The comments Barack Obama made about voters in my homestate of Pennsylvania voting against their economic self-interest have prompted long time California political consultant and pundit Dan Schnur to attempt to make the corollary argument for liberals at the NYT.

For many people, that’s certainly true. But there are plenty of other voters who don’t necessarily base their votes solely on jobs and taxes, and many of them are quite financially successful. They have determined their political affiliations largely as a result of the same continuing battles over abortion, guns and same-sex marriage that have drawn so many working-class voters to Republican candidates over the years. The only difference is the side of the fight they’ve chosen. It’s hard to argue that a wealthy pro-choice Democrat is any less of a values voter than a pro-life construction worker who votes Republican.

Perhaps Mr. Frank’s book would benefit from a sequel. We could call it: “What’s the Matter With the Upper East Side?” or perhaps “What’s the Matter With Beverly Hills?” or “What’s the Matter With Martha’s Vineyard?” The answer is that there’s nothing wrong with these voters at all, nothing more than there is anything inappropriate about blue-collar Kansans or Pennsylvanians who have decided that economic issues are not the most important influencers on their vote.

Many wealthy Democratic voters do recognize that they are voting against their economic interests and do so deliberately. They are actually voting on an economic agenda, one that recognizes that there are many people who are not as fortunate as them and that they can afford to pay more in taxes. Indeed Bill Clinton has made this argument about the Bush tax cuts, as has just about every major Democratic contender in recent years.

They also happen to side with the Democrats on social issues in addition to fiscal ones. In recent years, the social issues of most concern to Democrats have faded from prominence in the wake of 9/11 and the constant defense against the Republicans, particularly Bush.

The mistake that Senator Obama and Mr. Frank both make is that they assume that only the values of culturally conservative voters require justification. An environmentally conscious, pro-stem cell bond trader who votes Democratic is lauded for selflessness and open-mindedness. A gun-owning, church-going factory worker who supports Republican candidates, on the other hand, must be the victim of partisan deception. This double standard is at the heart of the Democratic challenge in national elections: rather than diminish these cultural beliefs as a byproduct of economic discomfort, a more experienced and open-minded candidate would recognize and respect the foundations on which these values are based.

The bond trader is fully aware of his fiscal situation. He watches the taxes come out of his pay check every month. The economic impact on the Reagan Democrats or whatever you want to call them is much less direct. There has not been a deliberate strategy from the Democrats to lure the bond trader to our side, where there absolutely has been a strategic attempt to trump up values issues during election season to lure social conservatives to vote for Republicans.

I am not saying that what Schnur has written here has absolutely no merit. The Democrats run into problems when they say things that are condescending and insulting to voters. The tone is an issue and that is where Obama ran into trouble. Talking about the impact of policy positions on voters lives is not. Democrats do need to make an argument that fiscal issues are more important to voters’ daily lives than things like guns and marriage equality.

The media gives us bloggers crap all the time about the fact that we don’t have editors, so what we write is not to be respected. What is amazing is the amount of quality that we are able to create without having someone looking over our drafts. So it is not without a bit of schadenfreude that I point you to this First Read post by the fine folks at MSNBC.

PORTLAND — Bill Richardson described the conversation he had with Hillary Clinton on his decision to endorse Barack Obama as “heated” in an exclusive with NBC Nightly News today.

Both Richardson and Obama shared the spotlight this afternoon at a press conference and later in a sit down interview with NBC’s Lee Cowan. (Please insert link to NN spot)

Richardson described the conversation that he had with Clinton last night “tough.”

“It was tough to make the call, but I did. It got a little heated. It got a little tense. But it was understood, and I’m proud of my decision.”

Lee Cowan is listed as the author of this post, but it is pretty clear that Lee is not the one who wrote this, let alone put it up using their CMS.

1) An author would have said “Both Richardson and Obama shared the spotlight this afternoon at a press conference and later in a sit down interview with me.” and not used their own name.

2) You can see that the person who actually wrote this passed it off to someone else to post it up. The note: (Please insert link to NN spot) is showing. Presumably they wanted someone to plug in the hmtl including a link to whatever the “NN spot” is and the person who posted it didn’t notice the note.

Pretty freaking funny. Too bad for Lee, other people’s mistakes under his name reflect poorly on him.

