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It is a GOP argument that Obama should pay lots of attention to the demographic revealed in this article. Efforts to get the votes of folks who admit caring about skin color or middle names are a waste of precious time that should be spent persuading less provincial and anti-intellectual voters, especially those independents in the swing states.
Of course, the GOP and the PUMAs would like to convince Obama to focus first and foremost on voters with the least chance of voting for him.
In a seminar about the importance of setting priorities, a speaker asks the audience how best to get as much of the material he has before him into a large bucket, and the material includes stones of various sizes, pebbles, sand, and water. The analogy, of course, is to the question of how best to create a full and fulfilling life.
The answer is to put as many large (high priority) things into place first, followed successively by smaller things, until at last you add the minutia (the water; the icing, the gravy).
A voter who says, "I know it's stupid, but Barack HUSSEIN Obama?!?!" should be prioritized as sand or a tiny pebble in this scheme, and worried about only AFTER all the larger stones have been gathered into the Ark.
P.S. A note on ad hominem: there is a vast, qualitative difference between saying that a man is an idiot because his argument is idiotic and saying that his argument is idiotic because he is an idiot. And so, it's one thing to discount someone because they endorse racism, anti-intellectualism, creationism or the Bush Doctrine (idiotic concepts all) and quite another to discount someone for BEING liberal or conservative, dark or light skinned, homo or hetero-sexual. Only the latter is ad hominem.
