The following comes from an e-blast from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:
Lawmaker positions could impact voter support
Voters in Illinois are ready for changes to gun laws, and there is a large bloc who is more likely to support a candidate who votes for stronger laws. They are not by any means anti-gun, but they strongly favor laws that will help prevent guns falling into the wrong hands and protect their families.
While opposed to conceal and carry generally, if it must happen, voters favor a broad range of limits on who can carry weapons where. They don’t stop there. There is also near universal support for background checks on all gun sales, and strong support for banning military-style assault weapons and limiting ammunition magazines.
Voters do not buy the NRA’s arguments that common-sense gun laws are a slippery slope towards infringing on 2nd Amendment rights and confiscating guns. They believe there is a moderate, middle-ground approach, and are looking for lawmakers who fill that space.
Please click here to read our key findings and recommendations from a survey of 600 registered voters in Illinois, with an additional 300 oversample of Will and DuPage counties. A phone survey was conducted from March 27 through April 2, 2013. Margin of error is +/- 4 percent for the total electorate and +/- 5 percent for Will and DuPage counties (combined).

Page Gardner, president of the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, flags a serious problem for Democrats in her post, “Sinking American Electorate: Unmarried Women On The Edge” at The Campaign for America’s Future Blog. Noting that unmarried women are a key component of the ‘Rising American Electorate’ (RAE) that helped to elect and re-elect President Obama, Gardner explains:

Sadly, unmarried women and the RAE are becoming disengaged. Our research shows that their concerns are not being addressed by current economic policies. If left unaddressed, this disconnect could spell disaster for Democrats in 2014 and beyond. In 2012, it’s true, members of the RAE overwhelmingly supported President Obama. And as the Republican National Committee noted last month in its “autopsy” of the 2012 presidential campaign, the sheer number of these RAE voters is only expected to climb in coming years. “The minority groups that President Obama carried with 80 percent of the vote in 2012 are on track to become a majority of the nation’s population by 2050,” the RNC wrote.
But midterm elections traditionally attract very different voters than presidential races, and Democrats should prepare for what could be a drastic drop-off in voter support. In 2008, for example, unmarried women represented 21 percent of the total vote. But these same women fell to just 18 percent of the vote in 2010, a non-presidential year. And their support is crucial. For all the talk of the gender gap in American politics, the truth is that the marriage gap is even more profound. In 2012, unmarried women supported President Obama over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney by 36 points, a massive margin that helped stem other losses. Even though President Obama lost the married-women vote by 7 points in 2012, he made up for it with his overwhelming support by unmarried women. The point: If unmarried women do not turn out in droves on November 4, 2014, Democrats could be in for a long evening.

Democrats can not afford to rely on the GOP’s miserable image with unmarried women, because 2014 is going to be all about turning out the RAE base and these voters must have something to vote for, in order to get them to the polls. Gardner urges Democrats to focus more intensely on concerns and priorities that energize this key demographic group:

So what should leaders of both parties focus on? Our research shows that the top priorities for all women are protecting retirement benefits, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Unmarried women care deeply about Medicare, investing in job training and making college more affordable. Other major priorities include helping women-owned businesses, expanding preventive health care for women, raising the minimum wage and making child care more affordable. And, importantly, unmarried women want equal pay for equal work. Today, an unmarried woman has to work more than 19 months to earn what a married man earns in just one year.

Any formula that leads to Democrats taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives, or even holding a majority in the U.S. Senate, must include an energetic appeal to unmarried women, rooted in the priorities Gardner cites. Without that, Dems will likely be defeated in the mid-terms.

