The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Since Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, right wing pundits have done their best to frame his pick as a “bold” choice. In fact, it appears to have been a choice born of the dawning realization at Romney’s high command, that his political situation was becoming increasingly desperate.
And the notion that Ryan himself is a “bold visionary” is nothing more than sheer fantasy — unless, of course, your “vision” of the future is the “Gilded Age.”
Before the announcement, conventional wisdom held that Romney would make a safe, boring choice for vice president — somebody like Tim Pawlenty or Rob Portman. The thought was that he would be cautious, both because he is, by nature, a cautious kind of guy — and because he was doing well enough that he didn’t want to make the a rash move that could blow up the way McCain’s decision to enlist Sarah Palin as his running mate exploded four years ago.
But let’s face it, Romney was having a terrible summer. According to Nate Silver’s 538.com — the most sophisticated forecasting model around — Romney’s chance of winning this fall had dropped to under 30%. His Las Vegas odds — and odds on the Intrade political market — weren’t much better.
Romney’s foreign trip was a disaster. As much as anything it demonstrated that he lacks the most important single trait of successful political leaders: empathy. Romney seems constitutionally incapable of putting himself in other people’s shoes. He launched his expedition to Europe and Israel to demonstrate that he was a capable statesman, and looked instead like a bull in a china closet — insulting everyone in sight. Worse yet he looked out of his depth — like a student who was allowed to create his own SAT test and still failed to pass. Or, as former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs put it — he looked like a guy who struck out at T-Ball.
His refusal to release his tax returns has continued to focus attention on Romney’s wealth — and the fact that in the one full year of returns he has opened to public scrutiny, he paid only a 13.9% effective tax rate makes it look like he plays by a different set of rules than ordinary mortals. Matters got worse when the a non-partisan Brookings Institute Study found that his tax “reform” plan would increase the taxes of 95% of Americans, and give him — and millionaires like him — hundreds of thousands of additional tax breaks.
Romney’s history of outsourcing American jobs, his record at Bain Capital, his Swiss Bank Accounts and cash in the Caymans, have all begun to convince persuadable voters that he just isn’t on their side. And it has become apparent that the more voters learn about his record as governor of Massachusetts — 47th out of 50 in job creation — his claims to be an effective job creator were just so much hot air.
And finally there was the indisputable fact that Romney seems incapable of relating to ordinary Americans and their lives (e.g., “corporations are people too,” “Ann drives two Cadillacs,” “I love firing people,” etc.).
That’s not to say that Romney doesn’t still have a lot of chips on his side of the table. The long recovery from the Great Recession — which was, of course, caused by precisely the same policies that Romney would like to revive — presents a headwind for President Obama. And that headwind has been amplified by Republicans in Congress who have intentionally sabotaged the American economy for their own political advantage — doing everything in their power to prevent passage of the infrastructure and jobs programs that independent analysts say would have created at least another million jobs.
And, of course, there is the advantage bestowed by the unprecedented tsunami of money with which multi-millionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson hope to buy the outcome of the election.
In fact, a good case can be made that Romney still has a pretty good chance of beating the odds in November. But the Romney campaign — and its super wealthy right wing supporters — were starting to panic. And the forces that wanted to bet the ranch on a real, radical right-wing take over of American government used that panic to successfully promote their choice of most right wing vice presidential candidate since 1900. They convinced the campaign high command to double down on the view that this election is ultimately about mobilizing their base — and, they argued no one could do that better than Paul Ryan.
Ryan’s choice must have been controversial among Romney’s advisers. Medicare is enormously popular in America — especially among senior citizens who make up a disproportionate percentage of the vote in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Nevada. Ryan is — after all — the leader of the movement that no kidding around, wants to abolish Medicare as we know it. Presumably they believe that they can spend enough to confuse older voters into believing something different. Don’t bet on it.

