TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore posts at The Washington Monthly about former President Bill Clinton’s response to the “highly mendacious and deeply divisive new ad on welfare policy” that tries to mislead voters into believing that President Obama is somehow abolishing the central “work” focus of the 1996 welfare reform act. Kilgore quotes from Clinton’s response (via Politico):

…The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act will not be waived.
The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.

Kilgore adds:

How did the Romney campaign’s response to this rather categorical rejection of the ad’s claims? It just repeated them. I swear, trying to engage these people in any sort of reasoned discourse is like looking into the eyes of a goat: nothing there but the determination to keep on keeping on, truth be damned…The welfare ad is going to be in heavy rotation according to Romney campaign sources, and no number of refutations of its central claims (by Clinton or by “fact-checkers” like PolitiFact, which quickly gave the ad a “Pants on Fire” designation) will stop them.

The Romney campaign and the candidate himself are on track to set an unprecedented record for deliberate distortions — if they haven’t already done so.

TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore has a post up at Washington Monthly’s ‘Political Animal’ about Romney’s chief strategist Stuart Stevens, more specifically what was revealed in Noam Scheiber’s TNR profile of Stevens. Here’s Kilgore:

..Stevens comes across as the rare Republican operative that a progressive might like: literate, funny (or so Scheiber says), and not taking himself or even politics all that seriously. He dislikes life in Washington, as most sane non-natives do, and doesn’t much “get” the right-wing ideology of his party.
But on another level, his very insouciance seems sinister. He wrote a memoir of his experiences in Bush’s 2000 campaign that apparently treats the whole Florida saga like a series of fraternity pranks….

Kilgore references a much-ridiculed Romney ad which was ‘creatively’ edited to make it look like President Obama made a gaffe, when really the President was quoting a McCain adviser. Kilgore quotes Scheiber: “Stevens could hardly believe the blowback–it was an ad, after all, a mere act of propaganda. What was the big deal?,” and adds:

This amorality about politics helps explain why Stevens–who is described as remarkably in synch with the ostensibly very different Mitt Romney–treated the ideological concessions his candidate had to make to secure the GOP nomination as sort of the cost of doing business. Cynicism is hardly a rare trait among campaign consultants, but when yoked to a candidate like Romney who has never taken a single policy position he would not cheerfully abandon the moment it inconvenienced him, Stevens is hardly a reassuring figure to anyone at any spot on the ideological spectrum who takes governing and its consequences seriously….
…I feel about Stevens sort of like I feel about Mitt’s vice presidential choice: if America is about to lurch off into a fateful right-wing direction, I’d sort of like the people leading it to tell me what they want to do and why, and not hide behind inanities, or worse yet, treat the country’s future as a trifle or a plot line in their personal stories. And if Mitt Romney wants to be the hero of that story, I’m afraid Stuart Stevens will be perfectly happy to write it up and then write if off as another cool experience.

All in all, Stevens doesn’t sound like a political strategist who cares much about ethics — or about helping Romney find the ‘common touch’ he seems to lack.

In his latest ‘Public Opinions Snapshot, ‘TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, author of America’s New Swing Region: Changing Politics and Demographics in the Mountain West, shows that Americans still want a significant government role in health care. Teixeira explains:

Conservatives have been arguing strenuously that public uncertainty about the Affordable Care Act is connected to a deep-seated reaction against government involvement in health care. According to them, voters are waking up to the depth of government involvement in the health care system and are rejecting it.
Findings from the recently released American Values Survey conducted by Penn Schoen Berland for The Atlantic Monthly and the Aspen Institute indicate, however, that the public continues to embrace strong government involvement in the health care system. Take the question of whether the government should guarantee health care coverage: With the Affordable Care Act firmly in place, 69 percent of the public still endorses government responsibility for health care coverage, while 31 percent are opposed.

