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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: March 2012

TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Why Super Tuesday Won’t Deliver a Knockout Blow

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
This year’s Super Tuesday will be “super” in the most obvious way: Ten states with a total of 437 delegates will make their decisions on the same day. What will be the upshot of all these contests? Below, a guide to what is likely to happen and how to interpret the results:
Super Tuesday won’t prove decisive. This is true for two reasons. First, all ten states are using some variant of a proportional system to award delegates. Some are looking to statewide vote totals, while others focus on the results within congressional districts. (Ohio uses a hybrid system: About a quarter of the delegates are allocated proportional to the statewide vote above a 20 percent threshold, unless one candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, in which case he gets all the statewide delegates. The remaining three quarters go to the victor in each congressional district on a winner-take-all basis.) Whatever the details, these proportional allocation schemes virtually ensure that no candidate will score the kind of knockout blow that John McCain did on Super Tuesday four years ago.
Second, the mix of states on March 6 makes it very unlikely that any candidate will pull off anything like a clean sweep. In 2008, Mitt Romney didn’t win a single primary in the Deep South, and almost half his victories came in states that share a border with Canada. With that track record, he’s not likely to prevail in Georgia, or Tennessee, or Oklahoma on Tuesday, though he should win comfortable victories in Massachusetts and Vermont. And because neither Newt Gingrich nor Rick Santorum managed to get on the Virginia ballot, Romney should prevail there as well, barring a shocking last-minute surge in support for Ron Paul. And then there are three smaller states (Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota) where libertarian support for Paul could make a difference–who knows how much, and to whose ultimate advantage?
The biggest prize is Ohio–and it’s still up for grabs. Ohio is the most important state that is voting on Tuesday not because it awards the most delegates (it doesn’t; Georgia is larger in that respect), but because it’s the most significant politically. Since the founding of the GOP more than a century and a half ago, no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio, which is the closest thing we have to a microcosm of the country. Granted, the state’s Republican primary electorate is far from a representative sample of voters in Ohio. But it is large and diverse, and unlike Georgia and Michigan, it’s no one’s home base. In short, it’s a fair fight for high stakes.
So what’s happening in the Buckeye state? Two weeks ago, Santorum had moved out to a eighteen point lead, 42-24, over Romney. As of March 2, that edge had shrunk to only two points, 33-31. (Both findings are from Rasmussen, so it’s an apples-to-apples comparison.) The most recent Quinnipiac survey as of March 2 closely tracks Rasmussen, with Santorum enjoying a 35-31 advantage over Romney. (The next survey from that organization comes out Monday morning.)
The internals of the Q-poll offer some insight into the dynamics of the race. As has been the case in other states, Romney does well among older and better-educated voters, while Santorum is strong among white evangelicals and Tea Party supporters. 69 percent of Santorum’s supporters say they’ve made up their minds. But so have 65 percent of Romney’s. Notably, 48 percent of the voters backing Gingrich say they might change, and those who do are more likely to shift toward Santorum than toward Romney. And the demographics tend to work in Santorum’s favor. Compared to Michigan, Ohio has more evangelicals, more voters with no college education, and a larger share of its population in rural areas. On the other hand, as we saw in Michigan, voters still know less about Santorum than they do about Romney, who has run a national race before. So new information via negative advertising can influence their opinion of Santorum, and we can be sure that the Romney campaign will spend whatever they have in an effort to impugn Santorum’s conservative credentials. These countervailing forces point to a close contest down to the wire.
For Santorum, the difference between success and failure rests on two states. The best outcome for Santorum would be to win Oklahoma and Tennessee by healthy margins, hold on to beat Romney in Ohio, and squeeze by Gingrich in Georgia (unlikely but not out of the question). If that were to happen, Santorum would be declared the evening’s winner, regardless of the delegate count, and the Republican race would continue without a clear front-runner. The worst outcome for Santorum: winning only Oklahoma and Tennessee, fueling the narrative that he can’t expand his base of support much beyond social conservatives and intensifying the effort of those outside that base to rally around Romney.
Gingrich is almost certainly finished. It’s hard to see how he wins anything outside of Georgia and restores his credibility as the leading movement-conservative alternative to Romney. He’ll probably keep on going as long as the cash flows from Las Vegas. But Sheldon Adelson didn’t get to be one of the richest men in America by pouring his money down rat holes. If nothing else, March 6 may be remembered as Gingrich’s Waterloo.


