Digby has some perceptive comments in her Hullabaloo post, “Who does the political class listen to? A new report shows it’s not you and me.” She cites a 2011 survey by Benjamin Page, L. Bartels and J. Seawright of Northwestern University indicating that 68 percent of the general public and only 19 percent of the wealthy believe that “the government in Washington ought to see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a job.” Even more striking, 53 percent of the general public, compared with just 8 percent of the wealthy, believe that “the federal government should find jobs for everyone willing and able to work who cannot find a job in private employment.” Digby adds,

This is a major divide and it’s obviously not partisan since, for these purposes, wealthy is defined as the top 20% — and we know that this cohort is composed of members of both Parties. No, what this reveals is that the GOP anti-government propaganda of the last 30 years has truly just appealed to a narrow segment of the population. A majority of the country not only believe that the Federal Government should be active in helping people find a job, it should provide jobs if the private sector is unable to do it.

This alone should give the President confidence to amplify the urgent need for a major public investment in infrastructure upgrades in his SOTU. These findings show a huge disconnect between what the public wants in terms of bold job-creation initiatives by the federal government and what congress has thus far been willing to even discuss. The President could likely get considerable traction by making it a top priority.

At Wonkblog, Evan Soltas has “A policy primer for the 2013 SOTU,” including a good collection of quotes from the top rags, including this from Colleen McCain and Peter Nicholas at The Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday before a national audience and both houses of Congress will keep a sharp focus on job creation, a White House aide said. Hoping to boost the economy and shore up the nation’s middle class, he will lay out initiatives in energy, education, manufacturing and the nation’s network of aging roads, bridges and ports.”
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has some salient suggestions for President Obama’s SOTU address.
A new Quinnipiac University poll finds that 47 percent of respondents trusted President Obama more to “handle the economy,” vs. 41 percent favoring congressional Republicans.
When even George Will agrees with Sen. Sherrod Brown that it is time to break up the big banks, it’s time.
If the president is looking for support for a little more balance in our economic policy toward China, Mike Hall’s “New Report: End China Currency Manipulation, Create Jobs” at AFL-CIO Now is a good place to begin.
The Big Dog warns Dems not to rely on negative attacks vs. Republicans going forward toward the mid terms. “Make no mistake, the Republicans are going to try very hard to make it not as easy for you to win [on negativity] … we are now going to have to have an affirmative agenda for jobs and innovation.” Clinton also underscored the importance of Dems being boldy pro-reform to reduce gun violence: “I see this whole gun issue as an opportunity and not a toxic landmine. But it really depends on how you do it…It’s important not to give up on anybody, to talk to them. The worst thing that can happen is they can see we’re not crazy,”
Kos highlights a worthy cause for all Americans who want stronger opposition to the NRA — electing Robin Kelly as a congresswoman from Chicago. From his recent e-blast: “Two of the three top candidates in this race have received “A” ratings from the NRA. They filled out questionnaires in 2010 pledging to stand in the way of sensible reform, from banning high-capacity magazines, to requiring background checks for all gun sales…Chicago and our nation deserve better, which is why we’re blessed to have Robin Kelly in the race. Not only is she a great progressive through and through, but wears her “F” rating from the NRA with the pride it deserves.” Dems who want to support Robin Kelly can do so at her ActBlue web page right here.
The “Buffett Rule” is apparently poised for a comeback as a cornerstone of democratic tax policy, reports Tony Nitti at Forbes.
At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz, Kyle Kondik and Rhodes Cook assess Democratic prospects for winning House seats in 2014 in separate articles. Abramowitz and Kondik agree that “incremental gains” for Dems are likely but reclaiming a majority is unlikely at this point, given the gerrymandered realities. Cook is only a smidge less pessimistic about Dems’ prospects.
Nate Silver crunches some interesting numbers to arrive at a skeptical conclusion regarding prospects for Karl Rove’s new Super-PAC, which is designed to contain the crazier tea party candidates with more “electable” Republicans. “Mr. Rove’s efforts could backfire, therefore, if they result in the insurgent candidate receiving more sympathetic treatment through these channels; the amount of so-called “earned media” that the insurgent receives could outweigh the extra advertisements that the establishment candidate is able to afford.”