Read more…

It looks increasingly like another botched GOP vetting job behind the Ryan pick. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from Jennifer Bendery’s “Paul Ryan Only Passed 2 Bills Into Law In More Than A Decade” at HuffPo. One bill was a post-office renaming; the other was imposing a tax on archery arrow shafts. This is the Republicans’ big thinker?
Dems looking for a manageable soundbite on the Ryan pick should consider this one by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, reported in The Monitor: “As a member of the Budget Committee myself, I’ve had a front row seat to witness the architect of the Romney-Ryan budget…It suggests that we should end Medicare as we know it, shred the safety net for seniors in health care that we had in place for more than 50 years, turn Medicare into a block grants and send it to the states, which would really jeopardize seniors in nursing homes, potentially take 10 million students off of Pell Grants, cut health care, cut education.”
Or, try Paul Krugman’s take, from his NYT blog on “Galt/Gekko 2012“: “…Anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered…He is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine…Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.”
For bumper-sticker brevity, however, nobody is going to top President Obama’s zinger characterizing the Romney-Ryan economic plan as “trickle-down fairy dust.”
For least credible walkback on the Sunday political yak shows, I would like to nominate Newt for his comment on ‘Face the Nation’ that Ryan’s Medicare-to-voucher plan “is the right direction” for America — which is quite a stark contrast from his earlier characterization of it as “right-wing social engineering” and “too big a jump.”
Writing in Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Buffalo-SUNY Proff James E. Campbell makes an economic determinist argument that growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) is the most important economic statistic to watch in presidential campaigns. Campbell, a Republican, believes President Obama’s chances are fading with his real GDP stats. But the utility of his forecasting model suffers in this case by not factoring in Romney’s extraordinarily-high negatives, nor the quickening demographic transformation that is now underway.
Nader makes the definitive take-no-prisoners case for the $10 minimum wage.
A New York Times report by James B. Stewart sheds light on the possibility that Romney paid zero or very little in income taxes during the last decade: “…This summer the Internal Revenue Service released data from the 400 individual income tax returns reporting the highest adjusted gross income…Buried in the data is the startling disclosure that six of the 400 paid no federal income tax…The I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010…More than a quarter of the people earning an average of over $200 million in 2009 paid less than 15 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes.”
At Politico Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman write in “Romney-Ryan map has Florida at the center” that “The biggest danger for Romney is in Florida, with its must-win 29 electoral votes and heavy senior population, Republicans said it was crucial to inoculate voters on Ryan’s “Roadmap,” part of which would turn Medicare into a voucher-based system for future retirees…A well-placed source said Republicans recently did an extensive regression analysis war-gaming what states are most crucial given the polling…The single state that Romney absolutely had to have in all the various combinations: Florida.”
Paul Begala’s Daily Beast post “With Ryan, Romney Has the Plutocrat Ticket” concludes with what is so far the best line (and most disturbing image) about the Ryan selection: “And somewhere in hell, Ayn Rand is cackling with glee.”

With the selection of Paul Ryan for V.P. The Democratic Strategist is reissuing several posts about his political philosophy. This post by James Vega is from April 25th 2011
Paul Ryan is unusual among politicians because – unlike most — he is actually committed to a specific, explicitly formulated social philosophy – the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are three facts that make the depth of his commitment unmistakably clear:

• Paul Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said.
• He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on Rand. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,”
• He distributes copies of Rand’s books to his staff and requires them to read them.

So is Ryan really a committed and genuine follower of Rand? Let’s try just a little bit of intellectual honesty here. Just replace the name Ayn Rand with V.I. Lenin and imagine a Democrat trying to get away with doing the things listed above without being labeled a hard-core Leninist fanatic.
OK, so let’s accept that Ryan is a serious, dyed-in-the-wool Ayn Rand-ian. So what? Well, listen to these quotes from Rand about ordinary working people:

“The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains…
…Wealth is …made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent, by the ambitious at the expense of the lazy….
“What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