Creamer: Gas Price Hikes May Backfire on GOP

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
Eight months before the fall elections, Republican strategists are in a dour mood.

The economy has begun to gain traction.
Their leading candidate for president, Mitt Romney, is universally viewed as an uninspiring poster child for the one percent, with no core values anyone can point to except his own desire to be elected.
Every time Romney tries to “identify” with ordinary people he says something entirely inappropriate about his wife’s “two Cadillacs,” how much he likes to fire people who provide him services, or how he is a buddy with the people who own NASCAR teams rather than the people who watch them.
The polls show that the more people learn about Romney, the less they like him.
The Republican primary road show doesn’t appear to be coming to a close any time soon.
Together, Bob Kerrey’s announcement that he will get into the Senate contest in Nebraska and the news that Olympia Snowe is retiring from the Senate in Maine, massively increase Democratic odds of holding onto the control of the Senate.
The Congress is viewed positively by fewer voters than at any time in modern history — and two-thirds think the Republicans are completely in charge.
Worse yet, the polling in most presidential battleground states currently gives President Obama leads over Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

The one thing Republican political pros are cheering right now is the rapidly increasing price of gas at the pump and the underlying cost of oil.
The conventional wisdom holds that if gas prices increase, it will inevitably chip away at support for President Obama — and there is a good case to be made. After all, increased gas prices could siphon billions out of the pockets of consumers that they would otherwise spend on the goods and services that could help continue the economic recovery — which is critical to the president’s re-election.
But Republicans shouldn’t be so quick to lick their chops at the prospect of rising gas prices.
Here’s why:
1). What you see, everybody sees. The sight of Republicans rooting against America and hoping that rising gas prices will derail the economic recovery is not pretty.
The fact is that Republicans have done everything in their power to block President Obama’s job-creating proposals in Congress, and they were dragged kicking and screaming to support the extension of the president’s payroll tax holiday that was critical to continuing economic momentum.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell actually announced that his caucus’ number one priority this term was the defeat of President Obama. The sight of Republicans salivating at the prospect of $4-plus per gallon gasoline will not sit well with ordinary voters.
2). Democrats have shown that they are more than willing to make the case about who is actually responsible for rising gas prices — and the culprits’ footprints lead right back to the GOP’s front door.
Who is really to blame for higher gas prices?

The big oil companies that are doing everything they can to keep oil scarce and the price high;
Speculators that drive up the price in the short run;
Foreign conflicts, dictators and cartels — that have been important in driving up prices particularly in the last two months;
The Republicans who prevent the development of the clean, domestic sources of energy that are necessary to allow America to free itself from the stranglehold of foreign oil — all in order to benefit speculators and oil companies.

The fact is that the world will inevitably experience increasing oil prices over the long run because this finite, non-renewable resource is getting scarcer and scarcer at the same time that demand for energy from the emerging economies like China and India is sky rocketing.
Every voter with a modicum of experience in real-world economics gets that central economic fact.
That would make Republican opposition to the development of renewable energy sources bad enough. But over the last few months the factor chiefly responsible for short-term oil price hikes have been the Arab Spring and Israel’s growing tensions with Iran — all of which are well beyond direct American control.