Happy Tax Day! Well, maybe not for you. As Nobel Prize laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explains at At the New York Times Opinionator blog, in his “A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent,”: “About 6 in 10 of us believe that the tax system is unfair — and they’re right: put simply, the very rich don’t pay their fair share. The richest 400 individual taxpayers, with an average income of more than $200 million, pay less than 20 percent of their income in taxes…consider Germany, for instance, which has managed to maintain its status as a center of advanced manufacturing, even though its top income-tax rate exceeds America’s by a considerable margin. And in general, our top tax rate kicks in at much higher incomes…The top rate in the United States, 39.6 percent, doesn’t kick in until individual income reaches $400,000 (or $450,000 for a couple). Only three O.E.C.D. countries — South Korea, Canada and Spain — have higher thresholds.”
Jeffrey M. Jones reports at Gallup.com that only 55 percent of Americans believe their taxes are fair, according to a Gallup Poll conducted April 4-7 — the lowest figure since 2001. Interestingly, “…Democrats and political liberals much more likely than Republicans and conservatives to believe their taxes are fair.”
For an instructive history of a problematic word Democrats shouldn’t even be using, check out Hedrik Hertzberg’s “Senses of Entitlement” at the New Yorker. “The word, that is, not the thing. “Entitlements”–alternatively, “entitlement programs”–is now the standard descriptor for what ought to be called, more accurately and less tendentiously, social insurance. In the early days of Social Security, politicians and bureaucrats occasionally talked of it as an “earned entitlement.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. clarifies the role of the Newtown families in forcing progress towards enacting background checks. Dionne makes a convincing counter-intuitive argument — that the Newtown families have restored reason to the debate — while the NRA political minions have pitched emotional arguments devoid of reason.
Joan McCarter’s Daily Kos post “Remembering the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage debacle: What happens when you piss off seniors” is an instructive read, which notes “…See this week’s AARP survey. Seventy percent of voters age 50 or older are opposed to the chained CPI for Social Security. That increases to 78 percent opposed to having it applied to retired and disabled veterans’ benefits. But the number politicians really need to consider: 66 percent. That’s the group that will be more inclined to vote against a senator or representative who voted for any kind of deal including chained CPI.”
Also at Kos, John Perr explains why “Raising payroll tax cap is the best fix for Social Security“: Compared to President Obama’s chained C.P.I. proposal, “…Raising the payroll tax cap from its current $113,000 to $200,000 will generate far more revenue and deficit reduction for Uncle Sam without trimming benefits for millions of seniors already so close to the edge of financial distress.”
At The Daily Beast Bob Shrum’s “Democrats Need to Stop Attacking Obama’s Budget and Wake Up to Reality” notes in a nut graph: “The Obama budget does raise taxes on the wealthy by capping their deductions–which is one reason Democrats should rally to it. And there’s another: it increases spending now, while back-loading steeper deficit reduction, to support and speed the pace of the recovery. Do Democrats really think it’s smart to go into the midterms weighed down by the vulnerability of a sluggish economy? That didn’t work out so well for them in 2010.”
At The Nation, however, John Nichols warns that “Obama’s Chained-CPI Social Security Cut is Smart Politics… For the GOP.” Nichols explains that NRCC head Rep. Greg Walden is taking a new tack: “…ripping the president’s decision to go with “Chained-CPI.” And it explains why austerity opponents are ripping Walden – they fear any rips in the fabric of fantasy that suggests only a cuts agenda (as opposed to a growth agenda) will balance budgets.” But Nichols adds that Walden is one of the GOP’s smartest and most experienced strategists. “…He knows that a Democratic president talking about Social Security cuts is a winning issue for Republicans.”
In Jonathan Martin and John F. Harris’s Politico post “President Obama, Republicans fight the class war“, they quote GOP pollster Whit Ayres: “”We had Obama beating Romney by 11 percentage points on the question of who would do more to help the middle class,” said Ayres. “And that was absolutely critical. Demographics don’t explain our losses in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. What explains those losses is that Republicans were not deemed to be the party of the middle class…”Whichever party is the voice of the middle class ends up winning presidential elections,” said Ayres. “When Republicans were winning five of six presidential elections we were the voice of the middle class and Democrats were the voice of special interests and minorities. And just as Reagan pinned the tag of special interests and minorities on Democrats, Obama pinned on us the party of the rich this time. And then we did what Democrats did in the 1980s — we played into the caricature.” Say the authors: “Class warfare works.”
Mother Jones notes that Mitch McConnell’s “I’m the victim here” act has not impressed Kentucky’s flagship Louisville Courier-Journal, which ran an editorial yesterday saying: “Mr. McConnell has masterfully diverted public attention from the offensive content of the tape–which is the real story here–to his outrage over how it was obtained….He has long ceased to serve the state, instead serving the corporate interests he counts on for contributions and leading obstruction that continues to plague Congress. He needs a credible opponent and a serious effort by people ready to advance the interests of Kentucky and its citizens.”