The following article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is excerpted from HuffPo:
…Our economy may be slowly getting better, but we still have a very serious jobs crisis in this country — nowhere near to full employment and not on a path to get there for many years to come. Our manufacturing sector is still only limping along and our trade deficit remains catastrophically high. Our infrastructure is still badly in need of repair. Wages for most workers are still stuck in neutral or slipping compared to inflation, and over one half of those who found new jobs after losing them in the great recession are being paid less than in the old job. Our housing market is getting stronger in some metro areas, but is still very weak overall in terms of prices, homeowners under water, and numbers of foreclosures and empty homes.
And looming over these economic problems is quite literally the elephant in the room: these gargantuan Too Big To Fail, and apparently Too Big To Jail, Wall Street financial conglomerates. Because of their massive economic and political power, the financial sector swallows up more than 40 percent of the economy in this country, and because they can make more money doing speculative high-speed trading than by investing in manufacturing or infrastructure or making loans to small businesses, those sectors get starved for capital. Because of Wall Street’s obsession with short term profit, workers are not invested in and wages keep getting driven down. Because these banks’ accountants have figured out that their short-term stock prices will stay higher if they continue to show inflated housing assets on their books, they have been unwilling to work with homeowners to write down underwater debt. Because of tax policies such as low capital gains and the carried interest loophole that favor the financial sector, the federal budget is starved for resources, and because Wall Street wants to be able to speculate with senior citizens’ money, the pressure keeps building to cut or privatize Social Security, as well as state and local government workers’ pensions.

Read more…

Democratic strategist Robert Shrum has a good post, “Obama Must Fight One More Campaign: To Keep Senate & Win House in 2014” up at The Daily Beast. Shrum has a challenge for the President, who is riding high with some of the best approval ratings of his presidency:

…What can and should Barack Obama do to secure his landmark objectives and assure that his final two years aren’t a token presidency in the domestic arena? He will have to invoke the full persuasive power of the bully pulpit–and sustain the full firepower of his vaunted political organization in 2014. In effect, he will have to run all-out for a third term in the midterms.
…To confound the conventional, almost ominous predictions about 2014, Obama will have to articulate and amplify the narrative of his campaign last year. He will have to argue not intermittently but consistently that it’s time to do the country’s business and fulfill the voters’ mandate. He will have to say to them: You elected a president who’s on your side. Now will you elect a Congress on your side so we can move America forward? And he will have to be as totally engaged as he was in 2012.
…From the bully pulpit, Obama can provide air cover; he can even appeal to national-security voters by holding the GOP accountable for the indiscriminate slashing of the defense budget. But something more will be required. On the ground, Obama for America, now renamed Organizing for America, will have to wage a non-stop battle to reach and mobilize the sometime voters who can make the difference if they just turn out. If you receive the OFA emails, you are looking at the early signs of just such an effort.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and campaign chair Steve Israel have identified the districts where Democrats can capture the 17 seats that will give them a majority…But she and the members of her party–in House contests and in vulnerable and winnable Senate seats, too–absolutely need the full weight of the Obama enterprise: social media, granular voter contact, and tailored messages that push and follow potential supporters all the way to the ballot box. Democrats also need a relentless, OFA-led movement to combat suppression and persuade voters to wait in long lines if they have to…OFA should launch and fund a super PAC targeted on the most promising and perilous races–and designed as well to replace Republican governors and legislators in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Shrum’s challenge is loaded with difficulty and obstacles. But no one has come up with a better strategy, and the political stakes could hardly be higher. Fortunately, we do have a president who understands the leverage that comes from bold action. As Shrum concludes, “No past president has ever pulled off something with the scope and impact of what I’m suggesting here. But Obama has already written singular chapters in American politics. In 2014, for the sake of his vision, his legacy, and the land he has twice been elected to lead, he may–and probably will–have to upend the settled order of things one more time.”

How’s this for a nostalgia-provoking lede:

In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for another twenty-five years. The legislation passed 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. Every top Republican supported the bill. “The Voting Rights Act must continue to exist,” said House Judiciary chair James Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican, “and exist in its current form.” Civil rights leaders flanked George W. Bush at the signing ceremony.