How Obama Can Win Working-Class Voters

Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, has an interesting read at Bloomberg.com, “Six Ways to Keep Working-Class Voters on Obama’s Side.” Among Klain’s insights on how to win “values voters’ in the working-class:

Eschew elitism and embrace the elderly: It’s great that the president is taking his fight for women’s health-care coverage to the Barnard College commencement; it would be better if he took it to graduations at community colleges and nursing schools. Obama’s challenge in 2012 isn’t with Ivy League women (and their families), but with working-class men and women who need to know he shares their values. Likewise, the president’s relative youth and “change” message are enormously appealing to younger voters with more progressive values, but the White House cannot forget that the 2012 presidential electorate will be the oldest in history — and that these voters are the most traditionalist in perspective. The president cannot — and should not — depart from his own values, but he must constantly show respect and understanding for voters (especially older ones) who see these questions differently.
Unity with “the uniforms”: The president has an unmatched record of support for veterans, and for police officers and firefighters. Affiliation with these groups conveys a strong message to culturally and socially conservative voters about values and priorities. Every chance he gets, Obama should be seen with these critical constituencies, and align with them. The broader message he sends will be powerful.

Klain also urges the president to reacquaint voters with his compelling narrative of his humble origins in stark contrast to the GOP’s myth-mongering about his ‘elitist background.’ In addition Klain suggests Obama “make his economic case around principles” and use Vice President Biden’s cred with working-class voters. Klain also sees Romney’s front-runner status as an asset for president Obama, since Romney is the most clueless of GOP presidential candidates when it comes to class.
“Good economic news, in and of itself, doesn’t guarantee re-election,” Klain concludes. “The president and his team must keep a sharp eye on values voters, and not let these hard-working men and women slip away if the Republicans recover from their recent fiascos, and launch concerted, sophisticated efforts to win their votes on non- economic issues, as they have in the past.”


Political Strategy Notes

Clare Malone and Jamelle Bouie have “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Super Tuesday” up at The American Prospect. Frank James of NPR.org weighs in with “Super Tuesday: What to Look For.”
The Nation’s Ben Adler elaborates on “Rick Santorum’s Elite background” in stark contrast to his working-class pretensions, first noted at TDS by James Vega. As Adler notes, “His fraudulence as a working class candidate, both biographically and substantively, hasn’t stopped him from making reactionary appeals to anti-elite resentment…There’s no doubt that Santorum is more adept at appealing to cultural and class resentments of working class voters than Romney. But that doesn’t mean he is actually working class himself, and the media should not indulge this fantasy any more than they should have let George W. Bush pretend he was a brush-clearing cowboy.”
Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland has some interesting advice for President Obama in his Ohio campaign. As Pete Hamby writes at CNN’s Political Ticker: “If I were the president, I would talk about the Cayman Islands, I would talk about Swiss bank accounts. What could persuade a man running for president to have Swiss bank account?
Sue, Sandra sue!
Turns out Rush Limbaugh’s oft-cited ratings are a lot of baloney, alleges Cenk Uygur. Writing in HuffPo, Uygur says: How many listeners does Rush Limbaugh have? Well, in the press there are only two numbers you’ll ever see — 20 million or 15 million. Those are large numbers, so that is why Limbaugh is taken seriously and is believed to be influential…I’ve got news for you — those numbers are a total fabrication. They’re made up out of whole cloth…” Uygur explains how listener ‘ratings’ are determined and concludes “Rush’s audience is a myth. He is a paper tiger. Do some people listen to him? Of course. Is it anywhere near the hype? Not remotely. Talk radio is a dying business. I wouldn’t be surprised if his daily listeners didn’t even reach a million…”
Looks like Dems’ initial optimism about taking Snowe’s Senate seat was a little premature, reports Steve Kornacki at Salon.com. A popular former Governor Angus King, is now preparing to run as an independent. King is one of two Maine Governors who have been elected as Independents.
A new CNN/ORC poll has President Obama tied with a generic GOP nominee — in Georgia, reports Atlanta Journal Constitution Political Insider Jim Galloway.
Dems, don’t even think about tilting toward a little austerity, now that the recovery seems on track, argues Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in his ‘Conscience of a Liberal’ blog entitled ‘Not Again With The Pivot.’ Krugman offers five compelling reasons, including: “…it just isn’t true that structural adjustment, to the extent that we do need it, proceeds faster and more easily when the economy is depressed. Workers won’t leave jobs if they aren’t reasonably sure of finding others; firms won’t invest even in useful new technologies unless there’s adequate demand. Keeping the economy weak is a way to postpone good changes, not accelerate them…”
Women trending blue, says NBC’s Chuck Todd.
Ambreen Ali has a post up at Roll Call Politics, “GOTV a Mission of Hispanic Media,” which ought to chill Republican leaders. According to Ali, “Last month, Univision partnered with Hispanic advocacy groups and smaller media outlets in a campaign called “Ya Es Hora,” or “It Is Time,” to broadcast information on how to register to vote, comprehensive campaign coverage and news segments on issues such as immigration and jobs…A similar campaign ahead of the 2008 elections helped naturalize more than 1.4 million people, according to the network…Telemundo launched its own campaign with advocacy groups in November, called “Vota por Tu Futuro,” or “Vote for Your Future,” and has even worked political plots into its steamy soap operas…Univision and Telemundo both reach more than 90 percent of Hispanic households, giving them access to a much-coveted bloc of swing voters.”


