washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Like a master stage magician’s best “sleight of hand” trick, Ruffini makes MAGA extremism in the GOP disappear right before our eyes.

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A Democratic Political Strategy for Reaching Working Class Voters That Starts from the Actual “Class Consciousness” of Modern Working Americans.

by Andrew Levison

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The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

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Why Don’t Working People Recognize and Appreciate Democratic Programs and Policies

The mythology of “Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days” and the Modern Debate Over “Deliverism.”

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The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

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Immigration “Chaos” Could Sink Democrats in 2024…

And the Democratic Narrative Simply Doesn’t Work. Here’s An Alternative That Does.

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The Daily Strategist

March 28, 2024

Lakoff and Westen On Obama Speech

George Lakoff’s Alternet postWhat Made Obama’s Speech Great” is a must-read for political speechwriters, candidates and strategists. Interestingly, Lakoff leaves the linguistic heavy-lifting to others and uses his powers of analysis to show how Obama’s speech taps into something a lot larger than the buzz about Rev. Wright’s remarks — America’s longing for brotherhood. The whole article deserves a read, but here’s a teaser:

As a linguist, I am tempted to describe the surface features: the intonation, the meter, the grammatical parallelisms, the choice of words. These contribute to eloquence. I’m sure the linguistics community will jump in and do that analysis. Instead, I want to talk about the structure of ideas.
…What makes this great speech great is that it transcends its immediate occasion and addresses in its form as well as its words the most vital of issues: what America is about: who are, and are to be, as Americans; and what politics should be fundamentally about.
The media has missed this. But we must not.

Lakoff’s article might make a good introduction to Obama’s speech in those future speech anthologies J.P. Green referenced on Monday. At Alternet, you can also read Drew Westen’s equally-enthusiastic take (originally in HuffPo) on Obama’s speech, sampled in this excerpt:

…Obama offered the most eloquent, intellectually penetrating, and most moving description of the complexities of race in America of any politician in recent history. But he did more than talk about race. He began to build a progressive narrative that Democrats, and the progressive movement more broadly, have had difficulty developing….

And Westen offers this interesting view of Obama’s link with the white working class, as revealed in the speech:

…the meaning of Obama’s loyalty to his pastor in the face of enormous pressure to cast him aside is not likely to be lost on white males who value strength, courage, honor, and loyalty. Nor is an aspect of his life story many Americans may not have known, about the role played by his two white working-class grandparents in his upbringing; or his criticism of the failures of fatherhood in the inner cities; or his willingness to speak openly about the seething resentments of the millions of white men who punch a time card every day, feel increasingly unable to provide for their families as the price of gas skyrockets and heath care moves beyond their reach, and who don’t view themselves as all that privileged.

It’s by no means certain that Obama’s speech will prove to be a ‘net plus’ with voters going forward. But with academic luminaries like Lakoff and Westen weighing in with such glowing reviews, it will likely be of considerable interest to students of speech in the years ahead.


Political Poetic License

NOTE: This is a guest post by Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
It’s said that truth is the first casualty of war. But truth, and realism, also take a pretty good beating in politics—especially in nominating contests.
Consider what’s happened to two of Sen. Barack Obama’s brainiest advisors: Austan Goolsbee and Samantha Power.
Goolsbee, a widely respected economist who teaches at the University of Chicago, is the Obama campaign’s top economic advisor. (Full disclosure: Goolsbee has also worked with PPI and is a friend). He was muzzled after accounts of his meeting with Canadian government officials were leaked to the media (apparently by the Canadian Prime Minister’s staff). According to these accounts, Goolsbee reassured the Canadians that Obama, if elected president, would probably not follow through on his campaign promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Running hard in economically stressed Ohio, Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign pounced immediately, citing the reports as proof that her loathing of NAFTA is more sincere than Obama’s, even if it was her husband who signed the treaty into law back in 1993.
Goolsbee insists he was misquoted. But even if he didn’t actually tell the Canadians that Obama’s anti-NAFTA bark is worse than his bite, that’s probably the truth of the matter. After all, Canada is America’s biggest trading partner, Mexico is our third-biggest. With or without NAFTA, trade with our neighbors is only likely to grow. The idea that either President Obama or President Clinton would begin an historic, change-oriented presidency by picking a gratuitous fight with Canada and Mexico over a 15-year-old trade treaty is preposterous. And that’s not just the opinion of this pro-trade Democrat: the stoutly liberal John Judis has a new piece out today arguing that both candidates are using NAFTA as a symbol of globalization that misses the treaty’s genuine positive and negative aspects.
Samantha Power, author of a Pulitizer Prize-winning book on the Rwanda genocide, A Problem from Hell, resigned as a top Obama foreign-policy advisor for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” She promptly apologized and quit the campaign. But the flap obscured another, far more substantive Power utterance, namely a remark she made to the BBC in which she characterized Obama’s promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months as “a best case scenario.” She added:

You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009. He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator.

Here, Power was telling the truth, and a very reassuring truth at that. Of course, it exposed Obama to charges from the Clinton camp that he doesn’t really mean what he says about pulling out of Iraq, any more than he means what he says about renegotiating NAFTA. In a speech last week at George Washington University marking the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, Clinton had this to say:

Senator Obama has said often that words matter. I strongly agree. But giving speeches alone won’t end the war and making campaign promises you might not keep certainly won’t end it. In the end the true test is not the speeches a president delivers, it’s whether the president delivers on the speeches.

Fair enough, except that Clinton is also promising more than she can deliver on Iraq. “Here’s what you can count on me to do: provide the leadership to end this war quickly and responsibly,” she said at GWU. And she reiterated her pledge to start bringing troops home within 60 days of taking office, at a rate of one to two brigades a month, according to consultations with military leaders.
The problem is, you can end America’s involvement in Iraq quickly, or you can end it responsibly. You can’t do both. Consolidating the recent security gains in Iraq, keeping relentless pressure on al Qaeda in Iraq, working to reconcile feuding ethnic and religious factions, training Iraqi military and police forces, and pressing the Shiite-Kurdish government to integrate the Sunni Awakening movement into those forces– all these tasks are going to take time, and they’re going to require a substantial and sustained U.S. military presence. As a candidate who claims superior foreign-policy experience, Clinton should know that.
The voters get it. A recent Gallup poll found that more than six in 10 Americans think the United States is obliged to remain in Iraq “until a reasonable level of stability and security has been reached.” And while voters want candidates to have withdrawal plans, 8 in 10 say they are against immediate withdrawal.
At the same time, more than 60 percent of Americans say the Iraq war has not been worth the costs. Such sentiments, however, have not kept Sen. John McCain from playing the overpromising game from the other side. Returning last week from a trip to Iraq, McCain announced that America and its allies “stand on the precipice of winning a major victory.” Such triumphalism may be catnip to hard-core conservatives, but it probably grates on the nerves of a war-weary public that has just marked five years of occupation which have claimed 4,000 American lives.
What gives? Have all our presidential finalists momentarily lost touch with the reality principle?
There’s something about nominating contests that seems to suspend the standards of veracity candidates are normally held to. Apparently, all’s fair in the fight to identify with the inflamed emotions of core partisan or “base” voters, or, in the case of NAFTA, with Ohioans who feel that trade has somehow cheated them out of well-paying manufacturing jobs. In tailoring their message to party activists and local constituencies, candidates too readily indulge in a political version of poetic license, in which accuracy and realism yield to simplistic gestures and symbolism.
Thus, bashing NAFTA becomes a way to show solidarity with working Americans anxious about the impact of global competition on their jobs and incomes. These anxieties are real enough, and voters are right to demand vigorous new responses from government—a new social contract that includes a comprehensive system of worker training, universal health care, portable pensions for all workers, a fairer and more generous college-aid system, and more. But all that is complicated and costly, and let’s face it, such worthy prescriptions don’t pack as much emotional punch as refighting the battle of NAFTA all over again.
So, at least until the primaries end, we’re likely to be stuck with candidates insisting on 100 percent fidelity to crowd-pleasing positions they must know, deep down, they will have to modify in the general election—at which point, one hopes, reality will make a welcome and overdue reappearance on the scene.
Somebody does, however, need to tell John McCain that the primary season is over, and he no longer needs to thrill conservative audiences with promises of “a major victory” in Iraq.


