From Jamelle Bouie’s “Virginia’s New Dominion” at The American Prospect:

…Virginia’s growing diversity made Obama’s four-point victories in 2008 and 2012 possible; he carried only 39 percent and 37 percent of whites. Since 2000, the state’s Latino population has nearly doubled to 8 percent; the Asian American population has grown from 4 percent to 6 percent; the African American population has held steady at 20 percent, while whites have declined from 74 percent to 65 percent of Virginians.
The political character of the white population has also changed. The huge expansion of military spending under President George W. Bush turned vast areas of the state into hubs for service members and defense contractors. This attracted Northern transplants, most of them whites with moderate or liberal views, to the seven cities of Hampton Roads and the sprawling suburbs of Northern Virginia.

However, Bouie cites a trend familiar to many Democratic Party operatives throughout the fifty states: “In 2008, 39 percent of Virginia’s voters were Democratic; in 2009, that figure fell to 33 percent, while Republican turnout was steady.” To sink deeper roots in the south, Democrats have got to figure out how to mobilize stronger GOTV in mid term and non-presidential elections.
Bouie sees Virginia’s current race for the governorship as a marquee contest for assessing the transformation of key southern states from red into blue, with Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a less than charismatic candidate, but one with impressive financial resources, vs. the GOP’s Ken Cuccinelli, a tea party extremist. If McAuliffe wins, that will be an indication that the political transformation of Virginia into a blue state is pretty much a done deal.
That makes sense. Since neither candidate is going to light the VA electorate on fire, a McAuliffe victory will signal that Dems in VA at least, have figured out how to reduce the GOP’s edge in turnout in non-presidential years, in this case through a combination of high tech GOTV and alerting women, in particular, to the ramifications of having a governor who opposes abortion in all circumstances, kowtows to the NRA and denies climate change.
These statewide races are critically important to the Democrats’ future. At the very least, electing Democratic governors can help prevent gerrymandering and resistance to Obamacare. If McAuliffe can win in Virginia in 2013, then 2014 looks a lot better for Dems in NC and GA in 2014.

In a Buzzfeed interview with Ruby Cramer, DCCC Chair Rep. Steve Israel says it plain: “If you relitigate the ideology on the Affordable Care Act, it’s a losing strategy…Roll up your sleeves and solve people’s problems — get them on the exchanges, or if a small business is having a hard time navigating, help them navigate…Don’t be ideologues on the Affordable Care Act — just make it work, be a navigator, be a solutionist.” Cramer adds, The 52 districts the DCCC has targeted in its plan to win back the House — which, many widely agree is an unlikely possibility — are what Israel called “by their nature very moderate, independent, solution-oriented districts.”
At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky explains “Voter Suppression, Chris Christie Style” with more clarity than most.
According to the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, reports Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News: “Given a list of eight factors and asked to choose the one most responsible for the continuing problem of poverty, 24 percent of respondents in the poll chose ‘too much government welfare that prevents initiative.’ Whether Americans are too dependent on government was a flashpoint of the presidential campaign last year, and shrinking government has been a focus of the Tea Party movement, which has risen since the election of President Barack Obama…’Lack of job opportunities’ was the second most popular answer, at 18 percent, followed by ‘lack of good educational opportunities and ‘breakdown of families,’ with 13 percent apiece.”
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the National Voter Registration Act, Demos assesses the record and probes the unmet potential.
Kyle Trygstad’s “Senate Race a Test Case for Democrats in Georgia” at Roll Call provides a sober assessment of Dems’ projects for picking up a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia. Among his observations: “Blacks now make up 31 percent of Georgia’s population and about 30 percent of its active voters, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. Hispanics now account for 9 percent of the population but remain underrepresented in the voter rolls at just 2 percent. Similar demographic trends are also occurring in states such as Texas and Arizona.” In other words, if the Democratic nominee can win one out of four white voters, a Democratic pick-up is a good bet.
Bill Mayer tells it straight on the gipper: “This has become a kind of conventional wisdom that the Republican Party has gone so far right Reagan himself wouldn’t fit in, but I’m here tonight to call bulls**t on that. Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union busting, race baiting, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people’s taxes in half, had an incurable case of the military industrial complex, and said that Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom. Sounds to me like he would fit in just fine.” And that’s just one of his blistering graphs.
The Fix’s Chris Cillizza cites Libertarian-friendly attitudes of young voters towards same sex marriage and marijuana as reason for the hope that Republicans will get a bigger bite of the youth vote. But smart Dems know that Libertarians lose all traction with young voters when they have to defend the Libertarian policy of no government protection for the environment. E. J. Dionne, Jr. also has a commentary on the shallowness of Libertarian philosophy for those who live in the real world.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains why ‘the states-are-the-laboratories-of-democracy’ is a poor substitute for a functioning national government: “First, it leads to a race to bottom. Over time, middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy will become disproportionately burdened as the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to reverse course…Second, it doesn’t take account of spillovers — positive as well as negative. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without background checks in one state can easily find their way easily to another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the citizens of one states is likely to move to another state where job opportunity are better…Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century “states rights” has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans.”
Those wondering how two-faced Republicans can get are directed to Lee Fang’s post at The Nation, “Revealed: Letters From Republicans Seeking Obamacare Money.” As the post’s subtitle puts it, “It’s the height of hypocrisy: They call for repeal of the law but plead for its dollars on behalf of constituents.”
Painfully true and excruciatingly boring.

