As I mentioned yesterday, “Border” was the most frequently-uttered word in the last Republican presidential debate in Arizona. CNN.com’s LZ Granderson explores some of the implications of the term in his post, “Does ‘secure the border’ mean ‘keep America white’?“:

Now there will be plenty of other buzz words and euphemisms that will be tossed around during the debate, but since it is being held in Arizona, chances are the most popular phrase will be “secure the border.”
…The candidates will argue that it’s a matter of national security. That it isn’t just the friendly illegal immigrants looking for work we must worry about, but terrorists, drug lords and other criminals who seek to make their way through our porous border. They will say if they were president they would build walls, add troops, even commission a Death Star to keep this country safe.
Newt Gingrich has promised to build a double fence along the entire southern border, adding, “”The United States must control its border. It is a national security imperative,”
Ron Paul said “If elected president, I would move to quickly end foreign nation building efforts and use many of the resources we waste playing world’s policemen to control our southern border.”
They all will receive applause, and it will all sound great … until you realize that “secure the border” is slang for “keep the Mexicans out.”

If that sounds a little overstated, consider the border with Canada, as Granderson explains:

…The Canadian border is largely ignored in this dialogue despite being more than twice the size of the Mexican border and less than 1% secure, according to a 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office. Even if we were to disregard the 1,538 miles between Alaska and Canada, the 3,987 mile border connecting the lower 48 to our neighbors up north is still much larger than the 1,933-mile stretch that connects us to Mexico.

Read more…

Republican myopia regarding Latino voters is turning out to be a huge blessing bestowed on Democrats, as some recent statistics indicate:

Most repeated word in the GOP debate last night: “border” (followed by “illegal” and “fence”)
Percentage increase in the Phoenix Latino turnount from 2010 to 2011: 480%
Percentage of likely Republican primary voters in Arizona who “said they’d be more inclined to vote for a presidential candidate who backs SB 1070, according to the NBC News/Marist Poll”: 67+%
Percentage of Latino respondents saying the GOP ‘did not care about their support or was hostile to their commmunity’ in a recent Latino Decisions poll conducted for Univision: 72%
Number of GOP presidential candidates who have “voiced support for a broad amnesty that would allow younger illegal immigrants to become permanent legal residents”: Zero
Number of Times Rick Santorum said “Jobs” in the debate last night: Zero

It’s as if Santorum forgot he was really playing to a national audience. Granted, “Arizona is the epicenter of the national immigration debate,” as Michael Sherer notes in Time Swampland. Yet, even though the GOP still has a better shot than Dems of winning Arizona’s electoral votes, all of the candidates should get it by now that in every debate they are on a national stage, talking to Hispanics nationwide. Of course, their gamble is that immigrant-bashing will give them more value added in votes from whites worried about immigration than they will lose from Latino voters.
To some extent Santorum’s recent emphasis on social issues is understandable. Western Michigan is laden with conservative denominations and sects, and Santorum probably feels that his one shot at a bite of Hispanic votes in Arizona is to play his Catholic traditionalist card, hot and heavy. But the GOP has made a hideous mess of their cred among Latino voters, and it’s hard to see how they won’t pay a dear price for it in November.
“Conservatives have not realized how their tone and rhetoric has turned people off,” says Jennifer Korn, who led George W. Bush’s Latino outreach effort in 2004,” notes Scherer. “Latinos seem likely to account for a bigger share of the general electorate in battleground states like Colorado and Nevada than they did four years ago,” adds Tom Curry at msnbc.com.
But what’s good for the GOP in Arizona, may be disastrous nationwide. As Curry explains:

In the 2008 election, Arizona went for its own senator, McCain. This year, its 11 electoral votes are an alluring target for Obama’s strategists. But the Democrats’ “chances of it flipping are pretty minimal” this year due to the conservatism of white voters there, said Ruy Teixeira, a political demographer and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-allied think tank.
In the NBC News/Marist Poll of Arizona voters, in a hypothetical contest between Obama and Mitt Romney, 45 percent said they’d support Romney and 40 percent said they’d back Obama.
But overall in the general election, “The Latino vote is going to be absolutely crucial in 2012,” Teixeira said at a recent conference on Latino voters at American University in Washington.
In Nevada, for example, Teixeira projects a four percentage-point increase in the minority share of the vote and a five-point decline in white working-class voters’ share of the vote…If Obama can win 80 percent of minority voters nationally, “he could get shellacked” among white voters “as badly as Democratic congressional candidates were in 2010, when they lost the white working class by 30 points” and yet “he could almost survive that level of shellacking,” Teixeira argued.

