Rave reviews of President Obama’s Osawatomie speech are still rolling in. Writing at The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky had this to say:

…This was Obama’s best speech in a very, very long time, and it showed that he and his political people have finally figured out how to express the new, quasi-populist mood in this country in a way that sounds utterly majoritarian and unthreatening–and that backs the GOP into the corner of defending things that most Americans find indefensible. The tide is turning, and while it wasn’t the president who turned it, at least it’s clear that he understands the moment and seizing it.

Tomasky was impressed with the President’s grasp of the reality of class conflict in this political moment — and the way the middle class majority perceives it going into 2012:

…I counted 25 mentions of “middle class” in the speech. Finally–maybe, if he keeps it up–the Democrats have a broad and coherent response to trickle-down economics: middle-class economics. It’s ridiculously simple. It’s like a melody in a new pop song that you hear, and it’s so catchy and instantly memorable that you can’t believe that no one has written it until now….A strong majority of Americans is fed up with stagnation, with inequality, with the unfairness of the economic system.

Tomasky credits the President with a breakthrough realization, one that should serve him well in the campaign ahead:

…what was important here was the big picture. This is the first speech of Obama’s career, at least his career as a presidential candidate or president, where I felt he achieved a comfortable marriage of his own civic-republican beliefs about national community and principles of political economy that are plainly but not off-puttingly progressive. That he invoked the ghost of a Republican president to do it is so much the better. TR wouldn’t want much to do with Paul Ryan, and most Americans don’t either.

The President is on the right track, Tomasky feels. And if he can keep it rolling, the tide will turn in Democrats’ favor. “…If, 11 months from now, people are talking with their neighbors about how, for all his faults, Obama is the guy who’s on the side of the middle class and who has made it patriotic to say so, then the Republican candidate will be in a heap of trouble.”

WaPo columnist Greg Sargent takes a look at President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie Kansas, and finds it to be a critical point of departure, “a moral and philosophical framework within which literally all of the political and policy battles of the next year will unfold, including the biggest one of all: The presidential campaign itself.” Citing Obama’s emphasis on “inequality itself as a moral scourge and as a threat to the country’s future,” Sargent continues:

Obama’s speech in Kansas, which just concluded, was the most direct condemnation of wealth and income inequality, and the most expansive moral defense of the need for government activism to combat it, that Obama has delivered in his career…
The clash of visions Obama tried to set the stage for today — a philosophical and moral argument over government’s proper role in regulating the economy and restoring our future — is seen by Dems as more favorable to them than the GOP’s preferred frame for Campaign 2012, i.e., a referendum on the current state of the economy and on Obama’s efforts to fix it. Hence his constant references to the morality of “fairness.”
“We simply cannot return to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country,” Obama said, in what will probably be the most enduring line of the speech. A number of people on Twitter immediately suggested a new shorthand: “YoYo Economics.”
That line is key in another way. Dems believe inequality will be central in 2012 because they think there’s been a fundamental shift in how Americans view the economy, one rooted in the plight of the middle class and in the trauma created by the financial crisis.

A New York Times editorial affirms Sargent’s evaluation of the President’s speech:

The speech felt an awfully long time in coming, but it was the most potent blow the president has struck against the economic theory at the core of every Republican presidential candidacy and dear to the party’s leaders in Congress. The notion that the market will take care of all problems if taxes are kept low and regulations are minimized may look great on a bumper sticker, but, he said: “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” Not before the Great Depression, not in the ’80s, and not in the last decade.
The president repeated his calls for the rich to pay higher taxes, for financial institutions to be more closely regulated and for education to become a national mission. What set this speech apart was the newly forceful explanation of why those policies are necessary. Incomes of the top 1 percent, he noted, have more than doubled in the last decade while the average income has fallen by 6 percent.
Mr. Obama was late to Roosevelt’s level of passion and action on behalf of the middle class and the poor, having missed several opportunities to make the tax burden more fair and demand real action on the housing crisis from the big banks that he excoriated so effectively in his speech.
But he has fought energetically for a realistic plan to put Americans back to work and has been stymied at every step by Republicans. That seems to have burned away his old urge to conciliate and compromise, and he is now fully engaged against the philosophy of his opponents.
Tuesday’s speech, in fact, seemed expressly designed to counter Mitt Romney’s argument that business, unfettered, will easily restore American jobs and prosperity. Teddy Roosevelt knew better 101 years ago, and it was gratifying to hear his fire reflected by President Obama.

Perhaps it’s not just Teddy Roosevelt the white house is channeling. The growing popularity of Elizabeth Warren in the MA Senate race, along with the Occupy demonstrations serve as potent indicators that a focused populist message may well be the Democrats’ best hope for exciting the base, winning swing voters and holding the white house and Senate in 2012.
From here on in, Dems will have no quarter for economic injustice in the 2012 campaign. As Sargent concludes, “…We’ll be hearing these themes countless times between now and election day. And those who had hoped that Obama and Dems would make an unapologetically populist and moral case against inequality and economic injustice central to Campaign 2012 should be pretty pleased with what they heard today.”

