In his HuffPo post, “Three Fatal Republican Mistakes That Could Spell Their Defeat Next November,” Democratic political strategist Robert Creamer illuminates some potentially costly GOP blunders:

First, Republicans forgot the fundamental truth that it is much more difficult to take something away from people that they already have, than to prevent them from getting something for which they aspire.
It’s one thing to campaign against the possibility of better health care — or against legislation that would restrain the power of banks to sink the economy. It’s quite another to propose measures that would cut someone’s pay, eliminate their power to bargain, or slash services that benefit everyday Americans — even worse to propose cutting Social Security or Medicare. Those kinds of proposals are downright personal. They really make people angry.
Nothing changes a political calculus like “facts on the ground.” That’s why the Republicans are crusading so hard to prevent the Affordable Health Care Act from being implemented. Once it’s in force, millions of stakeholders will form a political army that will prevent it from ever being repealed.

Creamer provides more detail on how the Republicans paid a political price for their ill-considered efforts to undermine Medicare and Social Security, then notes their second major blunder:

…The Republicans have forgotten the all-important political principle, that you can’t believe your own spin. That’s especially true if you spend all of your time talking to the small group of people who agree with you. Take the House of Representative’s newly-elected Tea Party Caucus. This insular crew talks to each other — repeats each other’s slogans — listens to Fox News and has convinced themselves that most Americans agree that government spending is the worst thing since murder and mayhem.
…But now that the Republicans have begun to propose concrete cuts to important public services, their view of what the “American people” want is completely disconnected from reality.
Last week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that a 51% to 46% majority says the government should do more, rather than less. Fifty-six percent say that jobs and economic growth should be the government’s top priority compared to 40% who rate deficit reduction that way.
By 54% to 18%, Americans do not believe that cuts in Medicare are necessary to reduce the deficit. Forty-nine to twenty-two percent say cuts in Social Security are not needed. Fifty-six percent say cuts in Headstart Programs are “mostly” or “totally unacceptable.” Seventy-seven percent say the same of cuts in primary and secondary education. Majorities also call unacceptable cuts to defense, unemployement insurance, student loans, and heating assistance to low-income families.
On the other hand, while Republicans rail against increases in taxes — even for the rich, a whopping 81% favor placing a surtax on people who make more than a million dollars. Sixty-eight percent want to end the Bush tax cuts on those who make over $250,000.
An overwhelming 77% support the right of public employees to collective bargaining…To top it off, a Rasmussen (Republican) poll shows Wisconsin Governor Walker’s positives dropping to 43%, and his negatives soaring to 57%.
The winds have shifted — and because they believe their own spin, many Republicans have yet to notice.

The third major blunder Creamer cites is the GOP’s refusal to get it that voters will not buy discredited b.s. indefinitely:

Over and over, the Republicans have repeated their mantra that we need to “cut spending” in order to create jobs. Now, it is certainly true that controlling the nation’s long-term deficit will benefit the economy in the long haul. You can even make a case that when government debt begins to sop up lots of available credit, it can be a drag on private sector investment and growth. But no reputable economist agrees that cutting spending now — as we are just emerging from a recession — will create jobs. Just the opposite.
…The public is beginning to get the picture. The polling shows that voters want investments that actually do increase long-term growth — investments in education, research and infrastructure — that will allow us to win the future.

Chris Bowers has an equally encouraging (for Dems) take in his Daily Kos post “Why Wisconsin poses such a serious threat to Republicans.” Bowers notes that the normal fragmentation of progressives is being replaced by a more unified spirit because of Governor Walker’s union-bashing, and adds

