Campaign Advice For Barack Obama: Forget About The Center?

The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington has a list of seven things she feels Democrat Senator Barack Obama should do “to keep from blowing it” in the Presidential election. Some of the key ones touch on whether he should win over the center — a segment of the electorate past elections have shown is important but a segment which is often talked about with disdain by people on the right and left.

Here’s the section where Huffington advises on what stance to take with the center:

3) Get your campaign to give you a printout of the names of the over 1.5 million people who have donated to your campaign (at an average of $197 each). Give that list a read every day; feel the heft. And remember — sorry, Stu Rothenberg — that the tried-and-untrue swing voter strategy is what has led to the Democratic Party’s prolonged identity crisis. Forget the fence sitters. Instead, continue to speak to those who have turned their backs on the electoral process — those who are struggling without health care, without decent schools, without jobs, without hope.

That’s not an accurate depiction of the center.

The issue for the Democrats has not been that they tried to pander to the center and that Democrats don’t turn out to vote.

The issue for the Democrats is that in some past elections they offered inept or lead-footed candidates who were outclassed or outsleazed in (a) political nimbleness by Republican candidates, (b) the Democrats’ inability to get a cohesive message out on many fronts (just blaming it on Rush Limbaugh, weblogs or media coverage won’t do) and (c) falling into traps set by top Republican strategists and being unable to respond to and obliterate GOP charges against them.

It isn’t the center that has created the Democrats’ long vacation from the White House mandated by many America’s voters. It’s the Democrats’ performance as political professionals in matching and/or exceeding Republican strategists, countering charges, and detailing a compelling message for the future. In 2006, in fact, swing voters and centrists helped the Democrats win Congress.

She also says this:

7) Heed the old Texas advice of Dandy Don Meredith and Molly Ivins: “You got to dance with them what brung you.”

Voters longing for hope, inspiration, a new kind of politics, and fundamental change are “them that brung you” to the big dance. Don’t let the pundits, the advisors, and the cowards convince you to let someone else cut in.

This isn’t a matter of people cutting in. The problem in America has been two-fold:

–Some progressive Democrats consider it almost partisan treason if a candidate takes a position or tries to appeal to centrists and independent voters. They seek a campaign and government that gives them the policies they want, unfettered by political dilution. But dilution in politics often is often the product of compromise, consensus-building and aggregating interests — which create a more unified nation. We’ve already lived under a government that is of the party base, for the party base and by the party base. Do most Americans really want to see that again except this time with a “D” label in front of it?

–Some conservative Republicans consider almost partisan treason if a candidate takes a position or tries to appeal to centrists and independent voters. YES…this is the same sentence as above. So they want to keep their party as much veered to the right as possible.

In the past two months I’ve read blog posts and commentators who argued that independent, swing and/or centrist voters were really Democrats (Republicans who didn’t want their candidate appealing to the center argued that) or really Republicans (Democrats who didn’t want their candidate appealing to the center argued that).

In other words: there are intense pressures in today’s America to shove centrist and independent voters to choose between joining a political “sports team” that is either on the right or left, to embrace its total agenda and identify with it.

And if you don’t? Then you’re portrayed somehow as being part of the “mushy middle” — unless, of course you take a stand (and then it’s said you’re really a liberal Democrat or really a conservative Republican). REALITY CHECK: Most centrist and independent voters do not resemble blank-expressioned, neutral C-SPAN hosts.

Just look at the lead of this AP report:

They’re the most fickle voters, and potentially the most powerful. Thus, with party nominations secure, John McCain and Barack Obama now are pushing toward the center to win them over.

Meet “the mushy middle,” a complex chunk of people likely to decide the presidential election but difficult to reach and very hard to please.

“Yes, we can!” isn’t floating their boat. Nothing much is, from either candidate.

They aren’t uniformly conservative or liberal, and they don’t fit strict Republican or Democratic orthodoxy. They aren’t typically engaged in politics, and they don’t much care about the campaign. And like so many others, they are extraordinarily pessimistic.

The perceptions about centrists and independent is that they can’t take a stand, are too confused to take a stand and aren’t really following politics. And that to be centrist or independent they must somehow be neutral because if they take a stand they immediately are left, right, progressive, conservative, vegetarian, vegan — anything but centrist or independent.

But they do take stands, they are engaged — and American political history shows that candidates who’ve ignored them or not reassured them in national Presidential elections have often done so at their career peril. History also shows these voters can be passionate and do take strong stands once they evaluate both sides.

There is even a classic book that details it. It still holds up quite well — and really should be updated after 2008.