No, these are not out of context, uncharacteristic remarks and no, they are not referring only to people on welfare. They are the core of an organized philosophy that glorifies the wealth-creating businessman and dismisses the ordinary working stiff as a dumb and lazy parasite whose mediocrity is his own damn fault and who lives off businessmen’s productivity like a blood-sucking leech. It’s the philosophy at very heart of “Atlas Shrugged” the book that made Rand a right-wing hero.
Now here is Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given. It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Ayn Rand on the Cross:

“It is the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”

“Mysticism” and “superstition” were two of Ayn Rand’s favorite derogatory terms for religion and her dismissal of Christ for sacrificing himself for his “inferiors” ties together her contempt for both ordinary working people and Christianity at the same time. There are in her works countless statements that literally drip with scorn and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.
Many conservative Christians who take their Christianity seriously do face up to the genuinely creepy and sinister “uber-mensch” (superior man) and “unter-mensch” (inferior man) elements of Rand’s philosophy and reject it categorically.
Here, for example, is Michael Gerson:

Reaction to Rand draws a line in political theory. Some believe with Rand that all government is coercion and theft — the tearing-down of the strong for the benefit of the undeserving. Others believe that government has a limited but noble role in helping the most vulnerable in society — not motivated by egalitarianism, which is destructive, but by compassion, which is human. And some root this duty in God’s particular concern for the vulnerable and undeserving, which eventually includes us all. This is the message of Easter, and it is inconsistent with the gospel of Rand.

But Paul Ryan doesn’t believe this at all – he considers Rand his hero and inspiration – and it’s really vile and contemptible that so many conservatives who claim to be both devout Christians and great defenders of the average American are happily snuggling up under the covers and making goo-goo eyes with a guy whose philosophy should make them gag up their lunch and run to take a shower. Politics may make strange bedfellows, but this slimy and perverse union is particularly grotesque.

“Koch Industries ranks as the Wisconsin Republican’s sixth-largest source of campaign money throughout his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which says the company’s PAC and affiliated individuals have given him a total of $65,500 in donations.”
– from Bob King’s Politico post, “Koch brothers have Paul Ryan’s back”
“He has never held statewide office and has no foreign-policy experience. Both could be liabilities.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
“Ryan “was voted prom king and the ‘Biggest Brown-Noser’ of his 1988 high school class before leaving for college in Ohio.”
– from Bryan Bakst’s Associated Press profile of Ryan
Wikipedia deleted the “biggest brown-noser” comment from its bio page on Ryan this morning.
— from Dylan Byers’s Politico post, “The Paul Ryan Wikipedia edits begin”
Politifact gave him a “Pants on Fire” animated gif rating for his statement that “President Barack Obama “has doubled the size of government since he took office.”
– from Politfact Wisconsin’s “Paul Ryan’s File”
He may be Mr. Deficit Hawk now. But twas not ever thus: “He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan’s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as “irresponsible.”
— from Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine article on “The Legendary Paul Ryan: Mitt Who?”
Further, “There are also holes in Ryan’s budget-hawk armor: He voted for some of the biggest drivers of the deficit/debt — the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, all of which weren’t paid for. Moreover, Ryan voted against the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles recommendations.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
Worse, “Ryan has been a steady voter for unwise bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars. Few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper.”
— John Nichols, The Nation
“Ryan is just a “hyper-ambitious political careerist– who has spent his entire adult life as a Congressional aide, think-tank hanger-on and House member,” says Nichols. He “wants to keep on climbing until he’s America’s real life John Galt. He knows he could control a doddering fool of a puffed up CEO type like Romney as easily and thoroughly as Cheney controlled Bush,” adds the Paul Ryan Watch.
– from “Paul Ryan? Seriously?” by The Nation’s John Nichols, via The Paul Ryan Watch
Romney may have just booted Florida.