If you will forgive me for being elliptical and finally returning to the subject promised by the title of this article, that last sentence is why the new labor uprising is potentially so dangerous for Republicans. In these fights, the interests and organizing of labor, the netroots, and the Democratic Party are very closely aligned. The result has been astoundingly effective activism: tens of thousands of people at continuous rallies, a constant buzz from progressive media covering the rallies, paid media campaigns of high quality and quantity funded by the people consuming that coverage, and Democratic elected officials willing to use whatever procedural means necessary to take the fight as far as possible. It’s caused at least the temporary disappearance of what my astute friend Matt Stoller called “the rootsgap,”–a lack of alignment between the interests of the grassroots and the leaders of a political movement.
In Wisconsin, all of the “everyone-elses” are joined together in a coherent political operation, and we are winning because of it. Despite the full-backing of the iron fist of the conservative movement, a newly elected hard-right Governor has seen his approval ratings plummet to around 40% only two months after taking office. That’s unheard of.
If what happened in Wisconsin is replicated elsewhere, then conservatives are in a deep pile of doo-doo. They know it, too. Tea party groups are sending out fundraising emails on Wisconsin admitting that they are losing…

And if it seems that this perspective is just pretty much what you might expect from progressives like Creamer and Bowers, here’s an excerpt from a post, “Gov. Scott Walker Has Lost The War” by Rick Ungar at Forbes magazine, which proudly promotes itself as the “capitalist tool”:

In what may be the result of one of the great political miscalculations of our time, Scott Walker’s popularity in his home state is fast going down the tubes.
A Rasmussen poll out today reveals that almost 60% of likely Wisconsin voters now disapprove of their aggressive governor’s performance, with 48% strongly disapproving.
While these numbers are clearly indicators of a strategy gone horribly wrong, there are some additional findings in the poll that I suspect deserve even greater attention.
It turns out that the state’s public school teachers are very popular with their fellow Badgers. With 77% of those polled holding a high opinion of their educators, it is not particularly surprising that only 32% among households with children in the public school system approve of the governor’s performance. Sixty-seven percent (67%) disapprove, including 54% who strongly disapprove.
Can anyone imagine a politician succeeding with numbers like this among people who have kids?
These numbers should be of great concern not only to Governor Walker but to governors everywhere who were planning to follow down the path of war with state employee unions. You can’t take on the state worker unions without taking on the teachers – and the teachers are more popular than Gov. Walker and his cohorts appear to realize.
…The Wisconsin governor’s desire to be at the forefront of his perceived GOP revolution may not only have doomed the anti-union effort, but it may forever label him as the man who gave the democrats the gift that keeps on giving – the return of the union rank and file into the arms of the Democratic Party.