Obama’s Team and Its “Doctrine”

For those trying to distinguish Barack Obama’s foreign policy/national security views from those of Hillary Clinton, and/or seeking to understand how Obama might deal with a security-heavy general election debate with John McCain, Spencer Ackerman has penned an interesting take for the American Prospect based on extensive discussions with Obama’s international policy team.
Ackerman distills both a negative and positive aspect of the “Obama Doctrine.” The negative dimension is Obama’s rejection of the political premise that Democrats can’t put too much distance between themselves and Republicans on security issues due to the party’s poor reputation on the subject. The positive dimension is an approach to post-9/11 security threats that puts a premium on fighting terrorism through a military focus on al Qaeda and an economic and diplomatic focus on “dignity promotion” as opposed to simple anti-Islamism or mechanical democracy promotion.
It’s well worth the read, whether or not you buy Ackerman’s notion that Obama is presenting a “doctrine” as opposed to a very different way of addressing widely accepted security challenges.


McCainomics: You’re On Your Own

Yesterday’s Washington Post included a feature wherein economic advisors to the three surviving major-party presidential candidates did brief presentations on what their champions would do to deal with the current housing-driven economic crisis.
Former White House economic advisor Gene Sperling dutifully laid out Hillary Clinton’s latest housing plan, formally rolled out in Philadelphia yesterday, which features a foreclosure moratorium and a housing-focused “second stimulus package.”
Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee (apparently out of his “NAFTA-gate” doghouse) followed with an elaboration of Obama’s plan, which ranges from a bad mortgage conversion program and subsidies for low-income borrowers to incentives for middle-class savings.
And then you’ve got former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, speaking for McCain, who basically says the GOP candidate thinks those suffering from the housing crisis had it coming. Yeah, that’s right: after laying out McCain’s commitment to corporate tax cuts and a tax-credit based initiative to encourage individual health insurance, he goes on at some length excoriating those who would take action on the housing crisis, and setting forth strict conditions for participation in existing housing relief programs. Market forces will apparently take care of the problem one way or another.
It may take a while, but Americans troubled by the economy and the housing crisis will eventually get the message that John McCain’s idea of economic leadership is pretty much limited to high-end and corporate tax cuts, free trade agreements, an attack on appropriations earmarks, and whatever he means (beyond his support for Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme) by “entitlement reform.” I guess he could tout the stimulative effect of a Hundred Years War in Iraq, but that’s about it. And along with free market fundamentalism, the GOP candidate will also serve up a heaping hot bowl of moralism aimed at scorching those who fail to succeed.


Thinking About Strategies to Combat the Coming “Slime Attack” Ads

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.


How Long, O Lord?