This weekend I had the honor of attending the NOI Blogger Summit. On Sunday we had the pleasure of getting a preview of the Responsible Plan a project of Darcy Burner and other members of the vast left-wing conspiracy. This is a remarkable project and an example of real leadership by Darcy Burner especially, but also to the nine other congressional candidates who have endorsed the proposal. The goal is two-fold 1) To have a proposal for ending the war that candidates, citizens and other leaders can endorse 2) Change the meta frames of how we discuss the war.

This is the first time that I know of where a group of congressional candidates have joined together to advance a piece of policy. Darcy Burner has invested significant resources in partnering with bloggers and policy experts to launch this project. They have set up an LLC to run this proposal out of, which makes sense given the legal restrictions placed on the various non-profit statuses. ResponsiblePlan.com is collecting citizen endorsers, capturing names, addresses and email addresses. Right now there is no carrot to get other candidates to endorse by giving them names back. The privacy policy states that they may not share their contact info without their permission, so they can go back to them and ask for permission, but that will have a big drop-off. Legally speaking they would have to sell the names to the candidates, but you have to think that would be well worth it for both sides.

Unfortunately no California contenders have signed on to this proposal yet. Hopefully we will see a few of them come on board. The blogosphere has promised to push candidates to endorse the proposal. That should be effective.

There may be no Californians but my old boss, or my boss’s boss is more accurate at Common Cause, Chellie Pingree is among the ten initial co-sponsors. Chellie as she notes in this HuffPo piece has been speaking out against the war since 2002. This here is one of many reasons why I am proud to support Chellie and place her on the Ruck Pad ActBlue page (which I just added Darcy to).

When I stood up to oppose an invasion of Iraq in 2002 it wasn’t a popular thing to do. I was running for the U.S. Senate and the “experts” said it would be easier if I were in favor of the war. “This isn’t the time to take a stand,” they told me. Going along with the invasion might have been the easy thing to do, but I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do.

The right thing to do now is find a responsible way to end the war, bring our troops back home and make sure we take care of them once they get back here. That is why I was proud to endorse the ResponsiblePlan today and will be urging my social network, including congressional candidates to join me and what should soon be hundreds of thousands of Americans in doing so.

It is not just enough to sign. We must push this proposal out to everyone we know, blog about it and work to make sure that we change the conversation about Iraq. We should not be debating if the surge has worked or not. We should be discussion how and when we bring our troops home. It is time to change the frame. It is time that we lead, that our voices are heard and after five years we end the War in Iraq. We do that by electing more and better Democrats and we do that by helping them grow their megaphone. This project does all of that at once and that is really remarkable. This is the blogosphere and the progressive left at its best.

Ironically the dust-up over the comments made by Barack Obama’s former pastor should actually drive down the number of people who believe he is actually Muslim.  Then again generally speaking the people who would be upset if he was actually a Muslim, would be same ones who are pissed off with what Wright said.

Minus of course the Jews with the Muslim stuff.

The Clinton campaign has been trying to advance an argument that Barack Obama will be a weak general election candidate because he is not winning the states that “matter”. This has been relentlessly mocked by the bloggers and the media like the bloggers has dug into the numbers and found them wanting. So it begs the question, who exactly is responsible for this illogical strategy, the only way Clinton can argue she is “winning”. The answer is unsurprising. It is Mark Penn:

Here is what Penn said. . . .”Obama “really can’t win the general election.” As you’ll hear, he also says that “if Barack Obama can’t win” in Pennsylvania, “how could he win the general election?”

Later, a reporter asks what he meant. Clinton campaign communications chief Howard Wolfson jumps in to say that “Mark did not say that.” Then Penn says that if Obama doesn’t win the Pennsylvania primary, it “raises serious questions” about whether he can win the general election.

Penn was the one advancing this logic on the call, taking it one step past incorrect line of reasoning to batshit crazy. Wolfson made an attempt at damage control, but then Penn came right back around to it.

The results of the primaries have never lined up with the general election results. To determine potential performance we should look to general election polling. Consistently Obama expands the map. Clinton would go for the 50+1 strategy, which has worked out oooh so well the past two elections. He would be competitive in more states than Clinton period. Her only path to the nomination relies on the superdelegates overturning the results of the primaries and the caucuses. That and counting MI/FL as is, which is not fair or permissible under the rules of the DNC. The Democratic party needs it’s nominee determined in June. They need more than 2 months to put together a general election campaign. The party needs time to unify after a divisive nomination battle. That requires Clinton conceding unless she is ahead in pledged delegates after all of the primaries and caucuses have concluded. The fate of MI/FL will be determined by that point.

But I digress…

Mark Penn continues to drag Clinton down. How much you want to bet that he looked at his microtargeting data and figured out that there may be some benefit to letting Clinton’s supporters advance racist arguments?

The first 18 years of my life were spent in Pennsylvania. I know all too well the demographics of the state. Outside of Philly and liberal enclaves in other cities, racism still persists. The suburbs of Pittsburgh where I grew up were no exception to that. The Klan was still around and I had my own run-ins with Neo-Nazis. I say all this as a precursor to saying that Will Bunch has it nailed in this post.

ntentionally or not, “Archie Bunker’s congresswoman” was relaying the exact message that the Clinton campaign really wants out there, not in Torrence, Calif., or back in Queens but right here in Pennsylvania, in the mostly white rowhouse “river wards” of Philadelphia and a lot of working class burgs, from Scranton all the way down to the former steel towns of the Mon Valley.

Why do you think Clinton has distanced herself from the remark, but not so much really? And why do you think Geraldine Ferraro herself has been neither rejected nor denounced by the Clinton campaign?

Think of it this way. It was easy for Obama to reject and denounce an out-there hatemonger like Louis Farrakhan, and it should have been easy for John McCain to fully reject and denounce anti-Catholic whack job John Hagee (why he hasn’t is mindboggling). But the Clinton campaign can’t reject and denounce Geraldine Ferraro, because it would be rejecting and denouncing itself.

A sculptor brought in to mold a Hillary Clinton voter would have crafted Geraldine Ferraro from scratch. She’s 72 years old now. White. Female. Ethnic. Catholic. Emotionally vested in the idea that a woman should become president in her lifetime. Hailing from the community that was once the face of white middle-class America. Got where she was with the enthusiastic backing of New York big labor. Has views on the role of race in American politics that aren’t exactly ready for prime time, but well, hey, once they get out there you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle, now can you?

Pennsylvania is chock full of voters like this, many of them Democrats. You can — and should — argue whether “Archie Bunker” is a valid stereotype of Pennsylvania voters in 2008. Bloomberg News has already been out with its take on Obama’s “Archie Bunker” problem. It noted how Obama’s poor showing with blue collar and Appalachian whites in Ohio and stuggled to find supporters in a white ethnic neighborhood in his hometown of Chicago:

There is a good reason why Clinton did not demand that Ferraro immediately resign on Friday. There is a reason why she let her go on numerous other interviews and dig her self an even bigger bigot hole. The Clinton campaign thinks having Ferraro speaking her mind is a net benefit for them with the voters they are trying to bring in. That is more important to them than pushing back against racist commentary. They care more about winning than anything else. That is what has me the most scared about the continuation of this campaign. Somethings are more important than winning. I don’t think the Clinton campaign feels the same way.

The speed at the response by the Obama campaign to Clinton’s “red phone” ad is truly impressive. I had to give it to them for the language they used in response, but man they took it a step further. They have created a response ad within just a few hours of Clinton releasing her ad, and it is pretty good to boot. Now any news coverage will be about both ads, not just Clinton taking a risk on an aggressive ad.

Here is the original by Clinton and then the response by Obama.

If you click through to the main page for the videos on YouTube you will notice that Hillary’s is rated substantially below Barack’s. That is all organic movement, and a sign of the grassroots army that Obama has working for him in the small ways that add up. The higher rating increases the chances that more people will watch the video as it climbs the YouTube charts.

One last note.  The speed of the response makes me suspicious that the Obama campaign was tipped off that this was coming.  It is almost too good.

One of the many areas where the Obama campaign has out-shined the Clinton campaign has been in media communications, with one caveat, the Obama communications team has not been great at managing expectations for primary results. They have steadily improved and today provides an excellent opportunity for contrast.

The Clinton campaign launched a fear ad, suggesting that Clinton would be the only one you want answering the phone in the White House during a foreign policy emergency. The ad is a retread. The response to it by Obama’s campaign was excellent.

“We don’t think the ad is going to be effective at all. Senator Clinton already had her red phone moment — to decide whether to allow George Bush to invade Iraq. She answered affirmatively. She did not read the National Intelligence Estimate. She still, curiously, tries to suggest that it wasn’t a vote for war, but it most assuredly was…

“This is about what you say when you answer that phone. What judgment you show…She, John McCain and George Bush gave the wrong answer.”

They pushed it out quickly and it has been effective. It takes Clinton’s attack and turns it around on her. The surrogate, in this case Ploufe is directly in line with the arguments we have heard from Obama himself on this issue. It is seamless and will diffuse what ever impact comes out of this ad.

