Poll Position: Be Very Afraid

Oh no! The polls! They suddenly don't look good for Barack Obama! But does it really matter at this point? Should the campaign—and its supporters—start to panic? We checked in with two Democratic strategists who have different opinions on the situation. Here's the case for pessimism.

The jobless rate is up, home sales are down, and the Democrats have an appealing, history-making nominee. So that rash of McCain red, spreading like measles over the RealClearPolitics.com polling chart, is nothing to worry about—a temporary Republican sugar high, right?
Not so fast. Yes, this year's trends should favor the Democrats, with a poor economy and an unpopular Republican president. But we can't ignore how much the underlying landscape always favors the Republicans.
Sunday night, USA Today released a shocking poll that puts McCain four healthy points above 50%, leading Obama by 54%-44%, with only 2% undecided. Six other polls have McCain narrowly ahead or tied; none has Obama leading—a sharp reversal from last week.
If you hide behind electoral maps or statistical projections at your favorite number-crunching site, and ignore the national polls because "it's 50 state elections," you'll be lulled by projections based on weeks-old data, often conducted by middling polling operations. And you'll miss what's happened.
This election just flipped.
It's not "over," and Obama is far from doomed. But important dynamics were established over the summer, and especially the past 10 days, that help McCain tremendously.
Panic isn't helpful, but neither is denial. Actually, a little panic at Obama HQ would be prudent. An absence of panic means no lessons are being learned.
The biggest threat to Democrats winning the presidency—despite an economic agenda much better than the GOP's for the disengaged, downscale voters who decide elections—is always the decades-old perception by those voters that Democrats aren't "like them"—that they're culturally alien.
Bill Clinton was able to beat that tag, though he ultimately won more with his economic message than because of any stirring reaction to his "man from Hope" bio. But Republicans successfully attacked the basic American values of Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. Both lost, despite favorable political winds.
The economy's important. But you won't win over the undecided voters with generic-sounding economic proposals—like "cutting taxes for 95% of Americans" or "preserving Social Security"—if you can't convince them you come from the same place they do. The promises are great but lack credibility, and voters are anxious.
Race aside—and it's a huge factor, of course—Obama has struggled all year with looking like he "gets" the lives of those whose votes he needs. By choosing Palin, Republicans set a trap that made that vulnerability critical.
Commiserating with Iowa farmers about the high price of arugula at Whole Foods wasn't too swift. Much worse were the off-the-record comments about bitter people in small towns clinging to their guns and religion.
Obama's attempts to establish that he didn't come from the elite were tone-deaf: Talking about student loans you've only recently paid off isn't the best way to convince non-college-educated voters that you're one of them. Neither is telling them that your wife is a Brady Bunch fan.
When the Republicans rolled out the real deal, Wal-Mart mom Palin, Democrats took the bait.
First, they opened up a very unhelpful debate over experience. As Kirsten Powers points out in today's New York Post, "Lured by the McCain camp, Obama supporters engaged in an argument about who had more overall experience—the top of the Democratic ticket or the bottom of the GOP ticket." Making the obvious attack on Palin's experience only shifted the battle to McCain's best territory.
But the main damage was cultural, as Kirsten's must-read explains. It was so obvious to all the smart people supporting Obama that a small-town mayor is unqualified for leadership! They swapped mocking e-mails, cackled that Palin was a Quayle/Eagleton disaster who'd soon be off the ticket, and argued that the recklessness of her selection demonstrated John McCain's mental instability.
And instantly, they undid all Obama's success in winning new consideration in the small towns that resisted him in the primaries, and that had been insulted by his "bitter" remarks.
Palin, of course, was a huge hit at the convention. But so blinded by derision were the Democrats, and the media, that they completely missed the launch of a "new Ronald Reagan" a family-values superstar cooked up, under the radar, in the Republicans' Alaskan Frankenlab.
So now, McCain and Palin cast themselves as America's team, and Obama as the exotic community organizer from Hawaii who bugs people to go to meetings.
When Palin's background and "redneck" origins were so savagely ridiculed by Democrats, her mockery of "community organizers" came off as admirable gumption. She was fighting back. Soon, Obama was reduced to pleading that his organizing—which he'd made central to his bio—represented only a brief phase after college. You see, he explained, he went on to become a professor of constitutional law and a state Senator.
Barack Obama has never needed to win swing voters. His entire career has been based on appealing to core Democrats—from his organizer days, to his state Senate career, to his 2004 speech to a packed Boston convention hall, and his US Senate race that same year (he had no serious Republican opposition), to his stunning series of primary and caucus victories earlier this year. This results in a certain tin ear when it comes to communicating with the economically anxious, politically disengaged voters who Bill Clinton had such a gift for reaching out to.
But the problem isn't only Obama himself, it's those around him who live in the same bubble, who think a good way to connect with average American voters is to stage a mass rally—more than double the size of Obama's largest U.S. crowd—in a foreign country. Or who think it's persuasive to argue, as Jacob Weisberg did recently, that if we don't elect Obama we'll be shamed before the entire world:
>>>"If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race."
This is the thinking that loses elections. The new rash of polls is a wake-up call.

Peter Feld is a writer and long-time Democratic strategist.