If you have any friends or acquaintances you would like to educate about the importance of labor unions in creating a decent society, refer them to Robert Kuttner’s excellent article, “A More Perfect Union” at The American Prospect. Subtitled “New York’s Local 6 shows how organized labor can survive and thrive in the service economy,’ Kuttner’s piece spotlights an important local union of New York City’s hotel and restaurant workers and shows how it serves both members and political progress. Some excerpts:

…The Local 6 story suggests that in the enduring struggle of ordinary workers for fair treatment and a fair share of the national product, unions are not only more necessary than ever but still possible…At Local 6, three generations of union leaders have continued to build on the power bequeathed to them by their predecessors, not for their own personal gain but for their membership. Union leaders do not double dip by collecting extra pay as pension- or health-fund trustees; union officers and delegates are democratically elected, and the delegates work as volunteers for no fees. Local 6 also has been corruption-free…The union keeps finding new ways to mobilize the membership, and success builds on success. The union’s members have friends and relatives working in nonunion establishments and know the value of what they’ve got.

It’s a stark contrast from the workplace environment of nonunion shops in the industry.

Absent a union, the boss can fire for any reason or no reason at all. Management can be as arbitrary as it likes in assigning shifts, defining jobs, deciding whom to lay off and whom to call back. No formal process is required, and no explanation need be given. In a city with a large immigrant population at a time of high unemployment, there is a seemingly endless supply of workers willing to do casual jobs at low wages and fearful of being fired. All of which raises the $25-an-hour question. At a time when the strength of unions is dwindling, how does Local 6 do it?

Kuttner sketches the grievance process.

…Effective unions have long used shop stewards–regular workers who are available to listen to grievances and press complaints with managers. Local 6 takes the concept to a new level of sophistication and engagement. In New York’s union hotels, shop stewards are called delegates. They and assistant delegates are elected directly by the membership at each hotel. Every job category has one or several delegates depending on the hotel’s size.
…If a delegate cannot settle a dispute, it goes to the union business agent, a paid staffer who is responsible for several hotels. If there are still differences, the contract provides for binding arbitration. The union also has a tradition that it reserves for special occasions when it needs to make a point–the lobby meeting.
…Because of the union’s institutional power, however, the choreography of resolving disputes is mostly ritualized and peaceful. The contract spells out rights and responsibilities in detail, and the ultimate recourse to binding arbitration gives management an incentive to settle minor issues before they become major ones….The heavily immigrant union–67 languages are spoken among the membership–runs continuing–education programs that range from English as a second language to culinary school.

Unions deliver in terms of politics, notes Kuttner, locally, as well as nationally:

…One of the union’s newer innovations is the Hotel Employees Action Teams, or HEAT. Through HEAT, the union’s members become more involved in local politics, working to elect supportive public officials. At a time when political campaigning is often reduced to writing checks, HEAT is one of the remaining sources of on-the-ground campaigners knocking on their neighbors’ doors. “They punch above their weight,” says Dan Cantor, executive director of New York’s Working Families Party. “Every mayoral candidate is seeking their support.”
…The union’s political alliances pay dividends. A union with well placed friends sends a signal to developers that it’s better to work with the union than against it. A developer seeking to open a new hotel may not want to bargain with the union, but the project must run a gauntlet of zoning approvals, permits, community-planning meetings–all of which can make the developer’s life easy or miserable. The REIT that holds the real estate may be partly owned by another union’s pension fund, which can also encourage the owner to agree to card check.

Kuttner’s piece clarifies, without saying it, why the public workers of Wisconsin and Ohio have fought so hard to protect their collective bargaining rights. As Kuttner explains, “In the end, this story is all about power, and power used responsibly.”

