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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: February 2013

Creamer: GOP’s ‘Economic Terrorism’ Threatens Recovery

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Let’s call it what it really is. The Republicans have a gun pointed to the head of the American economy and threaten to shoot if they don’t get their way. They lost at the ballot box – their positions are unpopular in the polls — so they have abandoned the democratic process, and are once again resorting to what amounts to economic terrorism.
And right now it looks as though they are prepared to pull the trigger as the nation speeds toward the economically disastrous, across the board, draconian spending cuts mandated by the so-called “sequester.”
Over the last few days economists, Defense officials, and the President have all issued clear warnings that if these massive across the board spending cuts go into effect, they will cost in the range of 750,000 jobs, increase the unemployment rate and potentially throw the economy into a double-dip recession.
The Defense Department warned that 800,000 civilian personnel could be put on one day a week leave – effectively cutting their pay by 20% for the rest of this fiscal year – and significantly damaging the nation’s military readiness.
The automatic cuts resulting from “the sequester” would kick 70,000 children out of Head Start Programs. They would cut the ranks of first responders like firefighters and police – as well as teachers, and air traffic controllers.
Love long lines at TSA airport security check points? Think how you’ll feel standing in longer lines after the number of TSA employees has been slashed by the “sequester.”
Then there are the cuts to food inspections, the FBI and law enforcement – or cutbacks in the number of people who process Social Security and Medicare claims.
Now House Speaker John Boehner is scrambling to deny that the GOP has any responsibility for these massive automatic cuts. But that’s like a hostage-taker claiming that it’s not his fault that he is holding a hostage at gunpoint, it’s the responsibility of the family of the hostage that won’t pay the ransom.
The fact is that this current man-made crisis is one in a series of Republican hostage-taking episodes. In each case the GOP threatens blow up the economy if it doesn’t get what it wants. We simply can’t allow the GOP to force its unpopular austerity proposals on the country through these undemocratic means.
What is the ransom they are demanding? They want to end Medicare and replace it with a voucher program that costs seniors $6,000 more per year and makes a fortune for private insurance companies. They want to slash Social Security benefits. They want to permanently cut funding for education, child nutrition, and public safety. They want to shrink the size of government and protect tax loopholes for the wealthy.
But the GOP can’t win these things through the democratic process. We just had an election where the voters overwhelmingly rejected their positions. Their positions have no support in the polls. That’s why they’ve resorted once again to hostage-taking to force their minority positions on the American people.


Kilgore: ‘Hurricane Rick’ an Unmitigated Disaster for FL

After the tea party emits its dying gasp and historians get about collecting the better accounts of its wreckage, they should include Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, “Hurricane Rick,” which surveys the mess Governor Rick Scott and tea party state legislators have created in Florida.
It’s not just Scott’s shameless assault on voting rights that has done so much damage to Floridians’ hopes for a better future. As Kilgore points out:

…Floridians from every corner of the state have suffered alike during the last two years from an unusually virulent strain of Tea Party Government led by a governor as scary as any this side of The Walking Dead, Rick Scott.
In a cover article for Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer profiles the enduring damage Scott and company have deliberately inflicted on Florida’s public sector, in areas ranging from health care to transportation to the environment to mosquito control. But one pattern of misgovernment she notes that is especially appalling is the state’s refusal to accept even the most generous and badly needed federal funds on the purely political grounds of not wanting any truck with the evil socialist Obama administration.
Florida’s refusal of high-speed rail funds for an abundantly eligible and long-awaited corridor from Tampa to Orlando was the first and most obvious self-inflicted wound of this nature. And an impending decision (on which Scott is now being cagey after many months of suggesting he would join the other Deep South Republican refuseniks) could lead to rejection of a vastly generous federal match for a Medicaid expansion that Florida with its massive uninsured population could definitely use.

Scott’s disastrous reign will not be easily corrected, As Kilgore notes, quoting Mencimer:

Even if Scott ends up a one-term governor, his legacy won’t easily be reversed. When he rejected the high-speed rail money, the state passed up an opportunity to upgrade its underfunded transit system that it may not soon see again. Florida’s internationally renowned mosquito control system took a half century to build, but only three years to decimate. Likewise with public health, says Nan Rich, who fought the cuts in the state Senate: “The infrastructure is being destroyed and responding to public health crises becomes more difficult,” she says. “I shudder to think if what happened with Hurricane Sandy had happened here.”

