Obama Plays Offense

When I opened my New York Times this morning and saw the headline that Obama is taking the offensive, and challenging McCain in traditional republican areas, I did the happy dance! Barack Obama is openly embracing the 50 State Strategy and spurning the cynical DLC model of falling back on traditional liberal enclaves and writing us off out here in the middle.

It's a glorious day! It is a day that this red-state riffraff has been waiting for with bated breath since the day John Kerry punked us in October 2004 and sealed our fate to suffer four years of Blunt-force trauma at the hands of a couple of juvenile brats posing as a governor and his lobbyist brother.

Some of us have been pissed off at Rahm Emanuel and the DLC limousine liberals ever since.

Dr. Dean resonates with us because he listens to our concerns and treats Missouri like our eleven electoral votes matter - because in 2000, they sure as hell did. In 2000, aWol took this swing state by a mere 80,000 votes, and if he hadn't, our votes would have swung the electoral equation to Gore, even without Florida, and spared the entire world the abortion of government that has been the bu$h administration.

So yeah, we matter, god-damnit. Not only that, we have traditional Democratic roots that predate the founding of the state! Yes! There were Democrats in Missouri before there was a Missouri! The Missouri Democratic Party is the oldest continually-operating political party west of the Mississippi River, and the wingnuts only seized the state lege in 2000 (thanks to term limits, which have been a monumental disaster for the state).

Given the past eight years, and the indignities this president and the party he poisoned have heaped upon this nation - all of us, not just blue-state Americans - are pissed off and ready to put up a fight. I want a champion, someone who will throw down the gauntlet and challenge the conventional wisdom. Someone who will take the fight to them in every state and keep them on the defensive. While they are still scrambling to explain the latest lobby-gate revelation (Lindsey Graham didn't even try this morning, he just mouthed platitudes) Obama is hiring the mastermind behind Hillary Clinton's Ohio win and setting up the chessboard to take the state, and with it McCain's queen.

Oh, my, yes. Reading todays paper brought a long-overdue thousand-watt smile to my face.

Mr. Obama has moved in recent days to transform his primary organization into a general election machine, hiring staff members, sending organizers into important states and preparing a television advertisement campaign to present his views and his biography to millions of Americans who followed the primaries from a distance.

In one telling example, he is moving to hire Aaron Pickrell, the chief political strategist of Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio — who helped steer Mrs. Clinton to victory in that state’s primary — to run his effort against Mr. McCain there. In another, aides said, he has tapped Dan Carroll, an opposition researcher who gained fame digging up information on opponents’ records for Bill Clinton in 1992, to help gather information about Mr. McCain. That is the latest evidence that, for all the talk on both sides about a new kind of politics, the general election campaign is likely to be bloody.

Mr. Obama’s campaign is considering hiring Patti Solis Doyle, a longtime associate of Mrs. Clinton who was her campaign manager until a shake-up in February, the first of what Mr. Obama’s aides said would be a number of hires from the Clinton campaign.

[I have made the map clickable to the interactive NYT site ~~BG]

I don't pretend to be an expert or anything, but I do have a working knowledge of Missouri history, and how that history dovetails with the politics of the state.

For instance, I know that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Missouri since the 1850s. In fact, this state has only gone to the loser once in the last century - when our grandparents voted for Stevenson over the sitting President Eisenhower in 1956. Not exactly a traditional republican stronghold, are we?

In fact, I think if the New York Times had done a bit more research they would have made Missouri a battleground state leaning red instead of reliably republican on that map. Look at the primary results from the Secretary of States office:

[Image is clickable to the SoS results page]

If you do the math, you see that of over 1.4 million ballots cast in Missouri on Super Tuesday, 58.27% were Democratic ballots. McCain and Obama both won the state, but the numbers paint a bleak landscape for the McCain camp. McCain won 33% of the republican vote, with a raw vote tally of 194,053. Both Democratic frontrunners garnered more than double the votes McCain was able to muster.

Then there is the latest Rasmussen Missouri poll, which shows Obama a one-point favorite (43% to 42%, with 15% choosing "other" (9%)or "not sure" (6%). You can look at the poll here, and see just how out of step McCain is with the concerns of Missouri voters.