It’s looking a lot like Governor Walker is more interested in projecting himself as the new Reagan, than in helping his party win working class support in 2012. Other Republican leaders like Ohio Governor Kasich are nipping on the political koolaide as well. And that, for Dems, could be a very good thing.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
On Monday night, the 2012 Republican primary kicked off in earnest. The occasion was an Iowa forum sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, which is eager to ensure that the Christian Right (and Ralph Reed, who is launching his own comeback) maintains a prominent–indeed, an absolutely overweening–place in the decision-making process of the GOP. This “cattle call” was held in a brightly colored suburban megachurch in Waukee, Iowa, known locally for having a rockin’ pastor and praise band. It was a strange event, full of partisan red meat, but also off-kilter due to the fact that several major figures in this election’s social-conservative psychodrama, Mike Huckabee, Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, were not in attendance. What the audience did witness was an eclectic group of conservative sinners jockeying against each other–and the absent ghosts listed above–in hopes of subtly differentiating themselves in the eyes of Christian conservatives.
Obscure talk-show host and former pizza magnate Herman Cain was actually the most natural. He managed to act as something of a stand-in for Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, evincing a snug synthesis of the old Christian Right and the new Tea Party, and fluently tying together attacks on legalized abortion with claims that liberals were trying to turn America into the “United States of Europe.” But who cared? With several more appealing, more electable Christians waiting in the wings, his fluency seemed a moot point.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich opted to bury his audience in chillingly direct rhetoric about the clash between secularism and Christianity. He referred to the opposition not as “liberals” or “Democrats” but as “secular socialists”; compared the current partisan conflict to the buildup before the Civil War; and promised that two of his first four executive orders as president would deal with abortion, while a third would move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (a guaranteed applause line among staunchly pro-Israel evangelicals). It seemed almost enough to distract the audience from his less-than-sterling family values.
Ex-Senator Rick Santorum spent most of his speech dwelling on his role in the Right to Life movement, even going so far as to declare it a good thing that Bill Clinton vetoed two bills banning partial-birth abortions because the procedure’s legality served as agitprop for general opposition to legalized abortion. (George W. Bush finally signed a bill on this subject, which Santorum had originally sponsored.) Had he waved a fetus poster right there at the podium, it would not have been surprising.
The most unusual speech of the evening was delivered by former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, best known for a failed 1991 re-election campaign that teed up the infamous “race from hell” runoff between Ed Edwards and David Duke (Roemer wryly noted in his speech that he narrowly lost, but Edwards and Duke both wound up in the penitentiary). Roemer’s shtick is to refuse to accept campaign contributions over $100, and he tried to frame his assault against “special interest” money as a moral issue, even going so far as to blast Iowa’s beloved ethanol subsidy as a symbol of corruption and Big Government. This attracted hearty, charitable applause, of the kind that brooks no commitment whatsoever.
Perhaps the most consequential talk of the night was given by Tim Pawlenty, who is trying to frame himself as a good alternative for Christian conservatives, in case their more visceral champions fail to enter the race or to gain traction. He is clearly trying to figure out the right mode of speaking to the Republican base without appearing too bland–so this time he just spoke extremely loudly and quoted as much scripture as possible. Pawlenty did deftly employ one of the Christian Right’s most potent dog whistles, referring multiple times to the line in the Declaration of Independence which says that people are “endowed by their creator” with inalienable rights. (The implication is that religion and “natural rights,” i.e., the rights of the unborn or absolute property rights, can be sneaked into the Constitution via their alleged presence in the Declaration.) But, by and large, Pawlenty did not manage to give off the impression of an ardent culture warrior who chews nails for breakfast–something he will have to perfect if he wants to capitalize on the political opening available for him in 2012.
Meanwhile, everyone was bagging on Mitch Daniels, who is looking less and less like a viable Iowa candidate. Early on in the event, Ralph Reed directly alluded to Daniels’s belief that Republicans should declare a “truce” in the culture wars by trashing it; and nearly everyone who stood at the podium attempted to make it clear he didn’t buy the idea that the “Red Menace” of debt–in Daniels’s phrase– should motivate them to stop talking about abortion or same-sex marriage or secularism.
The mood of Ralph Reed’s forum was instructive. Religious conservatives are not about to be consigned to the background of Republican politics, particularly in Iowa where–as Reed reminded the audience–they are in a position to dominate the caucuses. There was no appetite for talk of compromise or dialogue with the Democrats, and candidates like Daniels, or even Pawlenty, seem like they might face a disadvantage if they do not sharpen their red-meat delivery. After the Tea Party victories of 2010, the atmosphere of the event was unabashedly triumphalist. It was a signal that conservatives will be highly energized in 2012–but perhaps also over-confident.

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This item, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, who is also Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, is the first essay in the Demos/TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government.
In November 2008, right after the presidential election, Elaine Kamarck and I published what turned out to be a very unpopular essay, entitled “Change You Can Believe in Needs a Government You Can Trust.” We began this way:

As Barack Obama takes office in 2009, he will confront a paradox. On the one hand, the American people are demanding action in many areas–to improve the economy, to increase access to health care while restraining costs, and to reduce energy costs and our dependence on oil, among others. On the other hand, people are deeply mistrustful of the federal government as an honest and capable agent for achieving these goals. There is nothing new about this ambivalence, but how the next president deals with it may make the difference between success and failure, measured in sustainable public support as well as legislative accomplishment.
This reason is this: in our politics, trust is a cause as well as a consequence. While events affect public trust in government, trust shapes the limits of political possibilities. When trust is high, policy makers may reasonably hope to enact and implement federal solutions to our most pressing problems. When trust is low, as it is today, policy makers face more constraints. As leading scholar, Marc Hetherington, puts it, “Most Americans, whether conservative or liberal, do not trust the delivery vehicle for most progressive public policy. Even if people support progressive policy goals, they do not support the policies themselves because they do not believe that government is capable of bringing about desired outcomes.” In 1992, for example, public support for some form of national health insurance exceeded any level previously measured. When Bill Clinton took office, however, trust in the federal government had reached an historic low, a fact that contributed to the eventual defeat of his ambitious health care proposal. While it is risky to draw broad inferences from a single instance, however dramatic, it seems reasonable to assume that the people will tend to resist, and perhaps reject, policy proposals that are wildly inconsistent with prevailing levels of trust in government.

We ended our essay by cautioning that 2009 would be more like 1993 than 1933 or 1965, and by recommending that the new administration lead off with a series of modest but essential trust-building measures rather than with large new domestic policy initiatives, which would be politically viable only after public trust had been substantially restored.
The events of the past two years have not changed my mind about any of this. Today, trust in government stands near an historic low, well below where it stood the day Barack Obama was elected. To understand what this means for the future, we need to review briefly the political history of the past half-century.
Trust in Government: A Brief History
In the late 1950s, the federal government that fought the Great Depression, won the Second World War, avoided the anticipated post-war economic slump, built the interstate highway system, and encouraged the growth of a mass middle class could draw upon a huge reservoir of public support. In 1958, 73 percent of the American people reported that they trusted the government in Washington to do what was right “most of the time” or “just about always.” 76 percent of the electorate that gave Lyndon Johnson his 1964 landslide said the same thing. That turned out to be a post-war (and probably an all-time) high. By 1968, trust had declined to 61 percent; by 1972, to 53 percent. Scholars point to Vietnam, assassinations, and racial and cultural conflict as the major contributors to the 23-point drop in the eight years between 1964 and the 1972 Nixon landslide over McGovern.
Then came Watergate, which dealt a shattering blow to public trust. By the midterm election of 1974, it had plunged an additional 17 points, to 36 percent–less than half the peak attained just ten years earlier.
It never fully recovered. In effect, the decade 1964-1974 marked the transition between two distinct phases of the post-war era. In the first, the default setting was public trust in the federal government; in the second, it has been mistrust.
This is not to say that trust has remained constant over the past 36 years. It continued to decline during the Ford-Carter years, bottoming out at 25 percent in 1980. It rose through much of the 1980s, reaching 44 percent the day of the Reagan 1984 landslide. It still stood at 40 percent the day George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. Then it slid again, to 29 percent on election day 1992 and a woeful 21 percent in 1994 as Republicans ended the Democrats’ 40-year majority in the House of Representatives. In the ten years from the 1994 midterms to George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, trust rebounded. By the end of the Clinton administration, it had more than doubled from its low-point, to 44 percent, identical to the Reagan-era peak, and consistent with the proposition that trust in government often tracks the state of the economy. Consistent with another maxim–that people tend to rally around the government in the face of external threats–it spiked to 56 percent in the year after 9/11 and still stood at 47 percent in November of 2004.
Bush’s second term witnessed another sharp drop in public trust, in part because events did not confirm the central public justification for initiating the Iraq war, and also because the economy entered a deep recession after the near-collapse of the financial system. By election day 2008, it had declined 17 points, to only 30 percent.
Despite the hope that Barack Obama’s victorious campaign had inspired, there is no evidence that it changed the public’s attitude toward the federal government. In June of 2009, when Obama still enjoyed the approval of more than 60 percent of the American people, only 20 percent said they trusted the government, a number that has barely budged ever since.