It comes from Ari Berman’s article, “Why Are Conservatives Trying to Destroy the Voting Rights Act?” in The Nation. We normally don’t think of recalling something that happened just seven years ago as nostalgia. But in this case the difference between the Republican party of ’06 and today is so stark that it now seems like another era. As Berman puts it, “Seven years later, the bipartisan consensus that supported the VRA for nearly fifty years has collapsed, and conservatives are challenging the law as never before.”
On February 27th the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which compels16 states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election law ‘reforms’ with the federal government. Berman lays out the challenge facing Democrats:

The current campaign against the VRA is the result of three key factors: a whiter, more Southern, more conservative GOP that has responded to demographic change by trying to suppress an increasingly diverse electorate; a twenty-five-year effort to gut the VRA by conservative intellectuals, who in recent years have received millions of dollars from top right-wing funders, including Charles Koch; and a reactionary Supreme Court that does not support remedies to racial discrimination.
The push by conservatives to repeal Section 5 comes on the heels of what NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has called “the greatest attacks on voting rights since segregation.” After the 2010 election, GOP officials approved laws in more than a dozen states to restrict the right to vote by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, shutting down voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, disenfranchising ex-felons and mandating government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot–all of which disproportionately target communities of color. The states covered by Section 5 were significantly more likely to pass such laws than those that are not.

Berman goes on to recount the troubling history of Chief Justice John Roberts fierce opposition to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And despite conservative arguments to the contrary, Berman explains:

…Past remains present to a disturbing degree in the South. States and ounties with a history of voting discrimination in the 1960s and ’70s are still trying to suppress their growing minority vote today. Six of the nine fully covered states have passed new voting restrictions since 2010, including voter ID laws (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), limits on early voting (Georgia) and restrictions on voter registration (Alabama and Texas). But only one-third of noncovered jurisdictions passed similar restrictions during the same period. The worst of the worst actors are still those covered by Section 5…It’s certainly true that voter suppression efforts have spread to states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If anything, though, that’s an argument for expanding the statute, not eliminating it.
…In addition to passing a raft of new voting restrictions, Republicans across the South used their control of state legislatures following the 2010 election to pass redistricting maps that have led to a resegregation of Southern politics, placing as many Democratic lawmakers into as few majority-minority districts as possible as a way to maximize the number of white Republican seats [see Berman, “The GOP’s New Southern Strategy,” February 20, 2012]. Republican leaders say they’re only following the guidelines of Section 5, but in reality they’ve turned the VRA on its head. (Most recently, on Martin Luther King Day, the GOP-controlled Virginia Senate redrew its maps to reduce Democratic seats by diluting black voting strength in at least eight districts.)
Expanding voting rights in these areas has been shaky at best. “Black voters and elected officials have less influence [in the South] now than at any time since the civil rights era,” says a 2011 report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which points out that only 4.8 percent of Southern black state legislators serve in the majority, compared with 54.4 percent in the rest of the country. Before the 1994 election, 201 of 202 black state legislators belonged to the majority party. Following the 2010 election, only fifteen of 313 did. There are more black elected officials in the South today, but they have far less power. And without Section 5, there would also be far fewer.
In Alabama, for example, Republicans targeted nearly every white Democrat in the state legislature for extinction but preserved the twenty-seven majority-minority districts in the House (even adding one more) as well as eight in the Senate in order to clear the maps with the feds. (At the time, the head of the Senate Rules Committee, Republican Scott Beason, referred to blacks as “aborigines.”) “If there’s no Section 5, all those majority-black districts are now vulnerable,” says Jim Blacksher, a longtime voting rights lawyer in Birmingham. “And there is no question in anybody’s mind what will happen next.” He calls Section 5 “the most important sea anchor against the ongoing, uninterrupted, virulent white-supremacy culture that still dominates this state.”

In reality, enforcement of the Act, has been more than prudent. As Berman notes, “Section 5 is invoked only in the most extreme circumstances and remains an imperfect and underused remedy. From 2010 to 2011, the Justice Department has objected to only twenty-nine of 19,964 submitted voting changes.”
Given the dramatic increase in voter suppression in recent years, Roberts and the other conservatives on the high court will have quite a stretch in building a persuasive case for voiding the VRA. That doesn’t mean they won’t issue such a ruling, however. Indeed, it will be surprising if they don’t. Either way, it is certain that pro-Democratic constituencies will face continuing obstruction of their voting rights until Republicans are soundly defeated in federal and state elections nationwide.

