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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2013

Lux: The Budget Should Reflect Our Values

This article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
In the first three years of the Clinton White House, there were two memorable budget wars, in 1993 and 1995. The open fights with the Republicans were brutal, highest-of-high stakes white-knuckle showdowns where Clinton’s entire presidency was on the line. Behind the scenes, though, our internal fights inside the White House were almost as intense. One thing I will never forget was a meeting where my old friend Bob Boorstin, one of the earliest staffers to join Clinton’s campaign, was fighting to keep some important line items that would help the poor in place and bluntly told President Clinton, “Your budget represents your values.”
While those of us fighting for more spending to help low and middle income people lost a few rounds in these internal debates, we won more than we lost, and in both 1993 and 1995 the budgets Clinton presented and the ones he ended up negotiating with Congress were quite progressive. The 1993 budget raised taxes on the wealthy, lowered taxes on the poor through a big expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and increased investment in programs like education, the environment, Head Start, and Student Grants and Loans. In the 1995 budget showdown with the Republicans in Congress, Clinton rejected the advice of people like Mark Penn that he avoid a showdown, and decided to draw a line in the sand to save “Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment” from cuts that Gingrich wanted to impose, and he decisively won that battle. In all of the budgets that Clinton proposed and negotiated with Congress while president, he for the most part embraced Democratic values.
20 years after Clinton’s first epic budget battle, our current Democratic president is wrestling with what budget to propose to Congress. The House and the Senate have already proposed radically different ideas of what a budget should look like, so obviously what Obama proposes is just one part of a much longer budget debate, but symbolically, as a presentation of his values, it remains a very important moment. The president has been spending the last year and a half talking about how he wants to fight for the middle class, and his budget should reflect those values. This is why it is so deeply troubling, as the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets are now reporting, that Obama is strongly considering putting a Social Security cut into his budget document. By doing this, the president can no longer fall back on what he has been telling progressives and Democrats in Congress, that he doesn’t want to cut Social Security but is willing to trade it for some good things that the Republicans would give up in a budget deal. By embracing — embracing! — Social Security cuts as part of his budget, his statement of values, the president is telling the American public, senior citizens, and progressives that he wants to cut what they overwhelmingly and passionately support.


Political Strategy Notes

After conceding that Margaret Thatcher was a tough adversary for the UK’s progressives, no one should feel any obligation to gloss over the great harm she did as Prime Minister. As Gerry Adams, president of the Irish party Sinn Féin, put it: “Margaret Thatcher did great hurt to the Irish and British people during her time as British prime minister…Working class communities were devastated in Britain because of her policies. Her role in international affairs was equally belligerent …. Here in Ireland her espousal of old draconian militaristic policies prolonged the war and caused great suffering. She embraced censorship, collusion and the killing of citizens by covert operations …. Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and ’81. Her Irish policy failed miserably.” Tony Benn, a 1970s labour minister and Thatcher’s political opponent, added “She did make war on a lot of people in Britain, and I don’t think it helped our society.”
However, there is something important American progressives can learn from Thatcher’s reign, as the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out in his article “Lessons Maggie Taught Me” at The Nation.
A (barely) bipartisan initiative may yet revive a modest proposal for background checks on gun purchases, report Ed O’Keefe and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post.
Bill Scher, executive editor of LiberalOasis.com and the Online Campaign Manager at Campaign for America’s Future, explores “The top 5 issues dividing Democrats ” at The Week. They are Social Security, trade, guns, taxes and climate.
WaPo’s Paul Kane reports on a new pitch for Democratic House candidates: “The best way to defeat the conservative, ideologically driven GOP, Democrats say, is to field non-ideological “problem solvers” who can profit from the fed-up-with-partisanship mood of some suburban areas. These districts will offer some of the few competitive House campaigns in the country.”
Michael Tackett has an extensive Bloomberg update on the campaign to turn Texas into a purple state.
Plum Line’s Greg Sargent calls out the majority leader, and argues that it’s time for Sen. Reid to put up or shut up: “By my count, this is at least the third time a Dem Senate leader has threatened to revisit rules reform. Yet the obstructionism continues with no action on Reid’s part….Reid needs to stop threatening to revisit the filibuster unless he actually means it. Empty threats accomplish nothing. Indeed, they’re counterproductive. They make Dems look weak. They inflate expectations among Dem base voters — and supporters who worked hard to reelect Obama and Dems to Congress — that we may soon enjoy a functional Senate.”
At National Journal’s ‘Hotline on Call.’ Michael Catalini, Naureen Khan and Peter Bell report that the GOP sees it’s top Senate targets as Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan and Mark Begich.
At FiveThirtyEight, Micah Cohen looks at what may be the highest-profile House race and explains “Why Sanford vs. Colbert Busch Could Be Competitive.”
Some say President Obama’s latest Social Security and Medicare proposals are intended more theater than reality. But someone in the white house should nonetheless read Lynn Stuart Parramore’s Alternet post, “7 Chilling Facts About Retirement in America That Should Make Obama Tremble Before Cutting Social Security and Medicare: Obama’s plan would be economically irresponsible, socially disruptive and morally repugnant.”


