In his most recent ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira presents data indicating that conservatives have a lot to be worried about, regarding the political attitudes of the rising Millennial generation, “the most progressive generation in the electorate, and its political influence rises every year as more of that generation becomes eligible to vote.” As Teixeira explains:

Conservatives hoped that the severe economic problems of the last few years would solve their generational problem. These problems, they thought, would lead Millennials to blame President Barack Obama and progressives for our current difficulties and desert the progressive camp.
Well, think again. A massive new Pew study on “The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election” indicates that the Millennial generation adults (defined by Pew as those adults born 1981 or after) remain resolutely progressive.

Teixeira offers a few examples:

On current economic policy, 55 percent of Millennials think the higher priority for the federal government should be spending to help the economy recover rather than reducing the budget deficit (41 percent).
On health care, 67 percent of Millennials either want to expand the 2010 health care legislation (44 percent) or leave it as it is (23 percent). Just 27 percent want to repeal it.
On social issues, 59 percent of Millennials support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, compared to only 35 percent who oppose this.
On foreign policy, 66 percent of Millennials believe the best way to achieve peace is through good diplomacy, compared to 27 percent who believe the best way to peace is through military strength.

On the major issues of the day, the latest opinion data indicate that a healthy majority of Millennial Generation embraces progressive values — and it’s increasingly clear which party is in the best position to benefit from their preferences.

Writing in The Nation, John Nichols reports that, less than a week out, the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is broad, deep and growing. According to Nichols, the recall drive has collected over 105K signatures of the needed 540 thousand signatures in its first four days, with about 2 months left to gather the remaining signatures.

It was not just that thousands were signing recall petitions on the Capitol Square in Madison…They were doing it in all seventy-two Wisconsin counties…The movement to recall Governor Scott Walker and Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch is just that: a movement. It extends across the state, to every county, to every city, village and town.
As the November 15 starting date when the movement would begin gathering petitions to recall Walker and Kleefisch approached, training sessions for petition circulators were being held in the most Republican counties of the state. More than thirty offices opened and were staffed by volunteers in communities such as Elkhorn in traditionally conservative Walworth County, where a “midnight madness” party was held last Tuesday so that petitions could be signed the minute it was possible to do so…
The political process is sick with spin and deception. But the biggest lie of the past year has been the suggestion, peddled primarily by Walker but also by the most disingenuous of his supporters, that anger with the governor has been confined to the liberal precincts of Madison or the Democratic neighborhoods of Milwaukee.
The truth is that with his assault on collective bargaining rights, the civil service system, local democracy, school funding and public services, Walker battered every town, village, city and county in Wisconsin. And with ethical scandals that are now swirling around him–following the September FBI raid on the home of his top political appointee and the revelation that his press secretary and one of his top fund raisers had requested immunity in a “John Doe” probe of political corruption–Walker has earned the scorn even of those Wisconsinites who will never think of themselves as liberals or Democrats.
The movement to displace Walker and Kleefisch, who had served as a willing rubber-stamp for the governor, is big. The grassroots energy across the state, the size of the crowd at Saturday’s rally, the number of signatures already collected: all of these confirm the historic scope and reach of the recall drive.
The movement to displace Walker and Kleefisch is broad-based. Trainings have taken place in every corner of the state. There are local committees, groups and activist circles in all of Wisconsin’s seventy-two counties. The recall movement takes in Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, independents and, yes, Republicans. That’s because Wisconsin’s instinct for fairness is stronger than the penchant for partisanship, as state Senator Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, confirmed when he refused to go along with efforts by Walker’s legislative stooges to rig the recall process.
…From Kenosha in the southeast to Superior in the northwest, from the inner-city wards of Milwaukee to the crossroads towns of Marathon County, Wisconsinites are rising to the call of democracy and honest governance. They are signing petitions, circulating petitions, filing petitions and defending petitions against bogus challenges from lawyers who are paid for by the out-of-state billionaires who are funding the Walker-Kleefisch campaign. And when the petitioning is done, when the recall election is scheduled, they will mount the greatest grassroots campaign Wisconsin has seen in a century–not just to remove Walker and Kleefisch but to renew the democratic ideals of a great state that has been temporarily misled.