Despite opinion polls indicating that the popularity of the tea party has tanked, their grip on Republican legislators at the federal and state levels, as well as GOP governors, is stronger than ever. In fact, they have achieved something akin to veto power over economic and social reforms, which are supported by substantial majorities of American voters. In effect, tea partyism has been grandfathered in by gerrymandering and the weakness of fearful Republican leaders, especially McConnell and Boehner, but also including McCain and others.
These “leaders” live in a much narrower political universe than do average Americans. They’ve got good health care and income security for themselves and their families, and they apparently believe that they can afford to indulge ideological extravagances with impunity. Not a one of them shows any indication that they give a damn about millions of American children having no access to health care, high unemployment or educational opportunities. The only thing that makes today’s Republican politicians insecure is the fear of being primaried. Even then, however, many of them, know they can fall back on corporate sinecures, if necessary. Economic insecurity is an alien concept which has no bearing on their lives.
There was a time when Republican politicians fought like hell for what they believed in, but would eventually negotiate in good faith for the good of the people. That time is over. Good faith negotiations on major reforms are no longer a part of GOP strategy.
When Olympia Snowe refused to challenge the reactionary tide that engulfed her party, that signaled the end of the hope that some smart Republican would come forward and take a courageous stand in support of bipartisan progress for the common good. When Scott Brown won Sen. Kennedy’s seat, I briefly entertained the hope that maybe he would break the GOP dam and make it possible for a few Republican moderates to offer a more bipartisan spirit. I still think it would have strengthened their party for the long haul.
Many Democrats see value in having a weak, fearful Republican party. It should benefit our candidates, right? Well, maybe here and there. But looking at the big picture, a stronger GOP would be good for the Democratic Party because we would have to step up our game to compete. Regretfully, that calculation seems irrelevant to the current political reality.
If you had to boil down the Democratic message for the 2014 elections into a lucid sentence, it would be “Vote for us because they are nuts and corrupt.” A clear distinction, yes, but it may not be enough to inspire the needed wave election that will make it possible for Democrats to enact the reforms the public supports.
If “nuts and corrupt” seems like an overstatement, consider the following from Paul Krugman’s column about Republicans being driven by spite in their resistance to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion:

…Medicaid rejectionism will deny health coverage to roughly 3.6 million Americans, with essentially all of the victims living near or below the poverty line. And since past experience shows that Medicaid expansion is associated with significant declines in mortality, this would mean a lot of avoidable deaths: about 19,000 a year, the study estimated.
Just think about this for a minute. It’s one thing when politicians refuse to spend money helping the poor and vulnerable; that’s just business as usual. But here we have a case in which politicians are, in effect, spending large sums, in the form of rejected aid, not to help the poor but to hurt them.
And as I said, it doesn’t even make sense as cynical politics. If Obamacare works (which it will), millions of middle-income voters — the kind of people who might support either party in future elections — will see major benefits, even in rejectionist states. So rejectionism won’t discredit health reform. What it might do, however, is drive home to lower-income voters — many of them nonwhite — just how little the G.O.P. cares about their well-being, and reinforce the already strong Democratic advantage among Latinos, in particular.
Rationally, in other words, Republicans should accept defeat on health care, at least for now, and move on. Instead, however, their spitefulness appears to override all other considerations. And millions of Americans will pay the price.

For America to progress, we are left with the hope that our GOTV and candidate recruitment edges are good enough for a net gain of 17+ House seats and hold the Senate majority in 2014. We are going to need some luck for that scenario to materialize. Yet it remains a more realistic hope than the fantasy that some Republican will come forward from the shadows and lead his party to sweet bipartisan reason.
Dems have no alternative to an all-out effort to make 2014 a wave election, challenging though it is, capitalizing at every opportunity on growing public disgust with the GOP. For the longer haul, however, we have demographic advantages, and there is every reason to believe that a more intense commitment to candidate recruitment and training, along with fully developed GOTV resources, can secure a working majority to make the tea party veto a nightmare that belongs to the past.

