TPM, Daily Kos, Brad DeLong, etc.: Chill out about Politico

Everybody is very riled up about this Politico article.

I think they're reading their worst fears into it. I'm really not getting "only white males matter" from it.

My read of it is that Obama is the popular choice in the sub-groups that we usually consider liberal. The rest of that section of the article goes on and on about how Obama will be beholden to liberals, after all. The thing about independents and whites that's different from single women, educated whites, blacks, and Hispanics is that we think of the former as being more ideologically diverse than the latter. Is this true? I don't know, ask a public opinion poller. But the point of that section of the article is that on the understanding that it's true Obama has a liberal mandate, not an ideologically broad mandate.

As a centrist white male that seems to like Obama a lot more than a lot of my liberal friends, this seems overblown. But overblown or not, I can't see how it's a claim that white votes matter more.

In fact, if you read the article and not just the section everyone is quoting, the author goes on at length about how stupid Romney and recent Republicans have been to only court the suburban white male vote (so clearly they see value in those non-white, non-male votes!).

I don't like everything I read by Mike Allen, but if you think you've read him say that non-whites are 3/5ths of a person, it's probably worth giving it a second read.

Of course he's right that we're worried about whether Obama has a broad mandate. It looks plausible that he might win the electoral college but lose the popular vote. That's what a weak mandate is. Obama is very likely to have a weak mandate and it's going to be because he does well with traditionally liberal groups and less well than he could have with groups that aren't traditionally liberal. I don't like it. I think it has more to do with Republican demagoguery than anything Obama has done wrong. But those are the facts.