We can hope that Florida’s vote for President Obama’s re-election signals that an important lesson has been learned by Florida voters. But Scott’s destructive decisions will likely reverberate long after he is gone. As Kilgore concludes, “…Like one of Florida’s devastating hurricanes: the damage happens very rapidly, while the recovery may never be complete.”


Political Strategy Notes

The Newt-Rove conflict is getting a little gnarly for the GOP. At HuffPo John Ward quotes Newt: “I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states,” Gingrich writes, casting Rove as the “boss” picking candidates through groups like American Crossroads. “No one person is smart enough nor do they have the moral right to buy nominations across the country…Handing millions to Washington based consultants to destroy the candidates they dislike and nominate the candidates they do like is an invitation to cronyism, favoritism and corruption.”
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum makes a couple of good points in his CNN Opinion post, “Obama needs a ‘Plan B’ on guns.”
Christie Thompson’s ProPublica round-up “Graphing the Great Gun Debate” provides great eye candy for data junkies.
Julian Selzer’s “How to fight climate change,” also at CNN Opinion, has some good suggestions for progressives, including this from Theda Skocpol: “To counter fierce political opposition, reformers will have to build organizational networks across the country, and they will need to orchestrate sustained political efforts that stretch far beyond friendly congressional offices, comfy board rooms and posh retreats … insider politics cannot carry the day on its own, apart from a broader movement pressing politicians for change.”
Mike Dorning reports at Bloomberg Businessweek: “Fifty-five percent of Americans approve of Obama’s performance in office, his strongest level of support since September 2009, according to a Bloomberg National poll conducted Feb. 15-18. Only 35 percent of the country has a favorable view of the Republican Party, the lowest rating in a survey that began in September 2009. The party’s brand slipped six percentage points in the last six months, the poll shows…Americans by 49 percent to 44 percent believe Obama’s proposals for government spending on infrastructure, education and alternative energy are more likely to create jobs than Republican calls to cut spending and taxes to build business confidence and spur employment.”
More bad news for GOP hopes for making inroads into the Latino vote: “In a new USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll, the president’s approval rating among Hispanics has rebounded to 73%.,” reports Susan Page at USA Today.
Do read Jonathan Chait’s post, “John Boehner Traps Himself on the Sequester” at New York Magazine, which makes a persuasive case that Boehner has become Obama’s not-so-secret weapon in the budget battle. “He’s given himself no way out save the total victory of forcing Obama to swallow entitlement cuts without revenue, a goal he almost certainly can’t attain. He’s the unpopular leader of an unpopular party advocating unpopular ideas against a reasonably well-regarded president, so a public fight will decrease rather than increase his leverage.
At The Daily Beast John Avlon explains why Dems should be able to make John Boehner eat his sequester albatross.
Are web-based polls now more credible? Molly Ball’s post on the topic, “A More Perfect Poll” at The Atlantic observes, “…a funny thing happened last fall, even as polling paranoia was raging: the polls got smarter, thanks in part to Internet-based polling, a method that had previously been seen as the industry’s redheaded stepchild. After the election, when Silver ranked 23 pollsters by how closely they approximated the presidential-election result, firms that had conducted their polls online took four of the top seven spots; in a separate ranking by a Fordham University professor, they took three of the top seven. Meanwhile, traditional, telephone-based survey groups like Gallup and the Associated Press scored near the bottom of both lists. That’s right: in 2012, polls that relied on people clicking on the equivalent of those “Your Opinion Counts!” pop-up ads proved a more effective gauge of the American electorate than the venerable Gallup Poll.”
Jason Easeley’s “Rachel Maddow Annihilates the Paranoid Delusions of Rand Paul ” at PoliticusUSA includes this observation: “The underlying problem that Maddow was getting at is that there is no buffer between the whack job conservative media, and Republicans who serve in powerful positions in our government. Some may argue that bigger issue is that someone like Rand Paul got elected to United States Senate, but in the history of Congress there have always been a few flakes, weirdos, oddballs, and lightweights holding office. There have always been ideologues and fringers like Rand Paul floating around in our political atmosphere. The difference between then and now is that the Rand Paul’s of today have a whole facts optional, but ideology required, media complex feeding their delusions.”


