Thomas F. Schaller hosts a Salon roundtable today on “The swing states of 2008.” His guests include pollster Paul Maslin (Dean’s ’04, Richardson ’08), Andres Ramirez, v. p. for Hispanic Programs and director of the Hispanic Strategy Center at NDN; and conservative blogger Ross Douthat, sr. editor at The Atlantic. Their discusssion is largely speculative and the panel is wary of taking early horse-race polls too seriously. But their insights about registration trends in the SW, the candidates’ age difference in PA, the effect of the Democratic Party’s decision on MI delegates, the benefit to McCain from picking Crist or Condi and other topics are informative. One of the things they seem to agree on is that NM is the state most likely to flip to Blue, with NH the best candidate to flip red. But they see VA, IA, PA, MI and FL as very much in play and have a couple of surprises that may be up for grabs.

There was an interesting exchange on ‘Hardball‘ Sunday when host Chris Matthews gave WaPo writer Kathleen Parker a chance to plug her new book, “Save the Males.’ Matthews quoted a couple of lines from Parker’s book to provoke comment:

Bush won the presidency against Al Gore and John Kerry in part because enough Americans considered him to be more manly than his effete opponents. How did a college cheerleader beat two Vietnam vets? Bush oozed regular guyness

Parker, quick to point out that this political insight was a tiny part of her book, added “…I would say that George Bush has probably retired regular guyness in politics for all time.” She then related a discussion she had about the Bobby Jindal phenomenon in Louisiana to illustrate her point, observing of Jindal :

He’s kind of physically slight. He’s of Indian descent. He’s always the smartest guy in the room. And I was interviewing this guy Jack Stephens, he’s the sheriff of St. Bernard’s Parish, very big, 6’5″. All the sheriffs in New Orleans–I mean, in Louisiana, except for seven, are Democrats and yet they shifted to Bobby Jindal. So I said, `How do you explain that? What’s –how do you explain this devotion to this guy?’ And he said, `Well, Katrina taught us that brains matter.’…So I think the new model of masculinity and manliness is going to be the intellectual. And surely that’s going to benefit Obama.

The conversation went downhill from there, with jabber about what constitutes manliness or the perception thereof. Putting the stereotype aside, Jindal may prove to have less to offer in the way of solutions than Parker suggests. But what resonated was the idea that a large number of voters may be sobering up to the need for increased brainpower in the white house. I know, that will happen regardless of who wins, since the bar has been set so low. But, if enough voters are saying to themselves, “Well, the regular guy thing hasn’t worked so well. It’s time to let the better thinkers run the show,” then Parker is right that Obama will have an edge. McCain is no dummy, but his policies are full of holes, and Obama should be able to win the minds, if not hearts, of voters seeking more credible answers than failed neo-con approaches.
As for ‘regular guy-ness,” I think it may be more about class than the manly man thing. Indeed, there are plenty of women who project the quality. The one political gift Bush had, other than a rolodex full of oil barons willing to subsidize his political ambitions, was an ability to mimic regular guy conversation, a skill largely unknown to his two opponents. It’s not about chugging brewskis, munching brats and wearing NASCAR hats on the campaign trail. It’s more about the way they talk. Bush, Gore and Kerry were all preppies from the upper class. Bush was arguably the preppiest of all. But somehow Bush had a better ear for parroting regular guy talk. I don’t know how many votes this is worth. But it doesn’t take many in a close election.
McCain has a preppy background too. But he also has a good ear for regular guy speak. Outside of the military and politics, however, his real-world work experience is very thin, compared to the much younger Obama. Ironically, Obama, who has genuine working-class roots is frequently characterized by pundits as having an aloof Harvardesque demeanor. He could probably warm it up a little, but he seems friendly and real enough. JFK and FDR, both aristocrats, projected both warmth and intellect as well as anyone. It came natural to Bill Clinton, who was raised by a working mom.
The whole ‘regular guy’ notion has always been based more on image or bogus persona, than reality. Blogger mikeplugh said it well in concluding his Kos post “The Myth of the Regular Guy” a couple of months ago:

…there is no such thing as a “regular guy.” The myth of the regular guy sells all of us short. It counts on us all being zombies. It counts on men favoring their more base selves and women favoring their submissive side. Humanity is best for its complexity and we demean our American culture by boiling it down to false choices. Reinforcing these choices by framing our national political discourse as a battle between the regular guy and the elitist intellectual class is a distortion of the truth and robs us all of a deeper vision of who we are and what problems face us as a people. Next time you hear someone playing this “regular guy” game, ask yourself what the truth is. Ask yourself what’s missing in their portrayal of the issues and the culture itself. I’m sure you’ll find it lacking.

