In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira shows the stark contrast between the conservative strategy for cutting the deficit and the views of the public:

It seems conservatives’ first approach to reducing the deficit is going after Social Security and Medicare. And their very last approach is getting rid of tax breaks for the rich. But it’s always worth pointing out how diametrically opposed this is to the public’s approach.
A recent Washington Post/Kaiser poll asked respondents their views on various ways of reducing the deficit. By an overwhelming 65-33 margin, they favored raising taxes on households earning $250,000 or more as a way of reducing the deficit.
But respondents’ views were quite different on reducing Social Security or Medicare benefits. They opposed these approaches to deficit reduction by an 82-17 margin and a 77-21 margin respectively.

As Teixeira concludes, “The public’s views could not be clearer: Tax cuts for the rich are on the table; cutting Social Security and Medicare are not. End of story.”

The Nation’s Brentin Mock reports on a new study, “Bullies at the Ballot Box” by Common Cause and Demos, which merits the attention of everyone concerned about the abuse of voting rights. As Mock reports,

…Common Cause and Demos released a report called “Bullies at the Ballot Box” that raises awareness about groups determined to challenge voters at the polls, even at risk of intimidating voters…The “Ballot Bullies” report examines laws around challenging voters in ten states, looking at how well or bad voters are protected from pre-Election Day voter registration challenges that can lead to reckless purging, voter caging, voters’ being challenged at the polls on Election Day and obnoxious behavior by poll watchers. According to the report, Florida and Pennsylvania have some of the worst voter protection laws, yet these are pivotal states that hold tremendous sway in the upcoming presidential elections. True the Vote has a substantial presence in Florida and has pressed hard for Governor Rick Scott’s reckless purging program there.

Warning about the bullying tactics targeting people of color of a group called ‘True the Vote,’ and “their voter-stalking Tea Party co-signers across the nation,” Mock quotes from the Report:

As we approach the 2012 elections, every indication is that we will see an unprecedented use of voter challenges. Organizers of True the Vote claim their goal is to train one million poll watchers to challenge and confront other Americans as they go to the polls in November. They say they want to make the experience of voting “like driving and seeing the police following you.” There is a real danger that voters will face overzealous volunteers who take the law into their own hands to target voters they deem suspect. But there is no place for bullies at the ballot box…With comments about the “illegal alien vote” and “the food stamp army,” King Street Patriots and their allies have created a climate of fear that voter fraud is rampant in minority precincts and used that fear to justify their discriminatory targeting of poll-watching efforts–again, without evidence to support the targeting.

Mock adds that “The King Street Patriots is the Houston-based Tea Party group that gave birth to True the Vote and its spawn of poll harassers around the United States.”
it’s good that voter suppression tactics like restrictive identification laws and reducing early voting opportunities have been getting more media coverage than ever. But all signs point toward an unprecedented level of voter intimidation and harassment on election day, as well as an escalation of Republican-inspired “caging” scams. Democrats and progressives need to be prepared to deal with it. Toward that end, we strongly urge everyone who cares about the integrity of American democracy to read the excellent, exhaustive report on “Bullies at the Ballot Box,” by Liz Kennedy, Tova Wang, Anthony Kammer, Stephen Spaulding and Jenny Flanagan.

Sometimes two blog items are so amusing when placed together that any additional commentary is unnecessary.
Here’s item one, a memorandum to interested parties from Neil Newhouse, Romney for President Pollster

Targeted Campaign: The Romney-Ryan campaign is running deeply local and targeted efforts in each of the states focusing on the voter groups that will make the difference on Election Day. Anyone asserting a “one-size-fits-all-campaign” effort is being put forward is simply misinformed, as evidenced by the 15 different ads released by the Romney Ryan campaign this past Friday and now running in nine states, including Wisconsin.

And here’s item Two: Andrew Sullivan commenting at the Daily Beast

…Above is a screenshot of the 15 new ads the Romney campaign is now airing in the eight core battleground states, each following an almost identical formula that hits Obama on economic issues tailored to each state. Every ad begins with the same cut from Romney’s convention speech:

This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. But this president cannot tell us that you’re better off today than when he took office

Then the ads pivot into state-specific claims:

Here in [state], we’re not better off under President Obama. [list of problems Obama is implied to be responsible for].
Romney’s plan? [list of generic GOP solutions], create [number] new jobs for [state].

