s.crew has nailed the general problem, although it will take more than better Dem media policy. The Democratic shortcoming is not in transactional politics (winning the next election), it is in transformative politics (winning the hearts and minds of new and independent voters.) A few extra points in elections here and there would be nice, but it will not stem the tide of the GOP’s forty-year focus on transformational politics.

The party that solves our economic crisis (it will NOT be the GOP or the libertards, it might not be the Democrats, it might be some new party) will do so from the bottom up through organizing, not top down through data mining. It is not preordained that we will solve our economic crisis in a positive way. The GOP may yet bring us to a theocratic fascism.

If Obama would just embrace pro-growth economic policies instead of bitterly clinging to his anti-growth policies he wouldn’t have to go though all the time and effort to mine and manage the data.

So the message is really about motivating your own supporters. There are sufficient numbers of disengaged potential voters that this is a very appealing option. If you can increase your side’s voter turnout from 40 to 60 percent, that is huge (so long as the opposition cannot match that performance).

Vote for Fascist Libertarians – minimal government, then good and hard.

It still leaves masses of ignorant voters with their mob-powerpolitics in the drivingseat.
Crunching numbers may be a nice academic approach, it still does not win voters over.

GOP-members/voters are bigots, on the whole, and I can’t see Obama/Democrats make any headway in for instance deminishing unfounded fears towards Democrats politics.

What the Democrats have been lacking, for decades as far as I am concerned, is coördinated media-play, like the GOP do with that sickening Fox News, Tea Partymorons etc.

I am not naïeve, I’ve never believed that the Republicans were willing to give Obama even the slightest break. So much for: “Yes, we can”, huh?

Mr. Obama has even stooped to the same level as Rowe/Cheney/Bush: Guantanamo (still open for business), medical care (flunked), financial “crises” , the list goes on and on…
He thinks that by showing tough love and hunting down/killing terrorists his “heart for the just cause” is somehow appreciated by the merkin right-wingers. Yeah right, dream on son.

Now don’t get me wrong: I would LOVE to see Obama do well, and for the GOP to get their ass kicked for quite some time to come, but sadly I just can not see it happening.

Democrats or Republicans: crunching numbers won’t cut it, to my mind most western societies are up for some basic re-thinking about themselves. And that message is one I hear nowhere, not in my country, the Netherlands, either.

Datacrunching is what I would call a pasttime for intelligent people, intellectuals .
They are not the people that need convincing. Go for the new voters, new Americans, get a vision across, set goals and tell them the truth: the days of US domination are over, gone.
It will no longer be possible to force befriended nations, like Bush did, into solidarity.
The famous “If you are not with us, you are against us”-doctrin clearly has backfired on the US.

Now there is something the Democrats and Obama should pounce on. The moral authority of the US (if ever present) is out the window and the damage to the US irreversible.

I just can’t get my head around the fact that the Democratic Party, with all its media and entertainmentspecialists, moguls and guru’s got beaten on their own turf by people like Karl Rowe, who spent years working on a strategy.
It is exactly what caused the downfall of Dutch social-democrats, they got complacent with their ïntellectual so-called superiority. And had their ass kicked.