The New Democratic Party?

The message below is from an email from the Obama campaign, who sent it out the day after the victory in Mississippi.

When we won Iowa, the Clinton campaign said it's not the number of states you win, it's "a contest for delegates."

When we won a significant lead in delegates, they said it's really about which states you win.

When we won South Carolina, they discounted the votes of African-Americans.

When we won predominantly white, rural states like Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska, they said those didn't count because they won't be competitive in the general election.

When we won in Washington State, Wisconsin, and Missouri -- general election battlegrounds where polls show Barack is a stronger candidate against John McCain -- the Clinton campaign attacked those voters as "latte-sipping" elitists.

And now that we've won more than twice as many states, the Clinton spin is that only certain states really count.

...For all their attempts to discount, distract, and distort, we have won more delegates, more states, and more votes.

Meanwhile, more than half of the votes that Senator Clinton has won so far have come from just five states. And in four of these five states, polls show that Barack would be a stronger general election candidate against McCain than Clinton.

Now... we move on to the next ten contests. The Clinton campaign would like to focus your attention only on Pennsylvania -- a state in which they have already declared that they are "unbeatable."

But Pennsylvania is only one of those 10 remaining contests, each important in terms of allocating delegates and ultimately deciding who our nominee will be.

We have activated our volunteer networks in each of these upcoming battlegrounds. We're putting staff on the ground and building our organization everywhere.

The key to victory is not who wins the states that the Clinton campaign thinks are important. The key to victory is realizing that every vote and every voter matters.

I'm obviously not claiming that this email represents unbiased reporting or anything, but it accurately reflects the core of Obama's campaign strategy: show up and play to win in every single state. The success of this strategy is one of most important reasons Democrats concerned about the future of the party should back Obama.

Since Reagan got elected, Democrats have conceded the middle and south of the country from the onset, and instead focus on those crucial swings states. This is bad for two reasons:

1) It encourages the Democrats to ignore the needs of people in non-swing states on the campaign trail, which means their issues are more likely to be ignored once a Democrat is in office (footnote: Bill Clinton); and

2) It has put the Democrats on the defensive: having already conceded such a huge part of the country, we spend all this money and time in Florida, Michigan and other "important" states, trying to show that we're tough on crime, or not offensively pro-choice, or are actually kinder to the working class, or are people you'd love to get a beer with... in other words, the red/blue/swing-state electoral map of the past eight years has made the race the Republicans to win and the Democrats to lose.

The Obama campaign's "unity" cry is not just a pretty idea--it's a lean, mean campaign strategy. They don't assume that places like Kansas and Nebraska are out of play for us. There are some states that are not "winner take all" electoral votes in the general election, but they have been 100% Republican the last few times around. There's poll data suggesting Obama counld change that.

One of the biggest problems with Democratic presidential campaigns is the assumption--or, fine, the knowledge--that some parts of the map are irrelevant to a Democratic victory. So when your campaign is deciding where to spend money, man-power, and the candidate's precious time, ignoring those places is probably a sound judgment call.

But when the people in those written off red states start to get upset that their family members are being forced to serve third and forth terms in Iraq, when they, yes, need an abortion, when they see a Will and Grace re-run and the possibility of not being a closeted gay person seizes their imagination--when conservative, christian-right-wing dogma proves insufficient--what political spectrum will be laid out before them?

A great thing about this prolonged battle for the Democratic nomination--and a great aspect of Obama's campaign organization--is that it's brought Democratic visibility to these places. When Kansas and Missouri turn on the news, or pick up the paper, there's Hillary and Barack. And therefore, the issues being batted around are not only the evils of stem cell research and whether exceptions to abortion prohibition are acceptable when a woman is raped, but also, do you have health care? How fast should we bring soldiers home?

The parameters of the debate widen enormously when Democrats come to town in a red state.

Whether he wins the nomination, Obama's campaign is moving the party forward by making Howard Dean's "50-State Strategy" more of a reality. When Hillary asks us to focus on "states that matter" (her campaign's "insult-40-states" strategy) she asks us to view the Gore/Kerry campaign strategy as, not only the best strategy, but the only possible strategy.

And how'd they work out in '00 and '04?

Obama could be for Democrats what Reagan was for Republicans: the person who brings an enormous new tide of voters to the party. Voters who are therefore many times more likely to be voting Democrats for life.

Unlike the most recent injection of voters to the Republican party, Obama's first-time voters aren't the Jesus-loves-guns variety. We're people who are ready for candid discussions of race in America; we're people for whom going to war needs irrefutable justification; we're people who are proud to have read books about something other than the apocalypse; we're people who understand the crucial importance of legal, widely available abortions; we're people who respect the rule of law, civil liberties, and people who live outside America; we don't believe the earth is 5,000 years old.

In other words, we're people who really should be voting in America right now.

The new voters being drawn into the race could become the constituency that allows Democrats to stand up and be Democrats for America, not Democrats for moderate Republicans.

I found at realclearpolitics.com this quote from a Republican media consultant, Alex Castellanos. (He consulted for Bush and Romney.)

"Obama is the hope and future of the Democratic Party, not Hillary, and everyone knows it. He is the one bringing new energy and voters. He could be a Democratic Reagan, invigorating the party for 25 years. If the Clinton people knee-cap Obama, it would be like killing Santa Claus Christmas morning in front of the children. The children won't forget or forgive."

By contrast, I dig up this quotation from October, i.e. a lifetime ago, when Hillary had a 30 point nationwide lead and was, undoubtedly, the front runner in the race.

“I am not out to knee-cap the front-runner, because I don’t think that’s what the country is looking for.” -Barack Obama, October 2007