If Parker is right, increasing numbers of voters are starting to ask versions of that question, and it should translate into Democratic advantage.

In New York magazine, Sam Anderson offers the first of what will be many, many previews of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. It concludes with this thought:

Convention speeches are by definition conventional: overproduced, stadium-sized, riddled with ritualized applause, cheese-ball taglines, balloon drops, and coded appeals to key demographics. Under the g-forces of so much demographic and institutional pressure, Obama could easily surrender to the occasion and be a little less impressive. His greatest speech, in this situation, might actually be a bad one. But, for a candidate whose entire reputation is built on freshness and change and inspiration, ordinariness could be a death blow. Obama’s only real option here is to find a third way: to fundamentally reimagine the occasion, as he did with the race speech, and blow the roof off the building without scaring anyone inside, to give the soaring speech of his lifetime that somehow doesn’t leave behind anyone on the ground.

Anderson generally suggests that if anyone can pull this off, it’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, “the first candidate in many cycles for whom speeches were not purely formal, schedule-plugging cliché-orgies but potent and densely written tactical weapons—and even occasionally, minor literary achievements.”

If you’re at all confused or in doubt about the anger being expressed towards the Democratic Party and the MSM by some HRC supporters, check out Rebecca Traister’s exhaustive summary at Salon today. She cites twelve specific things these folks–who call themselves PUMAs (an acronym for “Party Unity My Ass”)–are angry about, with particular objects of ire being Keith Olbermann, Howard Dean, and the idea of Barack Obama choosing a female running-mate not named Hillary Clinton.
I found number twelve particularly interesting, having heard it myself from several people unhappy with a post I did a while back arguing that a McCain presidency would be the wrong kind of “punishment” for the Democratic Party’s alleged sins towards HRC and her supporters:

12. And finally, they are angry because they feel they are held hostage by the party by their reproductive organs.
As many people have already observed: What are they going to do, vote for John McCain? No. The truth is, they’re really not. Not if they care about their freedoms to control their own reproductive lives. And they are acutely aware that party leaders know this and that, thus, despite all this anger, Democratic women remain a sure thing.
In a recent New Yorker profile of Keith Olbermann, MSNBC chief Phil Griffin described how Clinton voters felt alienated from Olbermann’s anti-Clinton coverage: “He turned out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Exactly. These angry people have nowhere else to go. So the safe expectation is that they will fall in line without much kicking and screaming. And that, ultimately, is why many of them are kicking and screaming. Yes, they’re going to vote for Obama. Of course they’ll vote for him. The truth is, they’ll probably love voting for him. But after what they feel has been done to them — the way in which they were written off, marginalized and resented, their hopes mocked and their history-making ambitions dismissed as retrograde identity politicking — damned if they’re going to be nice girls about it.

So any smug talk that Democrats need not take HRC’s supporters seriously because they’ll “come home” without encouragement delays, at a minimum, the day when that homecoming actually happens.

As a follow-on to the staff post about McCain’s limited female choices for running-mate, Swampland’s Joe Klein reports insider gossip that McCain is “frustrated” that he can’t go with any of his three personal favorites for the ticket: Tom Ridge, Mel Martinez or Jeb Bush.
Ridge is pro-choice, and Republicans can’t have that. Martinez is constitutionally disqualified, having been born in Cuba. And Jebbie, of course, has that unfortunate last name. You can’t much deny you’re running for “Bush’s third term” if you’re positioning your running-mate to run for the fourth and fifth Bush terms, or fifth and sixth if you count Poppy.
More and more, it looks like McCain will be driven to pick some boring white guy in a suit who isn’t offensive to the Right but won’t do much to help the GOP actually win. For many conservatives, it’s more about control of the party than of the White House.

Peter Wallsten’s L.A. Times article “Obama campaign targets black voters — carefully” merits a thoughtful read from Obama’s state-level organizers. In the nut graphs, Wallsten writes:

Obama strategists believe they have identified a gold mine of new and potentially decisive Democratic voters in at least five battleground states — voters who failed to turn out in the past but can be mobilized this time because Obama’s candidacy is historic and his cash-rich campaign can afford the costly task of identifying and motivating such supporters…What makes the idea of bringing in so many new voters more than just political fantasy is the Obama campaign’s deep pockets and the sophisticated apparatus it has begun building to achieve its goals — using techniques to ferret out and mobilize potential supporters that only a few years ago were the secret weapons of Republican strategists and their ideological allies.

