I've been frustrated by the White House's seeming lack of attention (or rather intensity) on the health care issue.  But then it occurred to me today that if the President spends much more time on health care, if he gets embroiled once again in the debates that have gone on for months, a perception will form that he's not dealing with the other, arguably more pressing issues facing the country right now, i.e. jobs and Wall Street.
I know that in some sense both of these things are tied to health care.  And yet, as Josh often says, what's important here is the meta-politics of the issue.  If there's a perception that he's spending all of his time wrangling and struggling with health care, the public will begin to get frustrated that he's ignoring other urgent issues.  Obama may be making a calculation right now that it would be worse to spend the next month and a half re-wrangling health care (while the perception forms that other issues are being ignored, and with no guarantee that health care will succeed anyway) than simply moving on to other issues where he might be more successful, and letting the chips fall where they may.  
I can't necessarily fault the Administration for this logic.  It leaves everything in the hands of the House.

The very first priority of an Obama presidency should be to reform our system of voting, by standardizing it where possible.  There have been too many examples already in this election of possible disenfranchisement of voters, dirty tricks, and malfunctioning machines to allow our flawed system of voting to continue.  Keeping people away from the voting booth helps Republicans; allowing more people to vote helps Democrats.  If we want to preserve a Democratic majority for years to come, the best thing we could do is to fix our system of voting.

I don't actually believe we live in a center-right nation, as many pundits have been saying the last couple of days.  I believe we have voted as a center-right country in the last couple of elections--but if the electorate voted fully, I think we'd find that we live in a center-left nation.

Voting should be standardized, using a paper optical scan ballot, with a "receipt" that is viewable online, so an individual can check that their vote was registered correctly after the fact.  Democracy demands that this reform happen right away.

I don't believe that most of the people spreading these vicious rumors about Obama actually believe them.  The higher-ups at the McCain campaign are reasonably smart (if sinister) people—they see these smears only through the lens of how it will boost poll numbers.  So implying that Obama is a terrorist, printing his name on ballots as Osama, calling him constantly by his full name, is just a ploy to increase votes, and they know it.  They don't actually believe any of it.

The problem is, many of their followers and Republican supporters take these smears at face value and begin to believe them.  An entire part of the electorate actively believes now, as a result of the McCain campaign, that Obama is a terrorist and a muslim.  This is not a healthy way to begin a presidency.  It has potentially dangerous and sinister consequences if Obama is elected.  A swath of the electorate would honestly that their president is treasonous.

If John McCain had any courage, he would deliver a speech directly to the American people explaining that Obama is a dedicated patriot and family man.  Further, he would explain why these slurs are false and disingenuous—in clear language, so the most stubbornly revanchist members of the "base" would understand.  He would say that he refuses to be associated with anyone promoting these lying, corrosive smears.

Unfortunately, as we've seen in this campaign, John McCain lacks courage. He only cares about his own victory—even if it is a Pyrrhic victory, leaving his own reputation and name in tatters. He is now a creature of Karl Rove, a puppet whose strings are being pulled by Steve Schmidt.

Luckily, these strategies seem to be working against him.  Unluckily, they are making a small segment of the population rabidly, violently anti-Obama.

The real failure yesterday came about, I believe, because the necessity for this bailout has not been clearly explained to Americans.

$700 billion is a staggering number to ask Americans to pay.  Most of us don't understand why not paying it could be "catastrophic," as the politicians are saying.  We've learned to distrust the rhetoric of politicians.

So, faced with this number and with mounting worries about our personal finances, a huge number of Americans called their politicians and asked them to vote "no" on this measure.

If the need for it had been explained clearly, the results might have been different.

All that matters right now in this campaign is voter turnout and swing voters.  These two things will decide the election.  And that means the ONLY people who matter to the outcome of this election are: lazy voters, and swing voters.  Neither of these groups are likely to read a major news source daily, or scroll through blogs looking for the next tidbit of political information.