Equally impressive, a majority, not just a plurality, wants more government involvement in health care. As Teixeira says:

…When the public was asked whether the government should exert more influence over America’s health care system to bring down costs and provide health care coverage, 54 percent agreed, compared to 44 percent who endorsed the idea that government involvement should decrease and that the system should be more free-market oriented. So the public actually endorses more government involvement, even with the Affordable Care Act already in place.

All of which helps explain why Republicans have failed to forge a majority coalition to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It also suggests that most Americans are now ready to give the legislation a chance — and are open to strengthening the government’s role in health care reform.

Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs does an excellent job of keeping CNN’s Candy Crowley on point about Romney’s indefensible refusal to release his tax records, despite her effort to make Harry Reid the issue. Transcript here.
And give it up for Reid for using the GOP’s message du jour against them, as Catalina Camia reports at USA Today: “”They’re a bunch of cowards, and they’re avoiding the issue,” David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff, told Politico. “Lindsey Graham, Reince Priebus — they’re a bunch of henchmen for Romney, and they’re all reading off the same talking points. They couldn’t hold a candle to Harry Reid.” As Mark Halperin notes at Time magazine’s ‘The page’: “I think Republicans have misplayed this because they’re keeping it alive as Reid wanted them to. He doesn’t mind being called those names, he couldn’t care less, but it keeps the story alive.” Fun to see the Republicans’ legendary echo chamber backfire.
By the way, the tax records of President Obama and Vice President Biden are available right here, going back 12 and 14 years, respectively. Is it really to much to ask that a Republican presidential candidate be equally forthcoming?
Jason Lange of Reuters has an interesting survey of presidential election forecasting models and their track records.
For a possible explanation for the GOP’s increasing desperation, see the Daily Beast’s “Michael Tomasky on the (Possible) Coming Obama Landslide” One of Tomasky’s observations the GOP should find particularly worrisome: “Obama can lose the big Eastern four–Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida: all of ’em!–and still be reelected.”
Jon Soltz, a two-tour Iraq veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org., blogs at Think Progress on “Why Does Mitt Romney Want To Restrict Voting Rights For More Than 900,000 Ohio Veterans?” Says Soltz, “…Mitt Romney, by supporting the Ohio law that would do away with three days of early voting for all but those covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act (‘UOCAVA’), is supporting the restriction of voting rights for as many as 913,000 Ohio veterans…My question for Mitt Romney is simple: “Why won’t you join the Obama lawsuit in Ohio, and protect our veterans’ right to vote?””
It’s an oft-repeated bromide of politics that ‘a better-informed electorate strengthens Democracy.’ But Anthony Fowler and Michele Margolis have a post up at The Boston Review, that shows “How Informing the Voters Helps the Democrats.” As the authors explain, “Voters uninformed on party positions who received information increased their evaluation of the Democratic Party by 0.8 points and decreased their evaluation of the Republican Party by 1.4 points, relative to the control group that received no information.”
David Schorr argues persuasively at Democracy Arsenal that a robust discussion about the reasons for high unemployment is something Dems should be encouraging. Says Schorr: “The conventional wisdom has it backwards, every day we really talk about the economy is a good day for the Obama campaign.”
The “Let’s make lemonade” award for the last week must go to former Republican Secretary of Education William J. Bennett for his CNN post on Romney’s blundering excursion abroad, “On world stage, Romney showed smarts.”

One of Michael Tomasky’s best posts, “Obama Is Winning Because of the Shrinking GOP” provides a lucid overview of the presidential race. With a little luck, the trend he describes could prevail through November.
Tomasky begins with the observation that Romney is “losing to an incumbent who, given the current economic conditions, ought to be pretty easy to take out” and sketches a pretty good snapshot of the current political moment:

The race is close, and of course Romney has a decent shot at winning. But the fact is that by every measure, he’s behind. He’s behind, a little, in national polls. He’s behind by more in the swing states. And behind by still more in the electoral college conjectures, where Nate Silver gives Obama 294 votes. Obama leads–narrowly, but outside the margin of error–in Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. If he wins those and holds the usual Democratic states–and yes, he’s up in Pennsylvania, where Romney has been sinking fast; only Michigan is really close–he will have won, even with maybe $1.5 billion thrown at him, a not-particularly close election.

Tomasky adds that, given the current economic reality, the divisions over the Affordable Care Act and the midterm elections, Romney should be up by six percent or so. Yet Silver gives Obama a 66 percent chance of winning, nonetheless. “…If that’s still the number after both conventions,” says Tomasky, “it’s pretty close to over.”
It’s not just the ‘likeability’ factor, argues Tomasky. It’s that a critical mass of voters are recognizing the GOP as the party of the aristocracy

Thomas Jefferson argued roughly that it was in the nature of mankind to divide itself, wherever there be free government, into two basic factions: an aristocratic party that wishes to “draw all powers…into the hands of the higher classes,” as he once put it; and a party that opposes that one, representing the broader people. The GOP has, I admit, done a marvelous job of convincing the media and even some liberals that it is the party of the people, because of its hold on the white working-class majority (a segment that is fast dwindling, by the way–electoral demographer Ruy Teixeira reported recently that this bloc will constitute a sizeable 3 percent less of the electorate this year than it did in 2008–the minority vote will overtake the white working-class by 2016 or certainly 2020).

The GOP plays the cultural card exceptionally well, so much so that they are still able to get strong support from the white working class, even though the Republicans offer them nothing in the way of economic security. Tomasky explains that “they must know on some level that the party does not represent them in the least economically. But they accept the deal, and it permits the people who are the real heart and soul of the GOP, the corporate titans and the plutocrats, to call whatever economic shots they wish.”

But their crossover appeal, shall we say, is limited. Throw in their lickspittles on Capitol Hill and in the right-wing media, and their neo-Leninist political tactics, and the picture gets even worse. The lot of them look like a bunch of grim Pharisees, and it’s all too obvious that all they really care about is cutting rich people’s taxes…I the Bain controversy is hurting Romney, and most indications are that it is, that would appear to mean that more Americans than just left-wingers are taking the issue seriously… The party has no moderate faction anymore. The GOP today is a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning. Its middle has been hollowed out.

Tomasky notes that Romney is “a pretty perfect expression of what the GOP has become.” Yet, he cautions, “Mitt might win. A presidential election is a menu with only two options, meat and fish. And if fish has $1.5 billion behind it, and is financing a successful drive to keep meat supporters from being able to vote in key states, then fish can pull out a victory. But the odds are against it for a good reason, a reason that Jefferson identified.”
Given Tomasky’s insights, the Democrats’ have a clear challenge — to define the aristocratic character of the GOP in such a convincing way that a sizable portion of the white working class, regardless of whatever cultural distaste they may share toward liberals, will find it impossible to vote for Romney and down-ballot Republicans.

This item by TDS Contributor Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Executive Director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, is the latest in a series of memos she has written for TDS on LGBT political strategy.
As a gay Christian minister leading a grassroots LGBT rights organization in North Carolina, I have daily occasion to consider the underdog’s position.
We are now almost three months out from the passage of Amendment One, a far-reaching state constitutional amendment that in its vague language appears to ban marriage equality, civil unions and domestic partnerships. Ultimately the courts will need to weigh in on its actual meaning.
Although a sucker punch, Amendment One’s passage was neither surprising nor particularly revealing. This was always the most likely outcome based on months of polling that showed us down by a wide margin. But precedent also suggested this outcome: we have now lost in all 32 states that have had marriage equality measures on the ballot since 1998. The passage of Amendment One reinforced what has been brutally evident for years: the current playbook – which involves rebuilding campaign infrastructure anew in each state, allocating insufficient resources to and relying on outdated technologies in field operations, and, in messaging, tip-toeing around the elephant in the room of displaying actual LGBT lives – isn’t working. This fall, Maine, Maryland, Washington and Minnesota will vote on ballot measures about marriage equality. Each has a chance to create a new playbook.
We live in interesting and often contradictory times. Public support for marriage equality continues to grow, helped recently by President Obama’s endorsement. But significant numbers of Americans remain conflicted about the issue. Two federal cases – a Prop 8 challenge and a DOMA challenge – could be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, yet LGBT people continue to live as second-class citizens in the majority of American states, including every Southern state.
Stating these facts does not in any way diminish the hope I also feel about what’s possible – full federal equality – in the next ten years. The strategies we use in the years to come will be critical not just because they’ll determine the pace and nature of our progress but also because they’ll shape how our country moves through the admittedly choppy straits of change. Ultimately, achieving full legal equality will involve a combination of strategies – from federal litigation to grassroots organizing to lobbying – to get there. But it also requires a clear-eyed assessment of what is and is not working about current efforts.
I believe that current efforts leave untapped our greatest strength: LGBT people and allies in states where discriminatory laws prevail (which is to say most states) who are ready to take public action calling for full federal equality. To tap into this strength, we must first embrace our status as underdogs and the strategic implications of this status. By necessity, the underdog’s approach to any goal favors efficient, creative, and bold tactics.
To succeed, the underdog must be efficient. Conventional wisdom in the LGBT movement holds that we should devote efforts to a state-by-state strategy that involves striving for incremental progress at the state level or trying to hold the line. This approach has served its purpose by breaking through the glass ceiling in a handful of states; the impact of those successes has been critical. But concurrently, our opponents have won in 32 states. Thus, even when we do win in a critical mass of states, the other side will still have a majority.
It’s time to move beyond a state-by-state strategy that has us working on fifty fronts simultaneously (in states where marriage and employment rights have been won, muscular state-level lobbying efforts continue). This strategy makes sense where legislatures and courts are friendly to the LGBT cause, but it is inefficient as a primary strategy in states where the opposite is true. Across the South, the majority of LGBT resources are directed to state-level lobbying efforts, even as legislatures across our region endorse increasingly regressive measures on civil rights.
Moving forward, our efforts across the South should focus increasingly on the federal level, the most efficient pathway to equality for LGBT people in all fifty states. The federal level is efficient because federal legislation and federal court rulings apply nationally rather than winning one state at a time. Frankly, we do not have the time to wait for a slow, incremental march to partial equality on a state-by-state basis. In some Southern states it would take decades to achieve full LGBT quality. The human costs of these discriminatory laws are profound.
Additionally, federal actors are responsive to national polling, which shows us within striking distance of clear majority support for equality measures around a range of issues. Recent national polling, for example, shows 73 percent support for a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act and 50 percent support for gay marriage. In contrast, 34 percent of people in North Carolina supported legalizing same-sex marriage in early 2012.
I love my state, but, in the short-term, I prefer our odds federally. I believe that intensifying federal advocacy efforts in Southern states can accelerate the pace of federal progress. This is not a widely-held view, however, because the South is often dismissed as a politically unwinnable afterthought in the LGBT movement.

Read more…

Note: Working America, the AFL-CIO’s community organizing affiliate with over 3 million members, is the largest and most active progressive organizing initiative operating today in white working class and lower middle class communities. Working America does extensive door to door canvassing and organizing, collecting unique data on the evolving attitudes of moderate and persuadable “Average American” voters. TDS will periodically share their “Messages From The Field” which provide unique insight into this key voting group.

• In a phone survey of Working America members taken right after the decision, we found that 44% agreed with the decision, with 12% saying they disagreed and 25% saying they weren’t sure. When asked what their biggest concern was in finding health coverage, 42% cited cost–by far the biggest issue.
• In an online survey, provisions of the ACA drew strong support, with more than 80% saying they liked the provisions preventing people from getting dropped if they’re sick or discriminated against for a pre-existing condition. The issue of cost is paramount: more than 80% said they’d look at cost as an important factor in choosing a plan.

The takeaway? There are still a lot of people who are undecided and don’t know much about ACA. Once they get a clear explanation of what the law is, they are much more receptive.
Karen Nussbaum, Executive Director
Working America