So here’s something to look for in the vast conservative over-reaction to Barack Obama’s comments about the economic roots of “bitterness” and cultural reaction among certain rural and small-town voters.
If you accept (as I certainly do) that economic and non-economic voter concerns are generally legitimate, then there’s more than one way to express elitist, condescending attitudes.
One way is to dismiss non-economic concerns. But the other way is to dismiss economic concerns. And that’s what many conservative pundits and politicians do every single day, by:
(1) arguing that the highly negative feelings Americans have towards the current state of the U.S. economy are delusional or even wimpish, given relative sanguine employment and inflation statistics; (2) suggesting that grievances against economic globalization or trade agreements reflect the views of “losers” who can’t or won’t adjust to economic “dynamism” and who selfishly wish to deny their fellow-citizens the benefits of a rapidly changing economy; (3) claiming that “values issues” or “patriotism” (i.e., support for the Bush administration’s national security policies) are objectively more important than mere “material” bread-and-butter economic issues; and (4) denouncing demands for even-handed economic policies or opposition to reverse-Robin-Hood tax priorities as forms of a divisive “class warfare” that threatens national unity and economic growth.
Methinks conservatives should cease and desist in all these lines of argument if they really intend to keep calling Barack Obama an “elitist.” To cite one example, there’s something pretty risible about the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal blasting Obama’s condescension towards the cannon-fodder of that newspaper’s loony and disastrous economic policies.
Let’s recall that the real elitists in this country are the folks who currently exercise most of the political and economic power, and they are not at present found on the political Left.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The Republicans are also trying to paint Obama as “elitist,” but that’s the standard GOP template (twice used successfully by George W. Bush – a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover, Yale University, and Harvard Business School, son of a former president and grandson of a former U.S. senator). It’s particularly amusing to hear that “elitist” label being thrown around by John McCain, given the fact that McCain is married to a multimillionaire heiress; that McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts that help the rich at the expense of the working class; and that he has spent weeks tweaking his mortgage assistance proposal, which originally offered homeowners the same quality of aid that Herbert Hoover extended to Great Depression victims nearly 80 years ago. (Another thigh-slapper: William Kristol – descendent of a Manhattan intellectual family, and son of a New York University professor – used his New York Times column today to argue that Cling-gate is proof of Obama’s attitudinal ties to…Karl Marx.)

Selah.