Brownstein: Romney’s Primary Wins May Come with High Price

In his National Journal post “The Cost of Romney’s Success,” Ronald Brownstein reviews some new polls and arrives at conclusions the Obama campaign should find encouraging. As Brownstein writes:

The new NBC/Wall Street Journal national survey released Monday, like the NBC/Marist polls released yesterday in the key swing states of Ohio and Virginia, quantify the broad sense in both parties that Mitt Romney’s slog toward the GOP nomination has come at a palpable price for November.
In the NBC/WSJ survey, Obama held a 50 percent to 43 percent advantage over Romney nationally, up from a 47 percent to 44 percent lead in the average of the news organizations’ polls during the second half of 2011, just before the voting began in the Republican race. What’s especially striking about the new survey is that it shows Obama has made his biggest gains among the group that has consistently resisted him the most: white voters without a college education.
…Romney’s eroding advantage among working-class whites tracks recent ABC/Washington Post polling showing Romney with an anemic favorability rating no better than Obama’s among those voters. These numbers are bound to increase Democratic optimism that the focus on Romney’s business career at Bain Capital, and his repeated comments highlighting his personal wealth, may create greater openings than almost anyone expected for Obama with blue-collar whites. If Obama could actually hold as much white working-class support as the NBC/WSJ poll gives him today, he’d bank it in a heartbeat: No Democratic presidential nominee since 1988 has carried more than 44 percent of non-college white voters.

As for the NBC/Marist poll,

The NBC/Marist results from the Virginia and Ohio polls suggest greater upscale vulnerability for Romney. The Virginia survey, which gave Obama a crushing 17 percentage point lead over Romney, showed the president actually drawing only the same meager percentage of Virginia non-college whites as he did in 2008: just 32 percent, according to figures provided by Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. But the poll found Obama attracting 49 percent of college-educated whites, up from his 44 percent figure in 2008, and holding big leads among minorities.
…Like the Virginia survey, the NBC/Marist Ohio poll showed Obama leading Romney among college-educated whites, 48 percent to 43 percent; in 2008, he split Ohio college whites almost exactly evenly with John McCain. In the survey, Obama trailed Romney among Ohio non-college whites by just two percentage points, a much more manageable difference than his 10 point gap against McCain in 2008.

Perhaps most encouraging, Brownstein concludes, “in both Ohio and Virginia the surveys found Obama attracting almost exactly three-fifths of moderates -the same dominant share he won in capturing both states last time.”