Looking ahead to Georgia, the biggest state in the March 6 Super Tuesday primaries, Latinos are 8.8 percent of the state population, but only 22 percent of them are registered to vote, according to recent statistics. In addition, it is believed that many Latino migrant workers have left Georgia, angry about Republican-driven state ‘reforms,’ which encourage harassment of Hispanics.
However, the Latino vote can be influential, even in the northeast, as Curry explains:

Even in Pennsylvania, where Latinos were only four percent of the 2008 electorate, they may end up being crucial, Teixeira said…He predicted that Obama will lose among Pennsylvania’s white working-class voters, but “all he has to do is not get totally wiped out. He can afford a 15-point loss, he can afford a 20-point loss, what he doesn’t want is 30-point loss” among white working-class voters…If he can get the Latino vote mobilized and motivated to vote for him at a high level, I think it very much reinforces his chances of taking the state,” he said.

Meanwhile Latinos are experiencing a jobless rate 2 percent higher than the national average. And polls indicate that jobs and the economy are still the primary concerns of Hispanic voters. And Santorum doesn’t even mention the word “jobs” in last night’s debate?
To be fair, Santorum’s GOP rivals are no more appealing to Hispanic voters, with their equally-dismal records on issues of concern to Latinos. But Santorum is supposed to be the Republican candidate with the most cred on job-creation. That candidate was nowhere in sight last night.

Give it up for former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (WY), yes he of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, for speaking out against Santorum’s homophobia, according to The Hill’s Daniel Strauss:

“I am convinced that if you get into these social issues and just stay in there about abortion and homosexuality and even mental health they bring up, somehow they’re going to take us all to Alaska and float us out in the Bering Sea or something,” Simpson said in an interview with CBS News released on Wednesday. “We won’t have a prayer.”
…”He is rigid and a homophobic,” Simpson, a Mitt Romney supporter, said. “He said, ‘I want a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage,’ and they said, ‘Well, what about the people who are already married?’ And he said, ‘Well, they would be nullified.’ I mean what is, what’s human, what’s kind about that? We’re all human beings, we all know or love somebody who’s gay or lesbian so what the hell is that about? To me it’s startling and borders on disgust.”

Simpson didn’t say whether he was bothered by Romney’s failure to speak out with similar indignation.

Wingnuts are still bent out of shape about the federal requirement that insurance companies provide full reimbursement for birth control for women, even when the women work at religously affiliated institutions. And they’re still angry about the Obama administration’s compromise requiring that the insurance plan, not the institution, pay the full cost of the contraceptive coverage.
As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ “In fact, conservatives are doubling down on their opposition and are pushing the Blunt amendment in the Senate that allows any insurer or employer to deny coverage of any health service, including birth control, if they find such coverage morally objectionable.” Teixeira adds:

Conservatives seem convinced that this kind of “culture wars” approach will yield a substantial dividend of public support. Well, maybe in some alternative universe, but not in this one. A just-released CBS/New York Times poll finds the public supporting “a recent federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female patients” by a wide 66-26 margin. Moreover, the poll finds that the requirement is supported by women (72-20), moderates (68-22), Catholics (67-25), independents (64-26), and even Republicans (50-44).
Even if the question is narrowed to focus on “religiously-affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university,” the public still favors full coverage of birth control by these institutions’ health insurance plans by a very substantial 30-point margin (61-31).

“Maybe conservatives should start looking for that alternative universe,’ says Teixeira. “Because their approach sure isn’t going to work in this one.”

