With Ticket Set, Dems Go To Work

Tight Polling Gives Party Something To Think About As It Begins National Convention

by Ronald Brownstein

Sunday, Aug. 24, 2008


With newly selected running mate Joseph Biden beside him, Barack Obama is seeking to regain the initiative in the presidential race behind a sharpened economic message.

Democrats are convening in Denver for a historic national convention amid a flurry of polls that have shown presumptive GOP nominee John McCain narrowing the advantage that Obama has held in virtually all surveys since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in June. In all but one of those five recent national surveys -- each conducted before Obama chose Biden as his vice presidential nominee on Saturday -- the Democrat held a statistically insignificant lead of 3 percentage points or less.

That tightening trend has raised the stakes for Democrats at this week's convention, which will formally select Obama as the first African-American major party presidential nominee.

Although Democrats generally express confidence that Obama still enjoys formidable advantages -- key among them an unprecedented fundraising and volunteer base and a powerful current of dissatisfaction with the country's direction under President Bush -- McCain's success at driving the debate this summer has provided Republicans their first reason for optimism in months.

"Given Bush's extremely low job-approval scores and the party identification advantage that Democrats have, the fact that John McCain is running essentially within the margin of error is an unexpected treat for Republicans," said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse.

In unison, senior Democratic strategists say that Obama faces two overriding priorities at the convention. One is to resolve doubts about his qualifications and agenda that McCain has seeded this summer with ads portraying the Democrat as a vapid celebrity and a soft-on-defense, tax-and-spend liberal. Even more important, many argue, Obama must reframe the fundamental choice in the election from whether he is ready to be president to whether the country wants to continue in the direction set by Bush, particularly on economic policy.

"They've got to push the debate back onto economic issues and the direction of the country under Bush, and they have to connect McCain to Bush, particularly on the economy," said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. "They've got to really go for that... or they are going to spend all of their time fighting these cultural cartoon characterizations of Obama [from the Republicans]."

Obama's campaign appears to be thinking along the same lines. Asked in a Friday interview with CBS Morning News what he most hopes to achieve at the convention, Obama said he wanted to make the economic "choice clear to the American people" by asking whether they want to continue on the economic course Bush has set. "I want the American people to focus on whether or not we can afford to continue those policies for another four or eight years," Obama added. "Because that's essentially what John McCain's offering."

Already, in the days leading into the convention, Obama has sublimated his sometimes abstract primary season message of reform and change to a sharp-edged kitchen-table economic message that portrays McCain as both an out-of-touch elitist and an extension of Bush. After McCain last week, during an interview with The Politico, could not recall the number of houses he owned, the Obama campaign aired a television advertisement ridiculing him within hours.

Senior advisers say that viewers can expect similarly pointed contrasts from the convention podium this week. After the 2004 convention, many party strategists criticized Democratic nominee John Kerry for focusing almost entirely on reassuring voters about his credentials and failing to aggressively make a case for change against Bush. While promising unexpected voices to offer reassurance about Obama, the nominee's advisers hint they will not repeat that mistake. The overall convention goal, said one senior aide, is to present "a very focused referendum on the choice between the two candidates."

This opportunity arrives for Obama at a moment when many Democrats believe he needs to find his second wind. Obama has spent much of the summer reacting to waves of attacks from McCain and other Republicans. The GOP onslaught, symbolized by a derisive ad comparing Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, has reduced Obama's lead over McCain in the polling trend estimate computed by Pollster.com from 5.4 percentage points in late June to 1.4 percentage points as of Friday.

Perhaps more important, the flurry of preconvention surveys found that the Republican criticism has dented Obama's image in several ways. In a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, McCain expanded his advantage from June to August when voters were asked who would use good judgment in a crisis and who would take unpopular stands, and he maintained a 2-to-1 lead as the candidate most personally qualified to be president. Similarly, in a CBS/New York Times poll, a 49 percent to 44 percent plurality said that Obama had not "prepared himself well enough" for the presidency. In a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey, noncollege white voters split almost evenly on Obama's patriotism, with 47 percent saying they didn't question it and a striking 44 percent saying they did.

Yet other results underscore Obama's continuing strength. His overall favorability ratings did not meaningfully decline in the new surveys; he continues to crush McCain when voters are asked which candidate offers new ideas; a much bigger share of his voters than McCain's say they are enthusiastic about him; and Obama consistently leads as the candidate who can best handle the economy, the issue that has emerged as voters' top priority. And McCain has succeeded more in reducing Obama's vote in surveys than in increasing his own.

Even a source of Obama weakness might prove an asset by week's end. One reason the race has tightened is that Obama, in all major preconvention surveys, attracted only about 80 percent of Democrats -- below McCain's showing among Republicans or Kerry's (89 percent) with Democrats in 2004. With a successful convention that shows reconciliation between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, some of those disaffected Democrats may be easier for Obama to move into his column than swing voters, who typically decide later, says Democratic strategist Tad Devine.

Still, as Democrats gather in the Mile High City, they are finding, perhaps fittingly here, that Obama's climb to the White House looks steeper than many of them expected.

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