Peter Nicholas of the L.A. Times D.C. Bureau writes on the importance of President Obama’s Pennsylvania campaign. “It’s too early to say the president is on the ropes,” writes Nicholas. “But there’s no question that his approval ratings have fallen, here as elsewhere. In a Quinnipiac poll last month, 44% of those surveyed said they approved of Obama’s performance in office. The same poll showed him in a dead heat statewide when matched against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney…Registered Democrats still far outnumber Republicans, but the GOP has narrowed the gap by 125,000 since the 2008 election.”
Marc Pitzke’s “The Republicans’ Farcical Candidates: A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses” at Spiegel Online International provides a capsule description of the GOP presidential field in the title. Says Pitzke, “They lie. They cheat. They exaggerate. They bluster. They say one idiotic, ignorant, outrageous thing after another. They’ve shown such stark lack of knowledge — political, economic, geographic, historical — that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein and even cause their fellow Republicans to cringe. …What a nice club that is. A club of liars, cheaters, adulterers, exaggerators, hypocrites and ignoramuses. “A starting point for a chronicle of American decline,” was how David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described the current Republican race.”
Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul ain’t having it — something about maintaining a semblance of, ahem, dignity — but the rest of the GOP prez aspirants are lining up to kiss the ring of The Donald, reports WaPo’s Aaron Blake.
Clown allusions are all over the blogosphere and the MSM, as the stunned journalistic community struggles to describe the GOP circus. Paul Krugman’s “Send in the Clueless” sheds a little light on the surreal mess the Republicans have made of their pre-primary season: “Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year…You also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security…So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless…that’s why the Republican primary has taken the form it has, in which a candidate nobody likes and nobody trusts has faced a series of clueless challengers, each of whom has briefly soared before imploding under the pressure of his or her own cluelessness.”
Not to pile on with the cluelessness theme, but today Romney will proudly welcome the much-coveted Dan Quayle endorsement, according to USA Today On Politics.
Nonetheless, T. W. Farnam reports at Washington Post Politics that 42 billionaires have contributed to Romney’s campaign, and adds “Although donors are limited to giving no more than $5,000 directly to a campaign, new rules allow them to give to “super PACs” that run independent ads supporting the candidates. Donations to super PACs are not limited, so billionaires can donate as much as they want.”
At CNN Politics, Julian Zelizer mulls over “How Democrats could win with a ‘fairness’ campaign.” Zelizer explains: “With President Obama’s low approval ratings, Democratic candidates won’t want to focus on his record. With the economy likely to still be in laggard condition, Democrats won’t be able to boast that it’s morning in America. With economic concerns front and center for most Americans, Democrats won’t be able to make much headway with talk about the foreign policy successes of this administration…This doesn’t leave candidates with many options. Although some could focus on local issues, they will be under pressure to develop a national theme since Republican candidates will be talking critically about Obama.The most potent theme that the party has to offer is the issue of fairness. Democrats can claim that as Americans struggle to survive in this economy, the party has championed policies that aim to soften the blows voters are suffering and to provide support for the middle class in hard times.”
Mark Schmitt’s “Why Republicans Don’t Mind Newt’s Brazen Flip-Flops” at The New Republic ponders the difference between Mitt’s and Newt’s flip-floppage: “Romney’s flips are tortured and self-conscious, shrouded in nuance and implausible stretches to reconcile two, three, or more positions…Gingrich, on the other hand, makes no such attempt to reconcile his positions…Gingrich seems able to live in an eternal present, in which the statements and actions of each moment are unconnected to anything before or after.”
Demos has a post, “Voter Registration for New Americans: New USCIS Guidance on Voter Registration at Naturalization Ceremonies,” that should be of keen interest to Democrats who want to accelerate naturalization — and voter participation — of Latinos in the U.S. The crux: “In October of 2011, the United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) revised its guidelines regarding the provision of voter registration applications at naturalization ceremonies; and for the first time ever, the USCIS has committed to providing the opportunity to apply to register at every single administrative naturalization ceremony in the country.”
U.S. News Politics has a good update on the campaign for Jewish support. The gist: “Such attention is all being paid in recognition that Jewish voters, though comprising only 2 percent of the electorate nationwide, are an important part of Obama’s base and could make the difference in battleground states including Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada in a close election. Moreover, the Jewish community is an important source of donations, and Obama campaign supporters want to maintain that support as much as Republicans want to chip away at it.”
Things are looking up for Democratic Senate candidates, say Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, writing in Sabato’s Crystal Ball. The authors’ updated ratings cite improved prospects for Dems running for U.S. Senate in six Senate Races: AZ; FL; MA; MN; NJ and WV. “While we still favor Republicans to take the four seats they need to win control of the upper chamber, we can also see a conceivable if unlikely path for the Democrats to retain control if the breaks go their way, especially if President Obama picks up steam in his reelection bid.” Their report includes state by state analyses of all Senate races.