Come on, progressives, let’s be honest. Of course it’s necessary and proper for progressives to criticize Obama’s budget compromises as either bad economics or lousy electoral strategy — or both. Heck, that’s the progressive coalition’s job and progressives would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t firmly oppose the compromise of basic progressive positions and goals.
But there’s no reason to resort to armchair psychiatry or to otherwise impugn Obama’s motives – saying he’s “timid” “gutless” “a DINO (Democrat in name only)” “gullible”, “in wall street’s pocket”, “a corporate tool” “a phony progressive” and all the other personal accusations against him when deep down we all know perfectly well the real reasons why he’s doing what he’s doing.
Let’s face it. Every Democratic president has to walk a very fine line in dealing with the business community and the economic elite of this country. That group is not entirely composed of extreme right wing ideologues like the Koch Brothers (although there is a very disturbingly large group who are). Many are relatively pragmatic individuals who are willing to accept a certain range of progressive policies when the political climate of the country overwhelmingly favors them. The majority of American businessmen are not going to go on a John Galt-style “producers strike” and shut down all their banks, offices and factories to protest a modest tax increase nor will they try to foment a military coup because they don’t like Elizabeth Warren.
But on the other hand, any Democratic president absolutely has to maintain a certain working relationship with the business community or face huge obstacles to almost all of his domestic priorities. Had Obama seriously threatened to prosecute substantial sectors of the business and the financial community for their role in the financial crisis when he first took office in 2008, he would not have gotten the stimulus bill, the modest financial regulation bill that he did get or health care reform. There were only a few major business figures who went overboard with hysterical accusations that Obama was out to destroy the entire free enterprise system in 2009, but if he had really come down hard on business and Wall Street that attack would have been picked up and become so widespread in the business world that plenty of Democratic Congress and Senate members would have melted away from supporting Obama’s first term agenda like snowflakes in forest fire.
Now, sure, its loads of fun to imagine an alternate reality in which a fiery populist president “takes his case to the people” and develops such titanic, fierce, ferocious and powerful grass roots support that American big business has no option except to meekly accept the president’s firmly populist agenda. And yes, we can all cheerfully recite Roosevelt’s stirring line “I welcome their hatred” as the great rhetorical model for how a really tough populist Democrat could deal with the business community.
But, come on, let’s face it, if intense grass roots support for that kind of muscular populism had really existed in recent years, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards would have won the Democratic primaries by a landslide in 2008, blowing away the far more centrist Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. In 2004 Howard Dean would have walked away with the Democratic nomination without raising a sweat and in 2000, Ralph Nader would have outpolled Al Gore. Right wing populists like George Wallace and Ross Perot pulled a major slice of the national vote in their campaigns in past decades while no left wing populist in the post-war era has ever even come close. You can’t just go around simply assuming and asserting the existence of some huge, sleeping left-wing populist majority that is just waiting to be mobilized as if it were a given fact of American political life when somehow or other it never seems to be able to drag its butt out of bed and go out to vote for firmly populist candidates on election days.
So let’s stop with the alternate reality stuff for a moment and try to visualize the strategic situation as Obama has to see it when he looks across the table during a meeting with a group like the Business Roundtable or similar organizations of the economic elite. He starts out knowing that a large segment of American business won’t even sit down with him at all – that they are wildly, irrationally and passionately opposed to everything he stands for and are willing to invest huge sums of money to defeat him and every policy he advocates.
So the members of the business and financial elite who are indeed willing to sit across the table from him are the ones he really needs to keep at least reasonably neutral if he doesn’t want an absolutely united front of business opposition to everything he does.
Now the business guys at the table are not completely unreasonable. A recent opinion study “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” by Benjamin I. Page and Jason Seawright of Northwestern and Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt, indicates that the “1 percenters” — those with $8 million in net worth – are at least somewhat open to some relatively liberal economic ideas. Most agreed, for example, with improving public infrastructure such as highways, bridges and airports; scientific research; and aid to education. They also agreed that the Social Security system should ensure a minimum standard of living to all contributors, even if some receive benefits exceeding the value of their contribution and they also agreed that people with high incomes actually should pay a larger share of their incomes in taxes than those with low incomes. And they recognized the need for sensible regulations.
But on the other hand, the study also found the following:

When we asked respondents how important they considered each of eleven possible problems facing the United States, budget deficits headed the list. Fully 87 percent of our wealthy respondents said deficits are a “very important” problem facing the country. Only 10 percent said “somewhat important,” and a bare 4 percent said “not very important at all.” The high priority put on this issue was confirmed by responses to an open-ended question about “the most [emphasis added] important problem facing this country today.” One third (32 percent) of all open-ended responses mentioned budget deficits or excessive government spending, far more than mentioned any other issue. Furthermore, at various points in their interviews many respondents spontaneously mentioned “government over-spending.” Unmistakably, deficits were a major concern for most of our wealthy respondents…. [In contrast, unemployment and education] were mentioned as the most important problem by only 11 percent, indicating that they ranked a distant second and third to budget deficits.