Concerns About Obamacare Way Overhyped

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall introduces an important post by Theda Skocpol, explaining why all of the fear-mongering about the Affordable Care Act is a waste of time. Says Skocpol:

I very much appreciate your continuing coverage of the ObamaCare implementation issues, especially the decisions various Republican governors and legislatures are taking for now. But on this latest about four reasons why ObamaCare might “fail” let me demur — as an expert, along with Lawrence Jacobs, who not only has studied and written a widely used book about health reform’s enactment and early implementation but is also continuing to research the various paths in the fifty states.
There is WAY too much doomsaying about all of the twists and turns. How many times has the blogosphere declared ObamaCare dead? Or claimed that some development, such as the grant to the states of authority to accept or reject components, would prove fatal? Experts like Jost and Gruber are implicated in overhyping too. Jost is a legal expert. Gruber an economist. Both are experts in their domains, but not in politics. Neither seems to understand the relatively protracted political contention that accompanies big expansons of the U.S. welfare state like this one. Social Security was opposed by the GOP for fifteen years after enactment, and came close to fiscal death various times. Medicare was very ideologically fraught for years. (Both have been revived as partisan battles lately.). But these programs have all survived, and so will ObamaCare.
Public opinion has always been partisan divided on the reform overall, but the key components have almost all been and remain very popular. They are coming into concrete existence in states with at least half the national population. A number of GOP governors have already blinked on rejecting Medicaid expansions, and others will — plus more will be defeated in 2014 (e.g., in Maine, where the legislature is ready to move ahead, and probably in Florida, too). Even the exchanges are getting quiet cooperation in various refusnik states, and there are advantages to some degree of national standardization in the exchanges, for which the federal government is now widely responsible. (Back when ObamaCare was passed into law, liberal bloggers were declaring doom over the fact that fifty states would have to design exchanges; now doom is being declared over the fact that half the exchanges will be strongly shaped by the feds. Which is it? Or is it just perpetual doom?)
This will be a long and contested process, but there is no prospect whatsoever that this law will be repealed or permanently thrown off track. Yes, the GOP will cut back vital funding if it gets windows, but those windows will not be likely to last. Before long, moreover, supporters will be able to point to real, popular gains in wellbeing in a lot of states — and ask why the laggard or refusnik states are denying these to their citizens. At the very least, bloggers and center-left news outlets ought to be pointing to the positive policy and political possibilities, not just declaring doom again and again.
Number four on your list is a serious problem. The rest are interim or overhyped. And number five is this: too much doomsaying among liberal media people.

Good points all. Remember also that the doomsayers, hand-wringers and Chicken Littles all said the same thing about Medicare, and few of them would give it up today. The implementation process will be challenging, as Marshall notes. But a little support, faith and flexibility are what is now needed to insure that the ACA will prove to be an important first step towards a system that provides comprehensive care for every person in America.


The Nation Hosts Forum on ‘How Can Labor Be Saved?’

By now anyone who has given serious thought to how America can secure a thriving middle class has concluded that the restoration of a strong labor movement is absolutely essential. In addition, the amount of time, energy and expense the GOP has lavished on various union-bashing projects is all the indication anyone should need that a strong union movement is also required for preventing a right-wing takeover of all of America’s political institutions.
Thus, the future of the labor movement is an issue of immediate concern to the Democratic party and all progressives. Toward that end, The Nation is hosting a forum, “How Can Labor Be Saved?,” featuring eight posts:

How Can Labor Be Saved? American unions are in deep trouble. What’s the way out?
by Josh Eidelson
Unions: Put Organizing First: Don’t forget that political power is intrinsically linked to organizing power” by Kate Bronfenbrenner
Make Organizing a Civil Right: It’s time to tie worker rights to “Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall” by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit
What Labor Can Learn From the Obama Campaign: It’s time to harness data” by Suresh Naidu and Dorian T. Warren
Build a Democracy Movement: ‘Money Out, Voting In’ should become labor’s mantra” by Larry Cohen
Become a Movement of All Workers: Let’s stop waiting for the government to tell us who can organize” by Bhairavi Desai
Time for Labor to Mobilize Immigrants: Immigration reform can be labor’s game-changer” by Maria Elena Durazo
Fight for the Whole Society: To survive, unions need to be better neighbors” by Karen GJ Lewis

Most of the entries can be read for free, with a couple of them requiring a subscription to one of America’s top progressive magazines.