With the selection of Paul Ryan for V.P. The Democratic Strategist is reissuing several posts about his political philosophy. This post is from April 27th 2912
Ed Kilgore has an insightful and entertaining post up at Political Animal, taking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to task for his less than credible dismissal of Ayn Rand as his philosophical guru. Riffing on a Ryan interview with National Review’s Robert Costa, Kilgore explains:

So we learn this week from an interview with National Review’s Robert Costa that Paul Ryan laughs off his identification as a big fan of Ayn Rand as an “urban legend,” based on little more than his youthful enjoyment of (and later, philosophical “bantering” about) her “dusty novels.” No, he sternly asserts, he rejects Rand’s “atheist philosophy;” give him St. Thomas Aquinas any old day!
Costa does not report that Ryan specifically denies the actual foundation for the “urban legend” associating him conspicuously with Rand: his remark in 2005, when he was hardly a callow teenager, that Rand inspired his entire career in public service, or his habit of giving copies of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s militant magnum opus, to his congressional interns in 2003.
All of this wouldn’t matter much, except for the fact that Rand is the philosophical godmother of modern GOP obstructionism, the rigid refusal to compromise on legislation to benefit working people or inconvenience the wealthy in any way. Kilgore elaborates:
…The thing about Ayn Rand, as anyone who has actually read her works can attest, is that she offered readers an all-or-nothing proposition. She didn’t entertain, she instructed. This was most evident in Atlas Shrugged, whose centerpiece was an endless didactic “radio broadcast” by her hero John Galt, identifying all human misery with the “mysticism of the mind” (supernatural religion) and the “mysticism of the muscle” (socialism, or more accurately, the rejection of strict laissez-faire capitalism), and with the ethics of altruism both reflected.

As Kilgore quotes from Whitaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal…”
As for Ryan’s reputation as a top GOP thinker, Kilgore concludes,

It’s possible, I suppose, that Paul Ryan is a secret “Objectivist” who keeps gold dollar sign pins in his underwear drawer. More likely, though, he doesn’t understand Ayn Rand any better than he seems to understand Catholic social teachings. In either event, his reputation as a deep thinker whose brilliance and good will demand respect from everyone across the political spectrum strikes me as entirely undeserved.

It’s not hard to understand why Ryan, like a deer caught in the headlights, would deny Rand’s formative influence on him, since she was not only a heartless reactionary, but also a militantly pro-choice atheist, who accepted Social Security and Medicare (According to “100 voices: an oral history of Ayn Rand”), while sneering at social programs for everyone else. But Ryan’s denials won’t be taken very seriously by anyone familiar with his record.

The following post comes from an e-blast from Chris Bowers of Daily Kos:
…Join with Daily Kos and Democracy for America by signing our petition telling the House Democrats in ultra-safe districts who have stockpiled more than $63 million to start sending some of that money to progressive Democrats in swing districts. Please, click here to sign the petition.
Democrats have a good chance to retake the House of Representatives, with eight polls in the last month showing them either ahead or tied. Still, the current Democratic lead is tenuous because negative ads from Republican Super PACs will only increase as the election approaches.
Fortunately, there is a way to counter this coming onslaught of corporate cash. There are nearly 100 House Democrats in very safe districts who collectively have more than $63 million in their campaign bank accounts. If these Democrats started sending some of that money to campaigns in swing districts, they would provide the financial support needed to send John Boehner and the tea party packing.
We know pushing these Democrats can work, because we’ve done it before. Back in 2006, our grassroots pressure resulted in ultra-safe Democrats sending millions of dollars to battleground districts, thus playing an important role in Democrats retaking the House that year.
We can do it again in 2012, but we need to start now. Please, click here to tell ultra-safe House Democrats to stop hoarding cash and step up their support for progressive Democrats in swing districts.
Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
“Tough on Kids; Weak on Work.” That was Bill Clinton’s regular and emphatic judgment on the Republican attitude on welfare reform as he vetoed two congressional GOP bills before cutting the deal that became the landmark 1996 law.
This was no mere rhetoric. As a welfare policy wonk in the 1990s I can attest to the fact that Republican interest in welfare reform was focused on everything other than work: punishing illegitimacy, creating absolute time limits for eligibility, devolving responsibility for the indigent to the states, and saving money for the federal government. If work requirements helped meet these goals, Republicans were supportive, but it was hardly their main interest, particularly if it required “making work pay” for welfare recipients via support for the working poor.
That’s one of several reasons the new Mitt Romney campaign ad attacking Barack Obama for an alleged “gutting” of the 1996 law by “dropping work requirements” is so mendacious and hypocritical.
The most immediate outrage is that the ad’s central claim is, to use a technical term, a lie. The Obama administration has not changed the architecture of the 1996 welfare reform law at all. What it has done, as a response to repeated requests by governors from both parties for flexibility in administering the law–a demand Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have been making from practically the moment it was signed–is to say it was open to offering waivers that exclude states from precisely those regulations that inhibit rather than encourage placing welfare recipients in jobs.
The July 12 memo from HHS Office of Family Assistance Director Earl Johnson which announced the waiver policy is reasonably clear about what the agency will and will not consider:

HHS is encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF [Temporary Aid to Needy Families], particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment. Therefore, HHS is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families….
HHS will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals of TANF.

Elsewhere in the memo–and in public statements by HHS officials–it’s made abundantly clear that the work focus and time limits for assistance that were imposed by the 1996 law will not and in their judgment cannot be waived.
So what about the Romney ad’s claim that “under Obama’s plan you wouldn’t have to work and you wouldn’t have to train for a job. They’d just send you your welfare check”? It represents a bundle of outright fabrications. There is no “Obama’s plan,” no abolition of work or training requirements, no return to a personal entitlement to assistance, and no unconditional assistance. The administration’s actual offer to the states of limited flexibility in the means of achieving the law’s unchanging goals is in no way a departure from past policies under either Democratic or Republican administrations. In fact, it explicitly tracks repeated Republican demands! In the early prehistory of welfare reform, Republicans tried to turn “welfare” into a block grant that states could have used pretty much whatever they wanted.
(Indeed, Bill Clinton vetoed one such Republican-passed law before signing the 1996 act in question. Generally, Romney’s campaign may have miscalculated somewhat by including in the new ad an image of Clinton signing the 1996 law. That has liberated the Big Dog himself to blast the ad’s assertions in scorching detail.)
Some may say campaign ads that distort and even lie about an opponent’s record or proposals are standard operating procedure these days. Is there any reason this ad should be taken more seriously?
The answer is yes. Aside from the fact that the ad is no mere feint, but is already in heavy rotation on the airwaves and is being echoed by Romney himself on the campaign trail, it makes unmistakably audible the main, recurring conservative “dog whistle” about Obama: He’s the unreconstructed old-school lefty who has unmoored his party from its Clinton Era centrist reforms and is determined to loot virtuous middle class taxpayers on behalf of shiftless poor and minority folk. Up until now, conservatives have engaged in the politically perilous tactic of demonizing the working poor: the “lucky duckies” who benefit from the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit; the wage-earners who don’t currently qualify for health insurance under Medicaid but would receive help under the Affordable Care Act; and lurking behind all these would-be “looters,” the struggling new homeowners whom conservatives so often blame for taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford and thus triggering the housing and financial crises.
Americans tend to admire the working poor, so this tack tends to produce an ambivalent reaction beyond the GOP’s conservative base. But by shifting its focus to the old conservative target of non-working “welfare bums,” the Romney campaign is on safer ground, assuming, as you should, that they don’t care if the ad reopens the racial wounds and grievances that welfare reform appeared to partially lay to rest. A line from a memo released by Romney campaign policy director Lanhee Chan in defense of the ad makes its intended audience very plain, calling the imaginary new Obama welfare policy “a kick in the gut to the millions of hard-working middle-class taxpayers struggling in today’s economy, working more for less but always preferring self-sufficiency to a government handout.” It’s the ancient “welfare queen” meme designed to encourage the non-college educated white voters whose maximum support Romney needs to overcome its exceptional weakness among minority and more highly-educated voters to see in Obama all the old hobgoblins that drove them out of the Democratic coalition to begin with.
It may be a sign of Romney’s weakness that he and his team are now willing to openly play with such racial and cultural dynamite. Or maybe it was the idea all along.