Unless you spent the weekend blissfully unexposed to every news medium, or limited yourself to Master’s Tournament coverage, you’re probably aware that Barack Obama has endured a non-stop pounding from Hillary Clinton and her surrogates, and from the entire Right-Wing Noise Machine, over comments made at a California fundraiser about his struggles with downscale rural and small-town voters in places like Pennsylvania.
The furor is over a passage in which Obama suggests that people living in chronic economic sinkholes have become “bitter” over their condition and the false promises of politicians to do something about it, and are “clinging” to religion and gun ownership, and hostile attitudes towards immigrants, trade and people of color, out of frustration.
The first question to ask is whether Obama’s remarks would have raised eyebrows significantly if they hadn’t been leapt upon by Obama’s enemies as a symbol of elitism and condescension, and indeed, on the Right, as proof that Obama is something of a crypto-Marxist (google “Obama opiate of the masses” for examples of that line of attack, or just read Bill Kristol’s New York Times column today).
I sort of doubt it. It’s hardly a revolutionary observation to note that people for whom decades-long economic trends (particularly those associated with globalization) have not been kind tend to “cling” to what they perceive as a rosier past, and to the cultural verities that endure, while expressing fear and hostility towards agents of change. On the face of it, that doesn’t mean rejecting the validity of those cultural verities, or mocking the generally sour and change-averse outlook of Americans who think their way of life is under general assault (you might want to look back at TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston’s cogent discussion in 2001 of the feeling among white men that they are history’s losers). And indeed, in his efforts to put out the fire, Obama has repeatedly argued that he was expressing sympathy towards these voters, and a determination to help them, rather than condescendingly dismissing their concerns, economic or cultural.
It’s interesting to compare the reaction to the scratchy audio of Obama’s original comments to those made in the summer of 2004 by Howard Dean: “I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays. We’re going to fight this election on our turf, which is going to be jobs, education and health care.”
Yes, Dean got challenged on Fox News for this comment, but although it arguably expressed contempt for the legitimacy of cultural issues a lot more clearly than anything said this year by Obama, it didn’t produce that much reaction. And for that matter, Dean was accurately reflecting a “false consciousness” attitude towards religion-based political issues in particular that has long been a staple of neo-populist polemics (expressed most famously and brilliantly by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter With Kansas?) for decades.
But Barack Obama has never associated himself with this brand of neo-populism. And his personal religiosity (in contrast to Dean), his high comfort-level with discussions of faith and other cultural matters (in contrast to the last two Democratic presidential nominees), and his campaign’s emphasis on the non-economic dimensions of the case for change (in contrast to Hillary Clinton), all make him an unlikely candidate for the role of sneering materialist in which his opponents are now trying to cast him.
What’s really going on here is that Obama’s “gaffe” has provided an imperfect but adequate match for the most urgent needs of his Democratic and Republican critics.
The primary worry in Democratic circles about Obama is his persistent electoral weakness among white working-class voters. But as it learned just prior to the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign has to be careful about this “electability” story-line lest it appear to validate or promote racist sentiments. So what better way to raise the subject than to seize on the idea that Barack Obama is the offender, even the aggressor, in his uneasy relationship with these voters! His “contempt” for them retroactively justifies their reluctance to vote for him.
Among Republicans, the “gaffe” has become an important data point in their efforts to undermine everything novel, interesting and appealing about Obama’s candidacy as a post-Baby Boom, post-partisan reform movement that makes a hash of the traditional left-right ideological spectrum. It’s all a hoax, they say, a mask: Obama represents nothing new; he’s actually the avatar of an old, familiar “threat:” the leftist elites who hate America, and particularly hate the sturdy folk virtues and simple piety of middle America. In much of the emerging conservative invective about Obama’s remarks, the venue gets as much attention as the content. Among the right-wing cognoscenti, Marin County, California is the Vatican City of elitist, New Agey liberalism (see Martin Mull’s 1980 movie, Serial, as the ultimate send-up of Marin County as hell on earth; cf. Sean Tyla’s roughly contemporaneous song, Breakfast in Marin).
The close interdependence of the intraparty and partisan effort to exploit this incident is beyond dispute. Clinton campaign surrogates are battening on the Right’s hysteria about Obama-the-Marxist as evidence that, sadly, unfortunately, the poor man is out of touch and unelectable. And every Democratic attack on Obama’s “elitism” provides another piece of evidence for the Right’s argument that Obama’s “mask” is slipping.
I have no idea whether this brouhaha will matter at all in terms of a Democratic nominating contest that Obama’s coming close to wrapping up. Without question, it will provide some renewed impetus to Clinton’s determination to stay in the race until she’s all but mathematically eliminated, and lots of breaths will be bated in anticipation of poll results weighing the impact of all the media hype on Obama’s “controversial” remarks. The one thing we know for sure is that the Right’s reaction is providing a full-on sneak preview of its strategy to defeat Obama if he is the Democratic nominee. And it ain’t pretty.

In 2004, Democrats relied on 527 organizations to provide a lot of the artillery fire in the race for the White House. The Kerry campaign essentially outsourced its field operation in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida to America Coming Together. The Media Fund — run by Harold Ickes — spent $57,694,580 on ads in 17 battleground states, and others like MoveOn.org spent additional tens of millions of dollars on advertising elsewhere. All told, 527s raised and spent more than $500 million in the election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Everyone fully expected that trend to continue this year. In the fall of 2007, operatives announced plans to organize a Fund for America, which would raise money to support independent organizations in 2008. The group told reporters that it planned to pull in more than $100 million from wealthy Democrats and distribute those donations to a slew of organizations targeting Republicans. To date, their efforts have fallen far short, and the Fund is believed to have raised just $3 million during the first quarter of 2008. This week, David Brock told The Politico that he plans to begin raising money for his group — Progressive Media USA — independently, with the hopes of sponsoring a $40 million media blitz against John McCain over the summer.
Dylan Loewe — who used to be the executive director of a 527 called Ballotground — wonders why 527s are struggling to raise money this year and offers a few possibilities. He asks if the mega-donors feel marginalized or unnecessary in the face of the fundraising juggernauts assembled by the Obama and Clinton campaigns, or whether they worry about the legality of the 527s in the face of the record fine that the FEC used to penalize ACT for its activities in 2004, or if they simply support Hillary Clinton and question whether they want to help Obama get elected.
Each of those things might be true for some, but I’d suggest a different theory altogether.
After spending hundreds of millions of dollars in 2004 only to come up short, the biggest donors in the Democratic party stepped back to reconsider their efforts. At the same time a political operative named Rob Stein began to make the rounds among influential Democratic circles with a PowerPoint presentation detailing the rise of the “Right Wing Message Matrix.” He convinced many of the party’s most important contributors that the tactical bets on winning elections were not contributing to the long-term health of the progressive movement. Instead he asked them to make strategic investments in infrastructure like think tanks and grassroots organizations, and the result was The Democracy Alliance. (Matt Bai outlines this story in detail in his book, The Argument.)
Now we can discuss the health and long-term prospects of The Democracy Alliance all we want. At some point, people with a stake in progressive politics probably should evaluate its success or lack thereof. But to me, it seems that there is a real possibility that donors with the ability to make million dollar contributions are going to have a different set of priorities in the fall (especially without the visceral presence of Bush on the ballot). Which means we might have to consider a different independent organization strategy for future elections.
Anyone think that small donors might be convinced to give to an amorphous organization run by Harold Ickes?

