Okay, so it's not tomorrow

This is actually not going to be as long or as detailed as I first thought; it's more of an addendum to my previous post.

About a week ago, Digby at Hullabaloo posted about a series of focus groups run by the Democracy Corps "in an effort to find out how we can win back the independent rural and red state Bush voter." The report of the findings said that

[p]articularly among non-college voters, cultural issues not only superceded other priorities, they served as a proxy for many voters on those other issues. [emphasis in original]

Digby concludes from this that even trying to approach red state voters, or at least the cliche red state voters, is a waste of time: The GOPpers

are building an impermeable, corrupt political machine made up of cronies, employees and hangers-on the likes of which we haven't seen since the 19th century. ...

Trying to court their most borg-like constituency is really beside the point.

However, some of the very quotes he pulls from the report don't square with his assessment: Some complain that the Dummycrats simply don't show enough backbone and don't seem to have core convictions.

Quit criticizing so much and have a little bit more of your own direction. Whether it's right or wrong, pick a direction and go. Be on the offense instead of the defense.

With some minor modifications, that notion - have the courage of your convictions and don't back down - could have come right out of Digby's archives. Or even mine.

But interestingly, an article to which he links gets it righter than he does. Christopher Hayes, writing in the wake of the November election, considers his experience campaigning among undecided voters in Wisconsin. He opens by noting that the "political class" can't understand such voters. How can it be that they can't make up their mind? (He lost me momentarily when he emphasized "this year's election, when the choice was so stark and the differences between the candidates were so obvious." In addition to the fact that there were those of us who weren't sure the differences were so "stark" - I'm still not sure just what the real as opposed to rhetorical difference was between Bush's Iraq policy and Kerry's, for example - can you think of a single election when we weren't told of "stark" and "obvious" differences?) The answer from that political class, he suggests, is that undecided voters either don't know or don't care.

But his experience told him there is a deeper malaise: It's not that people don't care, it's that they don't connect political action with the issues they face in daily life.

The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. ...

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. ... At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics - maybe, I thought, "issue" is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they're being quizzed on a topic they haven't studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question....

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." ... Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief - not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

Put another way, these voters didn't see health care as something they could do anything about through political involvement - it was something beyond their control. And because it was beyond their control, it didn't figure in their political judgments.

As I was trying to suggest last time, the more things people feel are out of their control, the more firmly they will try to control what is left. The more pressured, the more threatened, they feel in their daily lives, the more they will resist change in what is familiar. Put in more political terms, people under stress tend to become more conservative and will look to "moral" or "character" issues because those are the only things left to them where it seems what they think matters.

The comparison is not exact by any means, but I just flashed on the old civil rights chant that would go like "I may be black - but I am somebody. I may be poor - but I am somebody. I may not have a job - but I am somebody." And so on. The idea was to get people thinking and keep them thinking that yes, you are somebody. You have worth. To break down the sense of helplessness and inferiority that had been drummed in over scores, hundreds, of years. Maybe that's what we need now: A way to tell people, to convince people that yes, you matter, that yes, you can do something to change the world around you, that yes, together with your neighbors you can make the powers listen to you. Too many of us have given up believing we can do anything to make a difference - and as long as that doesn't change, little else will, at least for the better.

I suspect there is still more to say here but I'll leave it for another time.