The issues vary by state but include defense spending/national security, low home values, energy policy, the deficit, unemployment rates, government regulation, and trade/China. Some examples: In ads for CO, FL, NC, OH and VA, the Romney campaign says Obama’s “defense cuts will weaken national security and threaten [large #] of [state] jobs.”

The recent New York Times editorial on “Jobs and Politics” offers some salient insights in the wake of the latest unemployment figures, including “…The Republican agenda misdiagnoses the cause of slow job growth, blaming taxes and regulation, while championing more tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of the banks and other businesses as a cure. Those policies, however, are precisely the ones that were in place as the bubble economy of the Bush years inflated, and then crashed, with disastrous consequences. They are the problem, yet they are all that Mr. Romney and his party have to offer…”

Ezra Klein debunks the myth that the unemployment rate dropped because of an increase in the number of ‘discouraged workers.’ Klein shows that the number of discouraged workers actually decreased between July and August.

The new Reuters-Ipsos poll brings good news for President Obama. In addition to edging Romney by 4 points on the “if the election were held today” question, the President is seen as better on jobs, according to Reuters’ Alina Selyukh: “..Asked which of the two “will protect American jobs,” 32 percent of independent registered voters picked Obama, while 27 percent sided with Romney…Among all the 1,660 registered voters surveyed, Obama scored 42 percent compared to Romney’s 35 percent…Obama’s ranking in that category has climbed steadily over the past two weeks of the daily poll, starting with 34 percent on August 28, reaching 40 percent on September 7 and peaking Sunday.”

Matt Bai has a long article in the New York Times Magazine mulling over different answers to a question a lot of pundits are thinking about “Did Barack Obama Save Ohio?”
In his post, “The Washington Post’s Feckless ‘Fact-Check’,” at The Nation Eric Alternman calls out WaPo’s Glenn Kessler for being “the single most aggravating example of the press’s lack of interest in keeping anyone honest anymore…Today he’s the perfect example of a well-worked ref: an unwitting weapon in the Republicans’ war on knowledge and, sadly, a symbol of the mainstream media’s failure to keep American politics remotely honest–or even tethered to reality.”

Chis Kromm has another good post, “From Clinton to Castro: Democrats’ Southern strategy reaches out to both older and newer South” up at Facing South. regarding former President Clinton’s role, Kromm observes “Kevin Alexander Gray, a civil rights activist also from South Carolina, compares Clinton’s role with appealing to white voters to how Democrats used to deploy the Rev. Jesse Jackson when trying to mobilize African-American voters. “They used Jackson to ‘vouch’ for white Democrats to black audiences,” Gray told Facing South. “Clinton is vouching to whites for Barack Obama…”Bubba’s” mission of appealing to whites, including whites in battleground Southern states, exists in delicate balance with another key goal of this week’s convention: to win over the increasingly diverse South of the future. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviews Kromm and Kevin Alexander Gray right here.

Bloomberg’s Tom Schoenberg has an encouraging report on “Republicans Losing Election Law War as Campaign Ramps Up.” Schoenberg explains: “All told, across the U.S., there are at least eight challenges to state voter-identification laws, six to state redistricting plans, four to early voting restrictions, four to voter roll purges, two to registration rules and two to ballot disqualification measures…The challengers so far have won favorable rulings in about 10 of the cases.”

In his post, “Bad Economy? Blame It on Mitch McConnell and the GOP,” The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky says what many Dems, including yours truly, want President Obama to do: “…The smart and aggressive thing to do is to call out the people who’ve been blocking attempts at progress…One of the Democrats’ biggest strategic mistakes of the last two years has been their unwillingness to say plainly and openly that Republicans don’t want to see jobs created as long as Obama is president…Imagine if Obama called out Mitch McConnell personally for that infamous comment of his. The base would be in heaven, and voters in the middle would at least see him standing up for himself, not letting himself get kicked around.” I would only add that, if the President doesn’t want to do it, then have his surrogates start doing it loud and often until it becomes common wisdom, even among low information swing voters.

Josh Goodman has an interesting report on “Democrats seeking comeback in state legislatures” at The Seattle Times. Goodman explains: “In November, three-quarters of the nation’s state legislative seats will be on the ballot. With only 11 governorships up this fall, it’s the legislative races that will do the most to determine the direction of state policy over the next two years…The 2012 elections give Democrats their first chance to bounce back nationally from the Republican landslide victories in 2010, which gave the GOP more legislative seats than it has had since 1928. As of this June, Republicans outnumbered Democrats in state legislatures 3,975 to 3,391..”

