William Galston of the "New Republic" and "Huffington Post" and Josh Kraushaar in the "National Journal" preach in favor of the "Heartland Strategy" and decry or depreciate the "New Demography" strategy of Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and possibly Arizona and Georgia (these last two by a big stretch of the imagination and unbounded optimism )
I agree with these two intelligent strategists that the best strategy is the Heartland Strategy of Industrial States, the Rust Belt that has millions of White Workers. Obama has to conquer the minds and hearts of White Morkers ( specially the males ), otherwise he is toast.
But Galston and Kraushaar are very wrong in assuming that Minorities, specially Latinos, can desert and abandon the President in November 2012. They won't, because the Republicans make every possible effort to herd Minorities and Latinos to the Democratic Corral.
The level of Hate against Latinos and Minorities is so high in the GOP that Activists will go from door to door and from bed to bed of Latinos to wake them up and help them to go to the voting booth. Even if Republicans approve millions of State Laws to block these voters.
Huffington Post
The President's Only Chance for 2012
By William Galston
Senior Fellow, Brookings InstitutionNovember 16, 2011
The President's Only Chance for 2012
Some excerpts :
The Heartland Strategy -- is this:
The president's team hopes to recreate the "new majority" strategy that expanded the playing field and led to victories in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada in 2008 and perhaps Arizona and Georgia as well in 2012. This does not seem realistic.
Obama's 2008 miracle victory in Indiana is almost impossible to repeat.
These facts underscore the crucial importance of the heartland states -- especially Ohio and Pennsylvania. As a matter of history and simple arithmetic, is very unlikely that President Obama can be reelected without carrying them both.
Although Pennsylvania is usually 3 to 4 points more Democratic than Ohio, the evidence suggests that Obama is surprisingly weak there and needs to do some real work to shore up his standing in a state that Democrats often regard as being in the bag.
As for Ohio, the last Democrat to take the White house without winning that state was John Kennedy, who did it with electoral votes from Texas and other southern states that Obama will not receive. (The last Republican to win the presidency without Ohio? There hasn't been one since the founding of the party in the 1850s.)
Ohio is pivotal, election after election, because it is a demographic and political microcosm of the country. If a presidential candidate can win a majority there, he or she can almost certainly do so in the nation as well. And that's why both parties should pay close attention to the results of last week's election, in which the Ohio electorate overwhelmingly rejected both Gov. Kasich's assault on public sector unions and the individual mandate at the heart of President Obama's health reform law.
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