On the Purpling of Texas

Richard Parker’s NYT op-ed, “Lone Star Blues” takes a sober look at prospects for Texas becoming a Democratic state. It would be a game-changer for presidential politics. But, as Parker points out, Dems must overcome formidable obstacles, including:

…The Hispanic vote is not monolithically Democratic, nationally or in Texas. In 2004, 40 percent of Texas Hispanics backed George W. Bush for re-election. In 2010, Rick Perry got almost 40 percent of the Hispanic vote statewide, and nearly half in South Texas, the purported base for Democratic growth.
Then there is the problem of Democratic infrastructure: there hasn’t been one for years. In 1995, Ron Kirk forged a coalition of Hispanics and African-Americans to become the first black mayor of Dallas, but he could not do the same statewide; he lost a Senate race to John Cornyn in 2002.
That same year, the millionaire oilman Tony Sanchez, a Democrat running for governor, had money, a Mexican heritage and an ability to appeal to Mexican-American voters. For it, he still lost 35 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mr. Perry, who claimed the governor’s mansion.
But the biggest problem is voter participation. Only about half of eligible Hispanic voters show up nationwide; this edged up slightly in 2012 to 53 percent. In Texas, just 4.1 million Hispanics are registered to vote, and only about half of them make it to the voting booth.

President Obama received 41.38 percent of the popular vote in Texas last November, compared to Mitt Romney’s 57.17 percent. In addition, Latinos are 37.6 percent of Texans, and African Americans are 11.8 percent of state residents. Latinos and African Americans accounted for over 60 percent of births in Texas in 2010.
The challenge for Dems is clear, as Parker explains:

… It may be that the demographic wave makes all this beside the point, and that increasing turnout among Hispanics just a little might make a big difference…
But that requires ground troops, voter education and turnout efforts over a multicycle campaign. It also requires that Democrats stop assuming they’re going to lose. “If we start treating this as a purple state,” said Matt Glazer of the activist group Progress Texas, “we would be one that much sooner.”
…Aside from get-out-the-vote efforts and pro-immigrant posturing, the Democrats need to develop a better understanding of Texas Hispanics as more than just immigrants. Their No. 1 issue: jobs. Polling and focus groups by the University of Texas political scientist Daron Shaw suggest that economic themes — including education and entrepreneurship — may draw Hispanics to vote in greater numbers…

As Parker concludes, “It has been 36 years since the Democrats last captured Texas in a presidential election. It could well happen again. But to make it happen, they have to look beyond demographics and start focusing on the hard, long road of party building first.”
It can be argued that North Carolina, where Obama got 48.35 percent of the vote and Romney got 50.39 percent (Obama’s narrowest loss), or even Georgia, which gave Obama 45.48 percent of the statewide vote, are better bets for allocating Democratic resources for party-building.
But Texas has 38 electoral votes, compared to North Carolina’s 15 ev’s and Georgia’s 16. Only California has more electoral votes, And the Texas Republican Party has had a pretty easy ride in presidential elections in recent years, owing to limp turnout of Latino voters as much as anything else. That luck can’t last much longer, especially if the state Democratic party gets its act together, and does more to register and educate Hispanic voters, recruit and train more Latino candidates and do a better job of branding the GOP as the party of immigrant-bashing.


Does Obama Have Edge in Sequestration Negotiations?

Zachary A. Goldfarb’s WaPo article, “Obama to press for stopgap sequester fix” provides an update on the white house’s latest strategy for addressing the “deep, automatic cuts to domestic and defense spending” that are scheduled if a deal is not struck.
Goldfarb reports that President Obama, joined by “firefighters and other emergency personnel, will press Congress to pass a short-term measure that would delay the cuts, known as the sequester, for a period of time until Congress can pass a permanent fix.” Further, adds Goldfarb,

Obama favors replacing the sequester with a combination of spending cuts in automatic programs like Medicare and Medicaid and new tax revenue, raised by scaling back tax breaks that benefit the wealthy and select industries, such as energy firms. With a sweeping deal unlikely in two weeks, Obama is pushing for a short-term measure to delay the start of the sequester — such as one proposed last week by Senate Democrats that would use alternative spending cuts and tax hikes to postpone the sequester through the end of the year.
…While the cuts — the first of $1.2 trillion set to occur over a decade — may start March 1, they would only be felt over time. The cuts could be devastating for government contractors, civilian employees and the overall economy — which economists say could lose 750,000 jobs as a result of the deep reductions in spending.