As the polls narrow, we are hearing increasing talk about how to reach “the low-information voter.” Fortunately, we have The Onion to shed light on the question in this nifty clip on “In the Know: Candidates Compete for the Vital Idgit Vote.”

The following, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I really enjoyed the last two weeks of party conventioneering, and not just because I’m a political junkie. I mostly enjoyed them because I am a Democrat, and I thought we thoroughly won the convention wars. Christie was too much of a blowhard, Ryan got caught in too many lies, Romney was too robotic, and Clint was too distracting for the Republican message to sink in. Democrats had better speakers, a more credible message, and I think we won the values debate.
However, I think we also missed an opportunity to widen the gap and seal the deal, and I think this race will be close as nails right down to the end as a result. When the economy is as tough as this one is, the anti-incumbent party always has an edge, and when you add in a big money gap, it worsens the odds even more. I still believe in the end we will win this thing due to a better message and a great field operation, but it is going to be tough as nails all the way.
The opportunity we missed was to give voters a better education and more context on why the economy went bad and has stayed as bad as it is, and to lay out a big ideas plan for how to fix things for the long haul. We did a great job on many things- reminding voters that the Republicans got us into this mess in the first place, framing the values debate as lifting everyone up vs. you are all on your own, making great arguments as why our policies are so much better than theirs (and why theirs are terrible), and telling the story of President Obama’s character. But without more context of how things got messed up and why they have been slow to come back, the question in many voters’ minds is still there: yeah, things were bad when Obama got here but why are they still so bad? What Democrats should have done is to go beyond blaming the Republicans for the great recession, and tell the story of the villain behind it all, the Wall Street guys (including, yes, Bain Capital) who manipulated markets, got us all into trouble, and then blocked bigger reforms. Elizabeth Warren in her remarkable speech did a great job of beginning to tell that story, but one speech wasn’t enough.
With that context told, Obama could have gone on with greater credibility to then lay out some substance, Clinton-style, on how we were going to build an economy for the long term based on the middle class instead of wealthy special interests. He had pieces of a plan, some good nuggets, in his speech, but it didn’t feel like a deep, comprehensive plan that would bring the middle class out of its misery.
But no use crying over spilt milk. The Obama team made a different decision than I would have, and who knows, they may be right- a lot of what they did in that convention clearly worked. The question moving forward is what to do now.

Read more…

Since convention ‘bumps’ tend to evaporate, there may not be any measurable impact of the GOP and Dem conventions on election day. In terms of lasting, but immeasurable impressions, few would argue that the GOP convention could help Republicans much. If there is any edge, it would probably go to the Democrats. In his Wapo column, “The tale of two conventions favors Obama,” Eugene Robinson puts it this way “…Frankly, in terms of speechifying, any one night in Charlotte was better than the whole week in Tampa…It’s not that the Tampa hall lacked enthusiasm; it’s that the Charlotte hall seemed absolutely on fire.”

In his Politico post, “Conventional warfare: Why Democrats won,” former Republican Congressman/’Morning Joe’ host Joe Scarborough says the conventions may prove more consequential than many pundits believe: “Maybe there seemed to be such a disparity between the two conventions because the Republican Party has never been the least bit excited about its nominee. Or maybe it’s because Democrats were simply blessed with a deeper bench of political athletes in 2012. But whatever the reason, Republicans were lapped by their rivals and may ultimately pay in November for botching Mitt Romney’s debut…And that means that these conventions will have mattered — a lot.”

TDS managing Editor Ed Kilgore shares one particularly encouraging observation about the convention in his Washington Monthly post, “Table Set“: “The only thing I’m really confident about is that the “enthusiasm gap” we’ve been told about the entire cycle may have largely dissipated… After Charlotte it appears Democratic “base” voters are going to be “fired up and ready to go.” They need a skillful organization to give their enthusiasm its maximum electoral clout.”

In his FiveThirtyEight post “Obama Would Be Big Favorite With ‘Fired Up’ Base,” Nate Silver explores the implications of the gap between ‘likely’ and ‘registered’ voters for each party. Although Republicans have a smaller gap, reducing the gap among Democrats should give Obama a more significant edge in electoral votes.

Lee Fang of The Nation reports that Obamacare repeal advocate and GOP veep nominee Paul Ryan has made an under-the-radar request for Obamacare funding for a clinic in his congressional district.