It’s been obvious for a while now that Hillary Clinton’s ability to continue her candidacy to the Democratic Convention depends on her success in at least one of three dimensions (assuming she can’t catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates without some complete collapse of his campaign): (1) an uniterrupted winning streak in the final primaries; (2) the sudden appearance of a major positive differential in her general-election poll standings from Obama’s; or (3) a plurality in the final cumulative popular vote. Number (3) is the most plausible for her right now, particularly if she can convince the media and other Democrats to choose a measurement of the total popular vote that gives her the best chance of catching up.
This last note reflects the little-comprehended fact that there’s not any sort of “official” tabulation of the popular vote; nor will there be one when the whole game’s over.
Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal has an analysis up today on the National Journal site that runs through some of the difficulties involved in figuring out the people’s choice. They go beyond the question of whether votes cast in unsanctioned primaries in MI and FL ought to “count,” along with the fact that popular vote totals aren’t available for four caucus states. There’s also the anomalous situation in WA, which held a “non-binding” primary to accompany its delegate-selection caucuses.
Blumenthal also raises the technical but politically explosive issue of “measurement error:” at some point, the margin of victory or defeat for a candidate in an extremely close race becomes smaller than the number of votes cast or counted in error.
The bottom line here is that there’s enough confusion about popular vote totals to enable HRC to at least attempt to claim a victory if she can come up with a version of the results that passes the laugh test. And that could lead to a “numbers war” that will be very difficult to resolve.
For that to happen, of course, she needs to keep winning primaries, and the underlying big question is whether superdelegates will tilt decisively to Obama if he can win in, say, North Carolina. I think that’s more likely than not.

Today’s presidential campaign news includes a couple of items that bring back some bad old memories for Democrats of a certain age: discussions of crime and welfare policy.
Those who came of age in the 1990s or later may have a hard time comprehending the extent to which perpetually rising violent crime rates and the vast unpopularity of high public assistance levels affected politics at every level during the 1970s and 1980s. Crime and welfare served as the hardy perennials of race-tinged conservative “wedge issues” that helped erode white working-class support for the Democratic Party. The decline of crime rates (particularly murder rates) in and after the 90s, and the even more rapid decline in welfare rolls after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation signed by President Clinton, largely took these issues off the table.
Well, crime rates have been recently going back up in many cities, even as the Bush administration slowly starved Clinton-era crime-fighting initiatives. So it’s no big surprise that Hillary Clinton has unveiled a new anti-crime proposal in Philadelphia, a city where spiking homicide rates have become a major local preoccupation.
Much of Clinton’s plan really isn’t new; it focuses on reviving her husband’s signature COPS initiative, which was largely gutted by Bush and pre-2006 Republican-controlled Congresses. And indeed, the fact that it’s a Democratic candidate who has first raised this issue in the presidential contest reflects the extent to which Bill Clinton succeeded not only in blunting conservative “wedge” appeals on crime, but making support for police officers, as opposed to the GOP’s obsessive focus on maximum incarceration of drug offenders, a popular theme for progressives.
It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama, who in the past has bluntly criticized the failed war-on-drugs as a crime-fighting strategy, begins talking about crime policy more visibly as well. Meanwhile, if the issue continues to emerge, we may find out whether John McCain goes back to the tried-if-not-so-true Republican rhetoric on crime as a reflection of social permissiveness.
The welfare issue hasn’t really “come back” yet, except as a subordinate item of John Edwards’ discussion of poverty. But as a New York Times feature today indicates, it may just be a matter of time, as the struggling economy collides with the rising numbers of public assistance recipients who have reached the time limits established in the 1996 law. Both Clinton and Obama have praised the reforms as successful, and it’s very unlikely Democrats will re-embrace the idea of a national entitlement to cash assistance. But soon enough, the subject may no longer be “off the table,” and it could be of more than passing importance how the partisan dynamics of a new debate on the government’s role in providing a safety net against extreme poverty eventually shape up.

