Obama '08?

I'd definitely echo the 'polarisation' point..

There is zero chance, outside of some nationalist galvanizing event like an attack of the spyder creatures from Tau Ceti, that the movement conservatives and their media operations will suddenly get nice if the WH falls to the Dems.

The only realistic route for progressives/liberals/democrats is to extricate movement conservatives from the positions of power which they've managed to attain, to counter and best them on media strategies and organizational operations

OBAMA FIRST IN IA STAFF, BUT NOT ENDORSEMENTS

MSNBC First Read
Saturday, October 06, 2007

DES MOINES -- John Edwards' campaign has 15-foot tall banners mounted on construction equipment. Team Biden has a giant display of corn cobs to count up their candidate's "Ears of Experience." The Clinton camp has massive plywood "Hillary" letters a-la the Hollywood sign. And bloggers can't help but camp out to watch the legions of campaign volunteers outside of every multi-candidate event who wage sign wars that would put your local high school's homecoming rally to shame.

But, as some campaign operatives in Iowa like to remind the press, yard signs do not a ground game make.

Organization on the ground is key in a state as large (99 counties and just shy of 56,000 square miles) and as purple as Iowa (Gore won the state in 2000; Bush won in 2004.) The stakes are even higher for Democrats, whose unique caucus process makes a statewide turnout of well-informed and dedicated voters a requirement for success.

The necessity of a strong get-out-the-vote effort makes organization a good barometer of what might happen in January. And because we couldn't possibly count all the yard signs in Iowa even if they WERE the key to evaluating ground game, here's an insiders scorecard to who's got game in the Hawkeye State.

BODIES -- Even the most charismatic candidate can't turn out the vote without dedicated staffers to organize canvassing drives, phone banks, candidate visits, and town hall meetings. Among the six Democratic campaigns with an Iowa presence, the number of paid staffers ranges from about 30 to 200. Joe Biden's camp, even after moving almost all of his top dogs into the state, tallies at less than 30. Rival Senator Chris Dodd, on the other hand, boasts 59 full-timers, and Gov. Bill Richardson's campaign announced this week that their newly beefed-up Iowa presence clocks in at over 70 people in the field. Dennis Kucinich, by contrast, doesn't really have an office in Iowa at all, making him ineligible to participate in the recent AARP forum. He doesn't appear to be seriously campaigning in the state that's geared toward under-funded campaigns. Is he running for president or simply running just enough in order to get invited to forums?

It's a bit trickier to tell with the top tier Democrats, who are so competitive with each other that the campaigns decline to release hard numbers of paid staff on the ground. But sources confirm that Obama's staff is the largest, with an estimated 200 paid operatives in the state. That number is likely to increase in light of Obama's post-third-quarter organizational push. Best estimates put the Clinton shop at somewhere between a half and three-fourths the size of Obama's,and Edwards' paid staff may register at just a touch less than that.

FIELD OFFICES -- Those bodies need space to work and bases of operation for countywide efforts like canvases and rallies. Each campaign has numerous satellite offices throughout the state in must-stop cities like Davenport and Iowa City. Here, also, Obama takes the lead. The Illinois Senator's campaign boasts a whopping 31 offices, some in counties with populations less than 20,000. The Clinton field operation encompasses 21 offices; Edwards and Richardson each have fifteen. Dodd's staff spreads over eleven bases in the field, and the shoestring Biden shop has merely nine.

ENDORSEMENTS -- Endorsements offer the chance for candidates to tout support from community leaders, and they also come with the gift that keeps on giving -- a rolodex of movers and shakers in key counties statewide. When former Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Gordon Fischer endorsed Barack Obama, he candidly told reporters that his main asset as a supporter will be his connections within the state party. "I will be in touch with Iowa Democrats," he said. "Frankly I know a lot of them from my time as party chair."

In Iowa, the legislative endorsement race is on. Hillary Clinton weighs in with 16 endorsements from state senators and representatives; Obama and Biden share the silver medal at ten apiece. Biden's success in tallying support from the statehouse is due largely in part to his long-standing connections here, some of which date back to his 1988 campaign; his fundraising efforts during the last election cycle were instrumental for local Democrats who took back the Iowa legislature in 2006, and many of those personal relationships have translated to the endorsement podium.

John Edwards, who also has deep roots in the state, has seven on the books, but expect that number to go up to nine in the coming weeks as Edwards rolls out his county steering committees. Chris Dodd, in contrast, boasts an influential national endorsement (from the International Fire Fighters Association) but has only one state legislator behind him. Richardson has none.