So it’s not just the professional deficit scolds like Pete Peterson or the PR shop called “Fix the Debt” who are pushing the deficit fixation. Nor is it just the columnists and editorial writers at the Washington Post. The belief that dealing with the deficit is the most important national issue is pretty much a consensus opinion of America’s wealthy and business elite.
And now here’s the funny thing. If you ask progressives, most of them would passionately agree that “the one-percent” — the economic elite like those in the survey above — really run the show in America and make the political system dance to their tune. Many progressives will be happy to recite in vast detail how the economic elites in countries like Chile organized the overthrow of democratically elected populist presidents when the latter got the plutocrats really ticked off.
Yet, at the same time, when it comes to evaluating the political strategy and political compromises a Democratic President has to employ in dealing with the economic elite and the business community, the pivotal role and power of the 1% suddenly does not have to be taken into account. It’s like suddenly they don’t have any power at all.
But in reality Obama is faced with a basic choice: he can tell the sector of the business community that is indeed willing to sit across the table from him that he thinks the whole deficit issue is completely overblown – just like Paul Krugman says it is — and accept the fact that they will walk away from the table completely unsatisfied with his answer or he can say that he understands their concern and is willing to make compromises if the GOP will meet him halfway.
Now progressives can insist that as a matter of fundamental political strategy Obama should choose the first course rather than the second and be willing to accept the negative political consequences for his administration and agenda, no matter how severe they are. This is a debatable but defensible view.
But the point is that the choice between these two approaches is a serious choice between two political strategies, each one of which has profound consequences. It’s not some test of Obama’s moral fiber or personal machismo. Guys like Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders, if they were actually elected president and had to deal seriously with the consequences of their decisions, would almost certainly still choose the first choice rather than the second. But neither one would say that there were no serious negative consequences to their choice or that they didn’t have to even bother to seriously weigh the costs and benefits of the alternatives.
So let’s stop being so damn sanctimonious and self righteous, arguing that Obama’s choice must be due to timidity, cowardice, conservatism, obsequiousness to the wealthy or whatever else because (in the words of a thousand irate, hyperventilating progressive commenters) “any idiot can see that the first choice is the only correct one”. A progressive can disagree with a president’s choice of strategy without necessarily attributing it to personal weakness or bad moral character.
Obama has made a basic strategic calculation about how far he has to go to propitiate some part of the economic elite that holds tremendous power in American society. Progressives can and should debate his decision and, if they disagree, criticize it on that realistic strategic basis. They should not get sidetracked instead by arguments based on extraneous and essentially irrelevant claims regarding Obama’s flaws of character, defects of personality or inadequate fealty to the ethos and ideals of progressivism.

The following article is cross-posted from Greeenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:
Consensus
By: Brady Campaign to Reduce Gun Violence and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner
The overheated rhetoric in Washington belies a broad consensus among voters and gun owners that it is possible to reduce gun violence in this country while protecting the Second Amendment. Voters and gun owners come together to support basic, common sense steps, such as strengthening background checks, expanding and promoting safety courses and training to improve responsible gun ownership, or increasing penalties for those who illegally traffic in guns, that can make a difference. Few voters we talked to believe additional gun laws will stop all gun violence in the country, but voters support taking steps that can address some of the violence. At the same time, few voters we talked to, including gun owners, believe any effort to strengthen gun laws is inherently a violation of the Second Amendment.
In contrast to the political discord they see in Washington and in some state capitals, gun owners and non-gun owners alike find common interest in promoting a culture of personal responsibility. Gun owners are among the first to recognize the responsibility that comes with the right to own a gun. Gun owners and non-gun owners alike also believe that, like other public safety threats including smoking and car crashes, we can reduce gun violence through research, education, and keeping guns out of the hands of convicted felons, domestic abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill.
This memorandum reflects key highlights from a national survey of 1,000 registered voters. This survey includes an oversample of 300 gun owners, bringing the total number of gun owners to 629. The survey was taken March 11-24, 2013. The overall margins of error is +/- 2.72 at 95 percent confidence interval. The margin of error for gun owners is +/- 3.91.
Key Findings
Voters and gun owners overwhelmingly believe that it is possible to reduce gun violence while protecting the Second Amendment.
An 83 percent majority of voters believe it is possible to protect the rights of Americans to own guns and protect people from gun violence at the same time. This includes 85 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Republicans, 83 percent of both men and women, 88 percent of liberals, 77 percent of conservatives as well as 85 percent of gun owners and 81 percent of non-gun owners.
Gun owners and non-gun owners find common ground.
Gun owners and non-gun owners recognize a common interest in creating a system that both reduces gun violence and protects individuals’ right to own a firearm. And they find common ground in the promotion of education, research, personal responsibility and efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, the mentally ill and children. An 88 percent majority of both gun owners and voters agree, “People have the right to own a gun, but they also have the responsibility to educate themselves and be responsible gun owners. They should attend gun safety classes, have firearm insurance, educate others and keep their guns locked away until needed. The active participation of responsible, law-abiding gun owners can play a part in reducing gun violence” Similarly, 87 percent of voters and 85 percent of gun owners agree, “There are many causes of gun violence. While we may not be able to solve the entire problem or save every single life, there are solutions that can make a real difference. Republicans and Democrats, gun owners and those that do not own guns, parents and spouses, can come together to pass common ground solutions for gun violence than can save lives.”
Most voters want stronger gun laws.
By a 56 to 6 percent margin, voters prefer laws covering the sale of guns be made stronger rather than less strong. Another 36 percent believe these laws should be kept as they are now. Notably, nearly half (45 percent) of gun owners agree gun laws should be made stronger.
Strong support for basic steps to reduce gun violence.
As most public polling has made plain, strengthening background checks are simply not controversial outside of the halls of Congress, various state legislatures, and among K Street lobbyist. A 91 percent majority support requiring background checks on all gun purchases, 88 percent among gun owners. There are very few public policy questions with 91 percent support in this country, let alone a question subject to a filibuster threat. Voters and gun owners deliver similar levels of support for imposing new penalties for people who buy guns for convicted criminals who cannot purchase their own (83 percent favor among voters, 85 percent among gun owners).
A 53 percent majority of voters (47 percent among gun owners) are more likely to support a lawmaker who supports background checks on all gun sales. Just 9 percent are less likely (12 percent among gun owners).
Conclusion
The failure so far, at least at the federal level, to pass legislation to reduce gun violence four months after the tragedy in Newtown is a failure of politics. It is not a failure of the country to come together, gun owners and non-gun owners alike, and find consensus, but a failure of the country’s leadership to overcome its politics and pass legislation than can make a difference.

