In his Wonkblog post, “Ross Douthat gets Washington right, then very wrong,” Ezra Klein gets the New York Times columnist right. Douthat argued that the political establishment’s current focus on lower-priority concerns like gun control, immigration and climate change, when the public wants action on jobs and the economy, shows how out-of-touch ‘Washington’ is. Klein explains:

Much of the work here is done by bundling all the relevant players into a disappointing, elitist mass Douthat simply calls “Washington.” It’s “Washington” that’s failing. “Washington” that is not “readying, say, payroll tax relief for working-class families.” “Washington” where “we’re left with the peculiar spectacle of a political class responding to a period of destructive long-term unemployment with an agenda that threatens to help extend that crisis.”

Douthat departs from the “blame Washington” meme long enough to note that “the public’s non-priorities look like the entirety of the White House’s second-term agenda.” It’s a fairly transparent propaganda trick. Blame the entire political system for the paralyzing obstructionism of a faction in congress, while singling out the major player willing to compromise for the common good as somehow responsible for the failure to secure an agreement.
The political system in Washington — not the capitol itself — is broken in places, but not in ways that Douthat is willing to acknowledge. The abuse of the filibuster, for example, is a destructive systemic malady, which must be fixed before a working consensus can be secured. Yet, even this systemic impediment exists because of the Republican Party’s refusal to negotiate in good faith on the priority concerns of jobs and the economy, as well as nearly all other issues.
“Washington” has become a term that conflict-averse and pro-Republican commentators use to delude the public, and in some cases themselves, that GOP obstructionism is not the core problem. Opinion polls indicate that it’s not working all that well. Sure, millions of people parrot silly expressions like “Washington is out of touch.” But when specifically asked which party is more out of touch, in poll after poll more will say it’s the Republicans.
The better conservative columnists and commentators like Will, Brooks and Douthat, will occasionally fault the GOP for lame comments by its leaders and dumb tactical moves. But when it comes to assessing the GOP’s grand strategy of knee-jerk, full-tilt obstructionism to anything significant proposed by the President or Democrats, top conservative commentators shrug it off. They never defend the gridlock strategy directly, but their silence knowingly gives it a free pass. Their party — and America — would be better-served if they opened up the dialogue.

Start your day by reading John Blake’s “Veterans of forgotten voting war count the cost” at CNN.com. Then use it to evaluate the humanity of the Supreme Court majority’s decision on voting rights, expected later today.

If you thought that the GOP had reached rock bottom in dysfunctionality, read Eleanor Clift’s “The GOP’s Kamikazes Are Back” at The Daily Beast. If this keeps up Dems need only ask swing voter friends, “Do the Republicans really look like a party that can run the country? Really?”

Moyers & Co. are doing a great job of “Keeping an Eye on ALEC.”

At The Atlantic, Molly Ball gets on the “Can Democrats Win Back the Deep South?” story, and notes a growing role for new political groups: “…New groups such as South Forward and the Southern Project could make an impact — by providing resources and support to races and states that are often off the radar of the national Democratic Party. A third group, the Southern Progress Fund, also is gearing up to launch in the coming months…”

Micah Cohen’s NYT post “From Campaign War Room to Big-Data Broom” reports on the GOP’s efforts to match the data mining prowess of Team Obama. It does not sound like Dems have much to worry about just yet.

Catherine Hollander’s “Time Is Running Short for Big ‘Obamacare’ Push” At The National Journal outlines the challenge ahead for the Administration: “But Keith Nahigian, who helped design the Medicare Part D prescription-drug enrollment campaign during the Bush administration, thinks the White House and other pro-Obamacare groups are starting this push far too late…”If you don’t build partnerships, and you don’t have third-party validators and local trusted sources, you only have one-way communication of government telling people to take a personal health care decision, and right now there’s not a lot of trust of people [in] government, and also there’s a cost,” Nahigian said, referring to the fact that unlike voting for a candidate, individuals will be paying for insurance under the new law.”

Todd Lindberg argues at TNR that “The NSA Scandal Was Good for Obama.”