They vote by feel alone.  They vote based on their gut, on rumors, on what family and friends tell them.

It doesn't matter how many lobbyists dance around the head of McCain's pin, or how many lies he tells.  These things are reported in major media.  But they're not reaching either lazy voters or swing voters—because these voters don't monitor the news for every gaffe, like we do.

We need new ways to perform political outreach.

I am concerned.

Republicans are once again using two cynical strategies against the Democrats and it seems to be working.  They're tapping into the two deepest-seated notions in American life: patriotism and individualism.

Their first strategy is to control the question of loving one's country.  Somehow, the Democrats have allowed themselves to be painted as not loving their country sufficiently.  This is a lie, and the Republicans know it.  But it seems to gain them leverage with swing voters.  Despite the fact that Palin's husband belonged to a secessionist party, and she seemed to support it, Obama is the one who's portrayed as unpatriotic? 

The second strategy is the elitism angle that came up in 2000 with Gore and again in 2004 with Kerry.  America has an inherent anti-intellectual streak.  Our national sense of individualism promotes the idea that everyone, including the President, is equally capable.  Republicans were able to make Gore into a know-it-all, Kerry into a rich wine-snob, and now Obama into an Ivy league upstart.  Each of them, therefore, were portrayed as "holier-than-thou."  For Americans, this goes against our inherent sense of individual ability.

These two cynical strategies by the Republicans are obvious and have been used again and again to win elections.  So, my question......why haven't the Democrats figured out a way to combat this stuff?  Why are we threatening to let the most winnable election in history slip through our grasp, all because of cynical politics? 

If the Republicans win, it will not be because of policies or ability.  It will be for the exact same reasons they won in 2004: cynicism and jingoism.  Questioning Democrats' patriotism, and making our candidates' abilities into a form of elitism.

Unless Democrats figure out a way to combat this, I'm worried about the course of this election.  It will (once again) have nothing to do with policies.

Trolling on a few Republican websites just now, I noticed that they've already formed an opinion about Obama's speech tomorrow--and it has nothing to do with the speech itself.  In true Rovian spirit, they're scathingly mocking both the stage and the setting (a stadium of 70,000 people) as being Messianic. They've rolled this out as almost a party line—everyone from Limbaugh to Jonah Goldberg to George Will are right on message. Their ENTIRE criticism of his speech is pre-digested, and based on exactly what Rove spelled out very publicly a couple of months ago: Obama's perceived arrogance. 

What was seen as an asset—Obama's popularity—has through sarcasm been turned into his ultimate liability.  All of the Republican websites refer to him as "the One" and "the Messiah," but sarcastically.  They've zeroed in on his strength, his ability to connect with people, and made it into a deficit.  This is how sarcasm works: you take something and make it into its opposite.  You mock.  You make fun of.  And it works, sad to say.  It's the most effective political tactic I've ever seen.  It worked against Kerry, and it could well work against Obama too.  Everything Obama does from here on out will be re-processed by the Republicans through the meme of his "messianic arrogance."  They will hammer this message home with blunt force.

Meanwhile, the Democrats launch their earnest, fact-based attacks on McCain. "50% of this and that group have no widgets!, etc, etc." And the only people these arguments seem to convince are.....hmmmm.....Democrats.  Yet that elusive swing voter is being swayed by Rovian sarcasm, mockery and contempt.  Swing voters don't really care about widgets.  They care about narratives.  If the Republicans can completely debase Obama as an arrogant narcissist (which he's not, but doesn't matter to them) then they've already won.  McCain looks like a salt-of-the-earth American in comparison.  An exceptionally talented and inspiring candidate, reduced to a sarcastic caricature.

The Democrats, nice and not too go-for-the-throat, don't have a similar sarcastic caricature for McCain.  Instead, we have our widgets and our facts.  Which don't seem to win elections.  What the Democrats need to do is to zero in on a sarcastic meme for McCain—turn his greatest strength into a huge liability—and then hammer on it endlessly.

