Personally, I think Obama’s adherence to the 50 state strategy1 is what turned this election2. The stupidity of recent presidential elections focusing nearly all resources on a couple of pivotal states – Florida, Ohio – always has irked me. The nation is not quite as divided as some would claim: the red state blue state was a convenient metaphor, but never was reality. Each state was more purple than red or blue, and Obama was clever to realize that early on, and thus out-maneuvered Hillary in the primary season, and is out-maneuvering John McCain right now..
Matt Bai has a New York Times Magazine piece coming out this Sunday, discussing mostly Obama’s quest to capture the rural, white, under-educated vote. Quite interesting to political junkies like myself.
Obama, though, has talked from the beginning about running a “50-state” campaign, and he has spent considerable time and money in more culturally conservative parts of the country where Democrats rarely, if ever, venture, from Elko and Appalachia to Billings, Mont., and Las Cruces, N.M. To a large extent, this reflects Obama’s personal conviction about modern politics, which he first laid out in his 2004 convention speech when he talked about worshiping “an awesome God in the blue states” and having “gay friends in the red states.” He told me, when we talked, that Washington’s us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. “If voters are similarly polarized and if they’re seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we’re not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done,” Obama said.
It is also true, however, that a series of circumstances beyond his control have conspired to make a truly national campaign more feasible for Obama than for any Democrat since Carter ran in the dark days after Watergate. First, of course, there is the national sense of despair over the Bush era, which has made the president more of a uniter than he ever intended and which has enabled Democrats to get a hearing in parts of the country where they were being run off the land 10 years ago. Then there’s the advent of the Internet as a veritable money vacuum, which has enabled Obama to raise more money than any Democrat in history (about $460 million, at last count), meaning he can afford to pour some resources into states he has only a remote chance of winning. Perhaps most important, though, Obama’s campaign has also been able to take advantage of a drawn-out Democratic primary campaign that came through all 50 states before it was over — a draining experience that nonetheless established networks of volunteers and newly registered Democratic voters in states that in any other year would have been overlooked. In three states — Texas, Indiana and North Carolina — more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004.
The truth of the matter is that before LBJ’s presidency, and the confusion of the 1960s, white, rural Americans were reliably Democrats because the Republican party has long, long been the party of corporate America, and not the party of the little guy. Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater and their acolytes3 have cloaked Republican motives in a veil of cultural war, but perhaps the cloak is a bit threadbare this season.
Footnotes:
Howie Dean did a lot behind the scenes to build the networks of which Obama took advantage. The DLC folks and Clintonites are still furious about it.
The DLC idiots (like Clinton) have nobody to blame but themselves. Their margin of error was just to small to reliably win elections, unless there was an H. Ross Perot mucking up the works.