Shorter Dingell: ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’

The most senior member of our Michigan congressional delegation offered up pointers on what it’s going to take for Barack Obama to win Michigan in this profile piece by Albert Eisele for MinnPost. (Dig deep, the nuggets are buried at the end for some twisted reason only known to Eisele.)

Rep. John Dingell reveals that many of the Democrats’ most senior leadership are worried about the wretched nastiness to be unleashed in the days and weeks ahead. At his age, he’s seen it all, and if he’s worried, he surely has plenty of reasons.

Dingell also points out that Obama’s campaign will have to shift gears from a primary to a presidential campaign; on this point I think Rep. Dingell and I don’t see eye-to-eye. In my opinion, Obama has been running a presidential campaign since May, but unlike candidates that have come and gone before, Obama has had to both pace himself and accommodate rather unique circumstances. If he comes on too firmly, the opposition will decry Obama’s presumptuousness (read: uppity-ness, and you know what I mean). If he hangs back too much, they’ll whine and pule that he’s not prepared for the office of the presidency.

We’ve already seen both of these plays; we can expect them to be ratcheted upwards to new heights of ugliness each week from here until the election. On that I do agree with Dingell. (If you were to take a peek tonight at the National Review Online’s The Corner during Sens. Kerry’s and Biden’s speeches at the Democratic National Convention, you’d know they were already winding up like a tropical storm working on becoming a hurricane.)

Eisele wraps up the profile with an observation by Dingell as to the winning formula for Michigan: “He’s got to do some things…[if] he’s an economic populist, he wins the state.” Wholeheartedly agreed on this point.

But what will sell here, to a state split between Reagan Democrats, Christian fundamentalist Republicans, urban pragmatists, college-town optimists and rural realists?

None of them agrees on what will fix this state’s economic nightmare; they can only agree that we’re desperate for something to fix it. If Obama can make a solid case for corrective economic actions that appeal to a broad spectrum of Michiganders, he may just pull it off and win.

But no mean feat, that.