It’s impossible to open a magazine or newspaper these days without running across a fawning, completely credulous article that breathlessly describes a new breed of non-Democratic “moderates” and “centrists” who are said to be sprouting like mushrooms across the country.
These new moderates and centrists are profoundly different from the moderate and centrist political strategists of the Clinton era who sought to prod the Democratic Party toward the “center” in order to win the votes of political independents. Progressives strongly disagreed with these “New Democrats” on many issues but the vast majority of the Clinton era moderates and centrists (with the utterly dishonorable exception of the reptilian Dick Morris and a handful of other political chameleons) were at the time and have subsequently remained firmly and unequivocally committed to working within the Democratic Party.
The new breed of moderates and centrists, in very dramatic contrast, are described as being completely disillusioned with the Democratic Party as well as the GOP and currently wandering about in the political wilderness in search of a new third party or some innovative new technological platform that will allow them to create a political formation far beyond the snares of both Republican and Democratic orthodoxy.
In principle, it is possible to imagine a set of voters who might be attracted to such an alternative. There certainly are many moderate Republicans who feel deeply estranged from the current Republican Party and who yearn for “old fashioned” Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller, George Herbert Walker Bush or Bob Dole but who, at the same time, simply cannot imagine actually voting for a Democrat. On the Democratic side, even though Obama is in many ways the most centrist Dem in recent memory, he is still sufficiently liberal to make some of the more conservative Democratic voters vainly wish for an alternative that is less liberal and more “traditional values” oriented than the modern Democratic Party.
But there’s a massive, unavoidable problem with the idea that the current self-appointed leaders of this potential voting bloc genuinely reflect the views of most “middle of the road/neither Democrat nor Republican” voters. A central pillar of any honest moderate or centrist perspective today must necessarily be the recognition that — while a moderate voter may feel deeply estranged from both political parties – it is also simply impossible for him or her to ignore the fact that the Republicans are vastly more intransigent, rigid and uncompromising in their positions than are the Democrats.
A genuine moderate or centrist is, by the very definition of the two terms, someone who wants to see sincere efforts at compromise coming from both sides of the partisan divide rather than the total capitulation of one side or the other. Yet only a person who is completely – and I mean completely — immersed in the conservative and Republican world-view can seriously believe and assert that the Republicans have actually been just as flexible and willing to compromise as have the Dems.
E.J. Dionne says it well:

Some of my middle-of-the-road columnist friends keep ascribing our difficulties to structural problems in our politics. A few call for a centrist third party. But the problem we face isn’t about structures or the party system. It’s about ideology — specifically a right-wing ideology that has temporarily taken over the Republican Party and needs to be defeated before we can have a reasonable debate between moderate conservatives and moderate progressives about our country’s future.

He continues:

If moderates really want to move the conversation to the center, they should devote their energies to confronting those who are blocking the way. And at this moment, the obstruction is coming from a radicalized right.

In fact, opinion polls show that there are indeed many sincere moderates and centrists who do accept this basic reality. Progressive Democrats may disagree with this group on many subjects, but can nonetheless still grant that they are essentially honest and sincere.
On the other hand, however, a good number of the self-proclaimed leaders and theoreticians of this new centrist “movement” belong to three quite different and substantially less admirable groups. A quick rundown includes three distinct subcategories:

• “Tokyo Rose” Dems who gleefully bash all things Democratic on Fox News
• Faux-sanctimonious “both sides are equally to blame” hypocrites
• Double-talking “have it both ways” verbal gymnasts

Let’s look at them in turn.

Read more…

The following article by Democratic political strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo

Last week, after yet another episode of bizarre behavior on the Republican campaign trial, one of my partners — political consultant John Hennelly — came into my office and asked, “Next, will all eight of these guys ride into the arena piled into a VW Beetle and pile out with big red noses?”
Over the many decades I have observed or participated in presidential primary contests, I don’t think we have ever been treated to such a clown show.
Recall that the show began with a boomlet for Donald Trump who pretended to run for president to promote his TV show. On December 27th the pre-Iowa debate circus will reach its apogee when Trump chairs the last Republican debate of the year.
And the show would not have been the same without former Godfather Pizza czar Herman Cain. Though Cain has now “suspended” his campaign, who can forget the painful video of his attempts to remember which war was the one in Libya, or his absurd “999” tax plan, or the graphic descriptions from the charges of sexual harassment against him? And who didn’t wonder at his seeming surprise when a recent thirteen-year-long affair somehow managed to find its way into the news when he decided to subject himself to the intense scrutiny of a candidate for President of the United States?
The New York Times reported that the announcement that his campaign had been “suspended” had a “circus-like” atmosphere — “complete with numerous postponements, barbecue, a blues band and supporters in colonial-era dress.”
Of course, when the race began most observers thought that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann might take the prize for least-ready-to-lead the free world. After all, she was prone to off-the-wall statements, offered radical right-wing solutions, and she and her husband owned a business that specialized in “fixing” gay people. But the Tea Party faithful’s short infatuation with Bachmann came to a screeching halt the moment Rick Perry entered the race.
Perry launched his campaign at a “prayer rally,” but it turned out he was better at being the “yell leader” at Texas A&M as an undergraduate than in explaining his positions in debates. His minutes-long attempt to remember the third Federal agency he would eliminate if elected president made everybody watching feel almost as uncomfortable as he appears to be exploring virtually any subject with more depth than a sound-bite. And his seemingly inebriated, giggling New Hampshire speech that ended in a near-swooning hug of a bottle of maple syrup was just downright weird.
Last week we were all reminded once again why Rick Perry has some distance to go convincing voters he is, shall we say, “in command of the facts” — when he indicated that he thought that the voting age in the United States was 21 and he didn’t know the date of the General Election to which he is supposedly devoting his life.
It’s no wonder that on Sunday, Congressman Barney Frank said that in his casting of the Republican campaign as the “Wizard of Oz,” Rick Perry would be the Scarecrow — the one who desperately wanted a brain.
That’s not Ron Paul’s problem. Paul has to be regarded as a serious, knowledgeable legislator. His major limitation is that his well-articulated views are somewhere on the other side of the former planet Pluto when it comes to the American mainstream. Paul not only wants to abolish Medicare, like most of the rest of the Republican field. He also thinks both Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. He twice introduced legislation to abolish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that protects workers on the job. He opposes the minimum wage, the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve.
To his credit, Paul doesn’t try to sugarcoat or nuance these proposals. He overtly and articulately champions pure social Darwinism. Problem is that most Americans — including most Republicans — don’t. It sounds fine to many Republican primary voters for a candidate to talk about unfettered individual freedom — but when that translates into eliminating their Social Security check it’s a different matter.
Then there is Rick Santorum, defeated Pennsylvania senator, whose answer to just about any world problem is to ban abortion. So far, at least, Rick hasn’t had a turn at the front of the GOP pack — but it’s never too late.
And poor Jon Huntsman — the Rodney Dangerfield of the show, who just can’t get no respect. Seemingly the most qualified, eloquent, knowledgeable and presentable candidate, Huntsman forgot one thing: there is no way for a moderate to be elected dog catcher by a Republican primary electorate that has cascaded to the right — far, far from the American mainstream.
Huntsman is simply the skunk at the Tea Party.
That leaves us with the two apparent “contenders.” Newt Gingrich — the former House Speaker with a seemingly endless supply of far out “big ideas” — and robot-Romney — whose campaign was, up until recently, based mainly on the “inevitability” of his nomination.
From the beginning of the Republican nominating show the story line has been dominated by one central fact — notwithstanding his reputed “inevitability” — three-fourths of the Republican primary electorate simply doesn’t like Mitt Romney. They don’t like him — and perhaps more important — they don’t trust him.
Romney suffers from two overriding problems.
First, he has no core values beyond his own personal ambition. And that is the dictionary definition of what most Americans think of as a “typical politician.”
If he were performing in a side-show at a carnival, the barker might yell out:
“Step right up, see the amazing Mitt Romney — he looks like one man, but he’s really two candidates in one! Vote for Mitt and you get a pro-choice president and an anti-abortion president. You get a pro-health care reform president and an anti-health care reform president. You get a man who four years ago said he would ‘fight for every job in the auto industry,’ and two years later said that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt. Watch Mitt Romney perform amazing acts of political contortion to please any audience! Watch the man change colors to blend into his political environment the way a lizard changes color to make himself look like a leaf!”
Turns out that voters don’t think they get added value from a candidate that is actually “two candidates in one.” Republican voters, Independent voters, Democratic voters — all have one thing in common. They all want candidates with core values. That is an independent variable in politics. And that is what Mitt Romney isn’t.
John Kerry has a decades-long history of demonstrating his core values, yet in 2004, Karl Rove managed to convince many swing voters that he did not. Think how much easier it will be for Democrats — and for that matter his Republican primary rivals — to convince voters that a guy like Mitt Romney has no core.
That’s why in his version of the “Wizard of Oz,” Barney Frank casts Romney as the Tin Man — the one without a heart.
Romney’s second big problem is that pretty much everyone thinks of him as the poster boy for the one percent. He’s the guy who fired your sister — the cold, calculating numbers guy who clinically evaluates what is best for his bottom line and bloodlessly sends you off a pink slip. No empathy, no human concern. Romney is the fellow at Bain Capital that dismantled companies — and sent some into bankruptcy — all to make him and his deal-making buddies a pile of money.
He’s the guy who posed at the center of his Bain Capital crew with money coming out of their pockets, mouths, sleeves and ears.
You might think that Republican primary voters would think that those qualifications made Romney a capitalist hero. Trouble is, only a very limited number of Republican primary voters actually are the one percent that is the party’s financial base. Many Tea Party voters have some very unfortunate positions on all sorts of subjects — but the polling shows they care about their jobs, their Social Security, their Medicare. As much as they dislike “big government”, they don’t like Wall Street deal makers, either.
The Romney campaign narrative portrays him as problem-solving, effective businessman. Average voters would always prefer to have a president that effectively deals with their problems all right — but they don’t focus entirely on effectiveness. They want to know “effective for whom”?
The threshold question of politics is whether a candidate is “on my side.”
Voters would much rather vote for a candidate who they believe is on their side but ineffective, than one who is very effective advocating against their interests.
In 1988, Mike Dukakis premised his entire campaign on his managerial skill and technocratic effectiveness. After the Democratic Convention he led George H. W. Bush by 17%. Then the Bush campaign savaged Dukakis with a series of advertisements that effectively argued that Dukakis was “not on their side” — that he didn’t “share their values.” Dukakis stuck to his “effectiveness” argument, refusing to take on Bush’s values — the question of who is “on your side.” Ultimately, Bush beat Dukakis nationwide by 7.7% and four to one in the electoral vote.
Romney’s two fundamental problems are complicated by a third. Mitt has a hard time making an emotional connection with the voters. Ask Al Gore if this could be a political problem. And for Romney, the emotional connection issue is even more critical than it was for Gore because those traits tend to amplify people’s views that he has no core values and is a poster boy for the uncaring one percent. Romney seems wooden, scripted — phony and aloof.
In last week’s rare one-on-one interview with Fox News, Romney was brittle. He seemed offended that the interviewer would actually press him on the flip-flops in his record. He appeared to have a sense of entitlement, of aloof superiority that chafes at being questioned.
Romney is a caricature of a guy who was raised in a wealthy, privileged button-down environment.
These are the reasons that, no matter what happens in the rest of the Republican field, Romney never gets beyond about 25% of the primary vote in a poll. And that’s why Newt Gingrich has supplanted Romney as the new “top banana” in the Republican road show.
Conservatives know Gingrich. He may have done some serious flip-flops of his own, but most Conservative voters start with the presumption that Gingrich has been fighting for one version or the other of right wing values his entire career — and they like that. They also like the idea that Gingrich has always been an unapologetic Conservative, come what may, whereas Romney is a political chameleon that changes his spots to please whatever electorate he plans to court. Gingrich may sometimes veer out of control, but he is authentic — and quite a contrast to Romney’s robot-like-scripted phoniness.
The 75% of Republican primary voters have been screen testing all of the remaining candidates for the role of “alternative to Romney” for months. Romney is hoping that they never find a clear, suitable alternative, and his quarter of the vote, coupled with his “inevitability” and the argument that he would have the best chance against Obama, will be enough to power him to the nomination.
But it increasingly looks like that strategy is in serious trouble.
Voters and political operatives have begun to realize that his lack of core values and position as “poster boy” for the one percent will not just hurt him in the primaries — they will be toxic in the General Election as well. In fact recent polls have begun to show that it is now Gingrich that Republican primary voters think will have the best chance against Obama.
And as for “inevitability”? In Iowa, Romney is now third in the latest polls behind Gingrich and Ron Paul. If Gingrich wins Iowa he will consolidate his position as the “anti-Romney,” do well in New Hampshire — rout Romney in South Carolina and likely win Florida. After that you have to bet the “Big-Mo” will be with Gingrich.
But who knows? The clowns in circuses surprise us all the time with pratfalls and other bizarre acts. Like any good circus, the battle for the Republican nomination may leave us in suspense for some time to come.

