Back in March, I wrote a pair of posts arguing that Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race was not really designed to win over skeptical blue collar Democrats. I suggested that he would only be able to improve his standing with this demographic group through a sustained retail politics effort in upcoming state primaries where the preferences of these voters were likely to be decisive. The Democratic race has now passed through several of these states, and as his West Virginia defeat last night underscores, Obama may be offering his politics at retail, but this group of voters isn’t buying.

 

The art of successful retail politics entails a candidate’s ability to physically demonstrate that he or she can convincingly identify with the everyday experiences of a particular group of voters. That shared understanding should then translate into a candidate persona and a set of policy prescriptions behind which these voters will throw their collective political support. Although Obama’s personal biography suggests that he should be able to find some common ground with blue collar Democrats, his attempts to actually make that connection in the past three months have been nothing short of awkward. Whether it’s bowling in Pennsylvania, shooting pool in West Virginia, or his palpable unease with diner food, Obama’s efforts seem to have instead widened his distance from this group of voters. Mix in the highly sensitive issue of race, and I am not even sure that more of the same kind of retail politicking will eventually provide a solution to this problem for Obama.

 

So, the task for Obama going forward will be a difficult one. He must continue to speak to the aspirations and experiences of blue collar Democrats, while realizing that as a candidate he will likely struggle in his attempts to demonstrate that he is just like them, and hope that these Democrats don’t really mean it when they say they will vote for John McCain in the fall.

It has been pretty obvious for some time now that the Democratic strategy for defeating John McCain this fall will be to paint his election as a third term for President Bush. So, McCain is looking for ways to put a little distance between his campaign and an unpopular Republican president. As evidence of this, much has been made of McCain’s significant differences with the Bush Administration on the issue of climate change. While policy ideas like a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions have never been popular with conservatives, the strategic thinking here is that McCain’s support for such a cap might win him some independent voters, for whom the issue typically has greater resonance.

 

How far will McCain’s proposals on climate change go in combating the image of the McCain presidency as a third term for President Bush? I took a look at the most recent Pew Research Center data on issue salience among independent voters, and the results underscore the long-standing conventional wisdom that while the environment is of concern to many voters, it does not drive the vote choice in the way that other issues do. When asked which issue you’d most like the candidates to address in the 2008 general election, independent voters ranked the economy first (41%), followed by Iraq (25%) and healthcare (13%). Even if you combine energy and gas (6%) and the environment (4%), you still end up no higher than fourth on the issue list, with a combined 10% of independent voters for whom energy and the environment are driving their vote choice.

 

I am not suggesting that McCain’s position on climate change is of no importance to these coveted independent voters, but if McCain truly wants to beat back the notion that his presidency would be a continuation of the Bush Administration, he needs to draw sharper distinctions on issues beyond climate change. As important as that issue is, it is not likely to tip the balance for McCain among independents. Only some fresh thinking on the big three issues of concern to voters – the economy, Iraq, and healthcare – can accomplish that goal.

I have come across several news stories today reporting that Barack Obama is transitioning to a general election strategy, rather than wait for the six contests remaining on the Democratic primary schedule to conclude on June 3^rd. While there are a variety of strategic reasons for him to begin this process, what caught my attention was an item reporting that as a result of this decision, Obama would campaign in Michigan on Wednesday, one day after tomorrow’s West Virginia primary. Well, it was actually the Republican National Committee’s reaction to this announcement that I found so interesting. As reported by First Read, the RNC emailed out the following paragraph:

 

“Barack Obama can travel wherever he wants, but it won’t make his calls for higher taxes, restricted gun rights, and proposed meetings with state sponsors of terrorism any more appealing. Wherever Obama takes his flawed message, voters will learn more about the weak leadership he has demonstrated on important issues confronting the nation. Obama’s punitive tax plan shows he doesn’t understand the American economy or how to rejuvenate it – and that’s no different in Michigan, Florida or the other the states on his itinerary.”

 

I was struck by how remarkably comprehensive this brief RNC missive is in its itemization of the attacks that Obama will face in places like Michigan and Florida. Keep in mind that this is in response to a travel itinerary, not to anything actually said by Obama in one of these battleground states, and you get a pretty good sense of just how intense the tactical battle between the two parties will be this fall.

A reader, Sarah, recently emailed me for my reaction to John McCain’s speech Tuesday on the federal judiciary. She writes:

 

Speaking of ludicrous comments that McCain has made, what do you think about this comment that McCain made yesterday in a speech about checks and balances: "[It] is the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power. For decades now, some federal judges have taken it upon themselves to pronounce and rule on matters that were never intended to be heard in courts or decided by judges. With a presumption that would have amazed the framers of our Constitution, and legal reasoning that would have mystified them, federal judges today issue rulings and opinions on policy questions that should be decided democratically. Assured of lifetime tenures, these judges show little regard for the authority of the president, the Congress, and the states. They display even less interest in the will of the people."

 

McCain's comments fall squarely within the conservative tradition of arguing that judges (particularly those appointed by Democrats) have taken to circumventing the legislative process (and the checks and balances system), by using judicial rulings to make policy and pursue liberal political objectives from the bench. McCain is no doubt interested in shoring up conservative support for the general election, and judicial appointments will need to be a central component of his strategy. These new statements reflect a rhetorical shift to the right by McCain, likely motivated by the fact that some conservatives have been suspicious of his commitment to the issue, ever since he joined the Gang of 14 judicial appointment agreement brokered in the Senate in 2005.