Thomas Jefferson’s Religious Philosophy: A Profound and Inspiring Progressive Response to Rick Santorum and the Religious Right

A note from Ed Kilgore:
Rick Santorum’s recent comments on religion have elevated a number of core ideas of the religious right to a central place in the current national debate and have presented progressives and Democrats with a formidable challenge to their views.
In response to this challenge I am pleased to offer the following thought-provoking study of Thomas Jefferson’s religious philosophy as well as a companion communications campaign that illustrates how to put the study’s conclusions into action.

o Thomas Jefferson’s Religious Philosophy: A Profound and Inspiring Progressive Alternative to Rick Santorum and the Religious Right.
o A Communications Campaign: Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophy of Religious Freedom and Tolerance – a Democratic Alternative to the Religious Right

I believe you will find both the study and the communications campaign interesting and important.
Ed Kilgore


GOP’s Limp Response to Limbaugh May Hurt in November

If there is anything more disgusting than Rush Limbaugh’s revolting misogynist diatribe and his ‘apology,’ it would have to be the weasel word responses of Republican and conservative ‘leaders.’ For example:

Mitt Romney said Limbaugh’s remarks were “not the language I would have used.”
“…Rick Santorum said Limbaugh’s comments were “absurd,” he said the radio host was an “entertainer” and “an entertainer can be absurd.””
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Limbaugh was “right to apologize,” but still missed the point, blaming the “elite media” for exacerbating the controversy.
“It sounded a little crude the way it came across to me,” Paul said. “I don’t know why it has to be such a political football like this, so you have to ask him about his crudeness.”
Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain says it’s “totally unacceptable” for Rush Limbaugh to call a law student a “slut”
“Republican strategists, speaking anonymously out of fear of Rush’s power, have pointed to how his sexual shaming strategies “hurt Republicans.”

At least one conservative showed some integrity in commenting on the Limbaugh fiasco. As George Stephanopolis writes in his blog at ABC News:

ABC’s George Will told me Sunday on “This Week” that GOP leaders have steered clear of harshly denouncing Limbaugh’s comments because “Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”
“[House Speaker John] Boehner comes out and says Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff,” Will said. “And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

I assume the calculation of Republicans in voicing such tepid criticism is about not wanting to alienate the tea party yahoos, coupled with an assumption that all will be forgotten in a couple of months. They may be right. Too many American voters have a short memory about expressions of bigotry, which partly explains the popularity of Ron Paul. But if they are wrong, they will pay a huge price on election day, in which case America will owe a debt of gratitude to women voters.


