The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
From the point of view of a partisan Democrat, I can only think of one thing to say about the Republican Party’s escalating opposition to birth control: go ahead, make our day.
You have to wonder if the political consultants advising the Republican presidential candidates have lost their minds. In the competition for ultra-right wing voters in the Republican primaries, the Romney and Santorum campaigns have completely lost sight of how their positions on birth control appear to the vast majority of Americans — and especially to women — and affect their chances in a general election.
Outside of a very narrow strata of political extremists, birth control is not a controversial subject. At some point in their lives roughly 98% of women — including 98% of Catholic women — have used birth control — either to prevent pregnancy, regulate menstrual cycles and cramps or to address other medical issues.
Last week a PPP poll reported that:
This issue could be potent in this fall’s election. Fully 58 percent of voters say they oppose Republicans in Congress trying to take away the birth control benefit that saves women hundreds of dollars a year, including 56 percent of independents.
And a recent Pew Poll says only 8% of Americans believe that the use of contraceptives is “immoral.”
Democracy Corps published a polling memo last Thursday that said in part that:
…one of the most important factors powering Obama’s gains against likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney has been the President’s improving numbers among unmarried women, a key pillar of the present and future Democratic coalition.
Among this group, Obama now leads Romney by 65-30 — and there’s been a net 18-point swing towards the President among them…
The issue of access to birth control is very important among this group.
In addition, the memo went on to say that the battle over contraception could be another “Terri Schiavo moment” where the knee-jerk reaction of right-wing culture warriors runs afoul of Americans’ desire not to have government interfering with their most private personal decisions.
And the numbers understate another important factor — intensity. Many women voters in particular feel very intensely about the birth control issue. It’s not just another issue — it’s about their own control of the most personal aspects of their lives.
Notwithstanding these facts, Mitt Romney has come out squarely in favor of the “personhood” amendment that was soundly defeated in Mississippi — probably the most conservative state in the nation. That amendment would essentially ban most forms of hormonal birth control, like the Pill and IUD, that millions of women — and their spouses — rely upon to prevent unwanted pregnancy.
Santorum, in addition to his support of the “personhood” amendment, actually argues that contraception of any sort is immoral.
Both Romney and Santorum have attacked the Obama administration’s rule that requires insurance companies to make birth control available to all women with no co-payment no matter where they work.
Their positions are so far outside the political mainstream that they might as well be on the former planet Pluto.
And these are not positions that are peripherally related to voters’ opinions of candidates for office. For many swing voters, the GOP’s extremist positions on birth control could very well be dispositive determinants of their votes next November.
First, for a large number of women voters, their positions communicate two very important things:
They aren’t on my side;
They don’t understand my life.

Read more…

Of all the bad decisions Republican leaders have made during the last year — and it is a long litany of stupid calls — it would be ironic if the most self-destructive one turned out to be their suicide attack to destroy the American labor movement.
I say ironic, because last may AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, with the strong support of union leaders, announced at the National Press Club that labor unions were tired of being taken for granted and would no longer provide automatic support for Democratic candidates, who didn’t reciprocate by supporting the priorities of the trade union movement. As Trumka said, “If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, then working people will not support them.”
He meant it. Union leaders were sorely disappointed by weak Democratic support of measures like the Employee Free Choice Act, which would help strengthen union organizing rights. And there a number of Democratic candidates who received support from unions, but who didn’t do much to advance other bread-and-butter union priorities, like fair trade. Trumka and other union leaders understood that Republicans were the primary force obstructing pro-union legislation, but they also felt, with some good reason, that too many Dems, including many ‘blue dogs,’ caved to the Republicans too easily.
Smart Republicans welcomed this development. Anything that reduced labor support for their opponents they saw as a good thing. Unions provided about 30 percent of the top four Super-PAC expenditures supporting Democrats and about two-thirds of the financial support provided by the pro-Democratic House Majority PAC. But today, unions are facing a very different reality, as Matea Gold and Melanie Mason report in the L.A. Times:

Flash forward to today: Labor appears squarely back in the Democrats’ corner for the 2012 election — pushed there in large part by Republican attacks on collective bargaining rights for public employees.
Those and other anti-union measures are rallying organized labor to the side of its longtime Democratic allies, and not just in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, where they are battling efforts aimed at curbing union organizing.
The country’s biggest unions also have played a central role in helping a network of federal pro-Democratic “super PACs” get off the ground, pouring more than $4 million into those groups in 2011, even as many wealthy liberals kept their checkbooks closed.
And some major labor groups have even inserted themselves into the Republican presidential primaries with ads that take aim at White House hopeful Mitt Romney.

So, not only have Republicans overplayed their hand as legislative obstructionists, souring the public into record-low approval ratings of their party; Not only have they revealed themselves as groveling lapdogs for their wealthy contributors at the expense of working people; Not only has the GOP defined itself, most recently, as the party of extremist opposition to women’s reproductive self-determination. Now they have also taken a huge trump card that they could have played to significant advantage — labor’s decision to withhold support from some Democrats — and compelled the union movement to not only reverse that decision, but to go all in for record union support of Democratic candidates.
Democrats should hold a national “Thank Scott Walker Day.” But it’s not just Walker; It’s Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Ohio Governor John Kasich and other GOP leaders who have been arrogant enough to think they could crush the union movement with little resistance and no consequences. With classic Republican myopia, they are doubling down, as Mason and Gold explain:

Across the country, state GOP lawmakers — many of whom were swept into office by the tea-party-fueled wave that dominated the 2010 midterm election — are aggressively pushing right-to-work laws that would make it harder for unions to collect dues. And in the presidential campaign, Romney has taken a particularly antagonistic posture against what he calls “big labor.”

As a result,

“I think we’ll be more engaged in 2012 than certainly in the last 20 years,” said Mike Podhorzer, political director for the AFL-CIO, a federation of 57 unions. “Working people realize in a way they never have what a threat the current Republican platform is to their well-being.”
Organized labor is now expected to match or slightly exceed the estimated $400 million that unions spent to help elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in 2008, according to Marick F. Masters, a business professor who studies the labor movement at Michigan’s Wayne State University.

As the authors note further, one union alone, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, will invest up to $100 million this year to help Democrats. “What’s the alternative?” asks AFSCME President Gerald McEntee. The union has already spent $1 million attacking Romney in Florida. SEIU also ran attack ads against Romney in the Sunshine state. The ads represented unprecedented involvement in a GOP primary.
Labor unions are supporting very few GOP candidates who support them. But the pro-Republican pickings for unions are exceedingly slim this year as a result of the GOP’s jihad on unions. The AFL-CIO will be more selective in choosing which particular Democratic candidates they support this year. But the GOP’s war on collective bargaining has insured that union support of Democrats will be stronger than ever, both in dollars and muscle.

Well, the simple answer is this: an appalling number of “journalists” are pathetically gullible and lazy hacks and will swallow any nonsense a candidates’ flack feeds them just so long as it gives them an easy adjective to use to characterize a politician.
The slightly less simple answer is that Santorum’s flacks – a group which by the way includes David Brooks and other conservative cheerleaders along with the guys directly on Santorum’s payroll — have run a shell game on the press that the asleep at the wheel reporters don’t bother to question.
Just watch how David Brooks plays this incredibly transparent street-corner three-card-Monte trick on his readers and the rest of the press:
Step one: ignore the man’s actual personal history (MBA, Lawyer in silk-stocking firm, Politician, Lobbyist) and his parent’s actual occupations (Clinical Psychologist, Administrative Nurse) and use essentially irrelevant facts to imply he comes from a hard-scrabble blue collar life and background.

Brooks in Paragraph 7 — “Santorum is the grandson of a coal miner and the son of an Italian immigrant. For years, he represented the steel towns of western Pennsylvania.”

Step two: suggest his political views make him an authentic representative of working class America.