Black voter turnout lagged behind the overall voter turnout nationwide in ’04, 60 to 64 percent overall. But Wallsten reports that David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political Studies, which monitors Black voter participation, believes a 20 percent increase is feasible in November, given the excitement generated by Obama’s candidacy.
While it’s likely that Obama’s nomination will produce a record-level Black voter turnout in November, it could still fall short of full potential without a lot of work at the street level. Obama, a former community organizer knows this is critical. And judging by the outstanding job his campaign did in the primary caucuses, there is reason to hope they will deploy those same organizing skills in turning out the Black vote.
One challenge facing Dems in maximizing African American turnout is felon disenfranchisement. There were as many as 1.1 million disenfranchised Black felons in Florida alone in 2004. New reforms in Florida have reduced that number by about 10 percent, but getting newly eligible Black adults registered and to the polls, felon or not, will require a creative, determined effort from the Obama campaign. Bush won Florida in ’04 by 381,000 votes. In all it’s estimated that 500,000 registered Black voters didn’t vote in ’04, with hundreds of thousands more eligible Black citizens unregistered. Clearly, an energetic Black turnout mobilization in the Sunshine State could be decisive in November.
Meeting voter registration deadlines is another major obstacle in turning out new voters from all constituencies. Here, procrastination is the enemy. October 6th is the voter reglstration deadline for potential swing states like Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Most of the others have deadlines a week or two after that date. Only Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire and Wyoming have same day registration provisions. North Dakota has no registration requirement.
In other words, the Obama campaign has about 100 days to reach all of those unregistered Black voters and help to get them on the voter rolls. Otherwise, all such talk of turning out new voters is just wishful thinking. It’s a daunting challenge, but meeting it could make all the difference. Finding unregistered young people of all races is yet another challlenge, and being prepared for the GOP’s usual election day obstructions is critical, as well.
Wallsten cites the concern that Obama’s messaging to mobilize Black voters could turn off some white voters. But I don’t think that’s the main problem. Obama knows he must reach out more effectively to get a larger portion of the white working class, which has plenty of shared concerns with Black workers. The two are not mutually exclusive, and Obama will find the common ground.

David Paul Kuhn of The Politico has an interesting article out today about three women who could theoretically help John McCain cut into Barack Obama’s big lead among female voters by joining the GOP ticket.
It’s not a very extensive or impressive list.
Kuhn begins by dismissing the early talk about Condi Rice as a potential running-mate, citing her apparent lack of interest in the gig, and her total identification with the Bush administration. In fact, her reported pro-choice views probably disqualify her from the get-go.
Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has the paper credentials you’d want from a Veep, but has a stormy history with the cultural conservatives who likely have a veto over the selection, and is also widely considered Big Oil’s closest ally in the Senate.
There’s been some buzz about former HP exec Carly Fiorina, who’s been campaigning with McCain for a while. But as Kuhn points out, this may not be the right year to pick a former corporate CEO who presided over massive layoffs before getting fired and then accepting a $21 million golden parachute.
Then there’s Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, has a lot of movement conservatives fired up about her future if not her present. Palin, a former high school basketball star and beauty queen, got elected in 2006 after beating scandal-plauged Gov. Frank Murkowski in a primary, and is aligned against endangered porkmeister Don Young in this year’s GOP House primary. So she’s highly compatible with McCain’s alleged “reform” persona. But the reason conservatives outside Alaska love her is all about her rigid anti-abortion views, manifested in her personal life when she chose to continue a pregnancy, in her forties, despite knowing the child would have Down’s Syndrome. Still, she’s barely into her first term in office, has zero foreign policy experience, and is from a bright-red state that’s politically and culturally remote from the rest of the country. Maybe she and Jindal could create a formidable hard-right ticket in about 2020.
When it comes to McCain’s female running-mate options, as Porky Pig would say, “That’s all, folks!”