Andrew Grossman reports at the Wall St. Journal on Obama and Romney campaign strategies “to Snag the Growing Number of Ballots Cast Before Election Day” in 30 states. For those who need to better understand the GOP’s war against early voting, Grossman notes that 47 percent of voters cast their ballots early in battleground states in 2008, up from 28 percent in ’04.
At Campaign for America’s Future, Dave Johnson asks “What Is The Calculation Behind Romney’s Campaign Of Lies?” Part of Johnson’s answer: “This is a key thing to get, the Romney campaign believes that they can win this election using lies and propaganda as “truths” to drive their campaign story. They are making the calculation that the right’s media machine has become sufficiently powerful for their version of reality to reach enough of the public, and that it is sticking in their minds as “truths!”…They are also making the calculation — so far validated by the media response — that there will be little if any pushback from “mainstream” media. They trust that the media will look the other way, report lies as “one side says X, the other says Y,” tell the public “both sides do it,” and say this is just par for the course.”
Dave Wessel of the Wall St. Journal’s ‘Washington Wire’ has an update on “The Vanishing Undecideds,” noting “in the last Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, only 8% of the voters failed to express a preference for one candidate or the other. And when pollsters probed, they found that 84% of those who said they’d vote for Mr. Romney today were “definitely” or “probably” going to vote that way; only 16% were “just leaning.” On the Obama side, the figures were even stronger: 91% of those polled said they’d “definitely” or “probably” vote to reelect the president; only 9% were “just leaning.” A New York Times/Quinnipiac University poll found only a sliver of voters in key swing states — 4% in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are undecided.”
Jonathan Chait ‘s “Class War and Romney’s Counterattack” at New York magazine reports on Romney’s “comically-mendacious campaign.” Among Chait’s observations: “One startling thing about the campaign is how little Romney has done to prepare himself for such an obvious line of attack…He’s allowed Democrats to define him by his wealth and heartlessness. He seems to have fallen into the trap of believing that the sentiments about wealth that prevail among movement conservatives reflect the beliefs of Americans as a whole…In place of his lackluster defensive exertions, Romney is instead mounting a hyper-belligerent offensive. If Obama attacks him for redistributing from the middle class to the rich, Romney will paint Obama as redistributing from the middle class to the poor…the political punch of this messaging derives from the fact that white middle-class Americans understand messages about redistribution from the hard-working middle-class to the lazy underclass in highly racialized terms.”
Jason Easely’s PolitcusUSA post “The Unlikeables: GOP Convention to Feature America’s Most Disliked Politicians” makes a pretty convincing case that the GOP convention is shaping up as a net downer for Romney.
Slate economics correspondent Matthew Yglesias writes that “…A bombshell report released last week by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center shows that Mitt Romney has given Democrats the greatest gift they could hope for – a Republican plan for a broad increase in middle-class taxes.” He explains the Urban-Brookings methodology and adds, “What you get turns out to be a substantial decrease in the after-tax incomes of households with less than $200,000 a year in income, to the tune of 1.2 percent of total income on average. Richer households, by contrast, will pay less in taxes than they do now.”
At the Kansas City Star Steve Kraske has an update on Senator Claire McCaskill’s race against Todd ‘Liberals hate God’ Akin, who wants to “privatize Medicare and Social Security…objects to the minimum wage and to federally backed student loans.” Akin has a slight lead at the starting gate. This may be 2012’s emblematic “money vs. reason” senate race.
MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ show seems to have deteriorated into a pro-Romney gushfest. Although it’s more substantial than other morning yak shows, the blustering-Republican-with-timid-moderates anchor table formula is a yawner. Maybe the show could be enlivened by more frequent guest spots for MSNBC’s impressive stable of assertive liberal commentators.
Good to see NC back in play in a new PPP survey. The state’s electoral votes could be determined by Dem GOTV in the Triangle and Triad regions of central NC.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Anyone who’s lived in metropolitan Atlanta in recent decades (as I did until 1995) knows its infamously snarled highway traffic. But any Georgian also knows that it would be impossible to raise taxes to do something about it–at least since 2004, when Republicans achieved control of both the legislative and executive branches of state government for the first time since Reconstruction. Last week’s calamitous defeat of a sales-tax-for-transportation referendum in metro Atlanta and most of the state showed that when push comes to shove, Republican governing can’t survive the Republicans’ anti-governing message.
Shortly before he left office in 2011, Sonny Perdue–modern Georgia’s first GOP governor–set up a complex mechanism whereby voters would impose temporary higher sales taxes on themselves to pay for specific transportation projects, as agreed upon by local elected officials in twelve specially designated regions of the state. But he and other GOP leaders–including the current governer, Nathan Deal–and a business community desperate for a solution to the transportation crisis, did not anticipate that the Tea Party Movement they did so much to encourage would take so seriously its violent anti-government rhetoric, to the extent of fighting these TSPLOST (for Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) referenda tooth and nail.