Lux: Populist Women Leading Dems in 2012

The following article by Michael Lux, co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies and author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
With the middle class being beaten down, Wall Street and the top 1 percent still riding way too high, the Occupy and progressive movements finding new ways to make economic issues resonate in the media, a left-of-center populism is clearly on the rise. Even the famously restrained and centrist President Obama is kicking some serious populist ass. (Did you see the speech to the UAW he delivered on Tuesday? Amazing. I think it is my favorite Obama speech ever.)
One of the most interesting trends I am observing about 2012 era economic populism, though, is how much of it is being carried by women candidates. The original Populist movement back in the 1890s had some great women leaders like Mary Elizabeth Lease and Mother Jones, but in more recent decades most of the politicians one tends to think of as populists have been men — people like Jim Hightower, Tom Harkin, Paul Wellstone, Jesse Jackson, John Edwards, Brian Schweitzer and Sherrod Brown, for example. In this election cycle, though, the number of terrific economic populists who are women candidates is a new trend. There are a bunch of them in the House (including Darcy Burner in Washington, Sue Thorn in West Virginia, and Mary Jo Kilroy in Ohio), but I’ll just focus on the Senate today.
We can start of course with the inimitable Elizabeth Warren. She came on the national radar screen after being appointed by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to be the chair of the TARP oversight board, and she thrilled people by doing the unthinkable: she actually held officials from both political parties and the big Wall Street banks accountable. She has shown an uncanny ability to articulate in an understandable way how Wall Street messed up the economy, and is the most genuine and passionate advocate for the middle class that this country has seen in years. Full disclosure: she is a dear friend, so I am admittedly biased, but I think I speak for most progressives in saying she is one of the most exciting candidates for public office we have ever had run.
Here’s the deal, though: as good as Warren is, some of these other women candidates running for Senate this year, while not as well known, are in the same league as her. Take Tammy Baldwin, for example, one of the great, unsung workhorse heroes of the House. She has quietly built a reputation as a tremendously effective fighter on one progressive issue after another, and has been a true leader on economic issues. For example, it was Baldwin who took the lead in sponsoring a resolution in the House arguing against a weak settlement with the big banks on robo-signing fraud at a time when the issue was hardly on the radar screen for most members of Congress. With the Scott Walker and state Senate recall elections and Baldwin’s Senate race (along with being an important target state for Obama and having some other key races up and down the ballot), Wisconsin is ground zero for trying to win progressive victories this year.
Another likely Senate candidate with the news of Olympia Snowe’s retirement is Congresswoman Chellie Pingree. I have known Pingree since the mid-1990s when she was the state Senate Majority leader, and she has been a strong progressive leader throughout her career, including a stint as president of Common Cause before she ran for Congress. She will run a strongly populist progressive race going after the wealthy corporate special interests that are strangling the economy, and will be a tremendous advocate for the working class voters in Maine who have been hammered by this economy.
Another candidate that I am very excited about is Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. Being an old-school Midwestern populist from Nebraska, I love small state races like this one where the costs are cheap and person-to-person campaigning is the single most important factor. Heitkamp is a serious populist who took on the tobacco industry and other big business interests as attorney general. She is far more like Byron Dorgan, the great North Dakota populist who retired in 2010, who had led the fight against the repeal of Glass-Steagall and for eliminating corporate tax loopholes, than she is like Kent Conrad, who is a decidedly more pro-corporate Senator.
In the Hawaii Senate race, I hear great things about Mazie Hirono. Hawaii’s politics are very different culturally from those on the mainland, so traditional heartland populist language isn’t always in vogue, but Hirono is clearly running as an unabashed progressive on a wide range of economic issues, and has established herself as the clear front runner in both the primary and general elections.
Finally, in Nevada, Congresswoman Shelley Berkley is running a populist race for Senate against far right-wing Congressman Dean Heller, whose vicious attacks on policies like the DREAM Act put him in a category with Sharron Angle. Berkley is also into taking on the big banks to help the 60 percent of Nevada homeowners whose mortgages are underwater. She is putting the fight for homeowners and strong, comprehensive immigration reform at the center of her campaign. And there is no one more quintessentially Vegas than Berkley, who knows and loves her hometown and the people in it with a passion.
These six women are all great candidates, and all are running on classically populist themes in talking about the economy. Elizabeth Warren has gotten most of the attention, and no one could be more excited about her race than me, but these other races are important as well. Baldwin would be the best senator Wisconsin ever elected, even better than Russ Feingold in my view because of her effectiveness as a legislator. Pingree would immediately vault to a leadership position on the money in politics issue, which with Feingold gone needs a strong Senate leader. Heitkamp would bring back some much needed populism from the plains states, Hirono would be the most progressive senator Hawaii ever had, and Berkley would bring passion to the fight for Wall Street accountability on housing. Each of the six are strong candidates, either ahead in the polling or well within range of pulling out a win.
If all or even most of this class of women senators were to win in 2012, it would be historic, easily the highest quality group of new women senators ever. Progressives should do everything we can to rally behind them and help carry them to victory.


Key Civil Right: Union Membership

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and labor lawyer Moshe Z. Marvit provide a much needed and timely reminder in their New York Times op-ed “A Civil Right to Unionize.” Kahlenberg and Marvit, authors of the forthcoming “Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice” provide some insightful observations about the current state of the American labor movement, among them,

Corporations will tell you that the American labor movement has declined so significantly — to around 7 percent of the private-sector work force today, from 35 percent of the private sector in the mid-1950s — because unions are obsolete in a global economy, where American workers have to compete against low-wage nonunion workers in other countries. But many vibrant industrial democracies, including Germany, have strong unions despite facing the same pressures from globalization.
Other skeptics suggest that because laws now exist providing for worker safety and overtime pay, American employees no longer feel the need to join unions. But polling has shown that a majority of nonunion workers would like to join a union if they could.
In fact, the greatest impediment to unions is weak and anachronistic labor laws….