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For the second straight week, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ takes a look at public attitudes toward taking away collective bargaining rights, and finds “This week the signals from the public are even clearer. Poll after poll rolled in with the same basic finding–taking away collective bargaining rights is unacceptable to the public.” Teixeira explains:

Consider these results from the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. Respondents were asked whether it was acceptable to eliminate public employees’ right to collectively bargain over health care, pensions, and other benefits as a way of dealing with state budget deficits. The public said no by almost 2:1 (62-33).

Those who think the public is much less supportive of public employee collective bargaining rights than for private sector employees, should review the NBC/WSJ poll and think again. As Teixeira notes,

The poll also asked whether state workers who belong to a union should have the same right to collectively bargain over benefits as workers in private companies who belong to a union. The response was an ever more overwhelming 77-19 in favor of unionized state workers’ right to collectively bargain over benefits.

“What part of “don’t take away state workers’ collective bargaining rights” does Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker not understand?,” asks Teixeira. “Or does he simply not care what the public thinks? The latter seems a distinct possibility given conservatives’ track record on this score.”

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This is the introductory essay to a new online forum jointly sponsored by the progressive intellectual center Demos and The Democratic Strategist . It is authored by the forum’s co-editors, Demos Senior Fellow Lew Daly and TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore.
In the wake of the 2010 election and in the midst of current battles over the size, cost and purpose of government, it’s increasingly obvious that erosion of Americans’ trust in government has become a tangible political asset for conservatives and a source of great frustration for progressives. It’s ironic, of course, that Republican mismanagement during the Bush administration and a financial and economic crisis brought on by lax regulation has helped produced this atmosphere. But this reaction did not emerge from a vacuum, and distrust of government has a long pedigree in American politics and society.
And indeed, even as progressives battle unprecedented attacks on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society and vigorously debate strategy and tactics, there’s a growing hunger for a deeper understanding of distrust of government and its origins, and of possible paths for restoring sufficient public confidence to sustain future progressive policy initiatives.
That is why the prominent progressive intellectual center Demos and The Democratic Strategist are holding an online forum on this critical topic, drawing on diverse and distinguished voices from various corners of the progressive landscape.
Discussion of this topic is widespread but much of the debate up until now has focused (understandably) on analyzing the revival of harshly anti-government attitudes in the conservative movement and the Republican Party, as dramatized by the advent of the self-described Tea Party Movement, and less on the extent and the underlying causes of the decline in public trust, and on strategies for addressing and if possible reversing it. The basic trend lines are stark enough: Forty years ago, nearly 80% of the public trusted government to do the right thing nearly always or most of the time. By the spring of 2010, only 22% of Americans said they trusted government, the lowest level since 1994 (when the Democrats were swept from power in the House for the first time in 40 years), and lower than in the Watergate era
Earlier periods of extreme public distrust were driven by a mixture of public scandal (Watergate; the Keating Five and the House bank scandal; etc.) and economic stress (stagflation and energy shocks; the early 90s recession). Along similar lines, the circumstances behind today’s public distrust have been described as a “perfect storm” of public and private failure, aggravated by new factors such as intensifying political polarization and more powerful right-wing media.
It is not an exaggeration to say that public distrust of government, and the increasing political polarization caused by a libertarian Republicanism that plays well to this basic distrust, poses a fundamental threat to the future of our country. For any significant progressive legislation to pass in the future, the process will have to convince a substantial segment of the now reflexively oppositional electorate that there is a new, more honest system in place that will make the consideration, passage and implementation of legislation more genuinely reflect what “the people” really want. President Obama alluded to this in his post-election press conference when he suggested that a major failing of the health care reform effort was that it ignored popular distrust and dislike of the “process.” His statement implicitly recognized that no new major legislation could be passed until this basic problem is overcome.
No one living outside the conservative media cocoon and the Republican Party’s energized but small base can fail to see that solving the collective problems we have–from unemployment and the lack of good paying jobs, to educational decline, to global warming, to the public debt–will require strong and active government and quite possibly much higher levels of public revenue. Thus, assessing and understanding the causes and dynamics of public distrust in government, and finding remedies for this problem in our politics and public debates, are important challenges requiring much more attention from analysts over the next two critical election cycles and beyond. Demos and TDS have organized this forum to launch a new critical dialogue on this problem.
There are several key questions that we hoped forum participants would
help answer:

1. Has the collapse of public trust in government been a cumulative process over a long time, or primarily the result of recent events?
2. Is the source of distrust in government its perceived incompetence to achieve generally supported public goals, or its failure to engage effectively with citizens in setting priorities and pursuing them?
3. Are we experiencing class, generational or racial/ethnic divides over the role of government in which Americans are being pitted against each other in a zero-sum competition for public resources?
4. Should progressives focus on the perception or reality of special-interest control of government, incidents of public corruption, and the ongoing scandal of campaign financing, to improve public trust in government and the political process?

While we hope this forum will eventually engage an array of thinkers and writers, we will publish as a first and foundational round essay from the following distinguished progressives:
William Galston will write about the immediate challenge of meeting the crisis of public confidence in government created by the 2010 elections and the fiscal battles already underway in Washington.
John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira will discuss their public research findings on distrust in government, and a possible agenda for restoring faith in the competence and publicspiritedness of public institutions.
Patrick Bresette will examine different types of “distrust in government,” and the different agendas they demand.
David Callahan will focus on how to increase faith in the integrity of government, with particular emphasis on the need for progressives to take seriously allegations of corruption and special-interest influence.
Thomas Edsall will look at the effects of economic and fiscal austerity, and the likelihood of partisan polarization around the division of public resources.
Peter Levine will discuss direct citizen participation in government as a critical element in restoring faith in public institutions.
We will publish these essays serially, and will continue the forum as long as it takes to accommodate reactions, comment, and discussion.
Finally, as a separate companion piece to these essays, The Democratic Strategist is also releasing a special “TDS Strategy Memo” by Andrew Levison that presents a “common sense populist” communications strategy for overcoming public distrust of government. (A PDF version of the Strategy Memo is available here).

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Most economists believe that while the recovery remains fragile, it is likely to accelerate over the next year. As recently as a month ago, the American people agreed. But they don’t anymore. And there is a threat that these suddenly gloomy expectations could turn out to be perversely self-fulfilling–causing Americans to stop spending and investing, and thus hobbling the pace of economic growth to slow the already subpar job rebound.
Two recent surveys highlight the shift in popular sentiment. Drawing on data collected between February 24 and February 28, the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll documents a startling collapse of economic confidence. As recently as last month, 40 percent of American thought the economy would get better during the next year–the highest level of optimism since the spring of 2010–while only 17 percent expected it to get worse. Now, only 29 percent expect improvement; an equal share–29 percent–fear deterioration. And Gallup measures economic confidence on a weekly basis, using an index that combines perceptions of current conditions with assessments of economic trends. Two weeks ago, it had reached its highest level since January of 2008. Since then, the index has fallen by twelve percentage points, and nearly all the change comes from a plunge in expectations. Two weeks ago, 43 percent saw the economy as getting better; by last week, only 33 percent did.
There is a danger that, if households hunker down in response, the economy and job market would shift into lower gear. President Obama has a huge stake in avoiding this, from the perspectives of both policy and politics. It would be uncomfortable enough for Obama to run for reelection with unemployment around 8 percent, down from its peak but still higher than when he took office. But it would be much worse–possibly fatal–for him to wage that battle with unemployment anywhere near today’s level.
Only recent events could account for such an abrupt shift, which Gallup attributes to rapidly increasing gas prices and growing public concern about government finances at every level. If Gallup is right, Obama should try to reach an ironclad agreement with major oil-producing countries to increase production and compensate for any fallout from the Libyan civil war, so that market psychology might shift in a favorable direction and push crude oil prices down. Whether the Saudis, who are still seething at what they see as his abandonment of Hosni Mubarak, would be willing to help out, is another question altogether.
On the fiscal front, Obama has a growing incentive to strike a multi-year deal that shifts the focus away from short-term budget cuts and instead brings long-term deficits down to a sustainable level. Here again, public opinion is flashing warning signs: According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, 62 percent of people are concerned that the president won’t go far enough in cutting programs and reducing spending to deal with the budget deficit; only 26 percent fear that he’ll go too far. Unless he gets more involved, the public predisposition to see him as fiscally fainted-hearted could harden into the judgment that he’s part of the problem, not the solution.
This approach would be more popular than the Republican alternative. The American people favor cuts in programs such as energy subsidies and unnecessary weapons systems as well as an outright five-year freeze in domestic spending. They strongly support imposing an income surtax on millionaires and phasing out the Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year. They even profess themselves willing to reduce Medicare and Social Security benefits for wealthier retirees and to gradually raise the retirement age. But more drastic changes, such as turning Medicare into a voucher system, which House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan proposed last year, would run into a buzz-saw of public opposition.
It’s hard to say how all this will sort itself out. But one thing seems clear: The longer the uncertainty persists about the course of gas prices, state and local finances, and the federal budget, the harder it will become for the economy to get up a head of steam. If a president who prides himself on his ability to take the long view actually does so now, he will get himself off the ropes and into the center of the ring.