 

With a few Supreme Court justices at or near retirement, and other judicial vacancies remaining for the next president to fill, we will certainly hear a lot more about this issue on the campaign trail in the coming months. I expect that the nominees will draw some very sharp ideological distinctions on the types of judges they would be willing to elevate to the federal bench. If McCain’s rhetoric on Tuesday is any indication, the issue could prove to be one of the real political flashpoints of the general election.

One of the main arguments made by those pressing for an early end to the nomination battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is that the intra-party nastiness between the two candidates has unintentionally provided Republicans with a wealth of negative talking points for use against the Democratic nominee in the general election. I have already noted that I do not find this argument sufficiently persuasive to convince me that the full primary schedule should be truncated, and that is still the case.

 

I have based my skepticism of this argument on the idea that regardless of what happens in the Democratic contest, the McCain campaign and Republican Party are fully capable of conducting their own opposition research, with a thoroughness that would likely uncover all or most of these trouble spots for the general election anyway. Sure enough, we now learn that the Republican National Committee already possesses extensive opposition research dossiers on both Clinton and Obama. And, I am sure that the Democratic National Committee’s file on McCain is just as thick.

For political scientists used to candidate momentum as an important tool for predicting the likely outcome of a presidential nomination battle, this election cycle has been quite a rollercoaster ride. Back in February, I wrote several posts on the question of why momentum has not been particularly helpful for understanding the dynamics of the nomination battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. If you are so inclined, you can track back through them all, starting with the links in this post from February. At the time I wrote it, Obama had just completed a string of 10 consecutive double-digit primary and caucus victories, and political observers were suggesting for the first time that a sense of candidate momentum was driving the presidential race toward its conclusion. That was until Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania brought things to a screeching halt for Obama.

 

Now we’ve just completed a particularly intense two-week period in which Hillary Clinton finally seemed to be building momentum of her own, as Obama, dogged by lackluster campaigning and a high-profile series of campaign controversies and missteps, struggled to stabilize his candidacy. Yet, what a difference twenty-four hours makes, as momentum-based expectations were once again turned upside down by voters in yesterday’s two primary states. Just as momentum failed to carry Obama in March, so too did it fail to work its magic for Clinton in North Carolina and Indiana. Her candidacy is instead once again seriously in jeopardy, and Obama seems re-energized and is increasingly looking like the presumptive Democratic nominee. So, while we have seen some features of a classic momentum-driven campaign on occasion over the past five months, it has mainly served to confound the expectations of those very same political observers (myself included) who have relied on its predictive power in so many previous election cycles.

In case your cable news marathon tonight leaves you still wanting more analysis, I’ll be doing a North Carolina and Indiana wrap-up tomorrow morning on New Hampshire Public Radio’s The Exchange. You can hear the show live (lower left) at 9 AM, or listen to it later.

I will be interested to see if tomorrow’s exit polls in North Carolina and Indiana can shed any light on whether the current gas tax holiday debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is having an impact on voter decision-making in those states. It is one of the very few issues in this election cycle for which the two candidates have adopted such distinctly oppositional policy positions. Given how critical a concern gas prices have become, the conflict over this tax relief issue (Clinton, pro and Obama, con) just may provide a nice little (albeit rough) test of whether voters sometimes choose candidates based on their issue positions, rather than on other personal criteria.

 

I raise this question because last fall I wrote at length about how, despite all the talk of the importance of candidate issue positions leading into the early primaries and caucuses, voters typically make their selections based on more intuitive and emotional criteria, rather than on issue-oriented responses to the candidates. This is particularly true during the primaries, when there are usually few real policy differences between candidates of the same party. This gas tax relief debate has turned out to be an unusually high profile exception to that rule, and may provide some interesting insights into the primary voter calculus.

If Barack Obama must contend with the Rev. Wright controversy for the foreseeable future, then for John McCain it is his 100 years comments on American troop presence in Iraq that will surely follow him into the general election. As McCain’s reaction in Denver today underscores, Democrats are framing his original remarks quite effectively, in a way that is clearly getting under his skin. Tomorrow, it will be exactly four months since McCain made those off-the-cuff comments in Derry, New Hampshire, and I don’t anticipate that his Democratic opponents will stop using the words against him anytime soon. Just as voters must assess the significance of Obama and Wright for the future of presidential governance, it remains for them to decide if McCain’s remarks have been misinterpreted and whether Democrats, in endlessly replaying them, are unfairly characterizing his overarching vision for Iraq.

In yesterday’s post, I concluded that Barack Obama will have to deal with the Rev. Wright controversy in the general election, even if the intensity of the current flare-up dissipates over the next few months. In particular, he will have to contend with the question of why it has taken him 20 years to finally break with the Reverend. Writing in today’s Washington Post, David Broder takes an initial stab at answering this question, and Obama, himself, seems to grapple with it in an interview with the Today Show’s Meredith Vieira. It seems to me that if this critical question is left to linger, Republican opponents will use it to stoke the controversy again this fall. So, the sooner Obama paints a plausible backstory for this two-decade period, the better his chances of not getting sidetracked yet again as the Democratic nominee.

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