Writing on what he calls the Obama campaign’s “chemical warfare” against Mitt Romney’s wealth and business record, John Ellis of Buzzfeed offers the following assessment of the electoral landscape:
The 2012 president election, boiled down to its remaining variables, is about two things: (1) white voters who voted for Barack Obama last time and have since grown disillusioned and, (2) white voters who stayed home in 2008 rather than vote for John McCain but may vote this time. The Obama campaign’s goal is to make both groups stay home rather than vote. It’s not a “negative campaign” they’re running. It’s purposefully toxic.
This may be useful way of resolving one of the interesting strategic questions of this cycle — namely, whether the Obama campaign is consciously giving up on the white working class vote (in the sense of conceding that the Republican nominee will win a majority and even a supermajority of non-college educated whites) and just trying to expand and excite Rudy Teixeira and John B. Judis’s “emerging Democratic majority” of minorities, young voters, unmarried women and affluent professionals. Many of the White House’s election-year policy choices have suggested that they’re doing exactly that: The Obama campaign’s high-profile emphasis on social issues (complete with explicit leftward shifts on gay marriage, immigration and welfare reform), in particular, would seem to be an extremely poor fit for the kind of voters in Ellis’s two categories, most of whom fall into what the Pew Research has called the “disaffected” demographic — a bloc that’s older and whiter than average, skeptical of government waste and conservative-leaning on cultural issues, but also distrustful of corporations and more sympathetic to the safety net that the typical Republican.
Yet at the same time, the Obama team’s biggest, highest-profile ad campaigns have been aimed squarely at that once-Democratic demographic, summoning the rhetoric of an older, more blue-collar and culturally conservative liberalism to portray Romney as a sinister, un-American job-killing plutocrat and the mortal enemy (quite literally, according to a pro-Obama SuperPAC) of decent hardworking men and women everywhere.
Viewed from a certain angle, these two approaches would seem to be at cross-purposes. (Why pander to blue-collar whites in your ad buys if you’re just going to alienate them on immigration policy or welfare?) But if the goal isn’t to win disaffected working class whites so much as to render Romney sufficiently radioactive that they mostly just sit things out in disgust, then the two-track approach makes considerably more sense. In that scenario, Obama doesn’t need these voters to like him, so he can afford to direct his policy pandering elsewhere; he just needs them to dislike his opponent enough to declare a plague on both houses and stay home.
There’s nothing particularly unusual about this kind of strategy, and Obama would hardly be the first politician to turn disillusionment to his advantage. Still, it says something about how far we’ve come from “hope and change” that the president’s re-election hopes may depend on making a struggling, disaffected and perpetually-disappointed bloc of American voters even more disaffected than ever.