American politics is about coalitions and
seizing the center --especially winning over
Independent voters. Winning Indies is important
because the base of each party
will vote for their party's candidates at 80%
rates almost no matter what. For all
practical purposes the only voters in play, who
are persuadable, are Independents,
roughly 1/3rd of the electorate.
These factors are absolutely crucial for
electoral success.
American politics is also about economics, but
only in the sense that focus on
the economy is essential in bad times and only
one issue among others in good times.
In bad times the electorate demands results
which correct economic problems.
In such periods the economy must be issue #1
and the very highest priority.
All of this is --or should be-- completely
obvious, especially to serious politicians.
Incredibly none of this registered on the Obama
White House. It was from the outset
and has been ever since, personality centered,
apparently with no other plan than
to make the most out of Obama's popularity.
Economic issues were approached
as if with the passage of a mega-billion dollar
bailout for Wall Street everything
would be made whole again, and no need to "ride
herd" on the economy
as long as it took to get the job done. This
simply never seems to have
occurred to Obama.
Such ineptness is breath-taking. As much as I
detested the presidency of Wm Clinton,
the man was a skilled politician who, like JBJ
before him, knew the game of politics
by second nature. Obama has been notable for
governing like an ideologue,
for running away from the center ( while
emphasizing centrism rhetorically , a case of
hypocrisy like nothing else for many years ),
and not having any real comprehension
of what Independents are all about.
Now, finally, he is paying the price.
Billy
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Real Clear Politics
October 10, 2011
Obama Team Split on How to Rally Unruly
Coalition
By Michael Barone
President Barack Obama obviously is
scrambling in his attempt to win re-election.
He has proclaimed himself the underdog and has
given up his pretense of being a pragmatic
centrist compromiser in favor of harsh class
warfare rhetoric.
But it's worth taking note of what he has
squandered. In 2008, Obama won 53 percent of
the popular vote. That may not sound like a
landslide, but it's more than any other
Democratic presidential nominee in history
except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and
Lyndon Johnson.
Higher than Woodrow Wilson and Grover
Cleveland, higher than Harry Truman and John
Kennedy, higher than Jimmy Carter and (but don't
bring up the subject with him) Bill Clinton.
Why have so few Democratic nominees won 53
percent or more, as 10 different Republican
nominees have? The historical reason is that the
Democratic Party has been an unruly coalition of
disparate groups -- big-city Catholics and
Southern whites for the century after the Civil
War -- which usually has been hard to hold
together.
Obama's 2008 coalition included two-thirds of
young voters and Latinos, majorities of those
earning more than $200,000 and those earning
less than $50,000, non-college whites in the
upper Midwest, and 95 percent of blacks
nationwide. Some obvious tensions there.
Now his strategists feel obliged to pick which
groups he'll concentrate on to get back up to 50
percent. What's interesting is that his
demographic strategists and his issue
strategists seem to be eyeing different groups.
The demographic targeters, in their quest for
270 electoral votes, have decided to concentrate
on traditionally Republican states that Obama
carried in 2008, according to a report in The
New York Times. They note that some of these
states -- e.g., Colorado, Virginia and North
Carolina -- have above-average percentages of
college-educated voters, who trended strongly
toward Obama.
They add that those three states have more
electoral votes (37) than Florida (29) and twice
as many as Ohio (18), which were both target
states in each of the past three presidential
elections. But Ohio and Florida have lower
percentages of college-educated residents, and
the movement toward Obama compared with past
Democrats was relatively minimal.
This may be smart targeting. For years,
Democrats have been seeking to regain the
majorities they won from blue-collar whites in
the days of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.
But they are a declining percentage of the
electorate, and it's been a long time since they
have given Democrats any majority at all for
president.
Statewide polling since June has shown Obama
with majority disapproval in Florida (43 percent
approves; 53 percent disapproves) and in Ohio
(44-52). That supports the view that his chances
are tenuous in those states.
But unfortunately for these strategists, recent
polls don't show Obama doing much better in
Virginia (45-50), North Carolina (45-51) or
Colorado (46-50). The Obamaites point to Sen.
Michael Bennet's 2010 victory in Colorado as a
model to follow. But Bennet won by only 48 to 46
percent, and the Democratic governor won with
just 51 percent against split opposition. And
Republicans carried the state's popular vote for
the House.
There's also an enormous gulf between the
so-called Colorado strategy and Obama's stance
on issues. It's not clear that lambasting
Republicans for not raising taxes on
millionaires and corporate jets is going to win
votes or rally the enthusiasm of currently
disappointed college-educated and young voters.
They may actually have looked past the campaign
rally cries of "pass this bill" to notice that
it doesn't have 50 votes in the
Democratic-majority Senate and indeed has hardly
any Democratic co-sponsors. Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid has been employing
parliamentary legerdemain to prevent a vote on
Obama's bill.
It's not so clear, either, that bashing
millionaires and corporate jets is going to
rekindle the enthusiasm of young voters and
Latinos discouraged after months of joblessness.
They may remember that spending hundreds of
billions of dollars on the 2009 stimulus package
didn't do much good.
At the moment, the only states where polls
since June show Obama with job approval as high
as 50 or 51 percent are those where he got
60-plus percent in 2008, plus New Jersey, where
he got 57 percent.
Those are enough to get him up to 200 electoral
votes, 70 short of a majority.
But they're not enough to reassemble the 53
percent coalition that hoped he would bring
change for the better. That coalition,
historically unusual, seems now to be part of
history itself.
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