Ben Goddard

As President Obama addressed the nation on Tuesday evening I was in a dark, crowded room peering through one-way glass at a group of voters from the real America — citizens who live outside the Beltway and spend very little time paying attention to our insular world here in the nation’s capital. The 30-some focus group attendees I listened to that night sounded many of the same themes the president was giving voice to in his speech to the Congress.

Watching the Republicans tear into the Obama healthcare plan this week leaves me wondering if their leadership held a different election from the one I voted in a dozen weeks ago. At the very least, they heard a different message from voters. The GOP leadership seems to believe that its mandate from voters is to repeal healthcare reform and, oddly enough, to cut Social Security to help close the deficit.

Sarah Palin is right about one thing — the Tucson Tragedy, as it has come to be called, is not a free-speech issue. In her video response to the event and the backlash against Palin-style political rhetoric, she says responsibility for the mass shooting there did not lie “with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies.” 

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Barack Obama is like a box of chocolates — you never know what you are going to get.

Years ago as a young political media consultant I would spend hours in the dark space behind the one-way glass of focus-group facilities furiously writing down what everyone said. At the end of the night I’d have pages of contradictory and often confusing quotes from the “real people” on the other side of the glass. One night a pollster with far more experience than I had told me to “listen to the music, not the words.” I took that advice and soon discovered that I had far fewer scribbles on legal pads, no writer’s cramps and a much better understanding of what voters were actually thinking at the end of the night.

So the voters have spoken, and those who opine are trying to figure out just what they said. I’m not sure anyone has that sorted just yet. The message is much more nuanced than the Republican spin about a total repudiation of President Obama’s policies. Those Democrats who are chortling that Republicans now have to govern, not just be “the party of ‘no,’ ” seem to have missed the point: that voters have had all the political sniping they are going to take. And, while voters clearly responded to the Tea Party message, they did not fully embrace the Tea Party and its candidates. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio proved themselves to be standout candidates, while Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell proved unready for prime time at best — examples of that old political axiom, “You can’t beat somebody with nobody.” 

Much has been written lately about the “nationalization” of the 2010 midterm elections. While it is tempting to categorize this year as another so-called “wave” election, history shows that such waves tend to flow quickly back off the beach.

“Empathy” is what many political pundits are now saying President Obama lacks. They criticize him for an inability to communicate to voters that he “feels your pain,” as Bill Clinton so famously did. When he does manage to talk about dealing with economic hardship, it is usually in the context of struggling to repay student loans — an experience shared only by those fortunate enough to have gone to college in the first place.

The republic … isn’t designed to elect a bunch of experts,” says Florida’s Marco Rubio, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. That may be true, and is probably a source of comfort for Mr. Rubio. It is clearly one of the principles behind the Tea Party movement. But as election results have shown in states where the Tea Party has found success, “experts” are still critical to winning elections.

Traveling the country as part of a presidential candidate’s advance and media team some 35 years ago, I developed an affinity for what we called the “taxi driver poll.” The idea was that wherever you landed in America you could get an instant read on local political moods simply by talking to the cabbie who drove you from the airport into town.