No one should get euphoric about the latest unemployment rate snapshot of 8.6 percent despite the drop, because it’s still too high and there are all kinds of stipulations and cautionary notes that come with it. Still, as this chart, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, (created by Matt McDonald at Hamilton Place Strategies and posted by WaPo’s Chris Cillizza) indicates, the unemployment trend line has improved significantly overall during the last year.
With unemployment figures, the trend is more important than a snapshot. As Cillizza wrote back in April,

Economists spend their lives poring over numbers that provide detailed information about how and whether the economy is growing. Average people, on the other hand, tend to look at a single number to assess the economy’s relative health: the unemployment rate.
And, it’s not even the exact number that most people fixate on. It’s the trend line. Are things getting marginally better, marginally worse or staying about the same?
That trend line is the single most telling image of how the American public feels — and how they are likely to vote on — the economy heading into the 2012 election….But, a downward trend line on the unemployment rate — if not a drastic reduction in the actual number — will allow the President to make the case that the economic policies he put into place over his first term in office are working and, therefore, he needs a second term to make things even better.
One need only to look as far as Ronald Reagan for evidence of the power of the economic trend line…In March 1983, the unemployment rate stood at 10.3 percent. It steadily declined over the intervening 20 months and in October 1984 it stood at 7.3 percent….While a 7.3 percent unemployment rate was no one’s economic dream scenario, the movement was in Reagan’s direction. And voters reacted accordingly — handing him a 49-state re-election victory over Walter Mondale.

There’s something about simple charts like the one above that can convey a sense of optimism when words describing the same thing fail to do the job. With a little luck, President Obama will have an impressive chart to show the public next October. It’s still early for high-fives, but Dems can be hopeful.