Dear Readers:
In the last few days reporters and commentators have been discussing the sudden appearance of a deep split between Karl Rove’s new initiative, The Conservative Victory Project, and supporters of the Tea Party. Many have described it as a battle between “moderates” and “extremists” in the GOP.
To put it simply, this is nonsense. In the following TDS Strategy Memo we three contributing editors of The Democratic Strategist lay out the reasons why.
To read the memo, click HERE.
We believe you will find the memo both useful and important.

In his well-titled Washington Post column, “Are Republicans rebranding or rethinking?,” E.J. Dionne, Jr. pinpoints the meaningful distinction that should be made in any discussion about where the Republicans are headed and what they are trying to project. He then adds:

The bad news: In some states where Republicans control all the levers of power, they are rushing ahead with astonishingly right-wing programs to eviscerate government while shifting the tax burden toward the middle class and the poor and away from the wealthy. In trying to build the Koch brothers’ dystopias, they are turning states into laboratories of reaction…
…This deeply anti-majoritarian, anti-populist approach explains the really bad news: Some Republicans show signs of not worrying about winning majorities at all. Gerrymandering helped their party win a majority in the House (no longer so representative) in November while losing the popular vote overall by nearly $1.4 million. Some are trying to rig the electoral college in a way that would have let Mitt Romney win the presidency even as he lost by about 5 million popular votes.
And they are willing to use the Senate’s arcane rules and right-wing courts in tandem to foil the policy wishes of a majority of Congress and the president — witness the precedent-less U.S. Court of Appeals ruling voiding Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The president took this course because intransigent Republican senators blocked the nominations. There should be a greater outcry against such an anti-democratic power play.

If there’s any good news for Dems here, it’s that “The “Red State model” is likely to take hold in only a few states — and may provoke a backlash,” as Dionne puts it. For Dems, it’s about calling them out and making them own it publicly at every opportunity. But it’s also about stepping up our game by recruiting, training and funding better candidates and mobilizing better GOTV — a daunting challenge to be sure, but still an easier way to go than accepting the alternative.

The squeeze is on, as President Obama meets with Democratic leaders today to hash out strategy on the budget sequestration, gun violence, immigration and other items of the national legislative agenda. The NYT’s Jonathan Weisman and Elisabeth Bumiller report on the Democrats’ top priority — finding the best strategy to secure a temporary fix to prevent $1 trillion in scheduled budget cuts.
At TPM, Brian Beutler’s “Armed Service Republicans Reveal Unsustainable GOP Position On Sequestration” probes the GOP strategy for negotiating a deal on cuts and spending and the dilemma they face with respect to defense cuts and raising revenues.
Obama’s wunderkind speechwriter Jon Favreau is leaving to write movies. Cody Keenan will take the lead on SOTU, reports Christi Parsons, of the L.A. Times D.C. Bureau.
Nicole Flatow’s “Blacks, Hispanics Waited Almost Twice As Long To Vote As Whites In 2012” at Think Progress reports that an M.I.T. analysis indicates ” that white voters waited an average of 12.7 minutes, while Black and Hispanic voters waited an average of 20.2 minutes… the longest lines were in Florida, where another recent study estimated that at least 201,000 people may have been deterred from voting by lines that were hours long. This was in no small part due to Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) elimination of 6 early voting days in the state and other voter suppression initiatives that several top Republicans later admitted were intended to keep Democrats from the polls.”
Meanwhile, Aliyah Frumin reports at msnbc.com: “Determined to avoid a repeat of the GOP’s 2012 voter-suppression efforts, New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand and Assistant Democratic House leader James Clyburn are pushing for the “Voter Empowerment Act,” which requires electronic voting machines to produce paper receipts, allows for voter registration on election days, creates a new national voter hotline, and criminalizes voter intimidation practices.”
Despite Gov. Christie’s popularity, Dems are expected to hold the state legislature, reports Terrence Dopp at Bloomberg.
In NC, the state Obama lost by the closest margin, however, the Raleigh News Observer’s Jim Jenkins paints a disturbing portrait of state Democratic Party disarray.
It’s war in Missouri, where Republican supermajorities in the state legislature are trying to ram through tougher voter i.d. laws, but meeting “fierce resistance” from state progressives, reports Jason Hancock of the Kansas City Star.
Chris Cillizza crowns Sen. Marco Rubio the GOP’s new prince in a softball profile. Time Magazine concurs.
For some laughs and an informative look at what pulls Sen. John McCain’s chain, read Paul Slansky’s “Who the Hell Are You? The John McCain news quiz” at The New Republic.