Brooks in Paragraph 11 — “I do believe that he represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system”

Step three: take steps one and two, add some paragraphs in between them to distract the reader and then flat-out boldly identify Santorum as “working class” and hope nobody notices the quick sleight of hand:

Brooks in Paragraph 12 — “If you took a working-class candidate from the right, like Santorum, and a working-class candidate from the left, like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and you found a few islands of common ground, you could win this election by a landslide. The country doesn’t want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law”

Absolutely unbelievable, isn’t it. Santorum grew up in a middle class home, never worked a single damn day in a factory or hammered a nail in his entire bloody life and all of a sudden he’s frickin’ Rocky.
Look at these utterly nonsensical headlines: “Santorum fits working class bill,” and “Santorum: The Blue-collar Candidate – The former senator touts his working-class roots”
And somebody actually pays the stupid clowns who write this crap as “journalists” who are supposedly reporting the news? Hell, any MSM reporter who repeats this “blue collar” baloney should be instantly fired and replaced with a stenographer who just writes down Santorum’s’ campaign spin word for word. Come to think of it, the media should just get a bike messenger to carry Santorum’s press releases directly to the printing press or news show teleprompter. It’ll be much cheaper and a whole lot more honest.

The latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund shows a Republican Party in deepening trouble and emerging underlying trends that may have shifted the balance for 2012. Barring sudden economic shocks, there is accumulating evidence that we have entered a new phase in the political cycle, substantially more favorable to the Democrats.
This survey sees a collapse of the Republican brand at almost all levels. Negatives associated with the Republican Party have not been this high since right after they lost the country in 2008. Their presumptive nominee flirts with a 50 percent negative rating and may now represent a big drag on the national party.
President Obama nears the 50 percent mark and is now just four points away from what he achieved in 2008. Democrats have newly consolidated the progressive voters of the Rising American Electorate who were responsible for Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008. These voters–unmarried women, young voters, and minorities–dropped off in 2010 and lagged throughout 2011. They have returned in a big way for Democrats, led by a resurgence and re-engagement of unmarried women. Only young voters have not been re-consolidated, which is either a problem or an opportunity.
Seniors, who abandoned Democrats in 2010, have come back two surveys in a row and suburban swing voters watch the Republican primary debate with growing alienation from the Republican Party. The tax issue, a presumptive Republican advantage, has moved dramatically in favor of the Democrats.
These results may not simply be the result of a spot of good economic news and rough news cycles for Republican nominees, but the beginning of long-term structural changes that will characterize the 2012 election cycle.
Recent controversies over Planned Parenthood and contraception will not revive the Republican’s standing, indeed, the opposite may be true, as this survey shows voters disagree with them on principle and wonder why at a time of great economic distress, Republicans are consumed with denying birth control coverage for women.
This survey provides fair warning to the Republican Party that they may be losing the country.

Kos makes an important point in his latest post:

In the idealized version of the GOP primary, establishment Republicans would curry favor with their Wall Street pals while sending coded dog whistles to their foot soldiers–on race, immigration, reproductive freedoms, etc. Those dog whistles would motivate the GOP base without revealing their true radical nature to the American mainstream. It was a genius system while it worked, one that saw no parallel on the progressive side.
But the days of the dog whistle are over. The election of President Barack Obama created an entire cottage industry trying to prove how un-American and Kenyan he supposedly is, while Republicans like Rep. Pete Hoekstra run blatantly anti-Asian ads. Republicans laugh about electrocuting immigrants who will cut off your head in the desert if they’re not stopped, while passing laws openly hostile to brown people. Attacks on homosexuals have escalated to new hysterical highs as society becomes more tolerant and open to equality [and] while many conservatives were disgusted at sex for pleasure, at least they had the good sense to publicly pretend that their entire motivation was to save fetuses. But of course, that mask is off. What they want is to control female sexuality, and the hell with any candidate who doesn’t scream it from the rooftops.
….every day that this race continues is a day in which base conservatives demand their candidates–including that former “moderate” Romney–pledge vocal and overt fealty to an agenda so outside the mainstream, that independents are flocking to the Democratic Party.

Kos is right that this represents a dramatic change, one with potentially substantial effects on the struggle between the two political parties.

From his New York Magazine column yesterday:

The unpredictable Republican presidential race has taken another surprising turn as recent numbers show Mongol warlord Genghis Khan seizing the lead in national polls of likely GOP primary voters. Benefiting from widespread doubts about Mitt Romney’s authenticity and ideological commitment, Genghis has changed the shape of the race by sounding sharp populist themes that resonate with supporters of the tea party. “Mitt Romney wants to manage Washington, D.C.,” he told an enthusiastic crowd in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I want to burn it to the ground, slay its inhabitants, and stack their skulls in pyramids reaching to the sky.”
…Genghis’s surge to the top of the polls began after a recent debate in Williamsburg, Mississippi. After moderator Brian Williams questioned if his popular campaign promise to not only defeat President Obama but to enslave his family was racially insensitive, Genghis angrily replied that he enslaves the families of all his defeated rivals, regardless of race. Then, in a dramatic touch that reminded many Republicans of Ronald Reagan’s famous I-paid-for-this-microphone moment, he charged down from the stage on horseback, decapitated Williams, and displayed his head before the roaring crowd. At a post-debate focus group led by pollster Frank Luntz, numerous attendees praised Genghis for standing up to, as one attendee put it, “the politically correct media.”

Read the whole thing, it’ll make your day.

For a revealing take on the warped spirit of the GOP front-runner-in-waiting, check out Ed Kilgore’s “Santorum’s Rhetorical Surge” at Washington Monthly ‘Political Animal.’ Kilgore pieces together a disturbing portrait of the candidate, “expressing the rawest right-wing sentiments on the campaign trail” from Dan Popkey’s report in the Idaho Statesman. A couple of gems from Santorum’s diatribe at an idaho rally:

“We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority…”
“Don’t you see how they see you? How they look down their nose at the average Americans. These elite snobs!”
“I believe that if we are unsuccessful in this election that we will have failed in that duty and it will have horrendous consequences. … It will be the end of the great experiment in the order of liberty and freedom.”

There’s more. But you get the idea. As Kilgore explains, “Seriously, folks, Ronald Reagan didn’t talk this way. Barry Goldwater went about half this far and was eternally labeled the most extremist major-party candidate in U.S. history. If in 2008 Barack Obama had used this sort of rhetoric about the electoral stakes of victory or defeat, or the nature of the opposition, he would have been accused of introducing Kenyan Mau Mau tactics to American politics. Even now, he’s called a dangerous demagogue for suggesting Wall Street was partially responsible for the recession, or that the richest people on the planet ought to pay higher tax rates than their employees.”
A revealing portrait, especially for those who thought Newt was the point man for Republican nastiness. Kilgore concludes of Santorum’s splenetic rant, “If Mitt Romney had an ounce of real courage, he’d call him on it.” Such are the stakes of 2012.

As progressives face the 2012 elections, they find themselves struggling with a profoundly difficult dilemma.
On the one hand, progressives clearly recognize the extraordinary danger presented by Republican extremism. The possibility of additional conservatives being added to the supreme court is, by itself, more than sufficient reason to conclude that the GOP must not be allowed to win in 2012 but there are equally serious threats to the survival of the New Deal social safety net, to basic worker and citizen rights and, for millions of Americans, to the continued right to vote itself. Both opinion data and progressive commentary show that only a very small fraction of 2008 Democratic voters are willing to sit out the 2012 election or support a Nader-style third party.
At the same time, however, a significant number of progressives also feel that they simply cannot support Obama with anything like the enthusiasm they felt in 2008. Beyond the general sense of disappointment and frustration that many feel with his administration, progressives cite two practical reasons – (1) that they will lose their ability to convincingly advocate for broader progressive change if they appear to be giving unqualified endorsement to Obama and (2) that they will lose all leverage within the Administration itself if they energetically support and work for his re-election without first extracting substantial policy concessions in return.
The solution many progressives have settled upon is a kind of grudging, half-hearted support, laced with criticism. It is typically expressed in the following way: “Well, yeah, I guess I’ll vote for Obama. But I sure won’t contribute any money or volunteer.”
In a recent column E.J. Dionne accurately described the progressive ambivalence:

In traveling around Iowa and New Hampshire over the last few weeks, I have been struck by the number of Democrats and independents who still more or less want Obama to win and deeply fear the consequences of a government dominated by Republicans. But having made this clear, they then bring up the ways in which they cannot summon the emotions on Obama’s behalf this year that they felt the first time around.
Some point to disappointment over his failure to confront the Republicans early enough and hard enough. How, they ask, could Obama possibly have expected cooperation from conservatives? Others are frustrated that he couldn’t bring Washington together, as he said he would. Still others point to real Obama achievements, including the stimulus and especially the health-care law, and ask why he was unable to sell their merits to a majority of the electorate. And then there are those who wonder why the malefactors of finance have faced so little accountability.
Few of these voters would ever support a Republican, and most will turn out dutifully for Obama again. But a president who won election with 52.9 percent of the vote does not have a lot of margin. He needs to worry not just about issues but also about the spirit and morale of his supporters.

This halfhearted, unenthusiastic view could be clearly discerned in the progressive reaction to Obama’s recent State of the Union speech. Progressive commentary included a significant number of opinion pieces with titles such as “Why Did It Take Obama So long,” “Semi-Tough” and even “Faux-Populism.” While many progressives were pleased, a substantial group was negative, dismissive and disappointed.
Among progressives themselves there is an intense concern that this lack of enthusiasm represents a deeply unsatisfactory and dysfunctional dead-end. All progressives are fiercely and passionately opposed to the genuinely disturbing extremism that has taken control of the Republican Party and want to fight proudly and energetically against the bitter assault on Democrats and progressives that is now underway. But because of the deeply ambivalent way Obama and the 2012 election are framed in much of the progressive discussion, however, they find themselves unable to unite around an aggressive and positive approach.
But what is the alternative? How can progressives actively and passionately participate in the 2012 elections despite their various criticisms and disagreements with Obama?
The history of progressive social movements of the past suggests the answer: progressives themselves should aggressively re-frame what their participation in the 2012 election is actually about. Rather than accepting the definition of progressive participation in the 2012 election as representing unqualified support for Obama as a human symbol and embodiment of all progressive hopes, dreams and values, progressives should re-frame their participation as representing instead their support for something quite different — for a broad “progressive agenda for change.”
This is not a new departure for progressives but rather a return to the traditional progressive approach. It is, in fact, a rather unique historical accident that in the 2008 election progressives united behind a particular presidential candidate before they had united around a clear progressive agenda. This made Obama as an individual rather than a shared progressive agenda the center of the progressive message and organizing in that election campaign.
In previous eras of social change, in contrast, the progressive agenda and the movement to achieve it clearly and unambiguously came before any progressive commitment to any particular political campaign. The rise of the trade union movement preceded Franklin Roosevelt’s first campaign, the civil rights movement preceded John Kennedy’s 1960 election and the anti-war movement preceded the political campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. In each case progressives had united around a progressive agenda well before they united around a candidate and in every case it was the agenda that embodied the most deeply held progressive ideals and perspective rather than support for any particular Democratic politician.
Obama’s recent State of the Union Speech now provides a way to recreate this more traditional — and profoundly more healthy — relationship between political candidates and the progressive agenda. Obama defined his State Of The Union speech as a “blueprint” for America but it is more accurately described as the “outline” or “framework” for a Democratic economic agenda. As such, it makes it possible for progressives to advocate and organize support for a broad progressive agenda in 2012 rather than simply for Obama as a symbol and icon.

Read more…

Down 15 points to Santorum in Michigan in a PPP poll, Romney could ill afford to write an op-ed in the Detroit News blasting the federal rescue of Big Auto and calling himself a “son of Detroit.” But that’s exactly what he did. As former Governor Jennifer Granholm put it, “He opposed the rescue package for the automakers…Mitt Romney turned his back on Michigan. I would say he stabbed us in the back during our darkest hour and we’re not going to forget.”
Or, as The Economist puts it in its ‘Democracy in America’ blog: “ONE of Mitt Romney’s problems is that he lays it on too thick. He’s not just a conservative, he’s a “severe conservative”. He feels your pain because he too is “unemployed”. And he understands America’s car industry because he’s a Tigers-cheering motorhead, a true “son of Detroit”…The candidate was born in Detroit, though he grew up in Bloomfield Hills, one of America’s wealthiest cities. He probably cheered for the Tigers as a kid, but his position has since evolved. And cars may really be “in my bones”, as he claims, but he advocated letting Detroit go bankrupt in 2008…Free-marketeers that we are, The Economist agreed with Mr Romney at the time. But we later apologised for that position…”
Santorum up 7 over Romney in a big, bad bellwhether Ohio. But Romney does better than Santorum with RV’s in a head to head with Obama. Go figure.
In collaboration with Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and Mi Familia Vota, the League of United Latin American Citizens announces “strategies to increase the Latino voter registration and turnout; as well as the efforts to defend the rights of Latino voters across the country” and noting that “the Hispanic turnout is expected to be 26% greater than it was in 2008.”
A new CNN/ORC International poll indicates enthusiasm among Republican voters is tanking — a 13-percent decline since October, according to Catalina Camia’s article “CNN poll: Republicans losing fire for election” in USA Today On Politics.
Paul Begala writes in The Daily Beast about Bruce Springsteen’s new single “We Take Care of Our Own,” in which “the Boss is at his blue-collar best,” singing “We take care of our own/Wherever this flag’s flown.” Begala also has a plug for Jonathan Alterman’s new book, “The Cause“: Begala calls it “an important analysis of postwar American liberalism,” featuring a chapter on Springsteen and his vision of America, “one in which working men and women were imbued with dignity, even heroism, where gays were embraced as brothers and sisters, where blacks and whites worked and played together, and where ‘nobody wins unless everybody wins.” Begala adds, “Something’s happening here. From the Boss to Dirty Harry, our leading cultural indicators are foretelling a gritty, gutsy, all-American comeback. If the president is lucky, it will accelerate during Springsteen’s upcoming concert tour, build through the Olympics, gain steam during the political conventions, and crescendo in November.”
Nate Silver’s “Why Obama Will Embrace the 99 Percent” in the New York Times Magazine makes an interesting case that Obama’s new populist themes could serve him particularly well in key swing states, if he picks up 10 percentage points among white voters earning less than $50K: “All told, there are 101 electoral votes in swing states that Obama could either put into play or make more secure under the populist paradigm — well more than the 36 he might lose among Virginia, Colorado and New Jersey…The reason for the imbalance is that most wealthy whites do not live in swing states but in enclaves that the sociologist Charles Murray calls SuperZIPs. Most of these are in states like New York, California, Maryland and Massachusetts that are very far from being competitive. ”
At The American Prospect, John Sides argues in “Zombie Politics” that the only significant trend of white workers tilting to vote Republican is in the southern states.
Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, sounds the charge at HuffPo: “EMILY’s List — an organization committed to recruiting, training and electing pro-choice, Democratic women — is on track to raise more money to than in any previous election cycle. And we now have more than a million members. It took 26 years for us to reach half a million members, but thanks to the Republican Congress, we doubled our membership in just one year. If their policies weren’t so dangerous, we would have sent them a thank you note…More women are running for the United States Senate than at any time in our nation’s history…We’re confident that come November 6, there will be a record number of women serving on both sides of the Capitol.