Writing in today’s Washington Monthly Political Animal, TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore adds,

He’ll do what he can to make sure Republicans take the blame for the sequester, and then will fight to undo some of the damage in the immediately ensuring negotiations over the expiration of the continuing resolution on appropriations. But assuming Republicans have permanently eschewed the threat of a debt default, March should close the curtain on the last regularly scheduled fiscal crises until the midterms or perhaps even longer.

Meanwhile, The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent has an interesting argument that the Republicans are far more vulnerable than the president and Democrats if the sequestration actually kicks in:

The Hill reports this morning, however, that Republicans say they’re not worried about the political impact of the sequester. They tell the paper that they will be able to make the case to the public that the sequester was Obama’s idea, meaning he’ll take the blame for the damage it does.
This is ridiculous on the merits: Lawmakers in both parties voted for the sequester. But the more important point here is that this argument is an implicit admission of the weakness and incoherence of the GOP’s position in the sequester battle.
Here’s why: It’s an implicit admission that deep spending cuts are bad politically for whichever party owns them. After all, if this were not the case, then Republicans would not need to try to shift the blame to Obama for the cuts that are coming. Yet Republicans, and not Democrats, are the ones who are advocating for replacing the sequester only with deep spending cuts!
Indeed, in that very same Hill piece, Republicans also say letting the sequester go forward is the right thing to do for the country, since we need deep spending cuts to save the country from fiscal Armageddon. By contrast, Obama and Democrats are arguing against spending cuts of this magnitude; they’re insisting that the sequester cuts be replaced in part with new revenues drawn from closing high end tax loopholes, to avert layoffs and cuts to government that will hurt poor and middle class Americans. In other words, only one party — the GOP — is advocating for the very thing that Republicans themselves implicitly concede is politically perilous!
The basic dynamic here will not be changed by the argument that the sequester was the White House’s “idea.” The public will fully appreciate the true nature of the two sets of priorities on display here — particularly when Obama cranks up the public campaigning on this in earnest.

It’s yet another game of ‘political chicken,’ and it does appear that the president has an advantage in the blame game. There is no guarantee, however, that the Republicans will behave in a way consistent with either logic or self-preservation. But their party is already badly tarnished as being more interested in obstruction than good government. One more major disaster for the GOP could cripple their image enough to insure that Dems will hold the Senate and make better-than-expected inroads in the House in 2014.


DSSC Director Gives Dems Edge in Strategy

As J.P. Green noted yesterday, Senate Democrats face a daunting year in 2014, and Republicans have an edge with fewer vulnerable seats up for re-election. Republicans have seven fewer seats up in 2014, and the “seven most imperiled” U.S. Senate seats up in 2014 are now held by Democrats.
But Democrats do have one significant advantage in the person of Guy Cecil, executive director of Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Calling Cecil “the brains behind the Democrats’ improbable Senate showings in 2010 and 2012,” Jonathan Weisman reports in the New York Times:

Mr. Cecil’s return as executive director of the committee is notable in a city accustomed to political consultants cashing in for big money “downtown” — at lobbying firms and with influence peddlers off Capitol Hill. In 2010, Mr. Cecil helped engineer Mr. Bennet’s successful defense of his seat, one of the unexpected wins that kept Democrats in control of the Senate even as the party suffered a historic defeat in the House. Most assumed Democrats would lose the Senate as the 2012 season began. With Mr. Cecil directing forces, the party gained two seats.
… Mr. Cecil’s approach to Senate elections goes back to the vicious 1998 re-election campaign of South Carolina’s Ernest Hollings, the last Democratic Senate victory in that state, and 2000, when he helped former Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri defeat John Ashcroft, a Republican, despite the fact that Mr. Carnahan had died in a plane crash three weeks before Election Day.
Mr. Cecil tries to resist national political winds and tailor each campaign to the particular candidates and the states they are running in. Republican campaigns tend to ride national waves, running on broad national issues like the size and scope of government, the level of taxation and the defense of the homeland. Mr. Cecil had different ideas for different Democratic candidates.
For instance, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota ran on “North Dakota values,” a languishing farm bill and essential air service to rural America. Sherrod Brown, practically buried under an avalanche of Republican advertising, ran as David against Goliath, even if he was the incumbent in Ohio.
… At times last cycle, Mr. Cecil courted controversy. In Wisconsin, he backed the candidacy of Representative Tammy Baldwin, a liberal lesbian from Madison, when many Democrats wanted a more moderate voice from a rural corner of the state. Ms. Baldwin won, beating a four-term governor, Tommy Thompson, the Republicans’ candidate of choice.
In Missouri, Mr. Cecil encouraged Senator Claire McCaskill to pull off one of the most clever feats of the campaign cycle, an advertisement just days before the Republican primary that “blasted” Representative Todd Akin as the most conservative, most vehemently anti-Obama candidate in the Republican field. The effort was seen as a boost for Mr. Akin, the opponent she preferred.
“He understood the complicated needle I had to thread, running a disciplined campaign and seeing if we could end up with a general election candidate we could beat,” Ms. McCaskill said.

Weisman characterizes Cecil, who comes from a working-class family, as “true believer in the Democratic cause, not a hired gun waiting to cash out.” Dems could use a few more like Cecil at the helms of our state Democratic parties.


Dems: here’s an interesting case study in how a GOP pollster and two major MSM commentators work together to perpetrate a bogus “both sides are equally to blame” anti-Democratic narrative

The last two days have offered a fascinating case study in how a Republican pollster and the “objective” mainstream mass media can pull off a fast one to exculpate the GOP from responsibility for problems and create a “both sides are equally to blame” narrative instead.
This particular story began when leading Republican Pollster Bill McInturff released a poll and set of charts titled “The Washington Economy.” In his text commentary on the results he says

It is clear we have entered a new phase where the dysfunction and paralysis in Washington is having a significant and deleterious impact on how consumers feel about the overall state of the economy and their personal financial situations…This sharp a drop in consumer confidence is a direct consequence of the lack of confidence in our political system and its leaders.

He then continues:

…we wanted to develop a new NBC/WSJ polling question that could be tracked over time. Its purpose is to measure whether people say negotiations between Congress and President Obama make them more or less confident the economy will get better. Our hope is that this question will provide guidance about the relationship between how people perceive what is happening in Washington and economic confidence.

Now here’s the exact wording of the question:

“Thinking about President Obama and Republicans in Congress and their negotiations about the budget, does it make you feel more confident or less confident about the economy getting better”

Well, OK, the wording does seem a little oddly convoluted but still perhaps of some value. But, if you’re a pollster, after you ask this question, shouldn’t you also ask whether people think that the fault lies mainly with Obama or with the GOP. That certainly seems like a reasonable question, doesn’t it? Particularly if your goal is really to understand how the public views the relationship between “what is happening in Washington and economic confidence.”
In point of fact, the major U.S. opinion polls quite clearly show that the American people generally blame the GOP more than Obama for the dysfunction and paralysis in Washington when the question of blame is directly posed.
Now maybe it won’t come as a great surprise to anyone, but in McInturff’s presentation there’s absolutely no review or discussion of the polling data on questions about the relative blame and responsibility people consider Obama and the GOP to have for the problems described. There is only the odd question wording “thinking about President Obama and the Republicans in congress and their negotiation about the budget, does it make you feel more or less confident about the economy getting better” – a wording that makes it impossible to distinguish who the public might think is mainly at fault. This very ambiguous wording then allows McInturff in his text to point the finger of blame at a very wide and disparate range of culprits including “Washington,” “the political system” and “leaders,” thus creating the false impression that it is his polling data itself that actually shows that the American people blame both sides equally.
At bottom it’s the political commentator’s equivalent of the stage magician’s sleight of hand maneuver, but one really can’t fault McInturff himself too much. He’s one of the more honest Republican pollsters and is entirely straightforward and open about his strong partisan affiliation. There’s no law that says he can’t ignore polling data that undermines the argument he is trying to make.
On the other hand, however, you would generally hope and expect that mainstream political commentators – individuals who majestically and self-righteously present themselves as objective and nonpartisan — would sharply point out McInturff’s obvious omission and provide the missing data from other opinion polls in order to clarify the matter.
But, nope, readers have no such luck. Instead, two leading political commentators of the Washington Post and New York Times both picked up McInturff’s report and happily went right along with the misleading “both sides are equally to blame” spin that he put on his data.