The Republicans have used all of their heavy artillery to obstruct economic recovery, and they have slowed it down, but they have failed to stop it. In his Daily Beast post, “Obama’s Economic Triumph,” Michael Tomasky explains: “…Consumer confidence is at a five-year high. Personal debt is back to normal levels, which is a big deal. Housing investment is up, real-estate prices are rebounding everywhere, the stock market is breaking records… Obama has now created a net positive of more than 1.6 million jobs in four-and-a-half years, which is better than Bush’s mark of 1.08 million in all eight of his years…Many economists believe that things would be going even better right now without the austerity imposed on us by the Republicans who run the House of Representatives.”
NBC News Senior Political Editor Mark Murray reports that President Obama’s job-approval rating is at 48 percent, essentially unchanged, according to the new NBC/WSJ poll. Further, “While only 36 percent say they’re satisfied with the state of the U.S. economy, that’s the highest number on this question since 2006. What’s more, the percentage believing the United States is still mired in an economic recession is at its lowest level since Obama became president.”
The New York Times editorial board opines that “patchwork of conscience and callousness” that defines the difference between Democratic and Republican ruled states with respect to Obamacare and other benefits can’t last too long. “…Better examples are not far away. When residents begin to realize the grass is much greener on the other side of the state line, budget-slashing lawmakers will be under pressure to either change their ways or change jobs.”
At Wonkblog Ezra Klein explains why “The House won’t have a bipartisan immigration bill. That’s (maybe) okay.” Says Klein: “There’s a theory going around that that’s actually better for the final bill. The premise is that the purpose of the House process is to get a bill through the House. It could be a good bill. It could be a bad bill. It just has to be a bill. Because once something makes it through the House it will go to conference with the Senate. Once it goes to conference with the Senate, the Senate can force a product that’s more like its bill than the House bill. And once the process is that near to completion, House Republicans will be afraid to kill it. Speaker John Boehner will waive the Hastert rule, it’ll be passed with a bunch of Democratic votes, and President Obama will have something to sign.”
Nate Silver cites a “weak GOP field” as likely to favor Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s election to the U.S. Senate, replacing Sen. Lautenberg and holding the seat for Dems.
“Scarred by years of Republican attacks over Obamacare, with more in store next year, Democrats have settled on an unlikely strategy for the 2014 midterms: Bring it on,” writes Alex Isenstadt at Politico. “Party strategists believe that embracing the polarizing law — especially its more popular elements — is smarter politics than fleeing from it in the House elections…Democratic strategists are convinced there’s plenty to like in the law — such as coverage for pre-existing conditions, eliminating lifetime caps on coverage and allowing children to stay on their parents’ health care plans until they are 26 — and are coaching lawmakers and candidates girding for tough races next year to hammer home those benefits…”Fix the bad, keep the good, and move on” is the message House hopefuls are being advised to use. Offer help to voters navigating the ins and outs of the altered health care system. And flip the script on Republicans by accusing them of wanting to do away with the most popular provisions, the strategy goes.”
The Susan Rice and Samantha Powers appointments will likely whip up a frenzy of Obama Derangement Syndrome from the Republicans, although McCain and others may be encouraged by interventionist comments attributed to Powers.
Ed Kilgore flags the TNR post, “Why the Democrats Still Need Working-Class White Voters” by TDS colleagues Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira. As Kilgore sums up their post: “Realistic goals, careful targeting real connections, and a patient, long-term commitment to engagement are what’s needed to rebuild Democratic WWC support, and perhaps to prevent further erosion. It’s good advice for donkeys.”
As a long-time fan, it pains me to admit that Tomasky’s post “The Racist Redskins” is absolutely right. Democratic leaders should speak out in favor of a name change, especially since many attend the games.
Regarding another symbolic topic with political ramifications, Kilgore has what is likely the definitive takedown of the ill-considered argument that the confederate battle flag is an apolitical symbol of southern culture.

Bob Moser, author of “Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority,” kicks off a four-part series at The American Prospect with “The End of the Solid South.” Moser, the Prospect’s executive editor, makes a compelling argument that the region is rapidly becoming the pivotal battleground for U.S. politics — and it’s all good news for Dems:

Over the next two decades, it will become clear to even the most clueless Yankee that the Solid South is long gone. The politics of the region’s five most populous states–Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas–will be defined by the emerging majority that gave Obama his winning margins. The under-30 voters in these states are ethnically diverse, they lean heavily Democratic, and they are just beginning to vote. The white population percentage is steadily declining; in Georgia, just 52 percent of those under 18 are white, a number so low it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
By the 2020s, more than two-thirds of the South’s electoral votes could be up for grabs. (The South is defined here as the 11 states of the former Confederacy.) If all five big states went blue, with their 111 electoral votes, only 49 votes would be left for Republicans. (That’s based on the current electoral-vote count; after the next census, the fast-growing states will have more.) Win or lose, simply making Southern states competitive is a boon to Democrats. If Republicans are forced to spend time and resources to defend Texas and Georgia, they’ll have less for traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Democrats aren’t competitive in those states for another decade, they will benefit from connecting with millions of nonvoters who haven’t heard their message. They are building for a demographic future that Republicans dread: the time when overwhelming white support will no longer be enough to win a statewide election in Texas and Georgia.