Political Buzz Examiner Ryan Witt has crunched the polling data for the states and finds President Obama would win by over 100 electoral votes if the election were held today.
Santorum’s vicious attack against President Obama’s religious beliefs is already boomeranging. Kirsten Powers takes him to task at The Daily Beast for his radical contempt for environmental protection, in contrast to a growing community of Christian greens: “Perhaps it’s really Senator Santorum who hews to a “phony theology” at odds with the Bible. Santorum, who has been a shameless apologist for polluters, appears to worship at the altar of business and free enterprise no matter the cost to the health of Americans–including unborn Americans…Most recently he blasted the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule placing first-ever limits on the amount of mercury that coal-fired power plants can emit into the air. Mercury is a neurotoxin that has been known to damage developing fetuses and children and causes myriad negative health effects in adults.”
E.J. Dionne, Jr. sets the stage for ‘the Ash Wednesday debate,’ and ventures a prediction: “My sense is that Santorum’s social issue extravaganza has put him in danger of losing the Michigan primary.”
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum entertains the Republicans’ most dreaded scenario in his CNN post “GOP’s worst nightmare — a contested convention.”
Wapo’s Ruth Marcus makes a case for Dems moving toward the center, based on a new Third Way report. Says Marcus, “…Democratic-leaning independents have different views than those who call themselves Democrats. As Eberly reports, they are “less supportive of government intervention in the economy, more likely to believe that the government has gotten too involved in things people should do for themselves, and express higher levels of support for cutting Social Security spending.”
Also at WaPo, Eugene Robinson explains why Dems should root for Santorum. Grey Lady conservative columnist Ross Douthat agrees: “it would almost certainly be a debacle.”
For a good round-up of the GOP’s million-dollar Super-PAC sugar-daddies, read the NYT’s “In Republican Race, a New Breed of Superdonor” by Nicholas Confessore, Michael Luo and Mike McIntire.
You know that Suffolk University poll showing Scott Brown with a 9-point lead over Elizabeth Warren in the MA senate race, in contrast to three other recent polls showing Warren with a 3-point lead? Turns out some wonks think the Suffolk poll’s methodology was a little dicey. Mark Blumenthal has the skinny here.
Joan Walsh has a belated Valentine to Rick Santorum at Salon.com, for his calling attention to what a GOP victory would mean for American women who are accustomed to making their own decisions about their bodies. “Santorum may be compromising his own political future almost as much as he’s compromising women’s rights with his increasingly crackpot declarations. He’s also helping Virginians who oppose their state GOP’s extremism to get attention to their cause, while the Virginia GOP helps national Democrats sound alarms about Santorum’s lunacy. It’s a win-win for proponents of women’s freedom. I keep pinching myself to make sure it’s not a political trick.”

Before Mitt Romney’s “The trees are the right height” meltdown, you could say that at least one GOP candidate appeared to be fairly sane, if totally unprincipled in his waffling on every major issue. Now, however, even that exception is in some doubt.
As a result of Romney’s unhinged rant, the growing chorus of Republicans calling for a replacement messiah has begun to rattle the rafters. The prospects are not promising, as Michael Tomasky explains in his Daily Beast post, “There Will Be No Saviors for the GOP in 2012.”

What the party needs is not simply a new candidate. It needs someone with the courage to stand up and say that the GOP has gone completely off the deep end–and that the party could run an amalgam of Ronald Reagan and Mahatma Gandhi and he wouldn’t win as long as the party’s inflamed base keeps with its current attitudes. But it lacks such a person utterly. It’s a party made up of on the one hand unprincipled cowards, and on the other of people devoted to principles so extreme that they’d have serious trouble attracting more than about 42 percent of the vote.

Tomasky considers the possibility of one of the three most frequently-mentioned saviors, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie or Mitch Daniels, stepping up, and assesses their prospects:

…Here’s the problem. First, let’s consider the three men named above. What’s so savior-y about them? The Bush name? Please. It’s better than Nixon, but that’s about all that can be said for it. Christie’s tough-talking personality? That appeals to people on the right. But it could wear thin. And yes, the avoirdupois factor is an issue. Most Americans don’t want a president who looks like that. And Daniels has the charisma of an econ-department chair.
More importantly, each has litmus-test difficulties. Jeb, as Rich Yeselson pointed out over the weekend at the Washington Monthly, is kind of soft on immigration, and there is no single issue that revs the engines of the far right like that one. (Jeb opposed Arizona’s immigration law, among other things.) Christie appointed a Muslim judge and said, in a lacerating statement aimed directly at the kind of people who make up the GOP base, that opposition to said judge was based on “ignorance.” Daniels, back when he was a potential candidate, was regularly savaged by Rush Limbaugh. These are suddenly going to be right-wing heroes? Others mention Paul Ryan, but they’re just being delusional. Ryan would win about the same 15 states Santorum and Gingrich would, maybe 20, but most definitely not the right 20.