One of the treasured cliches of American politics is that the “the states are the laboratories of democracy.” It’s an appealing notion. It would be great if the 50 states were truly innovative in enacting cutting-edge legislation, which encourage other states to emulate what works and avoid what doesn’t.
It’s possible to cite recent examples of bold statewide initiatives, as do Ronald Brownstein and Stephanie Czekalinski in their National Journal article “How Washington Ruined Governors.” But there is mounting evidence that the states are now mimicking national polarization, more than experimenting with creative policies that have the potential for building consensus. As the authors explain:

…On gun control, gay marriage, immigration, taxes, and participation in President Obama’s health reform law, among other issues, states that lean red and those that lean blue are diverging to an extent that is straining the boundaries of federalism. “I can’t recall any time in American history where there was such a conscious effort to create such broad divisions, without any sense of how it is all going to turn out,” says Donald Kettl, dean of the public-policy school at the University of Maryland and an expert on public administration.
In many places, this widening gap is recasting the role of governors. Well into the 1990s, state executives considered themselves more pragmatic than members of Congress; they regularly shared ideas across party lines and often sought to emerge nationally by bridging ideological disputes. Some of that tradition endures. But now, governors are operating mostly along parallel, and partisan, tracks. On each side, they are increasingly pursuing programs that reflect their party’s national agenda–and enlisting with their party on national disputes such as health care reform. “Everything has been infected with the national political debate,” says Bruce Babbitt, who served as Arizona’s centrist Democratic governor for two terms and later as President Clinton’s Interior secretary. “And it’s really destructive.” Tommy Thompson, who launched a flotilla of innovations emulated by governors in both parties during his four terms as Wisconsin’s Republican chief executive, agrees. “Anyone who looks at this in an impartial way has to say we have become a more partisan nation,” he says. “I think we have [become] much more doctrinaire with our philosophies and much more locked into our positions.”

Progressives and Democrats applaud reforms in the blue states, as do conservatives in the red states, and Czekalinski and Brownstein provide plenty of examples of recent reforms and do an excellent job of providing historical context. What we are not seeing today, however, is much bridge-building at the state level — policies that reasonable people of different political parties should be able to support. It appears that political polarization at the national level is contagious and has infected the state houses. The authors quote former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson to dramatize the states’ diminishing role as ‘laboratories’:

During the national welfare-reform debate, Thompson and other GOP governors even publicly sided with Clinton to oppose a central component of the House Republican plan–something else Thompson doesn’t think would happen now. “We were much more willing to take on individuals in our political party when we knew it was right for our state,” he says. “Politically today that would not be a smart move. Back then it was much more of the right thing to do.”