Of all the Republican spin coming out of Washington in recent months, nothing quite exceeds in audacity this statement by House Speaker John Boehner in response to the jobs report showing unemployment dipping below 9%:

“The improvement seen in this report is a credit to the hard work of the American people and their success in stopping the tax hikes that were due to hit our economy on January 1,” Boehner says in a statement. “Removing the uncertainty caused by those looming tax hikes provided much-needed relief for private-sector job creators in America.

Gee, mighty nice of Boehner to give a shout-out to “the American people,” and not just those wealthy “job creators,” currently sitting on some of the highest business profits in recent history, that the rest of us must perpetually bow down to if we’d like to have a job. It’s especially amusing to see someone who is holding the operations of the federal government hostage to demands for new budget cuts take credit for reducing “uncertainty.”
Until fairly recently, there was something of a bipartisan consensus in this country that economic growth depended on a variety of factors other than corporate or high-income tax rates, such as the skills and knowledge of the work force, the positioning of the country with respect to key future industries like sustainable energy, and national progress on challenges like rising health care costs. Yes, conservatives worried about top-end tax rates and regulatory costs, but few if any pretended these were the only issues. Now, at a time of almost unprecedented income inequality, the GOP is committed to the proposition that only by making the rich richer can anyone else be vouchsafed any sort of future at all. That, my friends, is a particularly perverse form of the “class warfare” conservatives are always accusing progressives of trying to foment.

Andy Kroll has a good MoJo article, “Inside Labor’s Epic Battle in Wisconsin: How big labor and progressive groups pulled off the biggest protests in 40 years,” featuring a dramatically told account of the protests.The lede:

They piled off of buses and out of cars, filling the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, and surrounding the towering Capitol. Thousands crowded inside the building’s beautiful rotunda, their cheers echoing throughout the domed structure. An estimated 100,000 people had descended on frigid Madison to protest Republican Governor Scott Walker’s “budget repair bill,” a sweeping piece of legislation that would strip 170,000 public-sector workers of their right to collectively bargain.
Last Saturday’s “Rally to Save the American Dream” was the culmination of two weeks of protests and a 24-7 sit-in inside the Capitol. Not for 30 or 40 years have unions and progressive groups come together in such an outpouring of support for workers’ rights. What makes the Madison protests even more incredible is how spontaneous they have been: There has been no master plan, no long-anticipated strategy to turn Madison into ground zero for a reenergized labor movement.

