Democrats spending big $$$

The Democratic Party is outspending itself by more than 2 to 1 in these midterms.  In 2006 it spent$17 million.  Now, in 2010, we're looking at $50 million.

"It's a great experiment to see whether we can bring out voters whose only previous vote was in 2008," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ...

... Much about its "Vote 2010" effort has that way-back feel of two years ago: legions of canvassers going door-to-door, a stream of inspirational videos, an e-mail list of more than 13 million, and ads on Web sites including Latina.com, BlackPlanet.com, YELP.com and DailyCandy.

On Thursday, the 2008 presidential campaign's surviving grassroots operation, now Organizing for America, unveiled a spiffy Web site where supporters can get customized information about voting rules and deadlines in their states. It takes but a few keystrokes to fill in a voter registration form that then requires only a signature and a stamp.

But...

But for all the wizardry, what the Democrats don't have is a candidate on the ballot named Obama. Instead, they face a political climate in which hope and exhilaration has given way to anger and disappointment. To the degree there is enthusiasm now, polls show, it is largely on the Republican side.

According to Karen Tumulty's analysis in the Washington Post, that $50 million may be wasted.

Some veteran Democratic Party operatives are also skeptical that the $50 million investment will pay off -- except, perhaps, in keeping the grassroots operation alive for Obama's reelection bid two years from now. Some even suggest that the president's team has put his long-term interests ahead of his party's immediate struggle for survival.

"I have zero confidence that they're heading in the right direction here," says one longtime Democratic organizer who didn't want to be quoted by name criticizing his party's major midterm election initiative. Added another: "I think they're going to come in for a very rude awakening. It's going to be brutal."

It's a pretty depressing scene.

Rick Farmer, a Democratic activist in Sarasota, Fla., is seeing the challenge firsthand as he knocks on doors in a region where people are dreading the arrival of the effects of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on their beaches. "I can't tell you how much anger there is out there," he said. "I have people ready to spit in my face." Some, he said, tell him, "We've been hoodwinked -- not by Obama, but by government."

In Mobile, Ala., Organizing for America volunteer Darlene Gay-Allen blares the Dells' "I'm Only a Man" from her boombox as she registers voters and tries to persuade her neighbors not to lose faith. "President Obama is only a man, and he's doing the best he could," she said. 

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Elsewhere in the Post is a very good piece about our increasing infatuation with "narrative" -- the beginning, middle and end of a presidency, all invented and foretold by the media and assisted by all of us.

...Much of the reaction to the speech, rather than focusing on the plight of shrimpers or the legislative agenda, critiqued the address as a new panel in the ongoing Obama storyboard. On CNN, for example, White House correspondent Ed Henry complained that Obama had not discussed how much oil is leaking into the gulf, "perhaps because it doesn't fit into his narrative that the government is all over this." 

In this particularly meta moment, the overarching Obama story line hovers a level above events, distracting from the disaster in the gulf, glossing over the question of whether the government's concrete actions are sufficient, removing readers and viewers and listeners from reality. The narrative has been constantly updated -- Obama's a hero one day, a goat the next -- as ravenous news cycles and impatient audiences demand conclusions, and attention-starved media outlets can no longer subsist on the modest first drafts of history. 

"We are struggling to sustain a narrative concept in an age of contemporaneity," said David Shi, the president of Furman University in South Carolina, who is writing the ninth edition of "America: A Narrative History," a popular college textbook. "The demand for analysis and meaning of things right away puts real narrative under attack."

David Axelrod has some insight into this potentially damaging little phenomenon.

Axelrod acknowledged that the Obama campaign may have created a bit of a Frankenstein's monster in telling such a compelling story to begin with.

"He told that story and told that story well," Axelrod said.

The problem, he added, is that the story about the story is mainly what journalists care about now. The administration's actions certainly have political implications and often political motives, but the media's default setting is to process every policy proposal, diplomatic gesture, government appointment and, now, national disaster through that prism.

Narratives can ruin lives and whole countries.  But that's the next chapter.  In the meantime, it's worth wondering whether the results of the midterm elections will come as an enormous surprise to those who have clung to narrative rather than examining reality.