Of course, the signs aren't meaningless either. At last month's Harkin Steak Fry, the road to the Indianola balloon field was wallpapered with logos, and HillaryWorld was the hands-down winner of the visual contest. And besides the fact that Team Edwards is catching up fast in the endorsement race, it can't be ignored that, anecdotally, they might have the most tireless cheerleaders and sign-painters of the lot.
These categories don't even begin to take into account volunteers, ad buys, phone calls, and number of candidate hours logged in the state There's no metric of organization that can truly calculate the political magic that will make Iowans bundle up and decide to go talk politics for a few hours on a cold January night. But for now, keep your eye on the numbers and keep asking... "Who's got game?"

Obama [..] faces a paradoxical problem. The leading black politician of his generation, he has lost African-American support to Clinton since he announced his candidacy, according to an analysis of USA TODAY Polls. That's partly a reflection of his weakness among core blue-collar Democrats who remain solidly in Clinton's corner.

Obama's underlying message is that it's time to "turn the page" from the polarization that marks not only the Bush administration but also the Bill Clinton administration that preceded it. That doesn't resonate with many Democrats who recall the Clinton years fondly and would like nothing better than to return to them.

Obama, with money on his side, still seeks tractionA short-lived bumpDemographic shifts in the candidates' support

There have been demographic shifts within the two rivals' support that may turn out to be more important than their overall standing.

In 13 national polls this year, USA TODAY asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents whom they'd prefer if the nomination came down to Clinton or Obama. Findings from the first four surveys (taken in February to early April) and the last three (taken in August and September) were combined to create large enough samples to study different voter groups.

Among key findings:

• Clinton's lead among African-Americans has widened by 9 percentage points, to 62%-34%.
  
  That's disquieting news for Obama's hopes to prevail in the Jan. 29 primary in South Carolina, the first contest in a state with a significant black population.
  
  Clinton is boosted among African-Americans by her husband, who is overwhelmingly popular in the black community, and by her strength generally among working-class voters who see her as a champion on the kitchen-table issues that they typically worry about most.
  
  In recent days, Obama has been stepping up his direct appeals to African-Americans. In a commencement address at Howard University on Friday, he promised as president to address "glaring inequities" in the justice system exemplified by the handling of a racially tinged fight at a high school in Jena, La. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who has endorsed Obama, had blasted him for not doing more to protest the case in which only the black teens involved were indicted.
  
  Obama also addressed the Congressional Black Caucus' legislative conference Friday. In an unmistakable demonstration of Clinton's clout with many African-American officials, however, she was the featured leadoff speaker.
  
  
• Obama's support among those 18-29 has grown by 12 points, making it his strongest age group.
• Clinton's edge among those 65 and older has grown by 9 points, her strongest age group.
  
  She now leads Obama by a yawning 69%-26% among seniors, the group most likely to vote. In 2004, more than one in four of those who participated in the Iowa caucuses were 65 and older, according to surveys of voters as they arrived at caucus sites.
  
  
• Obama's support among the most affluent Americans has grown by 9 points, making it the only major demographic group in which he doesn't trail Clinton.
  
  They are now tied at 47% each among those with annual household incomes of $75,000 or more, and Obama lags Clinton by only 4 points among those with postgraduate degrees.
  
  Upscale Democrats also helped fuel such Democratic challengers as Hart and Bradley. "We know it's a significant enough constituency to generate a huge amount of buzz and a lot of money," Mellman says. "But it's not a big enough constituency to win a Democratic nomination. The challenge for Barack Obama is to move his appeal downscale."
  
  Clinton's strongest and most consistent support is among blue-collar workers. Those with annual household incomes of $30,000 or less prefer Clinton over Obama by 70%-27%, and her lead is nearly as big among people with a high-school education or less.
  
  Both are signs of her strength in the Democratic base, which has remained virtually unchanged through this year.

'The system isn't working for us'

Right. I encountered a bit of that when I've gone on here about the Clinton era from a different angle. When I went on about how America this time needs a progressive president who will do what Clinton shirked away from, needs a President who, after the conservative revolutions we've seen, will not be satisfied with just "four more years / of things not getting worse" - the way Clinton was. Even Soz shrugged a bit at that - I guess most Democrats really just think back of the Clinton era as good times, policy-wise - good enough, anyhow.

That makes it hard to campaign on a "enough with the Bushes and the Clintons" type theme. Since all but the most progressive regular Democratic voters seem to think Clinton was fine enough, policy-wise, all you've got left then is a more stylistic criticism: that politics was too "polarised" in the Clinton era, and that you dont want a return to that. But looking at the state of Republican and conservative politics today, you're gonna have polarisation anyhow, it's not suddenly going to mellow just because the president's name is Obama or Edwards. Democratic voters realise that I think - so there might just be too little in the ways of feeding ground for this theme right now.

I don't actually think Hillary has much to do with that. Bill Clinton was a good president. Hillary was the First Lady. That can be a position with some power, but it just ain't the same thing, by a long shot. She wasn't elected to anything, she wasn't appointed to anything, she just married the guy well before the fact. And I don't buy that she was there for the kind of nitty-gritty that is really necessary to get any kind of useful experience.