Free-falling GOP Trivializes Hitler, Stalin to Bash Obama

In their Politico post, ‘Republicans’ Uncivil War,” fellow Republicans Scott Faulkner and Jonathan Riehl lament the transformation of the GOP from a once-competent political party into an circus of bickering ideologues. While the authors view of the glorious GOP past is somewhat overstated to put it charitably, their take on the current predicament of their party includes some insights worth sharing:

The Republican Party is at war with itself and it is losing. For every successful Republican governor, there are Republican state legislators who embrace personally oppressive and interventionist initiatives. For every reasonable Republican member of Congress, there are more who embarrass. Every compelling soundbite from Republican candidates and pundits is overwhelmed by others that repel.
…Bush 43 added his own straw to the political camel’s back by his willingness to allow cronyism to trump competence. By promoting amateurs to bungle the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and allowing the once noble Federal Emergency Management Agency to make an epic mess of Hurricane Katrina relief, Bush eviscerated the longstanding Republican reputation for competent management. The Republican echo chamber remained silent to this dismal record, violating another of the GOP’s core principles — holding power accountable. A Republican world view that was devoid of facts and critical thinking was taking hold. Like Thelma and Louise, Republican politicians and pundits grasped hands and floored the gas peddle into the abyss.
Except for some stellar governors, the Republican movement has been in free fall since late 2005. Like a cancer patient on remission, the tea party-fueled 2010 election blowout offered a fleeting and aberrant reversal of fortune. It remains to be seen if Republicans can heal themselves or whether the Democrats will overreach clearing the way for a GOP comeback by default. Either way, America’s political landscape is denuded when rational thought and competence are edged out of the picture.

And when the Republicans are not likening President Obama to the anti-Christ himself, it seems their preferred fallback similes are Hitler and Stalin, as Lincoln Mitchell notes in his post “Mike Huckabee’s Reductio ad Hitlerum” at HuffPo:

…The Tea Party and right wing penchant for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin is evidence not of any totalitarian tendencies on the part of Obama. Instead it is evidence that right wing contempt for science is now rivaled by contempt for learning anything about history.
Stalin and Hitler are among the most brutal murderers and dictators of the 20th, or any other, century. Most of the world knows this. To the right wing of the Republican Party, apparently, Stalinism is a system of governance where the marginal tax rate exceeds 35 percent, while the Nazi regime, according to Huckabee’s newest insight, was one characterized by gun control.
…Using Communists and Nazis as a way to bludgeon one’s political opponents with powerful, if poorly constructed, political arguments is nothing new, but it is seems much more frequent now, with Obama a much bigger target than any previous president. Most of the more aggressive of these attacks come not from powerful Republican politicians but from media personalities like Huckabee, Tea Party activists or people on the fringes of political life. The failure of Republicans in more senior positions to speak out against this has now become so ordinary that it is rarely remarked upon, but it is still significant.

Yes, that Mike Huckabee, the one who reportedly told a gathering at an Ohio pancake breakfast

“Make a list,” said Huckabee, referring to supporters’ family and friends. “Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done.”

In case you thought he was just joking, it wasn’t the only time. As the Huck told a crowd in Virginia, according to HuffPo:

While campaigning for Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee jokingly made reference to voter suppression. He told supporters that it’s “their job” to keep McDonnell opponents from the polls: “Let the air our of their tires … keep ’em home. Do the Lord’s work.”

