Former FL Gov. Charlie Christ, the maverick Republican (now independent) who extended voting hours, increased the number of days people could vote and restored registration rights for felons, says it plain: “There are lines that should not be crossed; meddling with voting rights is one of them. It is un-American and it is beneath us.”
Nate Silver addresses a worrisome question for Dems in his FiveThirtyEight blog, “Is Minnesota a Battleground Again?”
Silver also believes Obama is doing well in Florida, and sees FL “in an essential three-way tie with Pennsylvania and Virginia for second place on the list of the most important states. (All of these states rank below Ohio.)”
There seems to be growing buzz about the Obama campaign spending its dough too fast, while not bringing in adequate additional revenues to remain competitive in the home stretch, as Peter Nicholas and Danny Yadron note in their Wall St. Journal post, “Obama’s Burn Rate Worries Some Democrats.”
Robert F. Bauer, general counsel to Obama for America and the D.N.C., has a post on a topic of potentially decisive consequence in bellwether Ohio up at the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s web page, “The fight for early voting in Ohio.” As Bauer explains, “…In 2010, almost one-third of the early votes were cast within a week of Election Day, well over 90,000 of which were cast within the last three days before Election Day. And these early voters are more likely to be women and seniors, and to have lower incomes, than those who vote on Election Day.” Despite a referendum showing overwhelming support for early voting, “the Ohio General Assembly…took away in-person early voting for most voters over this critical three-day period…the legislature is now providing different deadlines for different early voters. Some voters may vote from the Friday through the Monday before the election; most may not. The United States.” The issue is headed fort he courts.
Here’s a link to send to your friends who have gone all chicken little about Europe’s economic woes — Esther Zuckerman’s ‘Stat of the Day’ post at The Atlantic, “Boston Has a Bigger Economy Than Greece.”
Those who have had some experience with recurring nightmares will find James Warren’s Daily Beast post, “Bill Daley Asks: Is Obama Campaign Ready for Recounts?” troubling. Warren quotes Daley, a former white house chief of staff, Dept. of Commerce secretary and Gore’s 2000 campaign chairman: “It’s not the same as preparing, as Democratic lawyers do, for Election Day voter harassment,” Warren adds that Daley believes “that the possibility of a Florida replay wasn’t on the campaign strategists’ radar screen…Looking back, Daley concedes a few organizational missteps by the Gore camp in Florida, most notably not having a legal and media team on board more quickly…In fact, after the Florida ambiguity arose, the Gore camp reached out to a Florida law firm, only to later learn that its partners had second thoughts and would not help Gore, Daley said…The bottom line was that not having a firm locked in further in advance delayed by a crucial day or two the needed preparations by Gore during an inherently frenzied period.”

At ‘The Fix,’ Aaron Blake reports on “The incredible shrinking — and increasingly valuable — undecided voter,” noting that “Just 6 percent of Americans say there is a good chance they will change their mind about their pick in the 2012 presidential race — a reflection of the divided nature of American politics and the few voters who are actually persuadable…Another 13 percent say that it’s possible but unlikely that they will change their minds…That’s a more polarized electorate than we saw in either 2004 or 2008.”
For a revealing take on the scope and consequences of offshore tax havens, don’t miss John Nichols post at The Nation, “Broke? Not if Governments Tax the $21 TRILLION Rich Have Offshored.”
Dem ad-makers should take a gander at satirist Will Durst’s post up at the Torrington (CT) The Register-Citizen for one way to have some fun with Romney’s record and his denials. Says Durst: “The presumptive GOP nominee finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to convince skeptical voters someone can serve as a firm’s president, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, sole stockholder, junior janitor and cafeteria server in a plastic hairnet and still have absolutely nothing to do with the direction of the company or anything that’s going on. You might say he’s invoking a modified Wall Street bankers’ defense…Also, during the period in question, Romney sat on the board of a corporation called LifeLike, which co-incidentally seems to be his campaign slogan. But we’re pretty sure they had nothing to do with his construction. They make dolls, not puppets.”

In his “False Equivalency Watch” Washington Monthly post, Ed Kilgore takes New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall to task for a sloppy comparison Edsall makes in today’s New York Times:

[Obama] is running a two-track campaign. One track of his re-election drive seeks to boost turnout among core liberal groups; the other aims to suppress turnout and minimize his margin of defeat in the most hostile segment of the electorate, whites without college degrees….Over the past two years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have been conducting an aggressive vote-suppression strategy of their own through the passage of voter identification laws and laws imposing harsh restrictions on voter registration drives.

Kilgore, a self-described “fan” of the usually lucid and insightful Edsall, corrects the Times columnist’s mess:

Even if you buy Edsall’s assumption that the Obama campaign’s anti-Romney ads are designed to convince non-college educated white voters who won’t support the incumbent to give Romney a pass as well, it is fundamentally wrong to treat such efforts as equivalent to utilizing the power of government to bar voters from the polls altogether. Voters hypothetically convinced by the Obama ads to “stay home” in the presidential contest are perfectly free to skip that ballot line and vote their preferences for other offices, just as they are perfectly free to ignore both presidential campaigns’ attack ads and make a “hard choice” between two candidates they aren’t crazy about. Lumping negative ads together with voter disenfrancisement under the rubric of “vote suppression” legitimizes the latter as a campaign tactic rather than what it actually is: an assault on the exercise of fundamental democratic rights.

Put another way, ‘suppression’ is about unjust laws and practices designed to prevent specific groups from voting at all, which is very different from any strategy to persuade a group from voluntarily voting for a candidate.

The following article by Democratic Stategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Some of my consultant friends intentionally put themselves on Republican lists so they can get all their mailings and emails and know what they are saying, and Media Matters does a great job tracking what all the right-wing media figures are saying every day. I am happy all these friends are doing this, and as a result feel like I don’t have to, much to my relief — if I had to listen to and read all that goofy stuff, it would drive me crazy. So I have never given to a Republican candidate or right-wing cause, and never receive direct mail appeals from such entities. But for some strange reason, I managed to get on one of Mitt Romney’s direct mail lists and have started getting letters from Mitt asking me for money. I feel good about making this list because the letters are actually pretty funny.
The latest one starts out:
I am running for President of the United States and because you are one of America’s most notable Republicans, I wanted to personally let you know why. It is simple really… I believe in America.
Now if I am one of the country’s more notable Republicans, their party really is in more trouble than I thought, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. Mitt is running for president because he believes in America, which is odd given all his bank accounts in other countries and given his company, Bain Capital, has been a pioneer in outsourcing and offshoring jobs. Plus the fact that his tax policies would create 800,000 jobs overseas but probably cut over 4 million jobs here in America. Apparently, he doesn’t believe in American jobs, but still believes in America itself, which is good.
Mitt’s letter then goes on to use every cliché Republicans have been using about Obama for four years now, and about Democrats for 30 years: big government, higher taxes, deficits, crushing entrepreneurship, blah, blah, blah…
They have been saying all this same old stuff since the age of Reagan because so much of the time it has worked for them. (It’s certainly a more appealing argument than “we want to give massive tax cuts to the rich, help the biggest businesses every chance we get, and take everything we can get away taking from middle class and poor people.”) For a long time, many middle and working class swing voters bought that old Republican message hook, line, and sinker. And they may again this year because of the economy being so rough for so long, and because of old habits. But there are fascinating things going on in this electorate, and they are crystallized in an important new poll by Democracy Corps that found that by taking on the Ryan budget, Democrats could move a very significant chunk of the electorate.
What DCorps found is that you give people specific information about what the Ryan budget does, people turn against it dramatically, and when they hear that Romney has endorsed it, it is enough to move voters who have been hard to move in this race strongly toward Obama. The horse race numbers go from 49-46 Obama at the beginning of the poll to 51-43 after they hear both pro and con arguments about the Ryan budget (and 52-43 among those who heard the most about the Ryan budget). That is a major shift given that this has been one of the most stuck-in-concrete presidential races ever in terms of the horserace numbers.
Even more dramatic is the fact that the strongest argument tested, the one that really makes that shift happen, is when the question contains the phrase “President Obama says that he opposes the Ryan budget, particularly because of what it would do to the most vulnerable.” When you leave out the part after the comma in that sentence, the thing about the most vulnerable, the shift toward Obama is only one point, not statistically significant. But when you add that half-sentence, when you focus people’s attention on the Ryan budget’s impact on the most vulnerable, you move Obama’s numbers 5 points, a very dramatic shift in this kind of race, and at this stage of the race.
The times they are a-changing. When I started working in politics in the early 1980s, middle class swing voters — those Reagan Democrats of yore — were deeply disconnected from the poor. Part of it was Reagan’s inventive stories about welfare queens, but what made that believable was that those middle class swing voters in the suburbs really felt no connection or empathy to poor people living in big cities. They felt prosperous and secure enough that they just didn’t relate to or care about the poor and vulnerable- ironically, the success of 50 years of New deal economics had made people less sympathetic to those who were struggling. The pounding the middle class has taken over the last decade plus has changed that dynamic. Middle class voters are feeling poorer and more economically insecure themselves, less sure about their jobs and benefits and retirement and kids’ future. Their house is worth less, their savings may be depleted, their wages are flat or may even be less than they were not long ago. They know more poor people. Even if they still have their job and home, they know plenty of people — family, friends, neighbors — who have lost one or the other or both.
I first noticed this in the polling trends and focus group reports in 2009: to my amazement, you could actually score political points speaking about your concern about the poor and most vulnerable! As someone who was raised in the social gospel tradition of the Methodist church and who likes to preach about helping the poorest among us (much to the distress of some of my fellow Democrats who get nervous about such stuff), I was really pleased to see this developing trend, even if part of the reason it came about was bad news: the declining fortunes of the middle class means they feel so much poorer. But there are some other important reasons for this new trend in American politics, one that if it continues will reshape our political dialogue in a fundamental way for a long time to come. Here are three other things going on:
Demographics are moving Americans toward a more compassionate point of view as well. What Stan Greenberg’s calls the Rising American Electorate — young voters, unmarried women, Latinos, and African-Americans — are generally much more sympathetic to poor people than older white married voters, and those RAE demographic groups are all rising in population while older whites are shrinking as a percentage of the electorate.
Republicans steady march toward more and more extreme positions on a wide range of issues plays into this as well. The cuts in poverty programs that Reagan and the two Presidents Bush proposed were mild compared to the utter decimation by the Ryan budget, and as most people hear more specifics about that budget they are horrified. Given that Ryan’s budget is a smorgasbord of the nastiest ideas of extreme right-wingers from the last 30 years, with devastating cuts to poor and middle class people and a cornucopia of delights in terms of new tax cuts for millionaires and our biggest corporations, voters when they hear the details recoil in horror. All told, if the Ryan Budget were passed, it would mean at least $3.3 trillion cut in programs helping the poor, and around $3 trillion in new tax cuts for millionaires over 10 years. In fact, our biggest problem in this election is probably going to be convincing voters that Republicans really have made all these proposals they have voted for in the Ryan budget, because people in focus groups are disbelieving that politicians would be so openly cruel and heartless. But there is no doubt that this steady march toward the world of Ayn Rand extremism is having an impact on moving swing voters our way.
I also really do believe that more voters — whether because of their own and their friends/family hardships or because of changing demographics or whatever — are responding to the moral arguments of progressives, arguments that we have too frequently refrained from because of our own fear of sounding like “bleeding hearts.” Here’s how the DCorps memo put it:

The Ryan budget is weak — and attacks against it potent — because voters believe budget cuts affecting the most vulnerable are just wrong. Voters are most compelled by moral arguments against the budget — they believe that the budget should not be balanced on the backs of the most vulnerable and that cuts affecting seniors and the working poor are simply immoral. In our focus groups among swing voters in Columbus, Ohio, participants articulated this case with strong conviction, asserting that they are unwilling to sacrifice struggling families in order to reduce the deficit.
To be sure, voters make judgments about the budget based on what is good for the economy and best for themselves personally. But more importantly, above all else, these swing voters in Ohio drew clear lines based on what is “right” and “wrong.” These definitions are powerful and immovable; they have the capacity to turn voters sharply and steadfastly against the Ryan budget and against Mitt Romney for endorsing it.

There is something powerful going on here. For all kinds of reasons, our country is evolving, and I believe it is going to be harder and harder in the coming years to split middle income voters from the poor as politicians like Reagan and the Bushes became experts at. This trend, along with the demographic changes coming from the Rising American Electorate, give one hope that we might go back to an era such as the one from the 1930s to 1960s when people believed in the idea of community and looking out for each other in America.
The ironic thing about the greed of those at the top of our economic mountain, and the syncophantic politicians and media people that flack for them with their Ayn Randian Social Darwinist theories, is that their success in moving us back to pre-New Deal economics — with its incredible concentrations of wealth, small weak middle class, and masses of poor people — may move our politics to the point where people who spoke openly about their progressive vision of economics can win politically again. I am reminded of the incredible court case where Clarence Darrow made his argument for radical labor leader Big Bill Haywood (who had been accused of conspiring to kill a local anti-labor politician), and won him unanimous acquittal from the 12 man jury in small town Idaho with a speech that was pure populist, pro-labor economics:

Gentlemen, it is not for him alone that I speak. I speak for the poor, for the weak, for the weary, for that long line of men who in darkness and despair have borne the labors of the human race. The eyes of the world are upon you, upon you twelve men of Idaho tonight. Wherever the English language is spoken, or wherever any foreign tongue known to the civilized world is spoken, men are talking and wondering and dreaming about the verdict of these twelve men that I see before me now. If you kill him your act will be applauded by many. If you should decree Bill Haywood’s death, in the great railroad offices of our great cities men will applaud your names. If you decree his death, amongst the spiders of Wall Street will go up paeans of praise for those twelve good men and true who killed Bill Haywood . In every bank in the world, where men hate Haywood because he fights for the poor and against the accursed system upon which the favored live and grow rich and fat — from all those you will receive blessings and unstinted praise.
But if your verdict should be “Not Guilty,” there are still those who will reverently bow their heads and thank these twelve men for the life and the character they have saved. Out on the broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the wide ocean where men are are tossed and buffeted on the waves, through our mills and factories, and down deep under the earth, thousands of men and of women and children, men who labor, men to suffer, women and children weary with care and toil, these men and these women and these children will kneel tonight and ask their God to guide your judgment. These men and these women and these little children, the poor, the weak, and the suffering of the world will stretch out their hands to this jury, and implore you to save Haywood’s life.

The reason an Idaho jury would respond to an overtly political, overtly pro-labor appeal from Darrow was that because of their own circumstances, they knew he was right. Today, our economic system is giving us a similar result: people in the middle are feeling a whole lot more sympathetic to the poor in great poor because they know deep in their gut that they have a whole lot more in common with them.

The Republicans have got their knickers all in a gnarly wad about President Obama’s comments noting that most successful businesses and entrepreneurs have enjoyed considerable benefit from government services. In his Washington Monthly post on the topic, Ed Kilgore describes the GOP reaction as a “gigantic, “aha” moment in the campaign that would drive Obama from the White House like a whipped Kenyan dog.” As Kilgore elaborates,

…Even if you buy the twisted, mendacious version of the Obama quote that the Romney campaign is retailing, are Americans really so protective of the tender sensibilities of business owners that they are shocked anyone would suggest that each and every one of them built their businesses strictly on their own? (Aside from from roads and bridges and inheritances, how’s about employees as a significant factor in business success?).

Kilgore cites Dave Weigel’s explanation that the GOPers are always looking for the “magic word gaffe–a statement that reveals not what a politician believes, but what you already feared, in your bone marrow, that a politician believes,” then adds:

Bingo. The “magic word gaffe” is sort of the inverse of the “dog whistle” whereby pols use banal language that has a special meaning to ideologues (“constitutional conservative” being one notable example; “respect for life” being another). For our right-wing brothers and sisters, progressive (itself a magic word–maybe even a secret handshake–connoting Marxist convictions) discourse is full of these signifiers. “Equality.” “Fairness.” “Giving something back.” “Shared sacrifice.” Constant vigilance for these magic words is how conservatives have convinced themselves that the blandly pragmatic center-left politician Barack Obama pursuing leftover moderate Republican policies is a villain-figure straight out of Atlas Shrugged or (for the godly) Left Behind, hating success and righteousness.
The problem with this stuff, of course, is that the low-information swing voters who will decide the present election will require an awful lot of education to understand the magic word gaffes. They haven’t marinated their brains with Beckian revisionist history and don’t run around pasting “Breitbart Is Here!” posters on telephone poles. Many of them, in fact, probably don’t own businesses and don’t much think of their own bosses–much less the Mitt Romneys of the world–as heroic figures. So the nastiness aimed at Obama will inevitably get a lot coarser than what we hearing today. So what if a few facts get bent or invented along the way? America must be protected!

We may rest assured that the Republicans are not going to win a lot of new votes with this particular meme, since all those who would be gullible enough to buy it have likely long ago booked passage on the SS Wingnut.

A new opinion poll conducted by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic for National Public Radio sheds light on public attitudes toward the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the Affordable Care Act and the possible impact on President Obama’s re-election prospects. The survey, conducted 7/9-12, 2012, polled 1000 LV’s nationally, including an oversample of 462 voters in twelve battleground states. NPR commissioned DCorps, which leans toward the Democratic Party and Resurgent Republic, which favors the GOP, to insure bipartisan credibility in survey methods. But there are differences in interpretation and analysis.
According to the lead sentence in the e-blast of NPR’s analysis, “In the first-ever joint survey for National Public Radio by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic, voters in key battleground states voice opposition to further attempts by Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.” Further,

While voters are evenly split on the Supreme Court’s health care decision, they believe the Court has spoken and think it’s time to move forward and focus on the economy. More than half of all voters (51 percent) say “the Supreme Court has spoken and it’s time for us to move forward…our main focus should be on our economy–getting people back to work with better paying jobs.” This message beats the Republican alternative–that we need to continue to try to repeal the law because it is hurting our economy–among all voters by a 7 point margin and by 9 points (53-44) in the battleground.

Among the highlighted findings, according to NPR:

All voters sharply disapprove of Congress, including overwhelming majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. In the battleground, three quarters of all voters disapprove and half (49 percent) disapprove strongly.
Obama enjoys net positive approval among all voters (49 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove). Voters in the battleground are split evenly.
The Presidential contest remains very close; Obama marginally edges Romney by 2 points (47 percent to 45 percent) among all voters. The race is locked in a dead heat in the battleground, 46-46.
Americans are evenly divided on the Supreme Court decision–among all voters, 47 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove. On balance, however, voters say the decision is more likely to make them support the law.
In detailed arguments back and forth, voters lean towards supporting the health care law; in every debate, the pro-health care law position draws even with or beats the anti-health care law position.
Democrats draw their strongest advantage when they assert that the Supreme Court has spoken and it is time to move on and focus on the economy.

For the DCorps analysis of the poll, click here.
As you might guess, the Republican-favoring Resurgent Republic analysis of the data spins it a little differently. According to Resurgent Republic’s e-blast on thepoll, “in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the health care reform law, President Obama’s signature domestic achievement continues to be a drag on his chances for reelection, and the presidential election remains a dead heat, both nationally and in battleground states.”
With full results available at www.resurgentrepublic.com, the following are key highlights:

Independents remain a sticking point for President Obama. Swing voters disapprove of his job performance (50 to 43 percent) and his handling of the economy (56 to 41 percent).
On the presidential ballot, Independents favor Romney by 5 points (45 to 40 percent).
More voters still oppose than support the health care reform law: 48 to 43 percent (overall); 50 to 37 percent (Independents); and 52 to 39 percent (Battleground States).
Controlling the cost of health care is the top priority in reform, and among these voters, 68 percent say the health care reform law does not address their concern about costs.
On the issue of whether the health care law is good or bad for America, Republicans hold an advantage with Independents (47 to 43 percent) and battleground-state voters (50 to 44 percent).
On the issue of whether the health care reform law raises taxes, Republicans again have an advantage with Independents (48 to 42 percent) and battleground-state voters (49 to 45 percent).

Naturally, this interpretation fails to factor out those who oppose the ACA because it isn’t progressive enough or doesn’t provide a public option. Even taking the Resurgent Republic analysis at face value, it doesn’t look like Dems have too much to worry about regarding how opinions about the ACA will influence the few undecided voters remaining.

Andrew Sabl’s Washington Monthly post, “Why Republicans Are In a Box: Their Base, and Nobody Else, Trusts Big Business” helps to explain why Romney is getting so little traction from bragging about his business leadership experience. As Sable explains:

Mitt Romney has a similar problem regarding Bain. According to a Gallup survey from a few weeks ago, only 21 percent of Americans feel “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in business. (Here’s Gallup’s discussion with some historical averages; here’s a bar graph. And by the way, I’m glad that Gallup combines the results for “a great deal” and “quite a lot” since I don’t see a clear difference between the two.) But big business is the institution whose levels of trust show the greatest partisan differences. Fully 39 percent of Republicans proclaim the highest level of trust, but only 11 percent of Democrats–and, very important, only 15 percent of independents.
…Republicans–especially rich Sun Belt Republicans–generally think that big business is doing fine by America and can be counted on to continue to do fine. They’re astonished that anybody would call fairly standard corporate practices “the problem” rather than the solution. And they would probably hit back hard against Romney’s campaign if he tried to distance himself from those practices (not that he could easily do so!). But in feeling this way they are badly, perhaps fatally, out of touch.

Considering all of the economic fallout from the Bush meltdown, the Citizens United decision and other corporate scandals of recent years, how could it be otherwise?

Alan I. Abramowitz has an insightful post up at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing: in Search of the Elusive Swing Voter,” Abramowitz cites a recent AP/Gfk poll alleging that “swing voters — those who are undecided or uncertain about which candidate they will support — make up 27% of the electorate.” However, adds Abramowitz,

But there are good reasons to question whether there are nearly that many voters whose candidate preference is actually changeable. Evidence from a 2008-2009 panel survey conducted by the American National Election Studies shows that the proportion of voters who actually shift their preference during the course of a presidential campaign is much smaller than the proportion who claim to be uncertain about their choice. Moreover, most of the shifts that do take place appear to be explained by voters’ prior party loyalties rather than anything that happens during the campaign.
…Another very common assumption about the American electorate is that independents are very likely to be swing voters. Indeed, the terms independent and swing voter are often used interchangeably. However, evidence from the ANES 2008-2009 panel survey indicates that only a small minority of independents are actually open to persuasion during the presidential campaign.
In January 2008, 32% of respondents in the ANES panel survey described themselves as independents. And these independent voters were, in fact, less certain about their presidential vote choice in June than voters who identified with a party. Only 61% of independent voters were extremely or very sure about their choice compared with 81% of partisan voters. However, despite their lower level of subjective certainty, independent voters were only slightly less stable in their candidate preferences between June and November than party identifiers: 11% of independents switched sides, compared with 7% of partisans. Fully 89% of independents maintained the same candidate preference over this five month period, including 90% of independents who leaned toward a party and 88% of “pure independents” who expressed no party preference whatsoever. Based on these results, the popular image of independents as unstable voters moving back and forth between candidates in response to news stories and campaign events is a major distortion of reality.

And despite the much-trumpeted ‘volatility’ of the current political scene, Abramowitz concludes, “There is every reason to expect that the patterns of stability and change within the American electorate in 2012 will be similar to those found in 2008. In fact, with an incumbent president running for reelection, voter preferences could turn out to be even more stable this year than they were four years ago.” In other words, whether the president is re-elected or not will likely depend more on voter turnout than any notions of a ‘fickle’ electorate.

At Slate Matthew Ygelsias clarifies Democratic strategy re tax cuts: “…You write two bills. One is called the “Middle Class Tax Cut Extension Act of 2012,” and one is called the “Middle Class Tax Cut of 2013.” One says the Bush tax will be partially extended; the other says that having expired the Bush tax cuts will be partially reinstated. You hold one in your right hand and the other in your left hand, and you keep trying to get votes on the one through Dec. 31, 2012, and start trying to get votes on the other starting on Jan. 2, 2013. That’s a plan that’s guaranteed to work if Democrats win the election in November, and obviously nothing’s going to work if they lose.”
And give it up for Sen. Patty Murray, for adding moral clarity to the discussion, as quoted in Jonathan Weisman’s post at NYT’s ‘The Caucus’: “If we can’t get a good deal, a balanced deal that calls on the wealthy to pay their fair share, then I will absolutely continue this debate into 2013 rather than lock in a long-term deal this year that throws middle-class families under the bus.”
Of course Grover “The Pledge” Norquist doesn’t like it. But it sounds like some Republicans may be getting ready to jettison his stale act, come the new year.
You won’t find a better explanation of Romney’s ambivalence about talking about Bain than Jacob Weisberg’s “The Pain in Bain” at Slate.com. A sample: “Romney, on the other hand, doesn’t much want to defend creative destruction. He boasts about building Bain, but won’t discuss it in detail because it opens up a conversation about those same unattractive consequences: lost jobs, bankruptcies, private pensions dumped onto the federal government. In the case of China, Romney has tried to outhawk Obama, promising to launch what would amount to a trade war beginning his first day in office. When it comes to Detroit, Romney has backed away from his principled position that failed businesses should be allowed to fail. He’s in a corner, because he thinks it’s politically unsound to say what he really believes.”
At HuffPo and current TV, former MI Gov. Jennifer Granholm ably skewers Romney for his blatant hypocricy in sneering at those “who want free stuff,” while leveraging huge tax breaks for his Bain projects.
Naureen Khan has an encouraging interview with Democratic strategist Mark Mellman at The National Journal, which includes this observation: “Romney has more to worry about than Obama does. If you look at white voters overall, if Obama is able to hold on to the minority votes he got last time, he can win with less than 40 percent of the white vote. The truth is, in 2010, when Democrats were getting clobbered, they got 38 percent of the white vote, so getting 40 percent of the white vote is not that hard for the president.”
At the Crystal Ball, Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik see a dead-heat battle for control of the U.S. Senate, including the possibility of “a coin flip battle where the coin, when tossed on Election Day, might land on its side, in the form of a 50-50 Senate. That would require the vice president, whoever that is, to tip the coin one way or the other..”
The battle for the Senate looks even more important in light of Stuart Rothenberg’s latest ‘Roll Call’ assessment of Dem’s prospects for winning back control of the House of Reps.
The National Journal’s ‘The Next America’ blog spotlights “5 Bellwether House Races to Watch” (CO-6; FL-18; IA-3; NV-3; and OH-16).
At Dissent, Nelson Lichtenstein ponders an important question for America’s future, “Can This Election Save the Unions?”

The following Strategy and Research paper excerpt is cross-posted from Democracy Corps.
The most recent survey and focus groups by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps reveal deep opposition to the Ryan budget- and its potential to damage Mitt Romney’s candidacy if he embraces it in the coming campaign. At the outset, the Ryan budget (described in Ryan’s actual language) barely garners majority support. And voters raise serious doubts when they hear about proposed cuts–particularly to Medicare, education, and children of the working poor.
President Obama’s lead against Romney more than doubles when the election is framed as a choice between the two candidates’ positions on the Ryan budget- particularly its impact on the most vulnerable. The President makes significant gains among key groups, including independents and voters in the Rising American Electorate (the unmarried women, youth, and minority voters who drove Obama to victory in 2008). This is an important new finding; highlighting the Ryan budget’s impact on the most vulnerable seriously weakens Romney.
Key Findings:

The Ryan budget is a big target. Even described using Ryan’s own words, support for the budget barely gets majority support.
Mitt Romney’s embrace of the Ryan budget erodes his support in a close race. Romney’s full-fledged support of the Ryan budget opens him up to attacks on big, decisive issues.
Voters respond equally to three big critiques of the Ryan budget. Voters reject Ryan’s plan to allow the refundable child tax credit to expire, which would push the families of 2 million children back into poverty. Second, voters are deeply concerned about Ryan’s plan for Medicare and health care spending for seniors. Finally, voters strongly disapprove of cuts to education spending. These three facts about the Ryan budget are the most concerning to voters, especially unmarried women and Hispanic voters.
Concern for the most vulnerable has a ballot box impact. After hearing balanced facts about the Ryan budget and messages on both sides, we asked voters to weigh the two Presidential candidates based on their positions on the Ryan budget and its impact on the most vulnerable. Not only does focusing on the most vulnerable not hurt the President, it helps him – Obama’s margin widens to 9 points, with his vote climbing above 50 percent.

As a result, the upcoming debate about whether to extend the refundable child tax credit is an opportunity for those who support it. This memo outlines the strongest attacks against allowing the benefit to expire and the strongest messages to support it.
A more detailed analysis of these results can be found at Democracy Corps.

The following article, by Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I have been actively engaged in working in presidential politics since 1984, and one of the most important things I have learned is that people with a lot of secrets they don’t want the world to know should not run for president. Sooner or later, either the secrets come out or the desperate desire to hide them messes you up. Mitt Romney is learning some tough lessons on that score, and it will get worse before it gets better. Even a growing chorus of Republicans want to know what he is hiding, and more importantly why. Because here is the scary thing: given that the two years of tax filings he was willing to release revealed secret bank accounts in Switzerland, the Caymans, and Bermuda, a mysterious IRA worth over 100 million dollars, continued financial ties with Bain even though he allegedly severed ties with them in 1999, and a variety of other information that has sounded horrible to average voters, what is he hiding in the rest of his returns that is worse than that?
Then there is the when-was-it-I-left-Bain problem. As the sole owner of a business, I can assure you: I am going to be held legally, politically, and reputation-wise responsible for anything that happens in my company, even if I hand over many of the day-to-day duties to other people. Romney was Bain’s sole owner, listed multiple times multiple places as the CEO. He cannot escape responsibility from whatever Bain did in those years, and the longer he tries, the worse he looks.
As someone in Romney’s opposing camp, I am enjoying the spectacle. But this whole mess with Romney and his financial secrets reminds us again of a bigger, deeper truth: the rich — at least people who got rich the way Romney did — really are different from you and I. The story of how Mitt Romney got so wealthy, and then how he hid all that wealth and avoided taxes on it, is also the story of the modern decline of America’s middle class. Right around the time Mitt Romney went into business in the early ’80s was the moment when, aided directly by Reagan administration policies and the kind of corporate sharks Romney became, the middle class in this country began to decline in size, strength and prosperity. Mitt Romney and his fellow Wall Street sharks became so stunningly wealthy precisely because most of the rest of us got poorer. The working and middle class in this country got laid off, down-sized, out-sourced; their wages went down or flat, their out-of-pocket health care costs went up, and their pensions disappeared; the price of energy and groceries and other necessities went way up; and when the bubble caused by the out of control speculation of Wall Street burst, their one remaining asset — their homes — lost much of its value. Meanwhile, the guys like Romney who were doing the out-sourcing, lay-offing, wage and benefit-slashing, and financial speculating got filthy rich, and then because of our unprogressive tax laws and because they used Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts to hide their money, they paid a smaller share of their taxes than those hard-pressed folks in the middle class.
That is what is so beautiful about this ad:

That last line that appears at the end, “Mitt Romney’s not the solution. He’s the problem” nails it. Mitt and his class of one percenters have been exactly the problem, and what Mitt did to America while he was at Bain Capital will be mild compared to a presidency whose entire guiding philosophy would be to make it easier for companies like Bain to do even worse to us than they have been doing. It’s not that he is rich, as there are many rich people who made their money doing honorable things, like making and selling good products, or creating wonderful new software. It’s that he got rich by making the rest of America poorer.
It is fascinating watching this secretive Mitt vs the middle class debate play out given my reading material. Over the last few days I have had a chance to read two books and one extremely important article. The books are Chris Hayes’ fascinating take-down of meritocracy Twilight of the Elites, and Stan Greenberg and James Carville’s It’s The Middle Class, Stupid. The article is a new piece by Barry Lynn and Lina Khan on “The Slow-Motion Collapse of American Entrepreneurship.” All of them in their unique ways document how the American middle class is just being slammed by the long-term trends in the American economy. Lynn and Khan present dramatic new research documenting how massive mega-companies are dominating bigger and bigger shares of different industries, and squeezing out millions of small businesses and potential small businesses along the way. Chris does a powerful and compelling job of showing how arrogant and out-of-touch elites are growing further and further away from most Americans both economically and culturally, and how as a result that arrogance creates a culture where they keep screwing up with horrific consequences. And James and Stan do a wonderful takedown of how the middle class has been left feeling betrayed and screwed over by both political parties in the last 30 years, and how we need to turn things around quickly to restore the health and prosperity of the American middle class before it is too late.
Look, I will be honest: I am a thoroughly partisan Democrat, but I know both political parties have contributed to the horrific pounding of America’s middle class in recent years. Both parties share responsibility for the horrific repeal of Glass-Steagall, and for NAFTA and bad trade deals with China. Neither party’s Justice Departments have prosecuted the big banks to the degree they should, or seriously enforced the nation’s anti-trust laws so that small businesses would have a chance against the biggest businesses in industry after industry. I believe what we need in this country is not just a partisan electoral strategy but a non-partisan movement, beholden to no politician or special interest group, that will fight every day to expand and strengthen America’s badly bruised working and middle class. I fully understand that if Barack Obama wins re-election, the poor and working class folks I care about will not be even close to having all their problems solved. But to elect Mitt Romney — a man who is the epitome of the kind of business leader who has become wealthy by making all the rest of us poorer; a man who has endorsed Paul Ryan’s ugly budget, which would do more to destroy America’s middle class than any other piece of legislation in history — as president would be the height of foolishness.
This election is about Mitt vs. the middle class. And after the election, we need to build a movement of, by, and for that middle class so that no politician will ever again so blatantly run on a platform to destroy it.