The two big questions among Democrats at the moment are (1) whether there is any way to avoid a presidential nomination contest that extends at least into June, and (2) whether this extended contest might ultimately be a good thing.
Given the remorseless mathematics of the nomination process (the link above refers to Chris Bowers’ exhaustive account), this basically boils down to a much simpler question: at what point, if ever, do Democratic Party poohbahs, exercising their power via the news media and superdelegates, force Hillary Clinton out of the race?
Clearly, there are those who think this should have already happened–that HRC’s odds of winning the nomination on the basis of primary and caucus results have gone down to the longest of long shots, leaving her with the Hobson’s Choice of going negative in a destructive way or losing quickly.
The reason it hasn’t happened is pretty simple. What HRC most needed after the March 4 primaries was a hit on Obama that didn’t have her fingerprints. And that’s exactly what she got with the Jeremiah Wright controversy. While you can make the argument that Obama’s dazzling speech in Philadelphia last week mitigated the damage, and just as importantly, may have cauterized the wound by taking the issue off the table for the future, it still represented an unforced error that gave HRC’s campaign some hope that Obama might “crater” without a divisive push from her rival.
On the other hand, the second big development after March 4, HRC’s apparent failure to secure a “do-over” or ratification of the MI and/or FL primaries, is a major blow to her ability to plausibly argue she will wind up the primary/caucus season with a pledged delegate plurality (almost impossible now), or an acknowledged popular vote plurality (still possible but increasingly remote).
But so long as HRC is winning primaries–particularly if Obama’s sag in general election trial heats with McCain continues–Party Poohbahs are very unlikely to intervene to administer a coup de grace.
So: to answer the $64,000 question as to when a concerted effort might be made to squeeze Clinton out of the race, the most compelling answer is that it will happen about fifteen minutes after she loses another primary. Like the participants in the NCAA basketball tournament, she’s into single-elimination territory now.
The good news for her is that it might not happen soon, and theorectically might not happen at all.
If you look at the rest of the primary calendar, after PA, which everyone expects HRC to win, there’s IN and NC on May 6. Obama’s currently favored in both, but not by large margins, and neither is exactly hostile territory. West Virginia on May 13 ought to be Clinton Country, as is KY on May 20. OR also votes on May 20, and Obama’s favored there, but not by a big margin. Obama’s narrowly favored in two of the three final states–MT and SD, voting just after an assumed Clinton win in Puerto Rico.
There’s zero margin for error here for HRC, and even if she ran the table, she probably would not win by big enough margins to take the lead in pledged delegates, and would struggle to gain a popular vote plurality. Moreover, there’s the example of past candidates who won big in late primaries (e.g., Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Gary Hart in 1984) but couldn’t win the nomination. But that’s the strategy she’s left with, and until such time as she loses, don’t expect her to be forced out of the race.


Optimism and Pessimism Joust

It’s a pretty fair assumption that Democrats looking towards the general election are feeling exceptionally conflicted right now. On the one hand, the extended Clinton-Obama competition, which could easily extend into June and could possibly remain unresolved until the convention in August, is clearly inflicting damage on both candidates’ general election prospects while giving John McCain an enormous breather. In a very unhappy article in The New Republic today, Noam Scheiber argues that it may take a relatively early superdelegate intervention to nail down an Obama nomination and give Democrats a shot at victory in November.
But on the other hand, there remain certain fundamental factors that are almost certain to boost the Democratic nominee down the road and create some serious problems for McCain. Chief among them is the economy. At Bloomberg.com, Alison Fitzgerald reminds us that incumbent parties have rarely if ever managed to hold onto the White House in a recessionary atmosphere. Moreover, John McCain’s relative ability to avoid association with the record of the Bush administration does not necessarily extend to economics; even his own campaign concedes that his chief economic talking point is support for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent.
Beyond the economy, the belief of many conservatives that McCain is going to win by making the election a foreign policy referendum centered on Iraq is exceedingly strange. Yes, the tactical successes associated with the “surge” in Iraq have made this issue less deadly for Republicans, but there’s simply no evidence that Americans are shifting towards support for perpetual war or a reconsideration of the judgment that the invasion was a mistake.
In other words, there’s almost no doubt that John McCain will be fighting a powerful, historically high “wrong track” sentiment that may actually grow stronger in the fall, particularly if gas prices rise to over $4 a gallon and the collateral damage from the subprime mortgage disaster continues to play itself out. It’s always possible that McCain’s battered-but-intact “maverick” reputation compounded by unhappiness over the views of the retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ will trump these fundamentals. But the fundamentals are not going away.