Political Strategy Notes

Taegan Goddard explains why “Why Democrats think they can retake the House in 2014,” based on this cheery assessment by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.): “Redistricting has empowered the worst elements of the Republican Party, amplifying the extremist echo chamber and making the tea party Republican congress toxic to voters. Republicans redrew already-safe members into even more Republican districts, driving control of their party more to their base, forcing more primaries, and making it less likely that they can put forward a party agenda that appeals to Independents.”
Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley preview “2014 Senate Ratings: Red Alert” at Crystal Ball, with a state-by-state rundown of raises as they stand now, noting “The seven most imperiled seats in the whole country are all currently held by Democrats.”
CNN Politics’s Ted Barrett and Tom Cohen mull over Democratic strategy for addressing the sequester cuts in light of Republican opposition to any revenue-raising.
In his column, “The G.O.P.’s Nasty Newcomer,” the NYT’s Frank Bruni has a pretty good capsule summation of why Sen. Ted Cruz is not going to be the GOP’s Great Latino Hope : “He’s an ornery, swaggering piece of work. Just six weeks since his arrival on Capitol Hill, he’s already known for his naysaying, his nit-picking and his itch to upbraid lawmakers who are vastly senior to him…Republicans who look to him and see any kind of savior overlook much of what drags the party down, which isn’t merely or even principally the genealogy of their candidates. It’s the intransigent social conservatism, the whiff of meanness and the showy eruptions.”
Also at The Times, Trip Gabriel has an update on Ashley Judd’s prospects for running and whipping Mitch McConnell in the KY Senate race.
Ronald Brownstein discusses President Obama’s strategy for “Courting the Twenty-Somethings.” Among Brownstein’s observations: “The most striking aspect of Obama’s remarks was how unreservedly he articulated the views of the coalition that reelected him, and how little need he felt to qualify those views for fear of alienating voters beyond it. There was a confidence bordering on swagger in his call for action on immigration reform, climate change, and gun control–issues that he almost entirely sublimated through his first term–and his unwavering defense of collective action through government…That edge reflects the Obama team’s assessment of the political landscape after he survived the headwind of 7.8 percent unemployment to become only the third Democrat ever to win a majority of the popular vote twice. Obama crossed that threshold despite historically weak numbers among the older and blue-collar whites who traditionally anchored the conservative end of the Democratic coalition. He did so with strong support from the growing groups at the center of the Democrats’ new national coalition: minorities; socially liberal, college-educated whites (especially women); and the millennials.”
The National Journal’s Beth Reinhard reports on “The Democrat’s War to Win Women Voters
For those who were wondering which major corporations are providing political dark money for Republican causes through the State Government Leadership Foundation, Justin Elliot of ProPublica has some answers: “Exxon, Pfizer, Time Warner, and other corporations put up at least 85 percent of the $1.3 million the foundation raised in the first year and a half of its existence, starting in 2003.” Elliot’s article sheds light on how the organization serves as a conduit for funneling big corporate money to GOP causes.
Congratulations to David Corn, Mother Jones D.C. Bureau Chief, on winning the George Polk Award, one of journalism’s top prizes, for his report “exposing Romney’s infamous remarks at a fundraiser about “47 percent” of Americans who receive entitlements.”
At Campaigns & Elections, Bryan Merica explores some of the hot social media tools in politics: “Tracx is another monitoring and engagement platform in our team’s arsenal that any political communications junkie ought to look into. It contains in-depth metrics to help gauge the size and velocity of a conversation on social media–digging down so far as to show you on a map where sentiment is spiking…The toolset that shows the most promise is now calling itself Zignal Labs. During the 2012 cycle, it was deployed in beta format on a number of campaigns as “Politear.” Its developers have the right idea: use algorithms to determine how quickly and broadly a particular story or sentiment is being spread across social networks.”