As I was telling the Regular Son recently, the Obama campaign's strategy is pretty transparently demagogic. They are trying to engage the emotions of very specific constitutencies they hope to move to turn out to vote for them in the fall. These constituencies include: blacks, the elderly, and young unmarried women. Their tactics are precisely calibrated to gin up the anger and/or fear of these groups:
Blacks. Latching onto the Trayvon Martin case and pumping it into a national racial hysteria is a calculated move to try to move the needle on black turnout back toward where it was in 2008 (and to distract the black community from Obama's dismal record on jobs for blacks, especially black teenagers).
The elderly. Demonizing Paul Ryan's budget as an attack on Medicare is calculated to drive a small percentage (and this is the point... they only need to move a small percentage in a 50-50 country) of the elderly to vote for Obama out of fear that their Medicare will be taken away.
Young unmarried women. Don't be confused when the Obama campaign talks about a "war on women." They're not talking about married women, or middle-aged women, or elderly women. They are talking about 18-29 year old unmarried women who, I think it's fair to say, will be (like 18-29 year old men) among the most liberal and least informed voters. How do they get them to the polls? They scare them into thinking evil Republicans and meanie Catholics are going to take away their birth control. It's an utterly cynical move, because the Democrats are completely confident that most 18-29 year olds know next to nothing about religious freedom, and next to nothing about how much good Catholic hospitals and charities and missions do across the country and around the world. So they can be gulled into thinking that opposing the HHS mandate on birth control for religious employers is the same as wanting to take away their right to walk down to Walgreen's and buy a month's worth of pills for $9.
As noted, the Obama campaign is cynically (but smartly) thinking that, in a country where a Democratic candidate will get 45 percent just by virtue of not being Republican, they only need to move a few million people to their side to win. That they are targeting the poorest, the most fragile, and the most gullible simply speaks to their ruthlessness.