Obama’s Speech a Net Plus

After reading a couple dozen different takes on Obama’s Philadelphia speech (NYT’s Janny Scott has the latest installment here and WaPo has a handful of articles today linked here), I am now prepared to render the judgement that it did him more good than harm. Shucks, no need to commend my vision and candor — the glory goes to Obama.
What I have been wondering for the last week is how one large and pivotal constituency, the white working class, including it’s subgroup the “Reagan Democrats” received Obama’s heartfelt oration, or even if any such broad generalization, pro or con, could be made. I’ve seen no post-speech poll cross tabs that lay it out clearly, although the latest Gallup polls since Obama’s March 18 speech show Obama holding steady against McCain. My assessment is also anchored in the collective shrug from that key constituency, other than a few paragraphs in comments sections following articles. What we don’t hear/read about is a chorus of complaining workers exploded in man-on-the-street round-up articles, or otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong. Obama’s speech was excellent, as measured by clarity, persuasive power and delivery. It is exactly the sort of speech that generates future royalties for the speaker when reprinted in ‘Great Speeches’ anthologies, chapters on ‘The Explanatory Speech.’ But I’m not sure it was a great campaign speech in the sense of winning hearts and minds among undecideds in general or the blue collar constituency in particular.
The speech was necessary — he had to respond in some way to the fuss about Rev. Wright. And speechifying is most definitely Obama’s strong card as a candidate. It was a wise decision to address the problem this way instead of issuing a press statement and then being subjected to endless media interviews in which he is less skilled and in which he would be vulnerable to attacks from the press. Ditto for debates, in which Clinton is a little sharper. Now he can just say “Well, I’ve already discussed that thoroughly in my speech, and don’t really have much to add.” No one will blame him, because most voters of all races are more interested in how a candidate is going to help get their kids educated, protect their retirement assets, fix the health care mess and get us out of Iraq.
Although Obama’s speech may not have won many new hearts and minds, it did the job well enough, which was to counter-balance the negative buzz about some of Rev. Wright’s sermons and what Obama thought about them. For that, hats off to David Axelrod, or whoever was responsible for the strategy and speechwriting for jobs well-done, as well as to the candidate himself for masterful delivery.
As a practical matter, however, campaign speeches are probably best measured by their fallout. This one was a winner in that regard, with more positive than negative buzz, even if most of it comes from the choir. When was the last time anybody got so much good ink from a speech? All in all, yet another impressive example of Team Obama’s edge in strategy and tactics.


Will Florida Democrats Take a Dive in November?

Lurking in the background of the interminable dispute over the Democratic Party’s handling of outlaw primaries in MI and FL has been the fear that keeping these two states unrepresented at the convention in Denver could hurt the ultimate nominee’s ability to win either or both in November.
Up until now, this fear has been largely subjective and anecdotal. But earlier this week, three Florida media outlets published a poll suggesting that Florida Democrats are indeed feeling invested in the controversy, with a significant number of them currently inclined to punish the national party for its alleged disrespect.
More specifically, 14% of respondents say a failure to seat the Florida delegation would make them “much less likely” to support the presidential nominee in November, with another 10% saying it would make them somewhat less likely to do so. It’s also worth noting that only 28% of respondents blame the Republican governor and legislature for the mess, with 25% blaming the DNC and another 20% blaming the Florida Democratic Party.
There’s clearly some intraparty factionalism affecting these results, since Clinton supporters are roughly twice as likely to want the original primary results to stand as Obama supporters (Obama’s support, BTW, has gone up modestly since the primary).
This is all interesting, and perhaps questionable. Given the high odds of a polarizing general election, and the certainty that the Democratic nominee will campaign heavily in the Sunshine State, you’d have to figure some of these bruised feelings among Florida Democrats would abate by November.
But on the other hand, if the Clinton campaign continues to make its championship of MI and FL primary voters a centerpiece of the case for her nomination, and particularly if there is a Credentials Committees fight before or during the convention, then this issue is likely to remain front-and-center in Florida political coverage for quite some time. If HRC wins the nomination, this particular problem might largely go away. But if the nominee is Obama, and he wins after fighting tooth-and-nail against any seating of Florida delegates, then we should all hope someone in Obama’s political braintrust is already devoting some long-term thinking to what the candidate can do during the General Election to heal the wounds. A fly-around to key media markets in Florida, and perhaps Michigan, the day after the convention, might not be a bad idea. Maybe he could distribute some of those convention goodie-bags the unseated delegates will have missed.


A Religious Take on the Obama/Wright Controversy

I didn’t cross-post an article I wrote for TPMCafe on the religious dimension of the Jeremiah Wright controversy and Barack Obama’s handling of it, in part because it overlapped with earlier observations I made on this site, and also because I’ve tried to keep TDS relatively free of my various non-political interests (hence, no posts, much as I’ve been tempted, about Georgia football or basketball).
But given the apparently endless nature of the Wright controversy, at least among conservatives, and the heavy emphasis placed on religious factors by Obama’s critics, you might want to give it a read, particularly if you are a Christian in search of relevant if non-momentous Holy Week reading material.