In a way, Huckabee was just giving voice to the GOP’s extensive voter suppression project. Whatever criticisms can be fairly leveled at President Obama, he has never displayed anything like the utter contempt for the integrity of American Democracy that distinguishes the modern Republican Party.


Brownstein: Dems Now Strengthened by Wedge Issues

There was a time not so long ago, writes Ronald Brownstein in his National Journal post, “Why the Culture Wars Now Favor Democrats,” when Republicans thrived on the divisions the so-called wedge issues cause among Democrats. For decades, Democrats struggled with policies to address “crime and welfare to immigration and gay rights,” while Republicans reaped the benefits. As Browstein notes:

…Initially, wedge issues were mostly a Republican weapon. Tutored by political strategists such as Paul Weyrich and Lee Atwater, GOP leaders for years highlighted cultural and racially tinged disputes (such as abortion, school prayer, welfare, and affirmative action) that split Southern evangelicals and working-class Northern whites (particularly observant Catholics) from the Democratic coalition as if shearing an iceberg. The process peaked in the 1988 presidential race, when George H.W. Bush, at Atwater’s direction, used these cudgels to disqualify Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis as a liberal elitist “born in Harvard Yard’s boutique.”

Today, however, demographic convulsions and more relaxed attitudes among political moderates, along with increasing rigidity in the Republican party, have combined to flip the burden to the GOP:

In a mirror image, Democrats across these fronts are moving with uncommon confidence. In Congress, the party has overwhelmingly unified behind immigration reform and gay marriage and is only somewhat more divided on guns; in many blue states, Democrats are also pushing gun-control and gay-rights agendas. “Guns and gays, which we used to run away from, we’re now running on,” says Democratic strategist Tad Devine, a top aide in Dukakis’s 1988 campaign. If congressional Republicans block President Obama on immigration or expanded background checks, the 2016 Democratic nominee likely will revive–and benefit from–those causes.
Republicans gained from wedge issues when the blue-collar whites they were aimed at constituted a majority of voters. But the growing number of nonwhite or religiously unaffiliated voters and the socially liberal tendencies of the rising millennial generation have reversed the equation. At the presidential level, these noneconomic issues are mostly benefiting Democrats, not so much by dividing Republicans as by unifying the Democratic coalition of minorities, millennials, and college-educated whites, especially women.

Although some wedge issues, like immigration and gun control remain unsettled, looking towards the future, it’s hard to see how Democrats can lose their current edge with culture wars wedge issues — at least in the short run.


Two Views of the Latest Budget Maneuvers


Tomasky: I Think Obama Is Bluffing

Liberals are upset today because Obama’s budget is going to include a call for chained CPI and some means-testing of Medicare. Krugman thinks he seeks the approval of the Serious People. Chait concurs. Ezra Klein tweeted earlier today that it appears that Obama is once again opening a negotiation at the other side’s halfway point. In 140 characters he didn’t have room to denounce this, but presumably that’s what he meant.
Well, could be. But I tend to agree with Kevin Drum on this one. Drum writes that Obama doesn’t really expect the GOP to budge on taxes and therefore doesn’t expect a deal at all. And that Republicans, rather than make a deal, would prefer to continue to have the deficit as an issue to bang Obama with…

…it’s mostly a charade. And it’s a good one! One of the very best, in fact. Cutting the deficit polls well, it lends itself nicely to demagoguery, and it’s an all-purpose excuse to oppose any spending proposals they don’t like. So why on earth would you cut a deal to take it off the table? That would be crazy. And if they’re forced to swallow a tax increase as well, that makes it even crazier. There’s literally no benefit at all in this for Republicans.
So they won’t do it. Obama’s real hope–since I assume he’s not an idiot and knows all this perfectly well–is that Republicans will indeed refuse to make a deal, and this will turn the public against them in the 2014 midterms. I suppose that’s possible, depending on how well he plays his hand. It’s certainly more possible than assuming that Republicans will voluntarily commit electoral suicide by agreeing to a deal.