And worse for him still are the 31.5% of republicans in this state who voted for Mike Huckabee. With over 185,000 republican ballots cast for Huckabee, that is a lot of republicans that might opt to sit on their hands this November and skip the presidential race. Remember, 80,000 votes in 2000 made the difference. With the mobilization Obama has mustered, it won't take too many aggrieved Missouri conservatives opting to vote for Bob Barr, skip the race at the top of the ticket and only vote in the state and local races, or simply go fishing on election day to have an impact which color the photoshop wizards use to color Missouri on the map the night of November 4.

This is one red-state Democrat that is fired up and ready to go, and has been since January 1995, when the Contract on America was executed, and I have been absolutely spoilin' for a bare-knuckled brawl since the supremes selected in December 2000.

This is the political season I have been waiting for my entire life. It is high time the Democrats came out swingin' - and hot-damn if we don't have someone this season with a hell of a reach.

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Just the Beginning?

A shockwave is rippling through Missouri political circles right now. Chris Koster, considered by many to be the Republican front-runner for the upcoming Attorney General’s race and fourth-ranking Republican in the state senate switched parties yesterday, and the republican AG primary race came to a screeching halt.

“My vision for the state is not a far-right vision,” Koster told The Kansas City Star. “I am a hindrance to them, and they are to me. It seemed like a good time for a separation.”

The bloom was fading from the rose for Koster during last fall’s bruising battle over Amendment 2, it would seem. Koster is a strong advocate for embryonic stem cell research, and efforts to criminalize science by the MO GOP has been a burr under his saddle for a while. He sees it through an economic-benefit lens. “The Republicans are becoming the gang who can’t shoot straight on economic development issues,” he said. Talking about the plans to expand the Stowers Institute that have been tabled for now while the squabbling commences in Jefferson City, he seems non-plussed. “People don’t realize … what an incredible opportunity is being lost.”

Three issues combined to make the option of staying in the Republican Party an untenable proposition:

· •An incessant drive by conservative Republicans to criminalize stem-cell research and halt the long-planned expansion of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City.

· •A conservative assault on the state’s often-copied nonpartisan judge selection plan.

· •A failure to get an economic development bill passed two years in a row.

Yesterday, he quit.

When he left the Republican Party yesterday – with over $640,000 dollars in his war chest for the AG race, all donated by Republicans – he effectively withdrew from that contest. State law does not require that he return that money, but I hope our newest member acts ethically and does so. He also needs to sever all ties with the white-trash Karl Rove, too – he must fire Jeff Roe if he hasn’t already, and publicly apologize for ever being associated with that odious creature.

With the Roe caveat, I am going to be magnanimous here and welcome him aboard, (keeping in mind that he brings with him a streak of craven opportunism a mile wide. Remember that the guy asking for a ride across the river was hatched a scorpion, and act accordingly). That said, we have a big tent, with plenty of room for the moderate Republicans who are feeling uncomfortable with where my Grandfather’s Missouri GOP has gone. I hope Koster is the start of a slow bleed of the current state GOP's life force. I hope there are a dozen more who have some common sense and come on over before the end of the year. The more the merrier and the sooner the better!

I am not saying we should give Republican refugees the keys to the car and a bottle of Beam. I am saying let’s be gracious to those who are disenchanted. It sure as hell can’t hurt us. Missourians are intelligent and pretty much tend toward moderation and get put-off by extremes in all forms. There is a libertarian streak that runs through the state as a whole, left, right and center.

I learned first-hand about Missourians, moderate politics, and splitting the ballot in 1972. That summer I spent on my grandparent’s farm in the Missouri 06. My Yellow-Dog Democrat grandmother was a fervent servant of the Jerry Litton (Democrat, Chillicothe) congressional campaign, and my belt-and-suspenders Republican grandfather was equally committed to the election of a young, charming Republican fellow named Kit Bond to be the states Governor. The grandkids were equally involved in knocking on doors and manning the registration tents at county fairs for both parties. Both candidates won their races, and I took note. In fact, that election played a significant role in setting my political bearing for a lifetime.

The Missouri Republican Party is in disarray right now, in fact, it is likely that Matt “no chance in hell of being reelected” Blunt will face a primary challenge. (Didn’t Sarah Steeleman announce a planned primary challenge during his inaugural address?) He is so desperate in his pandering to the far right that signing legislation has taken on a Passion Play quality.

In light of the current situation in the MOGOP - and being intimately familiar with Missouri common sense and our tendency to turn moderate where politics is concerned, I am willing to look at Republicans fleeing a state party that has gone too far as a potential boon to Missouri Democrats, if we play our cards right.

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