Writing at CNN Politics about a ‘Plan B’ memo circulating in GOP circles, CNN Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger and Senior Producer Kevin Bohn also note the growing desperation in the Republican camp:

…One knowledgeable GOP source confirms that some Republicans are circulating the deadlines and the basic math that would allow another candidate to get into the nomination fight and take it all the way to the convention. More than a half dozen states’ filing deadlines have yet to pass. A majority of the delegates to the national convention are still up for grabs. One more factor to be considered: many states are choosing their delegates proportionally, which makes it easier for a candidate pick up delegates without outright winning a state…
…One of the Republicans who has seen the memo said “no one is hoping that this will come to play,” regarding a new candidate entering the fray. Yet some Republican partisans feel they need to make some contingency plans depending on the outcome in coming primaries. Other veteran Republicans contacted by CNN dismissed any possibility of another candidate entering the contest at this date.

Tomasky surveys the wreckage and potential ‘saviors’ and concludes,

“…There is no one who can satisfy the base of the GOP–a cohort so drunk on ideology and resentment that they cheer electrocutions and boo a soldier–and be elected president of the United States. Period…They can’t see the obvious paradox–that their lust for the White House is making them submit to all the wishes of a fanatical base, which is exactly what will keep them from winning the White House.

In other words, anyone smart enough to craft and deliver a sensible message isn’t going to get any traction with the tea party and wingnuts, who appear to have veto power in today’s GOP. Still, we know that someone will be nominated — just don’t expect a lucid moderate Republican on a white horse to appear on the horizon.

Just 8 days ago TDS happily applauded what appeared to be Tom Friedman’s decisive break with the “false equivalency” notion that he had previously been peddling – the idea that Democrats and Republicans are equally at fault for political paralysis and that a centrist third party is therefore needed.
Now, however, just barely a week later, in his latest NYT column Friedman has completely reversed himself once again and now repeats exactly the same fallacies he so energetically rejected the week before.
If you lay the two columns side by side the effect is more than a little creepy. It’s like watching Gollum/Smegal, the tormented creature with the dual personality in Lord of the Rings, as it huddles down all alone and shifts from one voice to another as first one and then the other personality takes control of its body.
Start by listening to the first of Friedman’s two voices — let’s call it Freidman/Gollum – as it argues that the two parties are both equidistant extremes of left and right:
“If [the Republican] candidate is Rick Santorum, I think there is a good chance a Third Party will try to fill the space between the really “severely conservative” Santorum (or even Mitt Romney) and the left-of-center Barack Obama. “

But then here’s Friedman’s other self – Friedman/Smegal – replying to him that the fundamental problem is the extremism of the Republicans and not both parties equally.
“When I look at America’s three greatest challenges today, I don’t see the Republican candidates offering realistic answers to any of them…when all the Republican candidates last year said they would not accept a deal with Democrats that involved even $1 in tax increases in return for $10 in spending cuts, the G.O.P. cut itself off from reality. It became a radical party, not a conservative one
We need to hear conservative fiscal policies, energy policies, immigration policies and public-private partnership concepts – not radical ones. Would somebody please restore our second party? The country is starved for a grown-up debate.”

But then Friedman/Gollum replies by completely ignoring Friedman/Smegal’s point and criticizes the Dems as if they had made no attempts at compromise and should have been able to achieve a “centrist” compromise without any Republican cooperation:

The Democrats…”are still in denial about the need to renegotiate our social insurance contract… [Obama] is not talking about the fundamental reforms in Medicare and Medicaid that we need, and he is not ready to touch Social Security…[he] talks about tax reform, but it is not comprehensive”

Friedman/Smegal then responds to Friedman/Gollum by insisting again that the real problem are the Republicans, that they are simply not willing to seriously negotiate, making even the massive concessions Obama offered last spring useless because the Republicans simply move the goal posts rather than negotiate:
“What we definitely and urgently need is a second party – a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country. Without that, the best of the Democrats – who have been willing to compromise – have no partners and the worst have a free pass for their own magical thinking.”

Friedman-Gollum ignores his alter-ego and simply repeats the “false equivalency” mantra:
“After months of nutty, gravity-free Republican primary debates, how great would it be to have presidential debates in which a smart independent…was in the middle to challenge both sides and offer sensible solutions”?

Friedman/Smegal rejects this:
“Since a transformed Republican Party is highly unlikely, maybe the best thing would be for it to get crushed in this election and forced into a fundamental rethink – something the Democrats had to go through when they lost three in a row between 1980 and 1988. We need a “Different Kind of Republican” the way Bill Clinton gave us a “Different Kind of Democrat.”

