It’s become a political cliché in this election season that Obama and his campaign have been largely about process issues (“politics, not policy”) and that there is a large segment of the Democratic Party that is surprisingly passionate about process issues and see in Obama a way to bring process issues to the fore. This attitude towards process issues stretches back to the Dean campaign. Whether this attitude is justified is another matter, but it’s becoming clear that it’s not an issue that is likely to win a general election, and that the Obama campaign’s focus on meta issues has been at the expense of issues that matter to another important voting bloc, and this might even cost him a nomination that for a time seemed to be practically his.  Read more