NYT editorial: Mr. Obama’s Party

[DeepModem Mom]

Mr. Obama’s Party
Published: August 29, 2008

One test of a presidential candidate’s strength, and often his best shot at winning, is how much he can mold his party in his image and rally it around a powerful argument for his election. Barack Obama left Denver having made significant progress on both fronts. The Democratic Party today is different from the one that lost the last two presidential elections. It is bigger, younger and less visibly linked to traditional Democratic interest groups....

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The party rallying around Mr. Obama in Denver looked noticeably different. Part of that is real: his campaign’s unprecedented registration drives have brought many new voters into the party and, we hope, permanently into the democratic process as a whole.

Part, we suspect, was stage management. There was little display in the convention hall, and even less in prime-time broadcasts, of the placards of the teachers’ and service workers’ unions, of the National Abortion Rights Action League and the Sierra Club. That reflected the Obama campaign’s sound analysis that American voters mistrust interest groups — except their own — and its brash conviction that Mr. Obama’s drawing power is so strong that they can win without giving these groups prominence....

Mr. Obama’s strategists believe their route to victory lies in the careful selection of battleground states, and in the vast expansion of their base of voters. That won the primaries, but he has to repeat that performance on a far larger stage. The bulk of the voters his team is registering are younger, first-time voters and minority voters whose turnout is always dubious.

We are skeptical of slogans, but there is a refreshing audacity — another of Mr. Obama’s favorite words — in the strategy that he and his team have chosen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/opinion/29fri1.html