Let’s face it; eavesdropping on this bizarre internal dialog really is spooky. We hear two utterly different voices coming out of the same body. It’s just like watching the dramatic climaxes in all the great multiple personality movies – “Sybil”, “The Three Faces of Eve”, “Marnie” and “Psycho.”
But what could cause a man like Friedman to develop a case of political multiple personality disorder that is so strikingly reminiscent of cinema clichés?
If we look to those same movies for guidance, the apparent answer is that it is always a traumatic event that precipitates the psychic dissociation. Under the shock of a trauma the protagonist cannot face, his or her mind fragments into separate personalities.
In Friedman’s case (as with other third-party centrists) the trauma they seem unable to face is the fact that the Republican Party is very clearly and rapidly evolving toward becoming an American version of the post-war French national Front, back in the decades when it was headed by Jean Marie Le Pen. For commentators and others who are deeply nostalgic for the stability and judicious elite conservatism of the post World War II American “establishment” (an establishment that included distinguished “wise men” from both political parties), the implications of the Republican Party’s undeniable extremism are so disturbing that today’s third party centrists are unwilling to fully accept it. One can almost hear them saying “No, no, it can’t really be that bad. Any minute now the GOP will come back to its senses. There must still be “adults” in the Republican Party who will get back in charge and stop all this nonsense. Meanwhile we should all just carry on as if nothing is wrong and that we still have two traditional political parties.”
Well O.K. I suppose one can sympathize just a little bit. It’s always hard to let go of the past. But let’s face it, life isn’t always easy and the bottom line is this: Sybil simply couldn’t face the fact that her mother was completely nuts. Anthony Perkins couldn’t accept the fact that his mother was dead.
And Tom Friedman simply can’t accept the reality that the “old” GOP is as moribund as Anthony Perkins long-dead mother, her bones clattering up and down in her rocking chair, and that the “new” GOP is rapidly becoming every bit as batty as Sybil’s completely psychotic, wacko mom. That’s why he’s wandering around in circles talking to himself like his own personal performance of Gollum and Smegal in “Lord of the Rings.”

Democratic strategist Mark Mellman posts on “From a referendum to a choice” at The Hill, noting that the GOP’s original strategy of making the 2012 presidential contest a “referendum on Obama” is rapidly losing viability, with each of the 4 leading GOP candidates making their less-than-impressive track records an unavoidable concern of sensible voters.
Rubio leads in veepstakes poll of Republican voters conducted 2/6-12 by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind, despite his declaration of non-interest.
If you missed it, like I did, chuckles await you at The Daily Beast in Barbie Latza Nadeau’s “Rick Santorum’s Communist Clan in Italy.” Nadeau writes “On the campaign trail, Santorum often touts his grandfather’s flight from Italy “to escape fascism,” but he has neglected to publicly mention their close ties with the Italian Communist Party…In Riva del Garda his grandfather Pietro and uncles were ‘red communists’ to the core,” writes Oggi journalist Giuseppe Fumagalli…”
It looks like Dems have a good chance to take the U.S. Senate seat now held by Sen. Richard Lugar. Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly will run against the winner of the Republican primary, in which Sen. Lugar is “being pounded by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock over questions of residency” (Lugar lives in McLean, VA), as Mary Beth Schneider reports in the Indianapolis Star. The Indiana Election Commission will hear challenges Friday to Lugar’s appearance on the ballot.
The Supreme Court may take a case which could reverse Citizens United, taking into account the experience of the two years since the ruling, reports Brenda Wright at Demos.
With low Republican turnout in the primaries, caucuses and beauty contests, the effort to get Dems to cross over and vote in the GOP contests is gathering steam. Kos explains the strategy behind “Operation Hilarity: Let’s keep the GOP clown show going!” Kos challenges Dems “who live in open primary and caucus states–Michigan, North Dakota, Vermont and Tennessee in the next three weeks–to head out and cast a vote for Rick Santorum.” Kos adds, “…If you’re squeamish about this, just remember what’s at stake–not just the White House, but Nancy Pelosi’s gavel and a Senate run by Mitch McConnell. The weaker the GOP standard bearer, the better our chances in November. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have had no problem meddling in our own contests…The Republicans have offered up this big, slow, juicy softball. Let’s have fun whacking the heck out of it.”
Ayn Randite Rep. Paul Ryan gets a richly-deserved pummeling by The Economist for his sneering at Europe as a supposed exemplar of debt burden: The Economist responds: “The European Union has lower government debt levels than America. Gross government debt in the 27 nations of the EU was 80% of the region’s GDP at the end of 2010; in America gross federal debt at the end of 2010 was 94% of GDP. Furthermore, government debt is growing more slowly as a percentage of GDP in the EU than in America, because pretty much every nation in the EU is implementing austerity measures. The general government deficit in the EU-27 in 2010 was 6.6% of GDP. In America the federal deficit in 2010 was 9% of GDP..”
Just what Romney needed to reclaim his creds with Michigan workers —Trump to the rescue.
Meanwhile, Andrew Romano reports at The Daily Beast: “For much of his presidency, Barack Obama has struggled with working-class whites. But Michigan is providing him with some signs of hope. Thanks in large part to the Obama-Bush auto-bailout package, the state’s unemployment rate has plummeted to 9.3 percent from a recent high of 14.1 percent–the swiftest, sharpest improvement in the country. Obama’s local numbers have followed suit: his approval rating is now well above water, and he leads Romney by double digits after trailing as recently as November, partly because he has gained ground in Macomb County, the original home of the Reagan Democrats. To win nationally, Obama needs to crack 40 percent (his number in 2008) among non-college-educated whites. If Michigan is a preview of things to come, he stands a good chance of pulling it off.”