This sounds right to me. The risk Obama runs here is that the GOP calls his bluff and does a 180 and says, “Okay, you want some tax increases? We’ll go to $300 billion.” Or some other smallish figure. Then he’ll have to play ball.
But I think the risk of that is small. Can you picture the Republicans giving ground on taxes before 2014? I can’t. They’ll keep demagoguing the deficit and run on that. The risk for them is that the deficit really goes down and no one gives a crap about it anymore. It’s expected to be $845 billion in October. It could be lower. And then what if it’s just $500 billion the following October, the month before the election? It’ll fade as an issue. Obama will be able to run around on the campaign trail saying he reduced the deficit nearly $1 trillion in two years in such an event. Not implausible.
All that said, people like Bernie Sanders should keep up the pressure in the meantime. But I see no incentive for the GOP to come to terms, and I think the Potus knows it.

Chait: This appears to be a message strategy

…this appears to be a message strategy aimed at advocates of BipartisanThink, who have been blaming Obama for failing to offer the plan he has in fact been offering. The strategy is that, by converting their offer to Boehner from an “offer” to a “budget,” it will prove that Obama is Serious.
On the one hand, this strikes me as completely ridiculous. On the other hand, it might actually work! BipartisanThinkers like Ron Fournier (“a gutsy change in strategy”) and Joe Scarborough (“Now THIS is a real budget … exciting”) are gushing with praise.
For the strategy to really succeed, the BipartisanThinkers have to help persuade Senate Republicans to strike a deal, and then somehow get John Boehner to secretly agree with it and let it come to a vote in the House, even if almost all the House Republicans naturally vote against it.
The fallback option is that the BipartisanThinkers stop blaming both sides and start blaming Republicans, though this seems like an extremely forlorn hope — more likely, the BipartisanThinkers will eventually redefine Obama’s compromise position as Big Government liberalism and the center as the halfway point between that and Paul Ryan’s plan to kill and eat the poor.


Progressive Activists Show How to Challenge Right-Wing Media

if you have felt despair about the relentless dominance of the MSM as a force for stifling progressive change, ‘Proglegs’ has a Daily Kos post that should lift your spirits considerably. Here’s a taste:

Ever since hate radio golden boy Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke a year ago, karma has been a real bitch for Clear Channel–who stood by their man.
Clear Channel’s radio revenue has been decimated by the StopRush movement through the efforts of activist groups like Flush Rush Facebook. These activists have worked every day to monitor Limbaugh’s broadcasts across the nation, enter ad information in The StopRush sponsor database, and contact advertisers to convince them to withdraw ads from the offensive program.
Last month, Clear Channel reported losses of $424 million for 2012. The media company has been firing employees throughout the past year in an effort to stop the hemorrhaging, to no avail. And Chairman of the Board Mark Mays announced his impending resignation.

Proglegs has more details about the Clear Channel’s troubles, and concludes:

Decent folks who believe in tolerance and equality are no longer powerless against Limbaugh’s efforts to spread intolerance on the radio. StopRush is making a major impact–and with your help we can do even more. Just a few emails, tweets, or Facebook messages a week to Limbaugh’s advertisers can go a long way toward making hatred less profitable. It is our collective voice that makes us strong.

Yet another reminder that political activism has forms for involvement other than campaigns and elections, especially in times when our political institutions seem mired in gridlock. There was a time when Clear Channel seemed indomitable, so vast was it’s reach. But a few hearty groups of progressive activists are bringing an end to their reign, and it’s just possible that a new era of progressive radio can now begin to take root across the nation.


Dems’ Daunting 2014 House Landscape Requires Creative Strategy

At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Kyle Kondik has the skinny on “Hard targets” — races for the 25 most vulnerable seats ion the U.S. House of Representatives for 2014:

One needs little more than just fingers and toes to count the number of House members who represent districts won by the other party’s presidential candidate in 2012. As mentioned here previously, just 25 House members — nine Democrats and 16 Republicans — hold such “crossover” districts. Compare that to 2004, when there were 59 such seats, or 2008, when there were 83.
Both Democratic and Republican strategists are going to start with these seats as they try to identify targets for the upcoming campaign, but as is clear from a district-by-district analysis, many of them are not particularly vulnerable.
Although the historical data are incomplete, the 25 crossover seats are probably the fewest number after a presidential election in nearly a century. The group includes some of the longest-serving members of the House, who have established deep roots that have allowed them to fend off challengers and build strong identities in their districts. In many of these districts, the challenging party simply must play a waiting game, hoping for a retirement that creates an open seat contest.

If that landscape isn’t daunting enough, Kondik adds that “the Republicans could lose all their crossover seats and still hold a 218-217 House majority. Democrats need to net a gain of 17 seats to win control of the House next year.” Kondik provides district by district capsule summaries of the current political situation in the 25 House districts. Clearly, Dems are going to need to leverage all of their fund-raising and digital assets to beat the historical patterns and pick up 17 house seats. To check out Crystal Ball’s other excellent resources for monitoring U.S. House races, click here.


Greg Sargent Explains Why Obama wants a Grand Bargain

Greg Sargent has provided a very insightful look at the administration’s basic political strategy that underies the current maneuverings over the budget. As he says, “I’m not defending this thinking; I’m simply detailing it.”

…here is my understanding of White House thinking on why a Grand Bargain is a good outcome.
Obama and his advisers don’t necessarily view Chained CPI [which is included in Obama’s budget] as good policy. But they think a Grand Bargain is ultimately a better outcome than continued sequestration, and the only way to the former is to peel off individual Republicans who are open to new revenues. They believe a Grand Bargain is good for Democrats in general, because it essentially would lock in a medium-term agreement over core disputes — about the safety net and about the size of government, and who should pay for it — that have produced a debilitating stalemate in Washington.
Yes, Republicans would continue railing about government spending, the thinking goes, but no one would listen, since they would have already endorsed a deal stabilizing the deficit. This would deprive Republicans of the ability to focus attention on one of their core targets — Big Government — as a way to avoid grappling with other issues, such as jobs and long-term middle class economic security, immigration, guns, and perhaps even climate change. Reaching a deal on the deficit will force Republicans to confront those problems more directly and to choose between real cooperation on them or continue to calcify as a hidebound, reactionary party incapable of addressing major challenges facing the country.
Liberals will point out that it’s folly to offer Republicans so much up front, because they’ll only denounce the offer as “unserious” and demand more, shifting the debate further in their direction. But officials insist the White House has no intention of budging on its demand for new revenues or allowing Republicans to pull Obama further towards them. (This doesn’t mean liberals shouldn’t make it clear that any further concessions on revenues are unacceptable.) The offer in the budget, the thinking goes, will drive home that Obama is the one who occupies the compromise middle ground, and if Republicans refuse to deal, it will be crystal clear in the public mind who is to blame for continued austerity. The White House doesn’t worry about putting its fingerprints on entitlements cuts, because Obama has long proposed them himself.
I’m not defending this thinking; I’m simply detailing it. In my view, it’s not clear yet that the sequester will shape up as enough of a political liability to force Republicans back to the table.
Liberals…need to start thinking right now about how to answer this question: Which is worse, a Grand Bargain, or continued sequestration? It’s unclear to me that there is any other likely outcome. Either Republicans will decide to weather sequestration or they will agree to some kind of a deal to replace it. So liberals need a good policy answer to that question.


Shocker Alert: The President is Engaging in Politics !

Having caught the tail end this morning of some inside-the-beltway pundit snarkage about President Obama doing some (gasp) campaign fund-raising for his own party, I was delighted to stumble upon Alec MacGillis’s post, “The Amusing Alarm Over Obama’s 2014 Fixation” in The New Republic. MacGillis bares the silly hypocrisy of it all in this excerpt:

…Underlying the tut-tutting about Obama’s fundraising is a broader, longstanding confusion in the Washington establishment over what is to be expected of Obama. We scorn him for seeking to hold himself above the fray and then lash him with high dudgeon as soon he deigns to descend into the muck. Never mind that he is following in the footsteps of his two-term predecessors–as the Post noted, “Ronald Reagan participated in 20 fundraisers for Republicans in 1985, and George W. Bush did 14 in 2005…. Bill Clinton, committed to helping the Democratic Party eliminate debt after the 1996 campaign, appeared at a whopping 77 fundraisers in 1997.”

Citing “feinting spells on the right” in response to the “news” that the president is now going to raise some dough for 2014 Democratic candidates, MacGillis continues:

…Can you imagine? A president who passed a lot of stuff when his party held both houses of Congress and has been all but totally stymied since losing the House has decided that it would be in his interest to…win back the House. Next thing you know, he’s going to try to help a Democrat get elected president in 2016 to make sure achievements like the Affordable Care Act are preserved.

MacGillis faults the naivete of those purist souls who believe that A President can use the bully pulpit alone to stop well-funded opponents and quotes David Jones, a former fundraiser for Clinton and Al Gore: “The opponents of his agenda are spending tens of millions of dollars to derail his agenda and he can’t unilaterally disarm. In today’s world it takes resources to get your message out to the public and in order to raise resources you have to have fundraisers and send out emails and make phone calls.”
I would just add the obvious fact that the president is the leader of his party and, as such, is supposed to be its top fund-raiser. I would be joining the outraged reaction if he didn’t help raise funds for the 2014 campaign. In fact, he should be doing more fund-raising if he wants to accomplish anything in 2015-16.
The purist whiners need to get real. No president in U.S. history has had to deal with a more obstructionist or more lavishly-funded opposition, nor one more wholly dedicated to reversing the hard-won gains of the Democratic party over generations. We would all like more bipartisan kumbaya. But the only thing this Republican party understands is defeat and it is President Obama’s duty to do all that he can to open another big can of ass-whupping for them in 2014.


Political Strategy Notes

These shameless voter suppression efforts –even for Republicans — in North Carolina may actually reflect an encouraging trend — that the state President Obama lost by the smallest of margins in 2012 is turning blue so fast Republicans are running scared and getting desperate.
Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future, has a warning for Democrats at HuffPo: ” The rising American electorate is looking for help: a forward strategy that will rebuild the country, educate the young, put people to work, capture a lead in the green industrial revolution that is sweeping the world, while insuring that the rewards of growth are widely shared. This requires fierce battles with those standing in the way — not simply the Tea Party zealots, but Big Oil and Big Pharma, Wall Street and the global corporate lobby that will spend lavishly to protect their privileges and subsidies. Without that vision and courage, the rising American electorate will continue to sink together. And Democrats will discover that a status quo party has little attraction to voters looking for change.”
I do hope the Organizing for America ‘List’ is as powerful as this conservative e-rag says it is.
At the New York Times Opinionator, Thomas B. Edsall’s assessment of “The GOP’s Digital Makeover” shows why the Republicans’ top-down culture may be a barrier to their achieving digital parity with Dems: “…The biggest obstacle facing the Republican Party may be how to get its leaders, including those in charge of the R.N.C., to accommodate and accept the freewheeling approach to innovation — the invention of invention — that made the digital revolution now transforming American politics possible in the first place.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. rallies progressives to save background checks from Republican obstruction. “…Gun-control advocates need even more discipline, and they cannot stop organizing after this fight is over. It will take years to build the kind of muscle the gun lobby has. Doing so will create the political space for other measures, including an assault weapons ban.”
If Elizabeth Colbert-Busch can make the word ‘integrity’ the issue, this U.S. House contest should result in a Democratic pick-up. It’s not just Mark Sanford’s philandering and lying about it; it’s his abuse of taxpayer money. As Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand put it in a fund-raising e-blast for the Democrat: “This is the same Mark Sanford who, as governor, disappeared from office and used taxpayer money to visit his mistress.”
Bob Shrum’s Daily Beast post, “Be Afraid, GOP: Hillary Clinton Is Back and She Will Beat You in 2016” has me thinking maybe we should put all this Hillary euphoria to work sooner, rather than later — and send her out to help rally women to elect Dems to congress, like Elizabeth Colbert-Busch.
At The Plum Line, Greg Sargent reports on a new pro-Democratic messaging initiative: “The American Bridge 21st Century Foundation Web site, “C-Quest,” which is “designed to focus attention on how the sequester is impacting actual communities around the country, as a corrective to the Beltway’s emphasis on the sequester as a political story, one that the White House has supposedly botched by over-hyping the sequester’s impact…The Web site is also accompanied by a Web video that collects local news segments from around the country on the sequestration’s cuts, and makes the point that Paul Ryan’s budget cuts would dwarf those of the sequester:”
David Callahan’s “The Right Way to Create Jobs” at Demos ‘Policy Shop’ has an argument every Democratic congressional candidate should be able to articulate, particularly in the 7 states that have an unemployment rate above 9 percent: “…Huge numbers of construction workers lost their jobs when the housing bubble imploded, and many of these people are still unemployed. In fact, construction workers have the highest jobless rate of any group of workers — 15.7 percent, over twice the national rate and three times higher than most white-collar professions. So infrastructure spending would help those workers who are still suffering most from long-term unemployment…We tried a surge in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. How about one at home?”
You go, guys.