But the calculus is different today:

…In most cases, the path to prominence for governors today is very different. In today’s highly polarized political environment, they are more likely to emerge as national figures by championing and advancing their party’s core ideas than by defying or rethinking them…This competition has inspired ambitious activity in both red and blue states. But many analysts question whether these initiatives really embody the “laboratory of democracy” ideal of state tinkering or rather reflect a centrally directed model in which states, often at the prodding of national interest groups, serially fall in line behind their party’s national agenda. Babbitt expresses a widespread concern that states have diminished their capacity to genuinely innovate because their every choice is framed through the national partisan struggle. “The divergences in the laboratory-of-democracy idea ought to grow out of grassroots experience” in the states, he says. “It’s not the case now. It’s a top-down divergence being driven by national ideological arguments. It’s not an experimental model, and it’s not a very productive exercise.” Rather than ideas rising from the states to Washington, he says, governors are being “conscripted and corrupted into the national political debate.”

Thus the authors’ concluding lament: “Not long ago, the states mostly operated as an exception to the war between the parties in Washington. Now they look more like an extension of it.” Indeed it’s hard to see a game-changing solution to the problem, other than an overwhelming, nation-wide defeat for the party most committed to legislative obstruction.

The following article by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The Washington Monthly.:
It’s no secret that political scientists as a tribe tend to downplay the importance of ideology and even of “issues” as active factors in American politics. Elections, they say (as an often-welcome corrective to Game Change-style overinterpretation of campaign events), are largely determined by “the fundamentals,” especially economic conditions and the identity of the party in power. Partisan attachments by voters, they often point out, are far more durable than anything you can explain by the day’s, month’s, or year’s controversies and positioning.
So it didn’t totally shock me that in a Salon piece on the “broken” nature of our political system, my esteemed friend the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein issues a disclaimer about the role that conservative ideology plays:

It’s not partisanship. It’s not polarization. It’s not even extremism.
It’s the Republican Party. The GOP is broken. Not too conservative; not too extreme. I have no view of where the GOP “should” be ideologically, and I don’t think there’s much evidence that being “too conservative” per se is losing elections for Republicans.

Having ruled out ideology as an explanation, Jonathan ranges far in identifying the actual reasons for the dysfunctional habits of the GOP. Do GOPers sometimes act like they prefer obstinacy to electoral victory, or are forever insisting on “pure” candidates? Maybe the “conservative marketplace,” in which there’s money to be made by looniness, and plenty of money to back primary challengers, is the problem. Do Republicans seem to have no idea how to actually govern? Well, they’ve had some very bad role models, from Nixon to George W. Bush.
I don’t disagree with any of those insights, but when Jonathan comes up with his list of the GOP’s bad habit, I can’t help but notice ideology would explain every single one.

* An aversion to normal bargaining and compromise

That’s natural to rigid conservative ideologues who are not focused on government as a means to “bring home the bacon” (the bacon is brought home by corporate supporters who for the most part need little from politicians other than the destruction of taxes and regulations), and view “bargaining” over government policies as playing on the other team’s field.

* An inability to banish fringe people and views from the mainstream of the party.

The whole point to the conservative movement’s drive to take over the GOP is to redefine the “maintream” and identify “RINOs” as the fringe, which is exactly what has been happening.

* An almost comical lack of interest in substantive policy formation

When your ideologically determined goal is to restore the policies of the Coolidge administration, what sort of “substantive policy formation” do you actually need? That helps explain the constant confusion Republicans have distinguishing “policy” from “messaging” or packaging.

* A willingness to ignore established norms and play “Constitutional hardball”

Jonathan uses a felicitous term here: “constitutional conservatives” think their agenda is the only legitimate direction for the country; “established norms” are the lubricant that has made possible the destruction of constitutional government.

* A belief that when out of office, the best play is always all-out obstruction

When you view the enactment of positive legislation as inevitably adding to a Welfare State that went out of control fifty or seventy-five years ago, there’s rarely any downside to obstruction, and a lot of imputed virtue.
Are there non-ideological factors, Jonathan’s and others, that can explain Republican dysfunction? Of course. And there’s never one single “cause” for much of anything in politics. But my own personal Occam’s Razor sure keeps leading me back to ideology and extremism as impossible to ignore in the saga of the GOP’s, and thus the American political system’s, recent dysfunction.