This post by John Russo, Coordinator of the Labor Studies Program at Youngstown State originally appeared in Working-Class Perspectives which is the blog site for the Center for Working-Class Studies at YSU.
As a professor, I am always interested in teachable moments. When it became apparent in late 2010 that Ohio Gov. John Kasich planned to introduce legislation depriving public sector workers of basic bargaining rights, I told reporters that it was a teachable moment about the role of public sector workers. After all, they were the ones who made all other work possible.
Both organized labor and community groups quickly embraced the idea that Ohio Senate Bill 5 could be a teachable moment. They launched a hugely successful campaign to put a referendum on the bill, Issue 2, on the November ballot, and then led the fight to persuade voters to oppose the issue and overturn the bill. Kasich’s attack and the forceful response to it may make it possible for Obama to win Ohio in 2012, despite economic conditions and 2010 election results that would seem to prime the state to swing to the right this time.
Another teachable moment has arrived now that Republicans have introduced Right-to-Work legislation in New Hampshire and passed it in Indiana. Similar legislation may be on the way in Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio. Such moves may well undermine the historic white working-class support of Republicans, and that could bode well for Obama’s re-election.
RTW legislation differs from past Republican attacks on unions. As labor historian Joseph McCartin has recently chronicled, while courting union endorsements and union voters, Republicans have pursued strategies that, over the last 30 years, have quietly undermined administrative agencies and government policies that facilitated the formation of unions. The result has been the erosion and marginalization of organized labor and its ability to raise wages, improve workplace safety and health, and advance representative democracy not only in the workplace but in the body politic.
The current RTW legislation is a direct attack on organized labor and its ability to represent the economic and political interests of both the rank and file and those non-union workers whose wages and benefits are enhanced by employers to avoid unionization. No doubt, the role of unions in building and rebuilding economic security and the middle class, advancing workplace rights, and promoting political democracy will be a central part of the curriculum for this teachable moment.
All the current Republican candidates have refused opportunities to speak to union leaders. Instead, they have signed on to the anti-labor agenda, including RTW legislation, proposed by conservative corporations, business groups, and donors. Together with their other economic proposals, they have established a Republican brand that embraces and even celebrates a distorted sense of morality and inequality of income, wealth, and power.