According to Nichols, “a multimillion-dollar effort paid for by the billionaire Koch brothers and other anti-labor zealots from across the country who have financed Walker’s campaigns” is trying to defeat the recall. He cites reports of incidents of intimidation, and one estimate that pro-Walker forces may spend at least $50 million.
But don’t expect the recall movement to be intimidated. As Nichols says, “Rooted as it is in the values and ideals of Wisconsin, the recall movement is genuine and determined. It has put pettiness aside and focused on the work at hand: removing a governor who has harmed the state economically, ethically and morally–and a lieutenant governor who has rejected her oath to defend the constitution and the best interests of Wisconsin.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Senior officials don’t define administrations; presidents do, by making the strategic decisions that reshape events. For the latest confirmation of this age-old truth, we need look no farther than Jackie Calmes’s excellent article on Tim Geithner, the one economic advisor Obama “fought to keep.” Toward the end of her piece, she reports the following, which occurred on a conference call shortly after the 2008 election:

Mr. Obama spoke of the transformative domestic policies he had promised and now would pursue. Mr. Geithner, say people familiar with the exchange, cautioned that the crisis Mr. Obama had inherited was so severe that it would constrain him.
“Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression,” Mr. Geithner said.
Vexed, Mr. Obama replied, “That’s not enough for me.”

And there you have it: an advisor giving the president-elect wise advice, which was instantly rejected as insufficiently transformative. The rest is history.
From the moment he was elected, Obama had two agendas–the agenda of choice, on which he had waged his campaign, and the agenda of necessity, forced upon him by events. In effect, Geithner was arguing that the latter would require the president-elect to defer much of the former. Obama responded by deciding to do both, simultaneously. That is the choice that led to a year spent on measures such as health insurance reform and cap-and-trade legislation. While the former was successful and the latter failed, both initiatives no doubt measurably contributed to the Democrats’ 2010 mid-term debacle.
We will never know what would have happened if Obama had taken his Treasury Secretary’s advice, any more than Stephen King knows what would have happened if JFK had lived. Still, the possibilities are intriguing. Would the president have insisted on tougher treatment for miscreant financial institutions, starting with Citigroup, despite his Treasury Secretary’s evident misgivings? Would he have demanded a serious response to the housing crisis, despite his National Economic Council director’s belief that all the policy options were counterproductive and stupid? Would he have pushed to redeem his campaign promise to create a national infrastructure bank? Would he have traded additional stimulus for a long-term agreement on fiscal stabilization? Would he have figured out how to end the Bush tax cuts as part of comprehensive tax reform? Would he have broken the logjam on trade much earlier in his term? Would he have exerted more pressure on the Chinese for a comprehensive rebalancing of our economic relationship?
Of course, many of these moves would have required a modicum of cooperation from Republicans, something that was evidently in short supply during Obama’s first term. But he might have gotten them to go along with a tougher stance toward the banks, as the nascent Tea Party revolt was demanding, and perhaps a firmer policy toward China, which even Mitt Romney is now advocating. Many liberals probably would be unwilling to trade the administration’s accomplishments in extending health insurance (however flawed they see it as being), for any of the economic options I’ve listed. But if growth doesn’t pick up over the next year and Obama ends up as a one-term president, his supporters will long ask themselves what might have been–if he had accepted the logic of his situation and played the hand he was dealt.

Jeffrey Sachs’s post “The Super Committee’s Big Lie” at the HuffPo has some information Democratic campaigns should find helpful in crafting responses to GOP myth-mongering about taxes. Sachs, a Columbia University economist and director of The Earth Institute, has harsh words for the Super Committee in general. But the most interesting and potentially useful part of his post has to do with making an important distinction between the economies of Southern and Northern Europe:

…Each day, Republicans warn us that if we raise taxes we will end up like Europe, that is, in collapse. Democrats, for their part, go silent, not sure what to make of the argument.
Here’s what to make of it: it’s plain wrong. Europe per se is not in crisis. Southern Europe is in crisis. Northern Europe, by contrast, where the taxes are higher than in Southern Europe, is vastly outperforming the United States.
Consider three key dimensions of the economic crisis: high unemployment, large budget deficits, and high current account deficits (broadly meaning more imports than exports). To compare how countries are doing, I’ll create a simple Misery Index equal to the sum of these three indicators. In 2010, for example, the U.S. had a Misery Index equal to 23.4, the sum of a 9.6 percent unemployment rate, a budget deficit equal to 10.6 percent of GDP, and a foreign (current account) deficit of 3.2 percent of GDP.
When we calculate the Misery Index for the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe, we find that, lo and behold, the U.S. ranks among the most miserable performers, 5th out of 20 countries. The country with the highest Misery Index is Ireland, followed by Spain, Greece, Portugal, and the United States. All five countries deregulated their financial markets and thereby experienced a housing bubble and bust.
The lowest macroeconomic misery is in Northern Europe. Norway has the lowest score, followed by Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Demark. All seven countries have lower unemployment rates, smaller budget deficits as a share of GDP, and lower foreign deficits as a share of GDP, than the U.S. We look pretty miserable indeed by comparison.
Yet, miracle of miracles, these seven countries collect higher taxes as a share of GDP than does the U.S. Total government revenues in the U.S. (adding federal, state, and local taxes) totaled 33.1 percent of GDP in 2010. This compares with 56.5, 34.2, 39.5, 45.9, 52.7, and 43.4 percent of GDP in Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark, respectively. These much higher levels of taxation are raised through a combination of personal, corporate, payroll, and value-added taxes.
The Northern European countries earn their prosperity not through low taxation but through high taxation sufficient to pay for government. In five of the seven countries, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, and Sweden, government spending as a share of GDP is much higher than in the U.S. These countries enjoy much better public services, better educational outcomes, more gainful employment, higher trade balances, lower poverty, and smaller budget deficits. High-quality government services reach all parts of the society. The U.S., stuck with its politically induced “low-tax trap,” ends up with crummy public services, poor educational outcomes, high and rising poverty, and a huge budget deficit to boot.