Under the Bush administration, Republicans have essentially been schooling themselves in playing rough, in politics-as-bloodsport.  That's true both from an administrative and a campaigning perspective.  Attacks and strategies that would have been seen as dishonest, smarmy, or shameful back in the Reagan or Clinton era are now considered fair game--for Republicans. 

But Democrats haven't yet learned these new rules.  We're still operating with the expectation that basic human decency will take over at some point.  It's like a boxing match in which the referees have disappeared, yet one fighter still abides by the rules, while the other constantly punches below the belt, in the kidneys, and wherever else he can inflict the most pain.  Who will win this fight?

This is why Democrats need to re-evaluate their entire campaign strategy and throw out the rules to some extent.  Our opponents will be vicious—politeness on our side will only lose us more and more elections.

The reason Edwards' haircut stayed in the news is because it was both an excessive expenditure that most Americans couldn't afford AND it was excessively vain.  If Edwards had spent $400 on hunting boots or golf clubs or whatever, no problem.

The Republican angle on elitism only points out elitism that is vain, and therefore somehow preening, girlish, and wimpy.  In the Republican calculus, owning seven houses isn't a liability.  But caring how they're decorated perhaps is.

Not withstanding the general gaffe that McCain commits by not remembering how many houses he has, we're a Horatio Alger society.  Will it really matter to the American public that John McCain is richer than them?  We've had presidents who were hugely wealthy, and some who made their own wealth, and some who came into office from the upper middle class.

Sure, the gaffe suggest that McCain is out of touch.  But does simply having huge wealth work against him?  I don't necessarily think so.  After all, for most Americans, having money is a sign (rightly or wrongly) of ability and success.

Many people may want a president who is demonstrably successful financially.

I was thinking about the "cross in the sand" story, and why the Democrats don't seem to be hitting hard on that issue -- or on any of McCain's other inherent liabilities.  His temper, his misogyny, the rumors of affairs, his age.

It comes down to one thing.  Democrats are constitutionally incapable of going negative.  We simply don't have the stomach for it.  We hate Karl Rove because he doesn't seem to mind cruelty, which is something that the Democrats ideologically are against.  Looking at the history of negative campaigning, very few of the successful and shocking attack ads came from Democrats.

The Republicans have no problem hitting Dems with half-truths and even outright lies, as in the Swiftboat charade.  And hitting hard.  But the Democrats can't even take an event that actually happened (e.g. McCain's "c**t" comment toward his wife, or his use of a racist term for Asians) and make an attack out of it.  Are the Dems too nice?  Too polite? Are they wimps?  Maybe part of the reason that a certain segment of Americans won't vote for Dems is simply because they refuse to get their hands dirty.  When McCain goes negative and hits hard, there's a perception that he's tough and hardened.  Whereas when Obama remains nice and positive, there's a perception that he's soft and too polite. "How," one of these voters might think, "will Obama react when Putin oversteps a border in eastern Europe?  Will he remain polite, friendly, positive?  Or will he be tough and hard-hitting?"

In campaign after campaign, from Lee Atwater on, I've watched the Republicans go negative.  Typically it happens late in the campaign season, and it gets worse the closer we are to election day.  And in election after election, the Democrats are shocked that it's happening, almost frozen in the face of the negative ads. They have no rebuttal.  And then they spend the six months after the election talking about how "unfair" it was, how scheming, how untruthful.  When are we going to learn?  When are we going to attack, instead of always being on the defensive, and unprepared, and stunned?

I'm expecting the same thing to happen in this election cycle.  I guarantee that McCain and crew are saving up their smarmiest, hardest-hidding attacks for about October 20th, when the Democrats will have no ability to react.  And I suspect that the Democrats don't have anything similar up their sleeves. We don't have the stomach for it.  And it may lose us the election, once again.