An article in last Friday’s NYT – “Big Gains for Iraq Security, but Questions Linger” – is more than a standard wartime dispatch. With two principal authors and ten local Iraqi correspondents credited as contributors, it is a significant attempt to explain key aspects of the current military situation for American readers.
For Democrats, the article makes two points of particular importance.
First, the article very strongly corroborates an argument that was made in a TDS post last week. The post warned about a sudden burst of conservative commentary that was distorting the military situation in Iraq to make the case for McCain and achieving “victory.” By the artful use of words like “routed”, “forced to submit”, “surrendered” and “scattered,” these commentaries made it appear that the withdrawal of Sunni and Sadrist militias from Basra, Sadr City and Mosul represented the near-collapse of the insurgency. From this it followed that it is only if the weak-kneed Democrats start withdrawing troops that the insurgents can possibly win.
The TDS post argued that a careful reading of the dispatches from these cities indicated that the withdrawals were more accurately described as mutually negotiated cease-fires rather than battlefield combat victories and therefore did not signal the collapse of the insurgent forces.
The Times article very emphatically confirms this view, repeating the conclusion at two different places.
First,
“The government victories in Basra, Sadr City and Amara were essentially negotiated, so the militias are lying low but undefeated and seething with resentment”
And then again,
“…the government’s successes in Basra and Sadr City were not so much victories as heavy fighting followed by truces that allowed the militias to melt away with their weapons.”
This is an important point. It provides Democrats with an authoritative source to use to challenge the misleading suggestions that the insurgents are actually on their “last legs” and “about to collapse” if Americans just “stay strong a tiny bit longer” or “support John McCain”. It will not stop conservative spokesmen from making such claims when talking to ordinary voters (where they think they can get away with it) but will reduce their tendency to assert this notion in serious debate or the op-ed pages of the Washington Post or New York Times where such rhetoric will be viewed as evidence of either extreme gullibility or embarrassing ignorance.
Beyond this, the article also presents other information about the military situation that Democrats need to understand in order to plan their own political strategy.

Read more…

As the general election contest begins to take shape, a lot of the early talk from the Obama campaign about “changing the map” has been symbolized by its much-broadcast interest in going after my home state of Georgia. It’s an audiacious move, or perhaps even a feint, on the surface. Yes, Georgia went comfortably for native son Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, and narrowly for Bill Clinton in 1992. But beginnng in 1996, Georgia trended heavily Republican (mainly because of the population explosion in the Atlanta suburbs), with Bush winning the state by 12% in 2000 and 18% in 2004.
The Obama campaign’s been listing Georgia as a potential target for a while, on the theory that a massive increase in African-American turnout (and in the Democratic margin there) could significantly narrow the gap. And indeed, the last big Democratic year in Georgia was in 1998, when black tunout (motivated in part by an overtly racial GOP statewide campaign) exceeded white turnout for the first time ever, and leapt from about 19% of the statewide vote to 29%.
But there’s another factor in play, which the first recent general election poll for Georgia has illustrated: Bob Barr. The former Republican Congressman for Georgia, and now the Libertarian candidate for president, gets 6% in an Insider Advantage poll of the Peach State, clearly cutting into John McCain’s vote, who leads Obama 44%-43%. (There’s actually another Georgian running for president, Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, but under current conditions she’s unlikely to dent Obama’s African-American support).
This data led Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com and TNR, who earlier mocked the idea of targeting Georgia, to recant a bit. But it’s all very, very early. Every presidential campaign talks about expanding the battleground at this stage, before focusing its resources down the home stretch to the states that are clearly winnable. But having money to burn, the Obama campaign has every reason to throw a scare into the relatively cash-strapped McCain campaign in places like Georgia. If McCain fails to rise to the bait, and banks Georgia as a sure thing, he could get a nasty surprise if Georgia looks dead-even in late October. If against the odds, Obama’s running-mate is Sam Nunn (who’s still well-known in his native state if not elsewhere), Obama could actually be the favorite in GA, which would indeed scramble the map.

In a gloss on some Gallup numbers on preferences for Obama and McCain among different age categories, Matt Yglesias makes a point that can’t be repeated too often:

[T]he accompanying analysis says “Barack Obama’s appeal to younger voters and John McCain’s support among older voters may have created a situation where the outcome will turn on the preferences of middle-aged voters — particularly those in their 40s.” You see analysis of this sort all the time, but it’s all based on a mistake — there’s not a demographic electoral college where “winning” particular sub-samples of the population is the key to victory and therefore it’s important to focus attention on the most evenly divided demographic groups. If John McCain persuades an Obama-supporting 25 year-old to switch to his camp, that has just as big an impact as one 45 year-old one 65 year-old or one 85 year-old.

Now, as Matt notes, there are voting categories that merit targeting more than others, because they have more persuadable voters than others. And due to the vagaries of geography, some voting categories are very important in determining who wins key states in the actual Electoral College. Finally, a vote that will otherwise certainly be cast for your major-party opponent is more valuable to capture than one which may otherwise not be cast at all, or will be cast for a minor-party candidate.
But the general rule is: a vote’s a vote.