Kroll explains how Wisconsin progressives rose up and got organized in the wake of the hideous beating Dems took there in November, after losing both chambers of the state legislature and watching the governorship be taken over by a union-hating ideologue. It’s an inspiring and instructive case study, one which provides hope and guidance for Dems across the nation.

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Unfortunately, Wisconsin has no provisions authorizing initiative and referendum in state law. It’s a shame, because polls indicate that Wisconsin voters would shred Governor Walker’s union-busting measure in short order.
In Ohio, however, not only is such a referendum possible, there is very likely going to be one to repeal a GOP-supported measure that would limit public employee collective bargaining and strike rights, as Evan McMorris-Santoro reports in his Talking Points Memo post, “The Next Union Battlefield In Ohio: The Ballot Box.”

As the Ohio state House prepares to take up the controversial collective bargaining and union rights provisions contained in the just-passed state Senate Bill 5, union supporters and Democrats are looking ahead to a battle that will put the legislation in the hands of people they say are on their side: the voters of Ohio.
Though they plan to fight SB 5 tooth-and-nail as it works its way through the Republican-controlled House, leaders of the SB 5 opposition tell TPM that they don’t expect to win there. There are 59 Republicans in the House and just 40 Democrats, meaning there’s little chance for a repeat of the drama seen in the Senate, where SB 5 passed by just one vote.
But, thanks to the eccentricities of Ohio law, passage in the House doesn’t mean SB 5 is guaranteed to go into effect. Though they more than likely can’t stop it in the legislature, the opposition can potentially block its implementation by promising to take it on at the ballot box. That means the fight over SB 5 could extend for months — maybe even all the way to November, 2012.

After Republican Governor Kasich signs the bill into law next week, there will be a 90-day period during which opponents of the union-busting bill will gather 231,147 signatures (6% of the vote total in the 2010 gubernatorial race) to put the referendum invalidating the legislation on the ballot. The referendum could appear on either the 2011 or 2012 ballot, depending on the date the governor signs the bill. Either way, union supporters believe they can win.
If the referendum is held in 2012, it would likely increase turnout among voters who would be inclined to vote Democratic, which could put Ohio’s electoral votes in President Obama’s tally. That would be fitting poetic justice of a high order for union-busting Republicans.

I made a case yesterday as to why Newt Gingrich could conceivably make himself attractive to dominant conservative elites and actual voters, if he ever gets his act together to launch a presidential campaign.
But Nate Silver offers a pretty good argument that Gingrich is neither popular enough among hard-core conservatives to lift himself from the field among activists, nor with enough of the public at large to make him attractive on electibility grounds:
As compared to Huckabee, Palin and Romney, the other potential ’12ers polled most often:

[A]mong Republican voters, Mr. Gingrich has the lowest favorable rating of the brand-name candidates, and the highest unfavorable one….
Last month, Gallup detailed primary preferences among 21 different demographic categories of Republican voters; Mr. Gingrich ranked no higher than third among any of them.

Things don’t look better for Newt among the general electorate; they actually look worse:

Based on a simple average of all polls since Nov. 1, Mr. Gingrich’s numbers with the general population are 32 percent favorable, 47 percent unfavorable. Those numbers are somewhat worse than when we checked in on Mr. Gingrich a year ago, when they were 35 percent favorable, 38 percent unfavorable.
They’re also not appreciably better than those of the supposedly unelectable Sarah Palin; Mr. Gingrich is perhaps one gaffe away from joining her on the other side of the 50 percent unfavorable mark.

So Gingrich is falling between the two stools of base appeal and electibility.
Now Gingrich’s standing is, like any candidate’s, dependent on the shape of the field, and as much trouble as he is having launching a campaign, he’s a lot closer than most of his potential rivals. But to become viable, he’s going to have to come up with a rationale for his nomination that’s more compelling than his apparent belief he’s some sort of Churchillian world-historical figure destined to lead the Republic in troubled times.