The authors advocate a clear and simple proposal to address the problem:

…It’s time to add the right to organize a labor union, without employer discrimination, to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, because that right is as fundamental as freedom from discrimination in employment and education. This would enshrine what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1961 at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention: “The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement. Together, we can be architects of democracy.”

The right to organize and join unions is clearly enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected by the U.S. Constitution and well established labor law. Yet the right is poorly protected “because the penalties — mitigated back pay after extended hearings — are so weak. ”
Marvit and Kahlenberg believe that the best specific remedy would be to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protection of unions and their members:

Our proposal would make disciplining or firing an employee “on the basis of seeking union membership” illegal just as it now is on the basis of race, color, sex, religion and national origin. It would expand the fundamental right of association encapsulated in the First Amendment and apply it to the private workplace just as the rights of equality articulated in the 14th Amendment have been so applied.

The Civil Rights and Labor movements have a lot in common, and it makes sense that they should find protection under the same legislation, as the authors explain:

The labor and civil rights movements have shared values (advancing human dignity), shared interests (people of color are disproportionately working-class), shared historic enemies (the Jim Crow South was also a bastion of right-to-work laws) and shared tactics (sit-ins, strikes and other forms of nonviolent protest). King, it should be remembered, was gunned down in Memphis in 1968, where he was supporting striking black sanitation workers who marched carrying posters with the message “I Am a Man.” Conceiving of labor organizing as a civil right, moreover, would recast the complexity of labor law reform in clear moral terms.

“…There are many factors that help explain why the nation has progressed on King’s vision for civil rights while it has moved backward on his goal of economic equality,” note the authors. “…Among the most important is the substantial difference between the strength of our laws on civil rights and labor. It is time to write protections for labor into the Civil Rights Act itself.”
It’s an interesting idea, and one which could prove to be of great benefit to the Democratic Party.


Berman: Obama Gaining with White Workers

On Tuesday J. P. Green flagged Ari Berman’s article, “Who Will ‘Reagan Democrats’ Support in 2012?” in The Nation. Berman’s perceptive take on Democratic prospects for winning the support of this pivotal constituency merits a little more attention.
Berman, author of “Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics,” quotes TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg on the failure of Romney and Santorum to generate much excitement among white working class voters:

“There’s lots of evidence that Reagan Democrats have pulled back from Romney,” says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who has studied this group of voters for three decades. “But we don’t know yet whether they’ll embrace Santorum. They do not really know him, though conservative pundits think he will have more of a working class appeal than Romney. Could be true–but only because Romney went Wall Street.”
Nor will Santorum’s outspoken social conservatism necessarily help him win Reagan Democrats. “I don’t think they are particularly socially conservative, if you are referring to abortion and family issues raised by Santorum,” Greenberg says. “They are fairly libertarian and anti-government intrusiveness–and are much more concerned with guns than the pill. They were/are strongly NRA in our research.” In 2008, Romney won Macomb County with 45 percent of the vote, while evangelical favorite Mike Huckabee came in a distant third.

In terms of Obama’s prospects, Berman adds that he lost the white working-class by 18 percent in 2008 and Dems lost them by a whopping 30 points in 2010. He notes Tom Edsall’s assertion that “Preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.” However, says Berman,

Edsall’s prediction generated a lot of buzz, but turned out not to be true. Obama has a 43 percent approval rating among working class whites in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, higher than it was in 2008. At the beginning of 2011, Romney led Obama by around twenty points among blue-collar whites in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, according to internal polling by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. At the end of last month, Romney led the president by only three among such voters in these Rust Belt battleground states, a seventeen-point swing over the past year. “White non-college voters in these states moved drastically away from Obama and Democrats between 2008 and 2010, but since then they have come back to basically the same levels they gave Democrats in 2008,” says GQR vice president Andrew Bauman.

And if Dems can stay in that range in the polls, 2012 should prove to be a very good year for the president and his party.