Campaign Diaries

A few days from the convention, the polls released this week will be used as a marker to determine whether Obama receives a bounce next week. Three major national polls released in the past 24 hours have Obama leading by 3%:

• An NBC/WSJ poll has Obama leading 45% to 42% nationally. A worry for McCain: 77% believe he would follow Bush’s policies.

• A NYT/CBS poll has the same exact numbers, with Obama leading 45% to 42%. Voters overwhelmingly named the economy as their top issues - which is both good news to Democrats and should worry them that they can’t open the lead in such circumstances.

• A third national poll, released by Fox News, finds Obama leading 42% to 39%.

The most shocking result of all in this wave of surveys is the internal number in the NBC poll that Obama only gets 52% of Clinton supporters, with 27% undecideds and 21% for McCain - meaning that a full 11% of the sample is made up of Clinton backers who are now not supporting Obama. These 11% do lean Democratic in the sense that they think Bush is doing a bad job and that the country is headed in the wrong direction, but they also have a far more favorable opinion of McCain.

Recapturing these voters could do a lot to put Obama on top - and it’s unlikely the Democrat will ever have a comfortable lead unless he closes the deal with these Clinton supporters. Indeed, it is not just the NBC poll that has Obama too weak among registered Democrats, as most state polls show McCain is more in control of registered Republicans than Obama is of his base.

We are a few hours - perhaps a day, perhaps mere minutes - away from Obama’s VP pick and the Senator now says that he has already made his pick. But it is hard to escape from a simple conclusion: An Obama-Clinton ticket makes much more sense today than it did two months ago. After Obama wrapped up his nomination, the conventional wisdom - that I repeated here - was that he would only pick Clinton if, when the time came to make his choice, he had yet to heal the party’s divisions and needed a bigger show of unity with his former rival. In early June, conventional wisdom also held that Obama would be able to build solid numbers among registered Democrats, and would thus not need to go with Hillary.

Even if Clinton is not picked as the vice-president, the delegates’ floor vote, Hillary’s Wednesday night speech and the choreography of her endorsement of Obama might be the week’s most crucial moments. If these “cathartic” moments (as Ed Rendell put it) manage to bring Hillary supporters back in the Obama camp, the Illinois Senator could enjoy a big post-convention bounce. But if something goes wrong, or if the press seizes on a protest staged by a few Clinton delegates, the road could become more difficult for Obama.

The fact that Obama has room to grow among registered Democrats heightens the importance of next week’s convention - giving the event a bigger potential but also increasing the risks. These giant political infomercials might have become too conventional to seduce independents (in 2004, neither Kerry nor Bush got a significant bounce), but much of what Obama needs in this Democratic-tilting year is solid support from his base. The convention is an ideal moment for him to reach for that.

Another thing we will have to watch for is whether the Obama campaign imposes a “positive-only” rule on its speakers. The Kerry campaign had insisted that the 2004 convention stay positive, and that Bush not be mentioned. That had lead to a somewhat mellow four-days, and compared to the vitriol coming out of the GOP convention a month later it ended up looking like a bad choice. But the decision at least made sense on paper, as Kerry wanted to appeal to independent voters. In 2008, Obama has still not closed the deal with his base; and while the Democrats who are hesitating to vote for him certainly skew conservative, they nonetheless remain partisan. A convention is a candidate’s chance to throw meat at the base and play on their partisan allegiances. Will Obama take that route, or will his campaign imitate John Kerry’s?