My post earlier this week about the important new Democracy Corps survey and analysis on national security as a campaign issue was reinforced and amplified by the invariably clear-eyed Jon Chait yesterday, who warns that the Democratic advantage on Iraq can coexist with a Republican–or at least McCain–advantage on national security generally. Here’s Chait on the broad problem:

Are the Republicans politically suicidal? I don’t think so. The public can oppose you on a specific policy question but still favor you on the issue in general. Richard Nixon was fighting an unpopular war in 1972, but he still crushed George McGovern on foreign policy. Likewise, despite the unpopularity of the Iraq war, John McCain’s general hawkishness might still be an asset for him.

Chait goes on to suggest that the right formula of wrapping opposition to the war with an overall national security posture that allays voter fears of excessive Democratic reluctance to use military force when necessary may have already been signalled by Barack Obama:

Iraq may not be popular, but the general perception (which is not the same thing as reality) that they’re willing to fight the bad guys remains a key positive for the GOP brand. Am I saying the Democrats need to try to mimic Republican positions in order to win? Not at all. A creative approach is needed, and Obama’s combination of dovishness on Iraq and hawkishness on al Qaeda in Pakistan strikes me as probably the best approach.

Whether or not Chait’s right about that assessment of Obama, I certainly share his main argument: you can’t just look at polls about individual issues, domestic or international, and then assume the electorate’s overall candidate preference will mechanically follow who’s right or who’s wrong about the sum of those individual issues. And that’s why Democrats truly do need to start thinking about a “creative” approach to national security that combines being right about Iraq with an overall posture that strikes Americans as being right about the security challenges the country faces going forward.
This can be a highly nuanced exercise. In 2004, John Kerry made hundreds of speeches that made it clear his foreign policy would use America’s full arsenal of military and non-military assets to keep the country safe and improve our strength and prestige. The order of the military and non-military arguments was a subject of constant debate within his campaign, and more often than not, he stressed the value of non-military initiatives before reassuring voters that of course he’d use military force if necessary. His actual platform would not have changed at all had he gone the other way, but the political impact arguably might have been different. The same is true for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The “creative” approach to national security Chait argues for is pretty much what most Democrats, and both Democratic candidates for president, actually support. But sometimes messaging is more about order and emphasis than overall content, and it would be a good idea for Democrats to start thinking about that even now.

As a bit of a Cassandra on the subject of the possibility of an unplanned and hideously divisive Democratic National Convention, I was interested to read a “movie treatment” called “Four Days In Denver” that New York magazine commissioned TV commentator and West Wing scriptwriter Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., to write. The idea is that Democrats arrive in Denver with Barack Obama enjoying a lead in pledged delegates and popular votes, but without enough superdelegates to win the nomination outright. Then the fun starts.
I won’t reveal the plot of O’Donnell’s fantasy, but if you read it, be sure to take it as entertainment, not a semi-serious prediction of what might happen. For one thing, the premise that HRC’s candidacy would survive final Obama leads in pledged delegates and popular votes is dubious in the extreme. Most of the dramatics that O’Donnell conjures up would have certainly played themselves out long before the convention itself, while he omits entirely some events (e.g., credentials, rules and platform fights) that really could happen.
At some point over the next few weeks, if the subject isn’t made moot by primary results, we’re thinking of publishing here at TDS some thoughts from convention veterans of the real issues posed by the possibility of a convention where the nominee is not certain going in. But I’m reasonably sure none of them will begin with a superdelegate sex scene. And that’s one of many reasons I’m toiling away here instead of pulling down big bucks in Hollywood.