Read more…

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When the Obama administration announced last month that religiously-affiliated institutions would be required to provide health plans covering contraception, there was widespread talk that a wedge issue was emerging. Several prominent Catholic liberals were quick to point out that Obama would lose the Catholic vote and seriously damage his re-election prospects. But as Republican politicians gleefully piled on, the evidence for such a dire development–and indeed, for the continued existence of anything you could describe as a “Catholic vote”–has diminished almost daily.
Of course, the White House responded to the Catholic Bishops’ furor with a deft maneuver that changed the political dynamics of the issue, offering a compromise that allowed the cost of contraception coverage to be borne by insurance companies, not the religiously-affiliated institutions themselves. This step won immediate praise from the leadership of the Catholic Health Association, Catholic Charities, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. But the split among Catholic elites simply reinforced the more fundamental reality: American Catholics are hardly monolithic, even on issues supposedly touching on the Church’s authority and teachings.
Polling of Americans on the contraception mandate controversy has produced significantly varying results, often depending on when the poll was taken and question wording and order. But no survey has shown a significant difference between Catholics and other voters on this issue. (John Sides found some evidence of a drop in approval ratings for Obama among highly-observant and conservative Catholics, but conceded that these are largely already Obama opponents.) Among the many polls, the most credible is perhaps a Democracy Corps survey that formulates the positions of the administration and of the Bishops in their own words. The results show that Catholics support the administration’s position by a 49-42 margin–barely distinguishable from the full pool of respondents, who support the administration’s position by a 49-43 margin.
This should come as no particular surprise to anyone familiar with the history of U.S. Catholic lay attitudes on issues where the Church hierarchy has taken strong positions. The most thorough recent research on public opinion involving abortion and same-sex marriage–issues where the Catholic Church has clear, unambiguous positions that are frequently communicated to the laity via channels ranging from papal encyclicals to the parish pulpit–comes from the Public Religion Research Institute, which did a major survey examining the views of Americans of differing confessional backgrounds in June of last year. At that time, 56 percent of all Americans and 54 percent of Catholics indicated they thought abortions should be legal in all or most circumstances. Only 29 percent of white evangelical Protestants, however, support legalized abortion–another indication that the anti-choice base in American politics is now more Protestant than Catholic.
To be sure, the same survey shows slightly stronger personal disapproval of abortion on moral grounds among Catholics than among the population as a whole. That attitude, however, is heavily concentrated among Latino Catholics. Forty-two percent of white Catholics consider abortion “morally acceptable,” compared to 40 percent of all Americans, while only 17% of Latino Catholics say the same. There is hardly a consenus Catholic position, even on personal attitudes towards abortion.
On same-sex marriage, again, Catholics are more likely to agree with other Americans than with their own leadership. An October 2010 Pew survey showed 46 percent of Catholics favoring legalization of same-sex marriage, as compared to 42 percent of all Americans. The hardcore resistance to gay marriage, on the other hand, is among white evangelicals (who oppose it by a 20-74 margin) and to some extent black Protestants (who oppose it by a 28-62 margin).
Conservatives often argue that support for the hierarchy’s positions is much higher among “real Catholics”–meaning those who attend Mass weekly. That’s true, but it’s not a phenomenon particular to Catholics. According to the PRRI survey, for example, support for legalized abortion varies inversely according to frequency of worship service attendance among evangelical and mainline Protestants, as well as among Catholics. Moreover, Catholics who disagree with the Church’s position on hot-button issues do not seem to be suffering from any misinformation about Church teachings (72 percent of white Catholics say they’ve heard about abortion from the pulpit) or from a bad conscience about their disagreements. Again according to PRRI, 68 percent of Catholics think you can still be a “good Catholic” while disagreeing with Church teachings on abortion, and 74 percent say the same about same-sex marriage.
The more you look at the numbers, the idea that there is some identifiable Catholic vote in America, ready to be mobilized, begins to fade towards irrelevance. In the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections, Catholics voted within a couple of percentage points of the electorate as a whole. It’s notable that both the Democratic vice president and the Republican Speaker of the House are Catholics–and that few Americans are likely aware of that fact.
This was not always the case, of course. From the days of Andrew Jackson to JFK, Catholic voters were considered a mainstay of the Democratic Party coalition. Irish and German Catholics were at home in the conservative Democratic party of the nineteenth century, and were supplemented by southern Europeans as the New Deal Coalition developed in the twentieth. While the Catholic attachment to the Democratic Party has persisted to a steadily diminishing extent in state and local elections, the disproportionate pro-Democratic “Catholic vote” at the presidential level abruptly ended in 1972 and has never returned.
To a large extent, that shift has simply reflected the broader ideological polarization of the two parties, which demolished traditional ethnic loyalties. Moreover, the upward mobility and suburbanization of previously urban white Catholics communities has naturally made them more susceptible to Republican economic and cultural appeals, a trend that among Catholics as a whole has been partially offset by the influx of Democratic-leaning Hispanics.
The idea that Catholics no longer behave self-consciously as “Catholics” on hot-button issues reflects the broader reality that they have become hard to distinguish from other Americans in their political behavior. And so whatever happens between the White House and the Bishops, it’s not likely to change the reality that the “Catholic vote” looks just like America.