The Schultz Report: What’s causing Obama’s slump in the polls?

In this week’s audiocast, we take a step back from the droppings of the daily news cycle to discuss some of the reasons Barack Obama’s campaign has been foundering in national head-to-head polling against John McCain for some time now. By political analyst David Schultz’s reckoning, the sources of Obama’s troubles include the attack rhetoric of Hillary Clinton and McCain, ingrained prejudices of race and culture, and Obama’s own abandonment of the progressive — or progressive-sounding — themes that made him a primary season sensation.

"There’s no question he’s been in a downturn, probably for several months," says Schultz.. "It pre-dates the recent attacks. In some sense, Obama probably peaked around three months ago when he won 13 primaries or caucuses in a row against Clinton. Ever since then, he’s really struggled. Clinton and Obama pretty much dueled to a tie in the remaining primaries. Obama’s never really recovered from a series of things that included the Clinton attacks and some [problems] of his own. She did a very good job — and McCain has picked up on this — in terms of alienating him from white working class voters.

"There seems to be a cultural gap, and maybe a racial gap, where polls are suggesting that the white working class just can’t identify with Obama. They don’t feel comfortable with his worldview, whatever they think that is. Some of it may be racism, but some of it may be that Obama has failed to broaden his constituency beyond people of color and young people. The second thing it could be is that a lot of what made Obama exciting is that he was new and fresh and he was running as a progressive candidate. Or at least he was thought of as a progressive candidate. He’s no longer as fresh, his stump speech, even though he’s varied it a little, is getting kind of stale. And there’s a sense in which, on a lot of issues, he’s running away from that supposed liberalism that a lot of his supporters originally tagged on him. He’s now moving and changing his positions on issues of trade, energy, Afghanistan and so forth, he now seems far more conventional.

"On a lot of scores, it looks like Obama may have peaked, and he hasn’t done a very good of refining his message in a way that expands his base. This creates a dilemma for him. If he seeks to hold on to the liberal base, does he risk losing the broader middle class? I’m not sure he does. I think that message of economic populism, of questioning free trade, of trying to cross racial lines in a lot of his speeches, is what made him a powerful candidate. As he gets more conventional and more cautious, he’s weakening as a candidate."

Schultz also begs to differ with those who think McCain’s recent spate of negative advertising will damage him more than Obama in the end. "These are actually very effective ads. McCain is taking a playbook from George Bush and the cultural conservatives in the Republican party," he notes. "This is still running against Hollywood. It’s tying Obama and Hollywood to all the cultural things that religious conservatives don’t like in America. [Thomas Frank's] great book What’s the Matter With Kansas? talks about the Republican strategy for almost the past 20 years of running against the Hollywood glitz culture — running against the Paris Hiltons and Britney Spearses of the world. McCain is doing the exact same thing in tying Obama to everything these conservatives don’t like about Hollywood and mass culture. Obama. Hollywood. Drugs. Abortion. Gays. Tolerance. Pornography.

"What’s surprising about these ads is that it’s McCain doing them and not his surrogates. Usually it’s third-party groups doing this stuff. But otherwise it’s not a surprise that McCain is using this strategy. It’s been an effective strategy to alienate Democrats from the heartland and the working class.

"The second thing that’s surprising about these ads — they’re like the Swift Boat [replay] of 2008. Back in 2004, not only did the Swift Boat ads attack Kerry. Kerry also did an ineffective job of responding to them. He let them pass over his shoulder. Obama’s running into the same danger. He’s not taking them seriously…. These are very effective attacks that have contributed substantially to the erosion in Obama’s support in the past few weeks."

Listen: David Schultz on the Obama campaign’s malaise (16:10)