If you’re tired of the same ole, same ole social metrics being trotted out year after year, read “Governor O’Malley Leads in the Fast-Rising Movement around Measurement Issues” at Demos. A new indicator, the “Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)” is being embraced by Maryland, Oregon and Vermont, with other states expected to follow suit. It measures “valuing natural resources and ecosystem services is a staple of GPI, along with other “non-market” goods such as family care-work, volunteerism, and public investments in education, health, infrastructure, and scientific research.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s “Boehner’s House implodes over flawed farm bill” says it plain about the Speaker and his minions: “…Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) exposed hypocrisy on the matter of government handouts by excoriating Republican House members who had benefited from farm subsidies but voted to cut food stamps…The collapse of the farm bill will generally be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his own right wing. That’s true as far as it goes and should remind everyone of the current House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is above all a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.”

J-school teachers should use this distorted screed as an example of cheesey reporting.

Greg Sargent tells the tale:

As Jonathan Chait notes, [Mitch McConnell’s speech to the American Enterprise Institute] is effectively an acknowledgment by McConnell that the IRS scandal has officially moved into its “post fact” phase:
McConnell actually makes this explicit, openly admitting that this scandal, at least as it reflects on Obama, is no longer about the specific behavior — scandalous or not — of living, breathing human beings, and more about something that’s been vaguely institutionalized throughout the administration

“I don’t believe that the president ever actually picked up a phone and told someone over at the IRS to slow-walk those applications or audit anybody. But the truth is, he didn’t have to. The message was clear enough.”

Darrell Issa’s selective release of transcripts, followed by the release by Dems on Issa’s Oversight Committee of full witness testimony that undercut Issa’s claims, seems to have further soured the media on GOP narratives hyping Nixonian presidential wrongdoing. Partly because of Issa’s game-playing — and partly because the very serious concerns raised by the NSA revelations intervened — the political press corps really does seem to have decided that Republican investigators have come up with nothing to tie the IRS targeting to the White House and that those initial leaks were little more than an effort to play them.
For now, at least, the media seems to have moved on. And so Mitch McConnell can now drop all pretenses and speak directly to the base in language only they can understand.

The interesting thing to note about this transition, however, is that in the modern Fox News world, fabricated scandals never actually die. Instead they mutate into quasi-theological “truths” that are shared, savored, recited and recycled in speeches and conversations among the faithful.
In this process their essential character changes. In the initial active phase of a “pseudo-scandal” the particular accusations involved are offered as the “evidence” that proves some proposition about Obama’s character and actions. In the second phase, on the other hand, the now completely accepted conclusions about Obama morph into the “proof” of the initial accusations themselves.
For example, in 2009, the lurid accusations that busloads of minorities had been bused from precinct to precinct to vote again and again for Obama was used as the “proof” that Obama had stolen the 2008 election. By 2012, the “well-known” fact that the Obama forces stole elections made it unnecessary to produce any specific proof that busloads of minorities actually had been herded from precinct to precinct. By 2012 anyone who expressed doubts about the accuracy of this accusation was told “Oh my God, don’t you watch Fox News? They’ve run hundreds of stories on this. And anyway, of course that’s what a socialist like Obama would do. He and his gang don’t believe in democracy.”
As a result, the “well-known” facts that Obama unleashed the IRS on his enemies and cringed and cowered under his bed as the Benghazi attacks unfolded and then tried to cover up his cowardice will now take their place alongside the equally well-known facts about the epic corruption around Solindra and blatant electoral theft of the 2008 election. In 2014 and 2016 they will become a kind of political litany, recited like incantations in every speech and debate. They will no longer be presented as specific facts supported by evidence but as a kind of shared moral vision and perspective. The initiates in this political sub-culture will simply “know” that Obama did these terrible things because they “know” that he is essentially evil and they will simply “know” that he is essentially evil because they “know” he does terrible things like these.

The following article is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps e-blast and linked to a major new Democracy Corps study, “Not so fast: 2014 Congressional Battleground Very Competitive“:
Not so fast.
The first Democracy Corps Congressional Battleground survey of the most competitive House races will challenge serious commentary and the informed presumptions about the 2014 election. Analysts, pundits, and commentators have concluded that there will be fewer seats in play in 2014 and that neither party is likely to upset the current balance. To be honest, this poll surprised us. Republicans have lost half their lead from 2012 – despite the more Republican seats and a more conservative electorate. It shows Democrats could at least replicate the net gain of 8 seats they achieved in 2012 – and that Republicans are exposed as the country tires of Tea Party gridlock, Obamacare repeal efforts, threats to Medicare and Social Security, and politicians protecting the richest. The parties’ strongest attacks, including on health care, produce big gains for Democrats – bigger shifts than we have seen in a long time. In the past, that has been a precursor to future gains.
Democracy Corps’ Congressional Battleground poll is the only one where interviews are conducted exclusively in the most competitive Democratic and Republican seats, using the actual names of incumbents in their districts. This is not a generic test ballot. And this survey has been a pretty good guide to the expanding battlegrounds in the elections of 2006, 2008, and 2010.
Read more at Democracy Corps.

