Obamacans

I think that the high-profile Republicans for Obama are looking for jobs in an Administration that he has said will include Republicans and be "post-partisan." What's more interesting are the ordinary Americans who are rejecting the failed conservative policies of the last couple decades.

Listen to Anna Rodriguez and her neighbors who gather nightly on lawn chairs to unwind, and a change comes into focus that could shift the national political landscape in 2008 and beyond.

...."This is the first election I ever actually looked at someone else other than the Republican candidate," said Rodriguez, 33, who is studying to be a teacher and is a fixture at the lawn chair hobnob here on Greely Court, a quiet cul-de-sac in a Pasco County subdivision called Wrencrest.

"I've had enough with the Republican economics," she added, as her husband, Danny, who had just driven from his banking job in Tampa, piped in: "No more Bush."

These are middle-class and upper-middle class families who have seen their home values crash, their jobs made insecure, their retirement threatened and their struggles ignored for years. If there's one statistic that defines the Bush years it's this one.

Average pre-tax incomes in 2006 jumped by about $60,000 (5.8 percent) for the top 1 percent of households, but just $430 (1.4 percent) for the bottom 90 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to a new update in the groundbreaking series on income inequality by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Their analysis of newly released IRS data shows that in 2006, the shares of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of households were higher than in any year since 1928.

This is why it's so ridiculous to hear conservative defenders talk about how the rich pay more of the nation's taxes than ever. Yeah, that's what happens when you have more and more of the nation's money. The top 1% now hold 20% of the nation's income.

And these disaffected conservatives are clustered in very specific communities - exurbs, the fast-growing regions where Republicans swept up in 2004. That clustering means that heavy losses in Congress are possible along with the Presidential election.

But many also worry that McCain, known for his war credentials, does not relate to the troubles facing communities so vulnerable to fluctuations in gas prices and housing values -- communities that happen to be in some of the election's most pivotal states.

The pain is especially acute in hotly contested Nevada and Florida, which are home to many such communities and are among the nation's hardest-hit real estate markets.

In eastern Pasco County, where much of the recent growth had occurred, the median price of a single-family home has dropped by nearly one-quarter over the last two years. Since Bush was reelected in 2004, according to a Times analysis, the average cost of gas to drive both ways of the 26-mile commute between the Wrencrest subdivision and downtown Tampa in a typical passenger car has more than doubled, from $4.36 to $9.22.

Similar trends can be seen in the exurban counties around Denver, Las Vegas, Cincinnati and Detroit, and in the Virginia exurbs near Washington, D.C.

Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, says that many young families that moved to exurbia since 2000 racked up credit card debt and took on big mortgages. Now, he said, "if they're upside down on their mortgage, they'll be looking for someone to blame."

Obama is going after these groups and trying to paint himself as a protector of the middle class. I like that this ad specifically mentions ending the war responsibly (although the business about Iraq having a $79 billion surplus seems misplaced, though it's that whole Iraq-economy linkage that Democrats have been trying to highlight).



The race for the White House will be won or lost among this section of the middle class. Obama is starting to understand that. More importantly, however, the rejection of conservative economic frames among this group portends a real wave election, with lots of new Democrats capitalizing on the historic opportunity offered by Bush and Republican failures.