A couple of fun stats re the Dem Convention. The Daily Beast reports that: 1. More than 25 million people watched Clinton’s speech, while only 20 million people watched superbowl champs the New York Giants vs. the Dallas Cowboys 2nd half, and 2. Twitter reports 52,756 tweets in the minute following Obama’s speech — a new record for a political event.

It may be a hoax, but hacker-extortionists are reportedly threatening to release Romney’s tax records.

At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Geoffrey Skelley discusses the ramifications of the Virginia State Board of Elections ruling that former Rep. Virgil Goode, the Constitution Party’s conservative nominee, has qualified for the state’s presidential ballot. Skelley’s bottom line: “…the only way Goode will truly be a spoiler is if the Virginia result is decided by just a relative handful of votes.”

I’ll close this week with a shout out to a couple of under-appreciated progressive heroes. Give it up for the DNC’s tough workhorse Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for overseeing the most well-organized Democratic convention, maybe ever. Also MSNBC President Phil Griffin for whipping all other cable networks, including Fox and CNN, with MSNBC’s coverage of the Democratic convention, and, beyond that, for having the mettle to put together the best progressive news programming in TV history.

Greg Sargent returned to one of his ongoing concerns yesterday, framing the issue as follows:

The Republican National Committee released a new ad today starring a former supporter of Obama who is in the process of breaking up with a cardboard cutout version of the President. Here’s what the woman says, more in sorrow than in anger:

Listen: This just isn’t working. It’s been four years. You’ve changed. You’re spending is out of control. You’re constantly on the golf course. And you’re always out with Hollywood celebrities….your jobs council says you haven’t even showed up in six months. You’re just not the person I thought you were. It’s not me. It’s you. I think we should just be friends.

…. The ad’s tagline: “Tell us why you’re breaking up with President Obama, at BreakUpWithObama.com.” Americans for Prosperity is also running an ad featuring former Obama supporters saying (again more in sorrow than in anger) that they feel duped by Obama’s promise of hope and change.

Sargent then notes:

I’ve probably suggested this too many times now, but each time an ad like this appears, it’s worth reiterating. The GOP theory of the race seems grounded in the assumption that many Obama voters are reluctant to part ways with him for purely emotional and symbolic reasons. They personally like him; they understand he inherited an unthinkably difficult situation; and they don’t want this historic and transformative presidency to end in rejection. These voters believe Obama’s performance merits replacing him, or are close to believing this, but they hesitate to boot him from office because it will make them feel guilty. So the ad tells these voters that they can feel okay about breaking up with Obama because, ultimately, he is the one who created sky high expectations for himself; it’s not your fault he let you down. “It’s not me. It’s you.”
But the thinking underlying these ads may neglect another possibility: What if the Obama supporters the Romney camp is trying to woo (but apparently has yet to win in the numbers he need) are reluctant to part ways with him for substantive reasons? …Perhaps these targeted voters are taking a more nuanced view of the economy and the Obama presidency, and are in the process of choosing between Obama’s ideas, priorities, values and vision and those of Romney. …

