Pusillanimous Populist Pugilism

Steve M. has a real point here:  the latest focus group from the Carville camp shows that working class white men really are winnable by the President...at least the ones truly worried about the economy and not FOX News.  What it also shows is that deficits don't matter to voters nearly as much as not kicking the blocks out from under them right now.

It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction.  They are wrong, and that will fail.  The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future.  They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle – and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand.  They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way – not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.

We are losing these voters on the economy, but holding on because Romney is very vulnerable.  They do not trust him because of who he is for and because he’s out of touch with ordinary people; he is vulnerable on the Ryan budget and its impact on people; he is vulnerable on the choices over taxes.  But in the current context, it produces a fairly diminished embrace of Obama and the Democrats, the lesser of two evils, without much feeling of hope.

The message here is that the Centrist Dalek refrain of "cut the deficit!" is the last thing that voters want to hear.

These participants—especially the non-college-educated men who have been affected personally or know someone who has—are very sensitive to cuts in Medicaid, to disability, and food stamps.  People rely on these programs–and the protection of Social Security and Medicare.  They just can’t fathom billions of dollars in cuts to these programs.  Anger increases when the proposal is juxtaposed with cutting taxes for millionaires.  In addition, the college-educated men seemed to recognize that when these programs are cut at the bottom, the whole economy is affected because people are unable to get ahead, spend money, and get the economy going again.

Carville may be a meathead, but he's right here.  President Obama can engage on this and he can win on this.  It's the Republicans who say Obama can't win on hope.