NOT QUIET
________________________
__________
Barack Obama's group therapy
By: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen
June 19, 2012 04:37 AM EDT
President Barack Obama’s campaign wants to turn Mitt Romney into the candidate of old, straight, white men.Of course, his aides would never state it so crudely. But that’s the unmistakable aim of their political strategy of the past two months.
The Obama campaign spent weeks playing up the contraception fight and pushing legislation to guarantee women equal pay for equal work — and then crowing about how women were fleeing the GOP. Obama got pushed into backing gay marriage more quickly than he wanted – but once he did, the campaign milked it for days to try to make Romney look like a throwback. The drumbeat on more affordable student loans has been constant. And now, the president is trying to drive a wedge between Romney and Hispanic voters with a sustained push to soften U.S. deportation policy.
To many Republicans, the president’s strategy is very crass — and potentially very effective. The threat of being marginalized as an aging, almost all-white, mostly male party is real and worth fretting about, they say.
“You’ve got opportunity if the Republicans decide that it’s OK to look outside the country club for some votes,” said John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster whose past clients included Jeb Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. “But you’re going to lose another close election if you focus only on getting out your base when your base is shrinking.”
The opening weeks of the general election have made plain the starkly different political calculations by Obama and Romney. The Republican nominee is trying to make the election about one big, overarching issue: blaming Obama for a wobbly economy and failed agenda. Given his strengths and weaknesses as a candidate, this is a no-brainer approach for Romney right now.
Obama, on the other hand, is trying to make it about a bunch of issues, often ones near and dear to specific states, or even demographic groups. Obama strategists see this election as a block-by-block knife fight, to be fought in fewer than a dozen states and likely decided by very slim margins. They think it’s a fool’s errand to worry about press panting over Bill Clinton or bad national polls. Instead, they obsess about Hispanics in Colorado, young voters in Ohio and swing voters in the Virginia suburbs (socially liberal or libertarian, fiscally moderate).
“This isn’t 2008,” a top Obama campaign adviser said. “We just think people are looking at the race the wrong way.” The right way, according to the adviser: “[T]he expansion of the electorate is our base. It’s African-Americans, Hispanics, young people and women.”
To concentrate its efforts to win over these voters, Obama for America has a sophisticated campaign-within-the-campaign, Operation Vote, focusing on specific swing and Democratic base groups, including women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, youth, seniors, and gays and lesbians, along with veterans and military families. There are separate structures for each of those groups in key states to amp up turnout and persuasion, including voter registration and “neighborhood team model organizing” that takes activities down to the grass-roots level.
Republicans, meanwhile, are under no illusion they can keep up with Obama among these groups, or win a majority of gays, young people, women or Hispanics. But it’s the latter two groups that have them most unnerved — knowing that they likely hold the key to who wins the White House.
Let’s start with Hispanics. The truth about politics is that Republicans — regardless of the nominee — are a mostly white party, and have been for decades. They get roughly 87 percent of their votes from whites — and rarely elect minority candidates at the national level. Right now, there are only two black and eight Hispanic Republicans in all of Congress. There are more than 270 whites.
Yet the proportion of white voters in the U.S. electorate slid from 88 percent in 1976 to 74 percent in 2008 while total minority groups more than doubled from 12 percent to 26 percent, according to a study of exit polls by Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who is president of North Star Opinion Research and a founder of the GOP research group Resurgent Republic.
Those numbers spell trouble for Republicans. Add to that the fact that the Republican Party, and Romney in particular, have become markedly more hostile in recent years to any immigration legislation that smacked of amnesty, putting themselves at a substantial disadvantage with Hispanic voters.
The president’s immigration announcement on Friday is likely to put Romney in an even deeper hole with this fast-growing group, which goes for Obama by a 30-plus margin in most polls. The new plan, which makes it easier for young immigrants to work without fear of deportation, killed in the womb an idea by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) that Romney was considering endorsing as a first step toward repairing relations with Hispanics after taking a hard line during primaries.
Romney is well aware of the threat to his campaign.
In April, speaking frankly at a private fundraiser in Palm Beach, Fla., Romney said in remarks overheard by an NBC reporter, “We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party,” and warned that Obama’s wide advantage with Hispanics “spells doom for us.”
Romney officials said to expect a significant campaign to win over wavering Hispanics, soon to include more specifics on deportation for specific groups. But the Romney campaign is convinced its best argument with Hispanics will be the same winning argument as with other groups — the economy. Unemployment among Hispanics is 11 percent, 3 points higher than the national figure.
“The Republican Party has a lot of ground to make up,” said Henry Bonilla, a former Republican House member from Texas who plans to help Romney with Hispanics. He admitted Obama’s immigration announcement made it “a little more complex” for Republicans but insisted that approval was not universal among Hispanics. “They understand that if this was his true conviction in the first place, he would have made this announcement right upon taking office,” Bonilla said. “People are smart and they see through it.”
Bonilla said he draws hope from his time campaigning with George W. Bush in border communities. “He was revered,” the former congressman recalled. “People were screaming and cheering and welcomed him because he wanted to be there. I think that people will find out, long-term, that Romney will want to be there, too. And it’s not a matter of, ‘Well, it happens to be Hispanic campaign day.’”
Obama, working in conjunction with Senate Democrats, plans to keep introducing ideas and hold congressional debates with the clear aim of dividing Romney and Hispanics.
Women are a problem for Romney, too. Obama led Sen. John McCain by 14 points among women in 2008. Romney has done better than that in recent polls, with an ABC News-Washington Post poll last month showing a 7-point gender gap, narrowed from 19 points in April. But Obama has made no secret of his intention to court women with very specific policies and events between now and Election Day.
That’s where Obama’s Operation Vote effort comes in, with outreach to key groups. House parties featuring first lady Michelle Obama have been aimed at women. A “barber shop and beauty salon” program (known internally as “the B&B program”) seeks to build enthusiasm among African-Americans. The Latino outreach includes a small-business program and a congregation-captain program. An urban DJ program, featuring voter-registration announcements, targets youths. Dorm captains focus on registering college students. Voter-registration drives blanket pride festivals and communities with heavy gay and lesbian populations.
The campaign is closely attuned to nuances: In New Mexico, for instance, you don’t say “Latino.” You say “Hispanic.”
“The way we communicate and engage is very specific,” an Obama campaign official said. “Latinos are a crucial, crucial demographic for us. We are running aggressive Latino outreach programs in places like Florida, Nevada and Colorado, but also in places like Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In Florida, you have a Puerto Rican community, the Cuban community, an emerging Central American community.”
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77562.html