HRC’s campaign is not the only one getting some extra scrutiny this week. Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has done a major article analyzing the personnel and strategy of John McCain’s campaign. He unravels the complex John Weaver-Rick Davis rivalry that’s been at the center of the campaign’s various purges and power struggles. And he also explains the odd Davis-driven decision to organize the general election campaign around a “regional autonomy” model that sounds a bit like one of those plans for stabilizing Iraq.
One thought I had after reading Jason’s fine piece is that it’s clear McCain’s back-from-the-grave nomination victory will tend to freeze the current campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message into place even if they aren’t necessarily right for the general election. That, after all, is how John Kerry wound up going into the 2004 general election with a questionable campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message. At about this stage four years ago, I can remember some Kerry supporters muttering to each other things like: “How can you convince a candidate his campaign is making potentially fatal mistakes when he’s just won the nomination after being left for dead?” I wonder if any McCainiacs are muttering similar things to each other today.

Any hopes Hillary Clinton’s campaign had that it could make the demotion of “chief strategist” Mark Penn a neutral or even positive story is rapidly dimming, as political journalists line up to criticize its general competence.
The latest example is a harsh article in The Politico by Jim Vandehei and David Paul Kuhn with the unforgiving title: “Clinton leadership a study in missteps.” A sample:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

Ouch.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a lot of the criticism of Clinton’s campaign is an exercise in 20-20 hindsight. Her third-place finish in the Iowa Caucus disguised an organization in the state that was probably better than that of past winners. Her fundraising, and even her small-dollar fundraising, has vastly outstripped all precedents. And obviously, she’s survived political near-death experiences at least twice in the course of this campaign.
The problem is that in Barack Obama, Clinton has faced a candidate and a campaign that are operating on a whole ‘nother level. As Peter Beinart put it in a Washington Post op-ed piece yesterday, Obama’s [campaign] “has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer.”
And despite his obvious vulnerabilities against Clinton and potentially against John McCain in a general election, Obama has created a political movement that constantly threatens to change the rulebook.
Let’s put it this way: is anyone confident, in retrospect, that Hillary Clinton would not have already locked up the nomination weeks ago if Obama were not in the race? Could, say, John Edwards or Bill Richardson or Chris Dodd have really challenged her financially, or picked up enough votes to have come close to the powerful women/Hispanic/African-American coalition she would have been able to put together if Obama hadn’t run?
I certainly doubt it. So maybe the best assessment of HRC’s candidacy at this point is that she’s run the kind of campaign that should have and probably would have won if so many constellations hadn’t suddenly lined up against her.
That’s how it looks post-Penn, and how it may look post-Pennsylvania as well.

In 2002, PBS began to post most of its Frontline documentaries online. Last year, they used a $5 million grant from MacArthur Foundation to expand the capabilities of its video player, which paved the way for last month’s four-and-a-half hour documentary, Bush’s War.
PBS doesn’t know for sure how many people watched the documentary when it aired on television. But it does know that more than 1.5 million people have tuned into some portion of the program online. Many have watched the episode in full.
Keep in mind: this is a television program longer than most feature films. It is undeniably engaging, but it remains a documentary with voiceovers, news clips, and interviews. It is fundamentally a piece of political nonfiction, and we don’t expect PBS documentaries like this to be sensations. But online, that is exactly what “Bush’s War” has become.
Liberated from the television, “Bush’s War” is something more than just a film. The webpage for the documentary is packed with features. There are more than a 20 interactive timelines and maps, which viewers can use to track the rise of terrorism through more than three decades. There are 175 embedded video clips and full transcripts from more than 400 Frontline interviews. There is a live chat with the producer and a forum for discussion. Bush’s War is being watched and talked about and explored in ways not possible in any other format.
All of which suggests a similar point to the one we were trying to make with our comments about Barack Obama’s speech on race — the web is making room for long forms of political dialogue. The speech was less than an hour, and this program runs nearly five times as long, but millions of people are sitting down to watch each of them.
That indicates something healthy about our democracy. The web is just an outlet for this type of content — it still must engage an audience in order to reach a level of popularity. In both of these cases, though, that is exactly what is happening , despite their length and substance.
The sound-bite isn’t dead, and the news as we know it will be with us for awhile. But we are watching the birth of a new type of public discourse.