It now seems hard to believe that there was a time when America’s corporate leaders gave a damn about the welfare of the nation. Yes, it was true that their market was overwhelmingly domestic back then. But there was also a genuine patriotism mixed in with the drive for profits, some of it attributable to the World War II generation who rose to top decision-making positions in their companies.
But you rarely hear the word “patriotic” in the comments of today’s corporate leaders. Their sole loyalty now seems to be their stockholders and the global marketplace, which they are milking for every available dollar. Nowadays they are far more likely to express their love of “free trade” than their love for America.
Thomas B. Edsall notes in his NYT Opinionator post that Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers says that “the uncritical worship of the free market in the 1980s allowed the nation’s corporate elite to abandon longstanding constraints in its treatment of labor, especially in shifting the rewards of rising productivity from employees to the owners of capital.” Worse, writes Edsall:

With the blessing of the new right, Krueger argues, corporate America has abandoned its commitment to the commonweal over the past three decades. It no longer honors norms of fairness and equality. To Krueger, it is in the economic sphere that American integrity has been eroded and its ideals corrupted.

Edsall then quotes Krueger directly:

In considering reasons for the growing wage gap between the top and everyone else, economists have tended to shy away from considerations of fairness and instead focus on market forces, mainly technological change and globalization. But given the compelling evidence that considerations of fairness matter for wage setting, I would argue that we need to devote more attention to the erosion of the norms, institutions and practices that maintain fairness in the job market. We also need to focus on the policies that can lead to more widely shared – and stronger – economic growth. It is natural to expect that market forces such as globalization would weaken norms and institutions that support fairness in wage setting. Yet I would argue that the erosion of the institutions and practices that support fairness has gone beyond market forces.

Krueger dismisses the routine explanation of many economists that increasing inequality and middle-class stagnation are caused by technology and globalization. Corporate profits are soaring, and coporate leaders could easily raise wages and salaries, without hurting their companies. He argues further that productivity has also suffered as a consequence:

Productivity growth has not accelerated over the past 30 years; in fact, except for the late 1990s (when inequality narrowed) productivity growth has slowed. If the rise in inequality had improved incentives, one would have expected productivity growth to rise even more quickly, not slow down. Indeed, it is hard to see what the macroeconomy has gained from the enormous shift in the income distribution.

Before the 1980s, C.E.O. pay used to adhere to “norms of fairness, so that the range of compensation between janitors and top executives was kept within limits.” Meanwhile, notes Krueger, other wealthy nations which have experienced economic downturns have escaped sharp hikes in inequality.
There has been a lot written about the decline of values in America and the rise in narcissism, with ample evidence all around us. But where it hurts most is in the values of the corporate decision-makers, who have the power to rebuild America, but who have instead replaced patriotism with geckoism.

From Why We Shouldn’t Trust ‘Independents’ By Jonathan Bernstein at The Washington Monthly:

[Here’s] a reminder of my good-enough way of thinking about how the actual electorate breaks down: it’s one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, one-third independent…but that final one third is itself really one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third (and thus one-ninth overall) true independent. And what’s more, those true independents are overwhelmingly the least informed and least attentive to politics…

In his New York Times magazine article, “Data You Can Believe In The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In” Jim Rutenberg illuminates some of the strategies and techniques deployed by the Obama campaigns digital wizards in 2012.
With respect to ad-buying, Rutenberg explains:

… The campaign recruited the best young minds in the booming fields of analytics and behavioral science and placed them in a room they called “the cave” for up to 16 hours a day over the course of roughly 16 months. After the election, when the technology wizards finally came out, they had not only helped produce a victory that defied a couple of historical predictors; they also developed a host of highly effective marketing techniques that were either entirely new or had never been tried on such a grand scale.
Grisolano and McLean and the others were part of a singular breakthrough in the field of television-ad buying, where about 50 percent of the campaign’s budget was spent, or more than $400 million. Previous campaigns would make decisions about how to direct their television-advertising budgets largely based on hunches and deductions about what channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching. Their choices were informed by the broad viewership ratings of Nielsen and other survey data, which typically led to buying relatively expensive ads during evening-news and prime-time viewing hours. The 2012 campaign took advantage of advanced set-top-box monitoring technology to figure out what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching and when, resulting in a smarter and cheaper — if potentially more invasive — way to beam commercials into their homes. The system gave Obama a significant advantage over Mitt Romney, according to Democrats and many Republicans (at least those who were not on Romney’s media team).
…Grisolano told me that the campaign literally knew every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex and income. What’s more, he hinted, the campaign had figured out how to get its television advertisements in front of them with a previously inconceivable level of knowledge and accuracy.

Regarding data-collection and classification:

Wagner dismisses the notion of “romantic war rooms” operating on political gut instinct as outdated and misguided. His is a hard-data system that rejects anything that is not definitively quantifiable. In the Bush era, strategists boasted about how they could predict voter behavior based upon car and sport preferences, a well-publicized bit of political magic that captured the imaginations of politicians and journalists alike. Wagner’s approach, part of a broader move in politics, cut all of that out; why engage in such divination when you have the time and money to just call voters and ask them about their leanings directly? “We’re trying to predict political preference; we’re not trying to predict whether you buy a car,” Wagner says dismissively.
The campaign couldn’t call the more than 150 million registered voters, obviously. But they could call enough of them in swing states (up to 11,000 a night) to figure out how they — and other people who lived near them, looked like them and earned like them — were likely to vote with an increasing degree of accuracy. In 2008, Wagner and his small team combined information from those calls with any other data they could find — census data, state voter lists and the like — and fed it into algorithms that produced support scores. One ranked how likely swing-state voters were to support Obama on a scale of 0 to 100, and another ranked how likely they were to show up at voting booths. Those scores helped the campaign direct resources toward the right voters, and Obama beat John McCain by 7 percentage points.

Read more…

Now that the chicken littles have all had their say about the one outlier poll that had President Obama’s approval ratings down 8 points, along come top polling analysts Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy to set the record straight at HuffPo: “A new Pew Research Center survey finds President Barack Obama’s job approval rating remains “fairly steady” despite recent controversies: “Currently, 49% approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president while 43% disapprove. That is little changed from a month ago, before the NSA surveillance controversy and the revelations that the IRS targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny.”
Tom Curry’s “Liberals brace for Supreme Court decision on voting rights” at NBC Politics considers possible strategies if the Supreme Court ruling on section 5 of the Voting Rights Act goes the wrong way.
What we call stuff matters in shaping public opinion. As Sandhya Somashekhar reports at Wonkblog: “According to the poll, overall favorability of the law jumps from 35 percent to 42 percent when the term “Obamacare” is used. That’s almost entirely due to the enthusiastic reception it gets from Democrats, 58 percent of whom responded favorably to “health reform law,” compared with 73 percent for “Obamacare.”…Independents in the poll reacted about the same to both descriptors (about a third responded favorably while around a half responded unfavorably). Among Republicans, 76 percent responded unfavorably to “the health reform law.” That number jumped to 86 percent when “Obamacare” was used.”
For the definitive down-to-cases update on the 2014 governors’ races, look no further than “Governors 2014: The Incumbent Avalanche” by Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley at the Crystal Ball.
Thomas B. Edsall’s ruminations on “Our Broken Social Contract” at the New York Times Opinionator are worth a read. But the “social disintegration, inequality and rising self-preoccupation” he cites is more a reflection of Republican party obstructionism than the Obama Administration’s “legacy.”
At CNN.com Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, makes the case for digital modernization of voting in America: “We need to change the way we think about voter registration and move our system into the digital age. If citizens take the responsibility to register to vote, the government has the responsibility to ensure they can…We can also enable citizens to register online and stay registered if they move or change their address. This would add 50 million eligible Americans to the rolls, cost less and curb the potential for fraud.”
RMuse’s “Republicans Are Passing ALEC Written Laws Banning Paid Sick Leave” at PoliticusUSA has an update on the GOP’s assault on worker benefits and protections at the state and federal level.
Here’s an interesting email pitch from the cell phone service, Credo: “Just in 2012, working through the CREDO SuperPAC, we defeated five of the worst Tea Party Republicans in Congress. And we launched more than 500 campaigns on issues like marriage equality, the environment and human rights…AT&T and Verizon Wireless have given $1,047,500 and $179,600 respectively to House and Senate Tea Party Caucus members since 2009–including Representatives Michele Bachmann, Steve King and Allen West (whom the CREDO SuperPAC helped defeat in November)…”
R. J. Eskow’s “9 Ways the Right’s Ayn Randian Experiment Screws Over the Young” provides an antidote to the facile Libertarianism Sen. Rand Paul is hoping to sell to young voters.
I do hope the Republican party regains some sanity, at least enough to negotiate like grown-ups. But this is just… nuts.

Robert Reich’s ‘Why the GOP Can’t learn” at HuffPo provides a lucid explanation for the Republican party’s inability to grow in credibility:

…The Republican base is far more entrenched, institutionally, than was the old Democratic base. And its power is concentrated in certain states — most of the old Confederacy plus Arizona, Alaska, Indiana, and Wisconsin — which together exert more of a choke-hold on the Republican national party machinery than the old Democrats, spread widely but thinly over many states, exerted on the Democratic Party.
These Republican states are more homogenous and conspicuously less like the rest of America than the urbanized regions of the country that are growing more rapidly. Senators and representatives from these states naturally reflect the dominant views of their constituents — on immigration, abortion, and gay marriage, as well as guns, marijuana, race, and dozens of other salient issues. But these views are increasingly out of step with where most of the nation is heading.
This state-centered, relatively homogenous GOP structure effectively prevents the Party from changing its stripes. Despite all the post-election rhetoric about the necessity for change emanating from GOP leaders who aspire to the national stage, the national stage isn’t really what the GOP is most interested in or attuned to. It’s directed inward rather than outward, to its state constituents rather than to the nation.
This structure also blocks any would-be “New Republicans” such as Chris Christie from gaining the kind of power inside the party that a New Democrat like Bill Clinton received in 1992. The only way they’d be able to attract a following inside the Party would be to commit themselves to policies they’d have to abandon immediately upon getting nominated, as Mitt Romney did with disastrous results.

As for the Republican Party’s future,

The greater likelihood is a steady eclipse of the Republican Party at the national level, even as it becomes more entrenched in particular states. Those states can be expected to become regressive islands of backwardness within a nation growing steadily more progressive.
The GOP’s national role will be primarily negative — seeking to block, delay, and filibuster measures that will eventually become the law of the land in any event, while simultaneously preaching “states’ rights” and praying for conservative majorities on the Supreme Court.

The increasing marginalization of the GOP may hep the Democrats win more elections. But it doesn’t provide much of an incentive for Dems to pursue creative or innovative policies, as challenges from a healthier Republican Party might do. In a way, a the GOP’s ‘death spiral’ hurts Dems too.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) has released the full transcript of a revealing interview with a key IRS employee about the agency’s “scandal,” which indicates zero White House involvement. In a saner world, that would put an end to any reputable media taking Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) too seriously. That should have happened years ago.
As Media Matters for America sums it up:

Rep. Darrell Issa’s past includes arrests for weapons charges and auto theft, suspicions of arson, and accusations of intimidation with a gun, but you’d hardly know it from the media’s recent coverage of the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While Issa was substantially mentioned in 15 articles in the nation’s largest newspapers since the last election — including several major profiles — only one of those articles mentioned any of these allegations. Likewise, interviewers did not ask Issa about his alleged criminal past in any of the cable or network interviews he sat for during that period.

The details of the aforementioned incidents are explored in the Media Matters post, and wikipedia’s bio of Issa. Reading these two posts leaves a residue of amazement and amusement. Issa’s personal story would make a good dark comedy, if not for his destructive influence in American politics. He contributed $1.6 million to the successful effort to recall CA Gov. Grey Davis, one gathers to advance his gubernatorial prospects, which were subsequently thwarted by the Terminator.
If sanity prevails, Cummings’s release of the interview transcript exonerating the White House of any involvement in the I.R.S. blunderings should end any hopes Issa may have been entertaining about election to higher office — unless things get way crazy. The only remaining question is whether the MSM will continue to take his Obama -bashing seriously.