At Roll Call, Meredith Shiner’s “Obama Budget Strategy Irks Democrats” quotes a senior administration official” saying that the President’s much criticized budget proposals are “intended as more of an olive branch to Republicans than an outline of Obama’s view of the budget and economy…The president has made clear that he is willing to compromise and do tough things to reduce the deficit, but only in the context of a package like this one that has balance and includes revenues from the wealthiest Americans and that is designed to promote economic growth.”
NYT’s Jackie Calmes clarifies President Obama’s proposed chained c.p.i. reform: “Under the president’s budget, the government would shift in 2015 from the standard Consumer Price Index — used to compute cost-of-living increases for Social Security and other benefits and to set income-tax brackets — to what is called a “chained C.P.I.” The new formulation would slow the increase in benefits and raise income tax revenues by putting some taxpayers into higher brackets sooner, for total savings of $230 billion over 10 years…Even so, he emphasized that his support is contingent on Republicans agreeing to higher taxes from the wealthy and new spending, in areas like infrastructure, to create jobs.”
Greg Sargent notes in his Plum Line post “Obama makes Republicans an offer they will refuse” that “The response from liberals to Obama’s latest offer has been threefold: They have denounced Chained CPI as terrible policy. They argue offering concessions to Republicans up front can only lead to giving up more concessions. And they note that positioning to win over the Very Serious People either won’t work — since the deficit scolds will never acknowledge that one side is more to blame than the other — or won’t politically matter over time.”
Tim Dickenson has “The Five Most Outrageous Facts About Our Broken Voting System” in Rolling Stone. They include: 1. African-American voters wait in line nearly twice as long as white voters; 2. Hispanic voters wait in line one-and-a-half times as long as white voters; 3. True-blue Democrats wait in line 45 percent longer than red-bleeding Republicans; 4. Voting in Florida remains a shitshow – even compared to other big states; and 5. The federal Election Assistance Commission is on its last legs. It is supposed to have four commissioners. It currently has four vacancies. All five of these facts were created by Republicans.
So how popular is same-day voter registration, which the Republicans have been trying to repeal in various states and localities across the country? An editorial at The Cap Times says that “In Maine, after Gov. Paul LePage and his Republican allies in the legislature ended the 38-year-old practice of allowing voters to register on election day, citizens petitioned in 2011 to overturn the governor’s assault on voting rights…Maine voted 60-40 percent to restore same-day registration…In Milwaukee, voters were asked if they wanted to retain election day registration. By a 73-27 percent margin they said “yes.”…In Dane County [WI], they faced the same question. The vote was even more lopsided, with 82 percent voting “yes.”…The Maine referendum was binding. The Wisconsin votes were advisory. But the message is the same.”
Micah Cohen takes stock of “Which Governors Are Most Vulnerable in 2014?” at FiveThirtyEight, and finds that “The two most unpopular governors up for re-election in 2014 are Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, an independent, and Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, a Democrat. But the remaining eight governors with net negative job approval ratings are Republicans, including four who rode the Tea Party wave to power in blue and purple states in 2010 and now appear to be in some danger: Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, Gov. Paul LePage of Maine and Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan.”
Lois Beckett’s ProPublica report “Voter Information Wars: Will the GOP Team Up With Wal-Mart’s Data Specialist?” provides an interesting update on the Dem-GOP data mining race. Beckett notes, for example, “…The [Obama] campaign used the television-watching data it acquired to figure out exactly what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching, all of which made for more cost-effective ad placements…The result? The Obama campaign bought more targeted ads, while spending less per television spot than the Romney campaign, according to data collected by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.”
Cass R. Sunstein, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, has an interesting review article “Moneyball for Judges: The statistics of judicial behavior” at The New Republic. There are no huge surprises in the data Sunstein presents from ” The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice” by Lee Epstein, William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner. As one passage notes “Justice Scalia is significantly more conservative than Chief Justice Roberts, and Justice Ginsburg is significantly more liberal than Justice Sotomayor…The authors find that a large number of justices change over time. Of the twenty-three justices who served for a minimum of fifteen terms, four drifted to the right, and no fewer than eight drifted to the left. In general, those shifts were not massive–not a wholesale conversion experience, but an unmistakable movement toward a greater degree of moderation.” Yet, as Sunstein concludes, “The good news is that statistical analysis and quantitative measures are enabling us to go far beyond the intuitions and anecdotes that have long dominated academic and public discussions of government’s third branch.”
John Avlon’s CNN.com headline says it well — “GOP’s cowardly gun filibuster threat.” As Avlon says, “Republicans are doubling down on irrational appeals and trying to block debate…That’s another reason this position is infuriatingly stupid — it compounds the number one negative perception about the Republican Party. Namely, that it is “inflexible and unwilling to compromise.”
Yet more evidence that the AFL-CIO needs it’s own television network: At Truthout MIke Ludwig’s “Labor Report: Four Major TV News Networks Ignore Unions” reports “During the years of 2008, 2009 and 2011, less than 0.3 percent of news stories aired on four major news broadcasting networks involved labor unions or labor issues, according to analysis recently released by Federico Subervi, a professor of media markets at Texas State University.”