They know it now: In a vote held on Primary Day, July 31, TSPLOST went down hard in nine of the state’s twelve regions, including metro Atlanta (where it lost 63-37), despite an unopposed $8 million pro-TSPLOST ad campaign and official support from most Republican and Democratic party leaders.
There are plenty of micro-explanations for the outcome. The whole referendum was complex and unprecedented. Whatever TSPLOST supporters gained in credibility from identifying specific projects to be funded, it may have lost from NIMBY opposition to those same projects. Odd coalitions emerged: In metro Atlanta conservative suburbanites thought too much money was earmarked for public transit projects, while liberal urban voters thought it was not enough. (Both the Sierra Club and the NAACP opposed the referendum). Many voters from different parts of the political spectrum disliked increased sales taxes as a vehicle for transportation funding (Georgia has among the lowest gasoline taxes in the country).
But the overriding factor leading to this humiliation of the business community and the state GOP leadership was simple: Having spent years demonizing higher taxes and government spending, Georgia Republicans were in a poor position to ask for more of both for any purpose under the sun. And with about 62 percent of the total vote last Tuesday being cast in Republican primaries, that was enough to doom the referenda. The only three regions where TSPLOST (narrowly) won were in central and south Georgia areas (including those surrounding the minority-dominated mid-sized cities of Augusta and Columbus) far from the GOP heartland of North Georgia, where the referenda were trounced by two-to-one margins or more.
The loss of Republican voters for TSPLOST was made most evident by business-community ads running in the metro Atlanta media markets just prior to the vote that cited Ronald Reagan’s support for tax increases aimed at infrastructure investments. That’s ironic, given the la-la-la-can’t-hear-you resistance of conservatives to Reagan’s tax heresies, which were cited repeatedly by Democrats during the tax struggles in Washington of the last few years.
The Georgia experience matters nationally for a simple reason: Since 2008, the GOP and its business allies have energized its movement-conservative base (rechristened as the Tea Party Movement) to savagely fight for radically reduced public spending. Now, when increased public investments and the revenues necessary to pay for them are obviously essential to keep a state economy growing, Republicans can no longer dial back the rhetoric, or even count on Democratic voters to help bail them out.
If Republicans conquer Washington in November and Republican-controlled state governments derive the bitter harvest of radically reduced federal support for public services, it will be interesting to see if a “governing wing” of the GOP survives at all in state capitals around the country. And it will be equally interesting to see whether business interests are happy with obtaining better tax rates and less regulation in exchange for dysfunctional government from sea to shining sea.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
Republicans should not be surprised if voter laws becomes a major topic of debate this election season–they will be the ones responsible for making it so. Over the past two years, the GOP has made a concerted attempt in a number of states to tighten voter registration procedures, cut back on alternatives such as early voting, and–most controversially–require would-be voters to show state-issued photo IDs as proof of identity. Because there’s such little evidence that these changes are needed to eliminate widespread voter fraud, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many Republican legislators want to discourage voting among groups–especially minorities and the poor–that cast their ballots mainly for Democrats.
But it’s worth remarking that beneath these crass political motives are some deeper moral issues. Proponents and opponents of these changes agree on one thing: Voting will be harder, and turnout will be lower. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Proponents think not. Speaking for many others, Florida State Senator Mike Bennett said, “I don’t have a problem making [voting] harder. I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert. This should be something you do with a passion.”
There’s something to this, of course. It is morally gratifying to witness the joy of peoples who are able to vote for their own representatives after decades of authoritarian governments–even more so when they have won this ability through sacrifice and struggle that have cost some their lives. In the United States, the movement that enabled long-disenfranchised African Americans to cast their ballots represented a moral high point in American history. African Americans who participated or lived through that struggle have never taken voting for granted, and they have worked hard to pass on that sentiment to their children. At the same time, they insist–undeniably–that their struggle should not have been necessary: The struggle was simply the means to attain a civic status that every citizen should enjoy.
That is why African Americans have a problem with making voting harder, as should we all. It’s common knowledge that poorer and less educated citizens have a harder time navigating a system that is already the most complex least voter-friendly of all the Western democracies (which helps explain why our turnout is so low). Facially neutral registration and voting requirements will have asymmetrical effects, a fact that only the willfully blind can deny.
But this argument raises another question: Are these effects necessarily a bad thing, morally speaking? Some arch-conservatives have gone so far as to argue that encouraging the poor to vote actually undermines just and limited government, because the poor will use their political power to take economic resources from those who are not poor. One such conservative, Matthew Vadum, put it this way:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know that the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians . . . . Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.