Sargent notes that, based on his conversations with Obama’s polling and media strategists, he suspects that the Obama team believes that this may be what is really going on.
But, if one pursues Sargent’s line of thought, there is actually an interesting psychological reason why the Republicans are quite literally incapable of seriously considering the particular possibility he proposes. There is, in fact, a kind of mental axiom among conservatives that all truly “normal,” “real American” people absolutely must perceive Obama in exactly the same way that they do. Oh, sure, lazy welfare spongers, social and cultural deviates of various kinds, silly, irresponsible students and corrupt union thugs may support Obama for “rational” reasons, but all “real Americans” must, and I mean simply must, see him in the way that Fox News presents him.
This is a necessary psychological deduction that follows from what is a core psychological premise among conservatives: that there is not – and in fact, simply cannot be – such a thing as millions of sincere, reasonable and honest liberals, progressives and moderates living alongside them in “real,” mainstream America. For conservatives, the world is rigidly divided into the real American “us” – who all see the world in a fundamentally conservative way — and the culturally and ideologically foreign “them” who see the world in some messy Islamic/Kenyan/Greenwich Village/Harvard/ Ghetto/Beverly Hills/East L.A./Woodstock way. For conservatives, there is simply no such thing as a pro-Obama or Obama-leaning “real American.”
The result of this inflexible mind set is that when conservatives try to imagine the reasoning process of the “persuadable” voters who the polling data demonstrate are indeed “out there” somewhere in the real America and who have not rejected Obama, conservatives find themselves forced to fall back on notions like gullibility, celebrity worship and media induced hypnotism to explain why these voters don’t see Obama in exactly the same way that they themselves do. The fact that the polling data show that Obama remains personally more popular than many of his policies seems to validate the gullibility/hypnotism hypothesis.
This explains why the GOP commercials this year so insistently present the case for voting against Obama in a way that appears to most Democrats and progressives as very weird and indeed hallucinated – as being something comparable to deciding to break up with a boyfriend who turns out to be a total jerk or becoming disillusioned with a hippy “love and peace” guru who turns out to be a fraud.
As it happens, Democrats should probably not be too unhappy about this conservative blind-spot. It is reasonable to suspect that for many weak Democrats and persuadable voters – even those who are in fact genuinely disappointed and disillusioned this year – the underlying subtext of the GOP ads actually comes across as extremely condescending and insulting.
Listen carefully to the “voice” that is speaking behind the message – the voice that is saying “Don’t worry, dear, it’s OK to break up with that lousy, no-good boyfriend you picked” or “Thank goodness darling, we’re so glad you finally left that weirdo cult you were in.” When you listen carefully, this voice suddenly becomes recognizable as the voice of pompous, gloating, self-righteous parents telling their wayward but now chastened son or daughter “We told you so from the beginning, you silly gullible idiot, why don’t you ever just listen to us.”
As anyone who has ever been a parent –or a child for that matter — will quickly recognize, this kind of sanctimonious parental lecture is, to put it mildly, rarely received by the son or daughter with vast, unbridled gratitude and joyful re-submission to firm parental control. I tend to suspect that on some subconscious level the Republican message may be received with an equal lack of appreciation by the persuadable voters to whom these GOP ads are directed.

Lots of great speeches last night. But just in case you missed this unique stem-winder from Governor Jennifer Granholm, enjoy this clip from her address to the convention:

The following, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The obvious, out-front effects of the post-Citizens United world of political spending are obvious for everyone to see: the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of extra advertising by secretive unaccountable organizations. But as irritating and nefarious as all that is, the hidden effects may be even worse.
Big money has always been a huge factor in politics, of course, with the people who could write the checks and raise the cash exerting a great deal of power in the system. But in the two election cycles since the Citizens United ruling, the power dynamic has shifted dramatically in three different ways, all of which are terrible for the future of our democratic system.
The first is the fear factor. Since Citizens United, I have begun having conversations with members of Congress on a regular basis who are factoring into their voting decisions the awareness that if they piss off a big money special interest, they will have to contend with a huge amount of cash — hundreds of thousands, even millions — being dumped into their race. Because so much of the money is not reported, they don’t know for sure when it might come or if it will come, but the fear of making someone with a bunch of money mad is so much bigger than it used to be. Because the amounts being thrown into these races are so much bigger than they used to be, and because so much more of the money is secretive, the fear factor has grown exponentially.
The second factor that is new is that the sheer amount in some of these super PACs and 501(c)(4) non-profits is making the small number of people who give the big money to them far, far more powerful than they have ever been before. There is no rule against politicians and campaigns having conversations with the people giving these huge amounts of money to these big outside super PACs, and it is documented that people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have been in close touch with the Romney campaign. When they are writing the kinds of eight and even nine figure checks they are, I can guarantee that Romney is listening very closely to them, and not just on policy either. Longtime Republican insider Roger Stone has said, for example, that a source has told him that the Koch brothers told Romney they would give an extra $100 million to Republican super PACs and 501(c)(4)s if he would name Ryan to the ticket, and given how much money the Koch brothers would make off the Ryan budget, that is a completely believable story. The people giving these kinds of sums are having a massive influence on the politicians running for office.
The third factor is the Unaccountability factor. Back in the day when Karl Rove was working directly for candidate and President George W. Bush, he did plenty of dirty tricks and ran lots of sleazy ads, but he was at least held partly in check by Bush having to answer for what Rove did. Now Rove is a free agent. His ads don’t need to have even a semblance of truth, and his dirty tricks directly harm no candidate. Having all this completely unaccountable money flooding the system is rapidly eroding any sense of fairness and honesty in our politics.
I have been involved in presidential and congressional campaigns for almost 30 years, and I can tell you definitively that the changes in the system due to big money since the Citizens United decision are profound. The system is being corrupted to its core, and we had better wake up before our entire democratic way of life gets washed away by this flood of unaccountable money.