"It’s more than an increased anxiety," said Doug Schoen, who worked as one of Bill Clinton’s lead pollsters during his 1996 reelection and has worked for both Democrats and independents in recent years. "It’s a palpable frustration. Deep-seated unease in the sense that the message has gotten away from them."

What's the problem?

Forgetting the lessons of 1992: One of the certainties of American politics is that it is hard for Democrats to win presidential elections without a deep connection to Main Street values and economics. That would seem doubly true for Obama, given the unstated but undeniable barrier his race presents in certain areas of the country. And few nominees have ever had such an inviting target as the economic record of the Bush administration ... from a ballooning federal budget deficit to higher unemployment rates to a mortgage crisis that could be the most menacing fiscal threat in decades.

and

Yet still, the Obama campaign seems to be struggling to find a consistent, cohesive economic message. One can understand why aides would not want to muddy his mantra of change and his image as a post-partisan, revolutionary figure. But blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Michigan likely won't vote for Obama because of some meta-narrative or a series of fabulous speeches.

"The [Obama] campaign is beginning to look like other campaigns," said a former top strategist for past Democratic presidential campaigns, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Obama is struggling with working-class whites just like John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis did, and Walter Mondale. He’s struggling with voters in the border-state South. And he’s struggling with an enormous wind at his back, a hatred for George Bush and a mainstream media that is little short of a chorus for his campaign."

Clinton, of course, was the only one of these Democrats to actually win the struggle. As he could tell Obama, voters want to know how their lives would be bettered by an Obama presidency in very specific terms. This connection (along with independent Ross Perot) is what powered his upset run against George H.W. Bush in 1992.

I'll follow up with a longer post tonight - I want to go back and poke the Netroots in the eye; their notion that there's a vast, untapped well of new voters who a leftwing insurgent candidacy could bring to the polls isn't working out so well, is it?

Obama needs to do three things right now:

He needs to clarify people's understanding of him. The reality is that he went to a radical black church; he can't wish those facts away. The reality is that he got his career started in association with a bunch of unrepentant former radicals; he can't give a speech and have those facts vanish. The reality is that he's a young man who has had less experience than we are used to in our Presidents; he can't make that go away either. And yes, the reality is that he's black and some people are going to be uncomfortable voting for him because of that. Can't make that vanish either.

But he can take those facts and use his vision and speaking ability to weave them into a picture of himself that people will understand and be comfortable with. He hasn't done it - he hasn't squared the circle of his beliefs and his history. I believe he can, and while it's late I don't believe it's too late.

He needs to let people know what's in it for them. He's got a lot of position papers out there, but he ought to get four or five lower and middle class families and bring them around the country with him and tell us, exactly, what his policies will mean for them. Make the white papers concrete.

And if he can't do that - can't draw the line from his policy papers into real changes in people's lives - he needs new policy papers.

He needs to stop with the public knifefighting. While I don't doubt that he's good in a room, the public collapse of his "hope" rhetoric onto his "lipstick" rhetoric is something he won't be able to survive.

Look. Startups are always valued on hope. Established companies are always valued on history. As soon as Barack acts like an established politician and talks like an established politician, he's going to get valued like an established politician, and he's not going to like that.

We're seeing him get tested, and we'll know in a month what he's really all about. I supported the candidate of hope and inclusiveness, and I believe lots of people like me want the same thing. If this becomes an election about toughness, well...