For a more extensive breakdown of the data in Sach’s ‘misery index,’ see here.
It’s a point that merits more repetition in public debate. I’ve noticed that even many liberals, including some commentators, talk about the ‘troubled European economy,’ in part because of a misguided tendency to think of the EEC as an economic entity that trumps the economic policies of individual nations. I once saw Sachs make the correction with a couple of sentences in a televised panel discussion to good effect, leaving his fellow panelists and viewers better educated about the possible effects of fair taxes, as well as what’s really going on in Europe. It’s not the kind of message you can boil down into a soundbite, but I’m thinking Sach’s argument could be leveraged to help Dems with high-information swing voters.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
This weekend’s “Thanksgiving Family Forum” at a Des Moines megachurch probably seemed like a great idea to Iowa social conservatives when it was first developed. You’d have the presidential candidates arrayed around a “Thanksgiving table,” obediently waiting for a symbolic serving of activist support. In the pews would be thousands of stolid Iowans of the sort most likely to show up at the January 3 caucuses. Wielding the microphone would be focus-group king Frank Luntz, probing the worldviews of the candidates to determine their fidelity to a teavangelical, big-God, small-government creed. And at the head of the table, in spirit at least, would be Iowa right-wing kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, ready to crown one of the candidates as the Mike Huckabee of 2012.
It could still play out that way, of course, but the political context surrounding the Thanksgiving Family Forum, cosponsored by Vander Plaats’ FAMiLY Leader group, the National Organization for Marriage, and Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink affiliate, suggests the effort to unite Christian Right voters around a single candidate in Iowa could prove too little and too late. Mitt Romney isn’t even bothering to show up for Vander Plaats’s intended display of power, which may be a shrewd estimate of its futility. And with CSPAN pulling its cameras, the event won’t even be televised (though it will be live-streamed by CitizenLink). Indeed, Iowa’s social conservatives, long used to enjoying a remarkable degree of fealty from any GOP candidate hoping to catch fire as a result of a strong caucus showing, are facing an incredibly frightening prospect: their own irrelevance.
Until very recently, Bob Vander Plaats, a perennial statewide candidate who made his mark on the Iowa political landscape with his co-chairmanship of Huck’s 2008 upset win and his role in the successful 2010 purge of three of the Iowa Supreme Court judges who issued the decision legalizing same-sex marriage in 2009, had enjoyed outsize political influence over the Republican Party. And with the 2012 GOP presidential cycle looming, most pundits assumed his Iowa-based group would only garner an even greater status within the party. But FAMiLY Leader quickly stumbled in its first big bid for relevance with its sponsorship in July of a pledge document, entitled “The Marriage Vow,” which was intended to mousetrap candidates lusting for a victory in the August Iowa GOP Straw Poll into a litany of very specific right-wing positions on “family issues” (e.g., same-sex relationships, abortion, and even contraception and divorce). The group’s Vow was so clumsily drafted (implying, for example, that African-American families were better off as slaves than they are today) that all the candidates other than Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum felt free to give it a pass, even though Vander Plaats warned it was a precondition to receiving the group’s endorsement.
Even more importantly, Iowa social conservatives seemed to hurt themselves through their inability to unite behind and stick with a single candidate. Maybe if they’d accepted Tim Pawlenty’s arduous courtship earlier this year, he would have emerged as the “viable conservative alternative” to Mitt Romney. Perhaps if they’d united behind Michele Bachmann the day after her victory in the Iowa Straw Poll, her campaign would have shown more staying power. But instead they hopped over to Rick Perry, only to abandon ship for Herman Cain, who with no end in sight for his sexual harassment/sexual assault scandal is hardly looking like a safe bet for the godly.
This demolition derby of candidates acceptable to people like Vander Plaats has left Iowa’s social conservatives in a highly vulnerable position now. If Mitt Romney manages to win the caucuses with the kind of half-hearted effort he has put into the state so far–all the while ignoring would-be kingmakers–the whole supposition that future candidates must spend every other day in the Hawkeye State for months and years before votes are cast will be significantly undermined. A Ron Paul win, meanwhile, would simply be a testament to his own permanent following, not to any Iowa-specific factor, and would also waste Iowa’s endorsement, since there’s no chance he’ll win the nomination. And even if Cain or Gingrich come out on top, it too will prove the irrelevance of directly courting Iowa’s social conservative leaders: Their surges in state polls are a result of the national appeal they generated through debate performances, not through their practically nonexistent ground-games in Iowa. Indeed, it must be disturbing to all Iowa Republicans to consider the fate of Pawlenty and Bachmann, candidates who “played by the rules” with an intensive focus on personal appearances and organizational efforts in the state only to come away with nothing to show for it.
So to whom can Vander Plaats and his group turn now for redemption? Rick Santorum is the only other candidate who has devoted real time and resources to campaigning around the state, which is why teavangelicals who believe their leverage in Iowa is the most important source of their leverage in the national GOP could give him a good long look at the Thanksgiving Family Forum. Some might find it strange that a Roman Catholic like Santorum could wind up being the last-gasp hope of Vander Plaats and his associates, but only a few cranks among conservative evangelicals still regard Rome as “the whore of Babylon;” most are long used to close cooperation with traditionalist Catholics in the anti-choice and anti-gay rights movements. Moreover, Santorum not only signed the “Marriage Vow,” but has defined his candidacy from the beginning in terms of hard-core, no-compromise social conservatism, even as better-known conservative candidates like Perry and Cain struggled on occasion with their positions on abortion and gay marriage. But in getting behind a candidate as uncharismatic and unrealistic as Santorum, Vander Plaats and his associates would be taking a big risk: If Santorum fails to launch, Iowa’s social conservatives would appear to be paper tigers hardly worth noticing–and that would no doubt be considered the worst fate of all.

In the coming days the Occupy Wall Street movement faces an extremely complex and difficult series of decisions about its strategy and tactics. It cannot simply repeat the initial tactic of occupying public spaces that it has employed up to now but it has not yet developed any clear alternative strategy for the future.
In debating their next steps the protesters – and the massive numbers of Americans who support them – will turn again and again to the history and example of the civil rights movement for guidance. Martin Luther King’s closest advisors including Jessie Jackson and Andrew Young have noted the clear historical parallels that exist between the two protest movements and both activists and observers will urgently seek to find lessons in the struggles of the past.
The discussion, however, will be hindered by the profoundly oversimplified vision that many people today have of how the victories of the civil rights movement were actually achieved. Most Americans have little more than a series of impressionistic images of the civil rights movement – police dogs and fire hoses unleashed against the demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, dramatic marches attacked by police in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and, across the south, sit-ins and freedom rides that rocked the region in the early years of the decade. In this vision, dramatic confrontations with the authorities appear to have been, in effect, the movement’s entire “strategy.”
But, in fact, behind every major campaign of the civil rights movement there was actually a very organized and coherent three-pronged strategy. To seriously seek guidance for the present in the struggles of the past, it is absolutely indispensible to understand the basic socio-political strategy that the movement employed.
The civil rights movement’s three-pronged strategy combined:

(1) Civil disobedience
(2) Grass-roots organizing and voter registration
(3) Boycotts and economic withdrawal

In every single major campaign of the civil rights movement – Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma — these three elements of the overall strategy were employed in a coherent, mutually supporting and reinforcing way. In contrast, no part of this coordinated approach was ever successful in isolation.
Seen in this light, there are indeed reasonable comparisons between the civil rights movement and the initial phase of Occupy Wall Street. OWS represents a modern application of civil disobedience, the first component of the civil rights movement’s three-pronged strategy. The essence of civil disobedience (also called “nonviolent direct action”) is the use of dramatic protests that disrupt normal activities and usually violate the law. They are designed to call attention to the existence of injustice and win public sympathy through the demonstrators willingness to risk danger and injury and to go to jail for their cause.

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