Carrie Budoff Brown’s Politico post “Obama and blue-collar voters: Take 2” corroborates one of Ed Kilgore’s points in his “A Vote is a Vote” post that no serious political campaign is going to “abandon” any major political demographic. Indeed, far from “abandoning” blue collar workers, the Obama team is redoubling their efforts to reach them. As Brown notes:

Obama isn’t going to win the blue-collar crowd — he lost them in Pennsylvania by a wider margin, 15 percentage points, than John Kerry did in 2004. He lost the same vote nationwide by 18 points against Republican John McCain.
But he can’t risk bleeding much more of their support, even as his coalition of minorities, young people, educated whites and single women grows in population while the Republican base of older, whiter, more rural voters declines, said Ruy Teixera, the co-author of a new report from the liberal Center for American Progress on the demographics of the 2012 electorate.
“He knows he’s not starting out on the right foot with these voters,” Teixera said in an interview. “He is well aware that, given the structure of the electorate in the state, he doesn’t want that 15-point deficit to yawn into a widening gap.”
That means Obama will need to spend more time in Pennsylvania than recent presidential voting patterns, registration numbers and demographics would suggest. Every Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992 has won the state. Democrats enjoy a more than 1 million voter-registration edge. And Democratic operatives here and in the Obama campaign argue that weaknesses in the Republican field and the president’s latest push on jobs better position him to woo working-class voters.

Of course the Republicans are doing all they can to amp up the meme that the Obama Administration is somehow “abandoning” the white blue collar workers vote. But the notion is absurd, given the size of this constituency, and that even the most discouraging polls show him getting an ample bite of it. Moreover, the Republicans have very little to offer the white working class and there are some indications that the economy is beginning to improve.
The Obama campaign may end up investing more of its resources in turning out other constituencies, if their best research indicates that’s a more cost-effective way to go. But they well know that ‘abandonment” of any large demographic group would be political suicide.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
To what extent is demography destiny in politics? That’s the question that Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin’s much-discussed analysis of the 2012 presidential race puts front and center.
Teixeira and Halpin posit that the balance of two forces, “the shifting demographic balance of the American electorate, and the objective reality and voter perception of the economy in key battleground states,” will likely determine the outcome of Obama’s reelection. At that level of generality, it’s hard to disagree. But I would argue that while demography matters, it is not as significant as Teixeira and Halpin believe. Yes, it makes a difference that Obama’s winning 2008 coalition relied on growing segments of the electorate while the traditional, mostly white Republican base is fated to shrink, election after election. But other things matter at least as much–especially the impact of the past three years on the orientation and enthusiasm of the Obama coalition, for reasons not all of which are rooted in the economy. Put simply: If Obama’s margins shrink among young people, Hispanics, and other key parts of his base while disappointment depresses their turnout, the falloff in Obama’s support will swamp the modest post-2008 demographic shifts in his favor.
While Teixeira and Halpin don’t disagree with my thesis (it’s a matter of simple arithmetic, after all), they systematically underplay the evidence suggesting that it may well come to pass. To redress the imbalance, let’s look at the most recent Gallup numbers from the week of November 21 to 27. Obama’s overall approval rating stood at 43 percent, as it has for more than a month–a level inconsistent with a successful reelection campaign unless there’s a significant third party candidate on the right.
For present purposes, it’s the details below the top line that matter. Specifically:

• Support for Obama among young voters ages 18 to 29 has plunged to only 48 percent.
• His approval among Hispanics stands at only 51 percent.
• With the exception of voters with post-graduate degrees, Obama is under water with every educational cohort: 42 percent among those with a high school diploma or less, 41 percent among those with some college, and 41 percent for voters with BAs.
• While his approval among Democrats and liberals remains robust (79 and 71 percent, respectively), he stands at only 39 percent among Independents and 51 percent among moderates–about 10 points below what Democrats need from these two categories to win national popular vote majorities.
• While the gulf between married voters and unmarried ones persists, Obama’s approval among unmarried voters stands at only 51 percent.

Compare these numbers with the shares of the vote Obama received from these groups in November 2008:

It’s clear that Obama’s margins are down–way down–not just among swing voters, but in the core of his coalition as well. Compounding the problem, the base’s enthusiasm and intensity have declined as well. As Gerald Seib has noted, while Democrats won the intensity race hands-down in 2008, the reverse is the case today. In the most recent NBC/WSJ poll, 56 percent of Republicans said that they were more enthusiastic than usual, versus only 43 percent of Democrats, and 59 percent of conservatives profess to be more enthusiastic than usual, versus only 38 percent of liberals. Over the past year, every survey has found these same disparities.
The bottom line is that unless things turn around considerably in the next eleven months, key parts of Obama’s winning 2008 coalition are poised to deliver both lower margins and smaller shares of the electorate than they did in 2008. (In general elections, actual votes closely mirror pre-election approval ratings.) If the election were held tomorrow against the most credible Republican challenger, the president would probably lose.
Demography shapes political orientations, of course. But so do events. And this is especially true for voters who don’t enter the political arena with well-established views and habits. While there’s good reason to believe that today’s young adults will remain more comfortable with diversity–of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation–than are their parents and grandparents, there’s no guarantee that this will translate into a liberal or pro-government orientation across the board. A thought-experiment: Suppose a Republican were to win the presidency in 2012, implemented a broadly conservative economic agenda, and that after four years the job market for young adults had improved substantially. Is it plausible that this scenario would have no impact on their long-term political orientation?
Similarly, while Obama received fully two-thirds of the votes from the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. population, the impact of his failure to enact–or even to push hard for–immigration reform is likely to be substantial. To be sure, few Republicans even espouse such an agenda. Still, it would not be unfair for Latinos to conclude that as things stand, neither party gives them much ground for hope.
Since the financial collapse began four years ago, events at home and abroad have disrupted Americans’ settled expectations. It would be prudent to assume that this will have a measurable impact on their political orientation as well. While it’s harder to predict the overall direction of these attitudinal changes, they may well tug against the influence of demography and reconfigure the political playing field.
Demography isn’t destiny. But neither is anything else. Americans’ political outlook will be shaped by the choices their leaders make, and even more by the consequences of those choices.

Kos gives due cred to OWS. “Until Tuesday, Republicans had been lukewarm on extending President Barack Obama’s payroll tax cut for workers…In the world where Occupy had never happened, Republicans would’ve held these tax cuts hostage without suffering any ill repercussions…In this world, Occupy has thrust income inequality to the forefront of the political debate — so much so that typically immovable Republicans are afraid to feed that narrative. In other words, a ragtag bunch of hippies with supposedly no demands have done what Democrats have never been able to do — get Republicans to cry ‘uncle’.”
For an interesting ‘down-home’ regional take on OWS, read “Tale of a Southern ‘Occupy’: Nashville aims to bridge political divides” by MSNBC’s Miranda Leitsinger. As one Occupy Nashville protester puts it in Leitsinger’s article, “This is a place where if people were really going to come together and form that ‘purple’ (combination of blue and red political affiliations) that everybody lusts for, it’s going to probably happen in this camp.” Says another, “We kind of pride ourselves on being a common denominator movement.”
George LaKoff has a different idea at HuffPo, where he urges OWS to “occupy elections” as the next step for the protest movement: “Whatever Occupiers may think of the Democrats, they can gain power within the Democratic Party and hence in election contests all over America. All they have to do is join Democratic Clubs, stick to their values, speak out very loudly, and work in campaigns for candidates at every level who agree with their values.”
Kyle Trygstad has a Roll Call Politics profile of the highly-regarded veteran Democratic Ad-maker Joe Slade White.
Joanne Boyer has a disturbing post up at OpEd news.com, “Is Your Vote Really Being Counted?,” which takes a suspicious look at electronic voting systems in the U.S. Boyer quotes voting technology expert Brad Friedman, who explains, “You now have one person, who with a few keystrokes on a computer can flip the results of an entire election with no possibility of ever being detected. It’s just that easy…we’ve seen scientific studies in state after state show how easy these voting systems are manipulated.”
If you’ve ever wondered what evidence there is that presidential candidate travel has a measurable influence on campaigns, John Sides has the answer at Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight blog.
More bad news for GOP union-busters, and especially the more clueless Republican presidential candidates who have popped off on the topic in NH. As John Nichols reports in The Nation: “On Wednesday, after months of wrangling over the issue, the New Hampshire House of Representatives killed a plan promoted by the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to make New Hampshire a so-called “right-to-work” state. The law was blocked because not just Democrats but almost two dozen Republicans rejected the counsel of presidential candidate Perry — who addressed the legislature Wednesday morning — and voted with organized labor and community groups that rallied to defend collective-bargaining rights.”
At Polls and Votes, poll analyst Charles Franklin charts the fall and rise of Newt Gingrich in light of his unique ‘recognition’ factor and “steady progress, rather than a sudden bounce.”
At HuffPost Pollster, Mark Blumenthal looks at recent Quinnipiac and YouGov polls to explain why “Newt Gingrich Likely To See Poll Bump Should Herman Cain Exit Race.”
I believe this. But I also believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
CNN Politics’ Jessica Yellin and Ted Metzger take a look “Inside Obama’s re-election math” and his campaign in Pennsylvania in particular. There are routes to 270 without the Keystone State, say the authors. But it’s hard to see any of them materializing if Obama can’t take PA, with it’s bellwether demographics.
Lots of buzz out on the internets about Ron Paul’s attack ad targeting Newt. But it strikes me as dingy, melodramatic and lacking humor, even from a Republican point of view — not unlike Paul himself. I think Dems can do much better, when the right time for it comes, which would be after Newt’s bull-in-the-china shop act plays out, Romney’s coiffure has gotten all frizzed and his party has formed a perfect circular firing squad.