A note from Ed Kilgore:
Dear Readers:
In their public pronouncements since November the leading figures in the GOP have essentially attributed their defeat in 2012 to the inept communication of their entirely correct message. In their view their major errors were “Saying some stupid things,” “failing to be welcoming to all Americans,” and, implicitly, picking a candidate voters genuinely didn’t like. All that is necessary, they publicly argue, is to correct these failings in order to achieve success in 2016.
At the same time, however, outside observers have noted a range of other, less publicly discussed strategies for winning the 2012 elections that the GOP employed and which it continues to refine for the future.
The Democratic Strategist is pleased to present the following perceptive look at this issue by Paul Booth, the Executive Assistant to the President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers and an innovative political strategist within the trade union movement. As he says: “After an election it is always a good idea for Democrats to try to see the contest through the eyes of their opponents”.
How the GOP Can Win in 2016
To read the memo, click HERE.

Michael Lind, author of “Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States” and co-founder of the New America Foundation has a post up at Salon.com, “The white South’s last defeat: Hysteria, aggression and gerrymandering are a fading demographic’s last hope to maintain political control.” The gist, in excerpts:

In understanding the polarization and paralysis that afflict national politics in the United States, it is a mistake to think in terms of left and right. The appropriate directions are North and South. To be specific, the long, drawn-out, agonizing identity crisis of white Southerners is having effects that reverberate throughout our federal union. The transmission mechanism is the Republican Party, an originally Northern party that has now replaced the Southern wing of the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the dwindling white Southern tribe.
…The white Southern narrative — at least in the dominant Southern conservative version — is one of defeat after defeat. First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively lord it over the other major group in the region, African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal troops to the South. The American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply problematic….
…many white Southerners do not think of themselves as having any “ethnicity” at all. Others — German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans — are hyphenated Americans. White Southerners tend to see themselves as “pure” Americans, “real” Americans, “normal” Americans. Long after Mayflower descendants were submerged by waves of European migration in New England, large regions of the white South remain the last places in the country where local majorities can trace their family ancestry back to before 1776 in British America.
…the old-stock Yankees in the Northeast and Midwest did not accept their diminished status in their own regions without decades of hysteria and aggression and political gerrymandering. The third and final defeat of the white South, its demographic defeat, is likely to be equally prolonged and turbulent. Fasten your seat belts.

While many white southern progressives, me included, will recognize the stereotype Lind projects so broadly on whites in the region, his “prolonged and turbulent” prediction may be overstated. Yes, the GOP will pitch a prolonged hissy fit to aggravate racial animosities and the more gullible white southerners will buy into it. But the more numerous white conservatives, particularly in the middle-class suburbs, are less likely to wholeheartedly embrace the reactionary fortress mentality Lind describes in the years ahead, as the Republican brand becomes increasingly contaminated.
Living standards under southern governors and state legislatures have not improved, and in some case have gotten worse. In December for example, Public Policy Polling reported that “Georgia Governor Nathan Deal could be vulnerable in 2014, given the right Democratic opponent. Only 37% of voters in the state approve of the job he’s doing to 40% who disapprove.” Looking further south,

PPP’s first Florida poll of 2013 finds Rick Scott’s approval numbers on the decline and Democrats warming up to Charlie Crist, setting the stage for Florida to possibly elect its first Democratic Governor in 20 years next fall…Scott’s approval rating is just 33%, with 57% of voters disapproving of him.

Every day in today’s southern suburbs, northerners are migrating in and more southern whites are working along side African and Latino Americans and socializing with them as neighbors. A more likely scenario is that the rigid white southern tribalism of earlier decades will soon begin melting like the polar ice caps.