This article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The big lie in American politics today is that “America is broke” or “in this time of austerity we have to tighten our belts.” America is not broke. We are not in a time of “scarcity” and when we buy into this fallacy, we contribute to political decisions that actually will do damage to our standard of living and that of our children.
This lie is used relentlessly to argue that “America just can’t afford” investments in education, or infrastructure, or jobs programs. It is used as the justification for the need to cut Social Security benefits, shift the cost of Medicare to senior citizens, increase the costs families bear to send children to college, or cut back on food for low-income children.
The fact is that for ordinary people times are tough. Median per-person income for ordinary Americans hasn’t increased for 20 years. And the federal, state and local governments are short of revenue.
But America is not broke — far from it. Ask the gang on Wall Street. Ask the bankers whose recklessness caused a massive financial collapse, yet continued to get multi-million dollar bonuses, if America is broke.
The reality is our economy is producing a higher gross domestic product per capita — the best measure of the sum of goods and services produced by our economy per person — than at any other time in American history. Gross domestic product per capita slumped after the Great Recession that was caused by the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks. Then it once again began to increase and has now reached record levels.
Overall, America is still the wealthiest nation in the world — and wealthier today than it has ever been.
In fact per capita gross domestic product increased over eight times between 1900 and 2008. That means the standard of living of the average American today is over eight times higher than it was in 1900. Average Americans today consume eight times more goods and services than they did at the beginning of the last century. We are eight times wealthier today than we were then.
And note that GDP per capita has increased six fold since Social Security was passed in 1935 and 2.3 fold since Medicare was passed in 1965. Demographic trends, like the number of seniors in society, have been massively outstripped by increases in our per capita gross domestic product — or standard of living. Those who claim that while we might have been able to afford Social Security and Medicare when they were passed, we just can’t afford them anymore, are just plain wrong.
So if per capita gross domestic product keeps going up, how could it be possible that the median income of ordinary Americans hasn’t increased in twenty years? And why do we have such big budget deficits? Why do we feel so broke in our everyday lives?
The answer is that we are not living in a time of scarcity. We have been living in a time of enormous inequality. Look at a guy like John Paulson. In 2007, as the financial crisis descended, he made $4 billion in personal income betting against subprime mortgages that helped sink the rest of the economy. In 2011 he made a record $5 billion in personal income as the manager of a hedge fund.
In 2011, Mr. Paulson made as much as 100,000 of his fellow citizens who earned $50,000 per year.

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If it seems to you that the death of Margaret Thatcher evokes a sense of deja vu, it is because we went through the same MSM myth-mongering routine when President Reagan died. Their supporters pulled out all stops in glorifying these twin reactionaries, who were said to greatly admire each other’s uncanny ability to screw everyone but the wealthy and get away with it.
You have to look around a little bit to set the record straight about Thatcher’s record, because her beatification as a saint of the super-rich is still commanding lots of coverage. But it’s out there for the willing. As Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers write at Counterpunch:

When Mrs. Thatcher took power, 1 in 7 of the England’s children lived in poverty. By the end of her reforms that number had risen to 1 in 3. She polarized the country in a ‘divide & conquer’ strategy that foreshadowed that of Ronald Reagan and more recent American politicians such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The effect of her policy was to foreclose on the economic mobility into the middle class that ironically she believed her policies were promoting.
Pundits the world over are chirping about her role in “saving” Britain, not as indebting it – destroyed an economy in order to save it. Her rule was historic mainly by posing the conundrum that has shaped neoliberal politics since 1980: How can governments nurture and endow financial kleptocrats in the context of rule by popular consent?
…Nowhere in the world is banking more short-term than in Britain. Nobody better exemplified this narrow-minded perspective than Lady Thatcher. Her simplistic rhetoric helped inspire an inordinate share of simpletons conflating supposed common sense with wisdom.

Thatcher’s real socio-economic legacy (said to have inspired the term “sado-monetarism”) needs to be outed more honestly, as it undoubtedly will be in the days ahead, at least in the progressive press. But weep not for the Iron Lady — it’s not like she doesn’t have plenty of defenders to whitewash her record. The critics will surely be drowned out in a tsunami of glorification.
Meanwhile, enjoy this performance of “Stand Down Margaret” by the English Beat, flagged by Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly.