By Dave Andrusko

"Sometimes the most important clues are hiding in plain view."
     -- From a column in today's Washington Post by David Broder, referring to the growth in the share of the electorate that identifies itself as conservative.

"The president was not reluctant to draw class lines or ideological distinctions."
     -- From a column in today's Washington Post by E.J. Dionne Jr., referring to President Obama's speech at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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Ah, yes, dueling op-ed pieces on the opinion page of the Washington Post. Good stuff, for their contrasting advice for pro-abortion President Barack Obama tells us what the chattering class believes the "solution" may be to remedying Obama's sagging poll numbers and, not co-incidentally, to salvaging the campaigns of Democrats in huge trouble.

Let's take Dionne first. The advice for Obama comes from the lips of Rep. Bernie Sanders, but it is clearly Dionne's position as well. Which is interesting because Sanders is a socialist who "believes devoutly in grass-roots, class-based politics."

There are so many competing myths about Obama you can't keep track without a scorecard. But the most curious is that Obama has supposedly adhered to a promise to find "common ground" with opponents, specifically Republicans. This is so far from the truth as to laughable.

The close thing to "common ground" he ever sought was with the Abortion Establishment--a rock-hard commitment to ensuring ObamaCare advanced the more-dead-babies agenda of Planned Parenthood. Since they were so close you couldn't slip a piece of paper between them, it hardly qualifies as a "compromise."

Enough of this playing to the middle, Sanders/Dionne counsel. Go for the jugular--otherwise known as vigorously articulating a "clear set of commitments"--and stop worrying about "compromising with a few moderate Republican senators." Does this make ANY sense?

Poll after poll shows the American public has picked up that Obama's policies are waaaaay out of the mainstream. Yet Dionne and Sanders believe the President can "salvage an election" by returning (I kid you not) "to his community-organizer roots." By playing more "class-based" politics, he can rally those on his party's left whose lack of enthusiasm would help ensure that Democrats get crushed in less than five weeks.

Broder picks up on the work of Gallup's Lydia Saad as massaged and extended by a Democratic advocacy group. Whereas Dionne counsels Obama to storm the ideological barricades, Broder advises just the opposite. He looks at the American electorate's changing self-identification and sees "the limitations on the apparent White House strategy of concentrating the president's campaign efforts on young people and single women."

And the one-sentence synopsis? There are fewer liberals than there were in 2008 and more conservatives.

In late June Gallup "reported that the share of voters who describe themselves as conservative had increased from 37 percent to 42 percent in the past two years," Broder wrote. "That does not sound like a big change. But given the long-term stability of basic philosophical alignments, the reaction it measured to the economic troubles and the performance of the new Democratic administration is very significant." (My emphasis.) Liberals are down to 20%. Moderates have shrunk to 35%.

Broder relies on the contribution of the Democratic political advocacy group Third Way whose analysis "overlaid" the work of Saad. They assumed in 2010 that "Democratic candidates run as well as Obama did nationally in 2008, taking 20 percent of the conservatives, 60 percent of the moderates and 89 percent of the liberals. And suppose, too, that turnout rates are the same for all three groups."

With that model Democrats do okay in five states. But even back-of-the-envelope calculations quickly show that "with more conservatives and fewer liberals in the mix, the Democrat would come up short in 13 other competitive states and barely break even in California, Illinois and New Hampshire," Broder writes. " Among the big states where the numbers break against the Democrats are Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania."

The problem for Obama is not that he has this deep hankering for "compromise." He talks a great game--which is why his party's Left is forever complaining--but if you look at what Obama actually produces--ObamaCare, for example--you see that the public has rightly pegged him as out-of-the-mainstream.

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