This is a classic argument against democracy that traces all the way back to the Greeks. It disappeared from serious American political discourse when states eliminated their property qualifications for voting nearly two centuries ago. In practice, America’s poor have opted for the American Dream of equal opportunity over aggressively redistributionist politics–witness their rejection of stringent estate taxes, a stance most liberals regard as patently self-defeating and view with incomprehension.
The deepest argument revolves around the moral status of voting. Last year, Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers said, “I think [voting is] a privilege, it’s not a right. Everybody doesn’t get it because if you go to jail or if you commit some heinous crime your [voting] rights are taken away. This is a privilege.”
This claim rests on an obvious confusion. Anybody who believes in the Declaration of Independence will affirm that liberty is among our inalienable rights. Nonetheless, certain sorts of crimes are thought to warrant incarceration, which is a deprivation of liberty. Does that transform liberty from a right into a privilege? Of course not.
The real logic is different. Our society presumes (as some do not) that all human beings are equal in their possession of both human and civil rights and that the burden of proof in restricting those rights must be set very high. Some people argue that no reason is compelling enough to override the right to life, for example, which is why the death penalty will always be a contentious issue.
Hardly anyone makes that argument about liberty, which is why life sentence without parole is widely regarded as a legitimate substitute for the death penalty. Without the ability to deprive some law-breaking citizens of their liberty, our entire justice system would come crashing down. But no one thinks that turns liberty into a privilege.
Voting is much the same. All citizens are presumed to be equal in their right to vote. Yes, most felons do forfeit their right to vote, at least temporarily. (We argue about whether permanent forfeiture is legitimate, even after felons have “paid their debt to society.”) But if we take the equal right to vote seriously, we must not pass laws that implicitly treat voting as a privilege some are fitter than others to enjoy. To confuse that right with a privilege is to change the understanding of American citizenship, and not for the better.