gives Clinton the nod is one that either denies Obama any votes in Michigan, or refuses to use estimates for the four non-popular-vote-tabulating Caucus States.
Even if you accept the narrowest pro-Clinton perspective, the total popular vote was, in reality, about as close as you can get to a tie this side of a Florida 2000 situation. So for either prospective or historical reasons, the Clinton camp really should stop talking about the popular vote “victory.” All that can do at this point is to stir up pointless and destructive grievances.

Democratic consultant Robert Creamer, author of this campaign’s political strategy “it” book, has an insightful HuffPo article, “Ten Key Steps to Put Obama Over the Top In November.” In one of the most interesting steps (#5), he urges:

…we also need mass mobilization that relies on “chain reaction contact” — where campaign activity explodes virally — geometrically — to involve millions and millions of self-initiating campaign activists. We need a campaign where millions of Americans wear Obama buttons, where people self-report to walk precincts and use online voter contact tools in droves.
Obama’s primary campaign provides a model, but now that model needs to explode into a social movement that defines the identity of its participants in the way the civil rights and anti-war movements did for an earlier generation. When they consider their role in this campaign, activists need to think about their participation the way volunteers in the civil rights movement thought about their roles at Selma — that they will proudly tell their kids and grandkids that they were there — that they played a part — in the transformational 2008 presidential election.
Obama has an inspirational message, and his campaign has a culture that could actually seed that kind of movement. And it is that kind of movement that could change the electorate so fundamentally that it makes states that are unthinkably Red into Blue states this fall.

A provocative idea, and one which plays to a unique Obama strength — and to a huge blind spot of our adversaries, as James Vega pointed out in a recent TDS post. Creamer’s article has several other ideas that merit support.

When I got my “stimulus” check from the federal government, like any good American, I decided to do my patriotic duty and buy something. I am now the proud owner of a 40 inch, 1080p Samsung HD-TV. It’s beautiful.
But there are a couple of funny things about watching television in high definition. First, you can’t really hide anything in HD — the wrinkles, blemishes, age spots, and scars all seem too vivid. Second, you start paying attention to those imperfections whenever you watch video — whether its on HD or not.
That’s especially true if you’re John McCain. This technology is just so unkind to him.
This being the Internet, I’m not the first person to make this observation.
But seeing McCain tonight offset by Barack Obama was almost painfully jarring. From the content to the venues to the sheer physical presence of each man, the two speeches could not have been more different. And I was watching MSNBC’s standard feed. When these two men debate in the fall, on the HD channels of each network, the visual contrast will positively pop off the screen.
There’s no way to deny that McCain wears a lifetime of hardships on his face, and I don’t write this to make light of his well-documented and often-heroic times of suffering. The man is former prisoner of war and a cancer survivor — he’s earned his scars and wrinkles. But the image that they create is a hurdle his campaign must now overcome.
I’d love to see some consumer data outlining the penetration of high def televisions among likely voters. Maybe the campaigns have those numbers, and that is why the Republicans aren’t scared. The prices of these televisions, however, keep coming down, and people keep buying them.
That fact makes it awfully hard for me to picture eight years of a McCain presidency, with everyone watching him age before our eyes in 30,000:1 contrast ratios.

In case you made an early night of it, Barack Obama won MT, wrapped up a majority of delegates, and claimed the nomination at a festive, SRO event in MN. Hillary Clinton won SD, claimed a total-popular-vote victory, did not acknowledge Obama’s delegate count, and said she’d decide next steps later, at what can only be described as a defiant event in NY. The TV networks spent a lot of time debating the meaning of HRC’s actions, with interpretations ranging from a short-term facing-saving measure to a power play to compel Obama to ask her onto the ticket.
We’ll have a lot more later today.

Since my earlier post today, a lot has been happening in the Democratic presidential contest. The cascade of superdelegate endorsements of Barack Obama that a lot of observers expected for tomorrow or later in the week is happening right now, and having already bagged more than twenty today, Obama now appears in excellent position to claim victory tonight.
Meanwhile, there’s mass confusion in media reports on Hillary Clinton’s plans for tonight, with some saying she’ll acknowledge Obama as the nominee, and others saying “Hell, no!” she won’t. To top it all off, there’s another report that HRC told a group of NY legislators today that she’d volunteer to form a “Unity Ticket” with Obama.
All this turmoil suggests that Obama’s going to have quite a party in MN tonight, and that HRC’s speech in NY will get a lot of attention. The poor voters of SD and MT, meanwhile, will have a hard time getting their primaries noticed.