Secondly, I've said pretty strongly that I think there is something deeply wrong with the idea of dynasties. Something deeply disturbing about the idea of America being ruled for 28 years by the same two families.

Obama is allowing us to forget how he inspired us

Hillary Clinton's young rival for the American Democrats' presidential nomination needs to get back to being different

[...]
... Obama's campaign so far has been disappointing in two ways. First, it provides, especially in contrast with Clinton's, a reminder of an often hidden aspect of presidential politics: campaigns are multimillion-dollar corporations, in which the chief executive has to provide the vision and direction, and all the moving parts have to work together.

This means, to take an obvious example, that major speeches and policy proposals that are meant to represent fundamental parts of the candidate's platform and identity have to be rolled out with great forethought. The candidate and the team need to get the right balance of politics and policy. And they need to be thinking ahead to how the media will react to the speech. They have to write it and present it in a way that increases the likelihood that the next day's stories emphasise the parts the campaign wanted emphasised.

The Clinton campaign has done this brilliantly, as with for instance her proposal for universal healthcare coverage three weeks ago, which was both more ambitious and more pragmatic than many observers had expected. The Obama team has struggled. In August, Obama gave a major foreign policy address. Republicans and pundits often carp that Democrats have "no ideas" on foreign policy, but Obama's address was shockingly substantive - full of proposals about foreign aid and international strategies to combat terrorism and fight poverty, proposals that really did add up to a vision of America's relationship to the rest of the world that was both genuinely liberal and appropriately tough-minded.

But this was also the speech in which he said that he would approve a strike in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

I'd imagine the Obama team knew that this line would dominate the headlines, but they surely didn't plan on how, because rather than getting praise for being a tough guy, he was mostly attacked for speaking naively about "bombing" an ally. It went on for days. The campaign couldn't control it and had to backtrack and clarify. As a result, probably no more than 22 people in the entire country have any idea of the content of the rest of the speech.

The Obama campaign keeps making mistakes like that, mistakes a better-run organisation would have ironed out in the eight months he's been an active candidate. There's been no sign of progress on this front. His speech on tax policy last month was overshadowed by Clinton's health plans and received the mixed reviews it deserved.

Obama has also disappointed in that he just hasn't been able to present himself as quite as different a political figure as his admirers had hoped. At the beginning of his campaign, he seemed like someone who had a deep contact with the ideals that animated America's founding, ideals of shared civic responsibility that he captured well in his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. The sentences in that speech were not mere anodyne cliches about unity; they were more profound than that, and they clearly sprang from somewhere deep within him. "There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq," he said. "We are one people, all pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes." That is what so many people found inspiring about him.

He hasn't been able to be that person. Maybe a political campaign is the last context in the world in which someone can be that person. Or maybe this problem is related to the first, and the corporation's many moving parts somehow got off track and the campaign sort of forgot its raison d'etre.

The experts say he has to attack Hillary Clinton more directly, over her initial backing of the Iraq war and her polarising reputation. Maybe. But I say he needs to do a little of the precise opposite too. Right now, he's like an American football team that, with about five minutes left in the third quarter, has been thrown completely off its game plan. His plan is not to go nose-to-nose with the Clinton machine. His game plan is to inspire - not to tell us he's different but to show us through his actions how he's different. Most people who found the Obama who gave that 2004 address so promising still remember what the appeal was in the first place. But people are forgetting.

Have you read the book Primary Colors? Published anonymously by a Washington Post reporter in 1996, it's basically a reportage about Clinton's 1992 campaign for the Democratic nomination -- thinly veiled as a novel about the "fictional" candidate "Jack Stanton"'s 1992 campaign for the Democratic nomination. In terms of both political strategy and tactics, Bill and Hillary are pretty much portrayed as a team of equals, Bill being the charismatic face of the team. By "Anonymous"'s description, Hillary was very involved in the nitty-gritty, including the successful parts.

I think that Hillary had some experience, sure, but I think there were necessarily a whole lot of things she was left out of as First-Lady-not-President. Cabinet meetings, top-level decision making, whathaveyou. Strictly in terms of security, constitution, stuff like that, it's much easier for a spouse to have a major role in a campaign as opposed to an actual presidency.

She told reporters again and again that she did not dominate her husband -- "He has a real core of toughness"; -- that her husband would not offer her a Cabinet post -- "That's not going to happen, and I wouldn't take it if it did"; -- that she would not sit in on Cabinet meetings -- "I never did that in Arkansas and I'm not going to start now," -- and that she would not be a pioneer First Lady making radical changes -- "I don't think so; I hope I'm going to be myself."

I definitely think that she had experience, I'm just saying that I think it's limited. More limited than she likes to imply.

(Depends somewhat on her opponent.)