Meanwhile check out this spin from the Clinton campaign as they try and set expectations for Tuesday.

Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and - of course - making speeches.

If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there’s a problem.

Should Senator Obama fail to score decisive victories with all of the resources and effort he is bringing to bear, the message will be clear:

Democrats, the majority of whom have favored Hillary in the primary contests held to date, have their doubts about Senator Obama and are having second thoughts about him as a prospective standard-bearer.

Translation: If we lose three out of four states, it is really Obama that is the loser, because he ran hard to win them. Sometimes you can read a piece of spin and come out agreeing with it, at least in part. This is not one of those times. It is truly eye-roll inducing.

The Clinton campaign set expectations several weeks ago that they needed to win both Ohio and Texas. Now with this spin they are setting themselves up to argue that a win in Rhode Island is a sign that Democratic primary voters think that Obama should not be their nominee.

The tactics they are using, the messaging and posturing is disappointing. In some respects I would love for this primary to be over immediately so we can focus all of our attention on McCain. However, this grueling primary campaign has been incredibly beneficial for Barack Obama. He has grown tremendously as a candidate. That is particularly clear when you look at his debate performances. So, while I do not relish a Democrat using attacks on Obama that the right will use in the general, it may serve as a learning opportunity for Obama and the campaign.

That does not mean that I am heading to Ohio hoping that Clinton holds on her ever shrinking lead, but that having the campaign continue for the next month is not the worst thing in the world.

The campaign really could not have written a better script for this. It so encapsulates the essence of the Obama campaign and just who is fueling this amazing drive to the Democratic presidential nomination. Sam at the BO blog:

Zachary Ellison was on BarackObama.com at around 11:50 PM (Hawaii time) when he decided to donate to the campaign.

“I looked at the counter, and it was very close to a million,” says Zach, a student at University of Hawaii who works at a grocery store to help pay the bills. “I don’t have much money, but I decided I wanted to be a part of this.”

It is people like Zachary who are allowing Obama to turn down the big lobbyists that are fundraising for John McCain. There are one million people, including yours truly, who have invested some small amount in hope. That is one in every 300 Americans. Barack Obama is fulfilling the goals of public financing outside of the formal structure. The Obama campaign is as been written before: the Dean campaign on steroids. They have found the successful formula to convert inspiration and engagement into effective volunteer time and a donation program that both encourages repeat donors and expansion of the donor base. They are both effective and inspirational, no small feat.

They are inspiring kids like Zachary to donate to Obama, despite their own financial difficulties, or perhaps in his case, because of them.

Having attended a private college before U of Hawaii, Zach says he is nearly $90,000 in debt. “My parents are both retired and my family is not particularly well to do,” says Zach, “and I’m drowning in debt.”

“While other politicians have been dismissive of my generation,” says Zach. “I feel like Obama speaks directly to my generation.”

When we called Zach and let him that he was the one millionth person to donate to the campaign, he said he “was shaking with excitement.” Zach says he’s proud to be a part of this historic achievement: “This campaign showed me that you can run a campaign in a completely different way than campaigns are tradionally run. Small donations matter. People can really get together, get organized, and get it done.”

Like I said, the Obama campaign couldn’t have picked a more perfect person to be the 1 millionth donor.

Clinton just announced that she will raise at least $35 million this month. Obama raised $36 million last month. I expect him to come close to doubling Clinton’s total. They are being very quiet because the numbers are so good. They will be jaw dropping when they do release them.

Former President Bill Clinton decided it would be a good idea to talk as if he was his wife Senator Clinton, while at a campaign stop. It was if he had slipped back into running himself, especially if you happened to miss the first three words. Jake Tapper has the quote and a link to the video:

So Hillary says, in 2005, the United States Congress adopted the Bush-Cheney energy bill, which gave $27 billion in subsidies to nuclear, oil, and gas and coal. The only thing that was justified was clean coal, because countries are going to be using that. We have to figure out how to take the carbon dioxide out of it. The rest of it is waste. If you elect me, I’ll repeal those subsidies. And put them into a strategic energy fund that will create American jobs for America’s future with clean energy.”

The video is even creepier.

Hopefully the Obama campaign will find a smart way to use this to their advantage. It worked the last time when Bill went off the deep end and made a big issue out of his stumping. It very much through the Clinton campaign off track. Hillary needs to stand on her own merit and does not benefit when Bill pictures himself as the president again.