Lots of speculative buzz out there about possible third party candidates and what they might do to President Obama’s hopes for re-election. Theo Anderson, for example, has a post up at In These Times, “Why Gary Johnson Should Terrify the Democrats,” arguing that,

The conventional wisdom is that a challenge by a strong Libertarian candidate would hurt the Republican more than the Democrat. But that seems unlikely. Democrats are usually critiqued from the right and pulled toward the center. The pressure coming from the GOP is always in the direction of more defense spending, a more hawkish foreign policy and fewer civil liberties. But what if Democrats are seriously challenged from the left on social and foreign policy-by a self-styled conservative?
The danger for Democrats isn’t that Johnson will win a significant percentage of the Left’s vote. The danger is that he’ll peel away a sizable share of the much-prized independent voters, who tend to be fiscal conservatives and social liberals, and who might feel, understandably, that Obama hasn’t played it straight with them. He backed away from his early-career support for gay marriage rights, for example, and endorsed civil unions when he became president. His position is now reported to be “evolving.” Does anyone know where it has evolved to, or when he might come to a definite conclusion? Or where he’s at on immigration reform? Or on the drug war?
There’s no uncertainty about where Gary Johnson stands on those issues. On every one of them, his position is both clear and deeply offensive to the GOP base, which is why he never had a chance of winning the Party’s nomination and has very little chance of winning the presidency. But it’s exactly why he appeals to independents.

Anderson’s rationale seems a little tortured, especially in stark contrast to Johnson’s limited charisma. Mr. Excitement he’s not, which is one reason he tanked in December, while quasi-libertarian Ron Paul is still a nettlesome factor in the GOP field.
Moreover, Anderson makes the classic mistake of treating Independents as a real-world third force, which they are not, as Alan I. Abramowitz has made clear with hard-headed data analysis on many occasions. From Abramowitz’s most recent post at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

…There’s an organization that hopes to provide Americans with a centrist alternative to the two major party candidates in 2012. It’s called Americans Elect and it has already raised over $20 million…The absence of a high profile candidate is far from the only major obstacle that Americans Elect faces. Attracting media coverage, raising the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to wage a national campaign and securing a place on the ballot in all 50 states are perennial problems faced by third party candidates.
Of course there will be third party candidates on the ballot in 2012, just as there are in every presidential election. But it is unlikely that any of these candidates will approach the 19% of the vote that Ross Perot received in 1992, or even the 8% that he received in 1996.
Third party candidates have not fared well in recent presidential elections: The total vote won by third party candidates has fallen from 20% in 1992 to 10% in 1996, 4% in 2000, 1% in 2004 and 2% in 2008.
There’s an important reason why third party candidates have fared poorly in recent presidential elections and why third party candidates are likely to fare poorly again in 2012: partisan polarization. The vast majority of American voters today, in fact well over 90%, identify with or lean toward one of the two major parties. And the vast majority of those identifiers and leaners strongly prefer their own party’s candidates and policies to those of the opposing party.
…Over time, the parties have been moving apart. But both Democrats and Republicans are now closer to their own party and farther from the opposition party than at any time in the past four decades. Democrats on average place the Democratic Party exactly where they place themselves while they place the Republican Party very far to the right of where they place themselves. And Republicans on average place the Republican Party exactly where they place themselves while they place the Democratic Party very far to the left of where they place themselves. As a result, very few supporters of either party are likely to be tempted to vote for a centrist third party.

As for “Independents,” Abramowitz clarifies the ‘threat’:

There is one group of voters that might be tempted to vote for a centrist third party: pure independents. These voters, on average, place themselves right in the middle of the two major parties and rather far from either one. But pure independents typically make up less than 10% of the electorate, and they tend to be less interested in politics and less attentive to political campaigns than voters who identify with a political party. There are simply not enough of them and they are too hard to mobilize to have a major impact on the outcome of a presidential election.

None of this is to say that is it impossible for a third party candidate to do significant damage to the Democratic nominee, as many believe Ralph Nader did in 2000. But it is unlikely, especially with the existing possible third party candidates, none of whom appear to have the chops to bust the two-party paradigm.