Moser describes the brutal gerrymandering conducted by the Republicans in the southern states and notes how it paid off for them in 2012, but adds:

…The voters are moving left, while the state governments are lurching right. The only safe prediction is that after 150 years of being largely ignored in national elections, the South is about to become the most fiercely contested, and unpredictable, political battleground in America…To this day, Americans still think “rural” when they think “Southern.” But there’s nothing very rural about the South anymore. Florida is 91 percent urban, Georgia and Virginia 75 percent, and in probably the biggest surprise, Texas is 85 percent urban.

He notes the ‘Great Remigration,’ African Americans coming back to the south in ever-increasing numbers:

Last decade, 75 percent of the growth in America’s black population was in the South. Atlanta and its endless suburbs gained 491,000 African Americans in the past decade, more than any other city. Some are middle-class blacks whose families once relied on government jobs up North that are now disappearing. Some are caring for older relatives left behind in the Great Migration. Some are simply coming home to reunite with their families, finding a region that has undergone seismic changes since the South’s segregated “way of life” finally came to a merciful end.

Add to that the accelerating growth of the Latino population:

…By 2010, 49 percent of newborns in Texas were Latino. Among the big five Southern states, Virginia has the lowest rate at 12 percent. Hundreds of thousands of young Latinos become eligible to vote in the South every year, and that number will be climbing for decades. At least for now, this strongly favors Democrats, who win Latino votes by large margins. Florida used to be the exception, because first-generation (and often second-generation) Cuban Americans were staunch, anti-communist Republicans. But younger Cuban Americans have joined a new immigrant population in Central Florida to help flip the state in the Democrats’ favor.
The key is getting Latinos to the polls–and it’s been a challenge in most Southern states. In 2010, for instance, Latinos were 38 percent of Texas’s population. But just 16 percent of eligible Latinos voted as Republicans won historically big margins in both legislative chambers. The poor turnout is partly a factor of youth. Latinos are, on average, a decade younger than Anglos. Most are not in the habit of voting. If they live in a state like Texas or Georgia, it’s likely that nobody has ever courted their vote.
Once Latinos begin to vote in proportion to their population, the change that they will bring to Southern (and American) politics won’t be limited to a shift in party loyalties. It will be manifested in a new progressivism as well.
Republicans like to talk about how Latinos are “hardworking, religious, family-oriented,” as if those qualities automatically made people conservative. In fact, an exit poll from 2012 showed the opposite: Latino voters are not only more liberal than Republicans; they’re sometimes more liberal than Democrats. On same-sex marriage, 59 percent said yes, against 48 percent of all voters. Should abortion be legal? Sixty-six percent said yes, against 59 percent overall. On economic issues, Latinos’ liberalism tends to be even more pronounced (the same is true for African Americans). Fifty-five percent said last year that they have a negative view of capitalism. They want more spending on public schools. They want universal, public-run health care. They want government to take a strong hand in the economy. Taxes? Raise them, if it means better social services. The same goes for every part of the South’s emerging majority–African Americans, Asian Americans, and under-30 whites who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Clearly the GOP will have to exercise considerable creativity to get a healthy bite of the Latino vote in the south , which may alienate their tea party base. And Moser notes that Dems face formidable obstacles in the region, including gerrymandered districts through 2020 and a strong possibility that the Supreme Court will invalidate the Voting Rights Act or render it impotent, thereby encouraging voter suppression in the region.
However, concludes Moser:

More likely, destiny will follow demography. The South’s big states could soon be undergirding a durable national Democratic majority that’s capable of lasting as long as the New Deal consensus. Liberalism would have a chance to flourish anew–not just in state capitols but in Washington, D.C., as well…From Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Barack Obama’s stimulus and heath-care overhaul, the biggest obstacle has always been Congress’s solid white wall of Southern conservatism. That wall is crumbling. In the future, if you can be progressive and win Texas or Georgia, the American political order will transform in ways we can barely comprehend.

As America prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s dream, it’s encouraging to know that such a positive transformation of the region he loved and struggled to change is well underway.

Greg Sargent’s “Is GOP hyping of scandals prompting a media backlash?” credits Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee with “a moment of fine concern-trolling” in his statement that,

…You know, when you look at the IRS and you look at the Benghazi issue and you look at the AP issue, I think the trouble here isn’t even the individual specific scandals, it’s this broader notion that there’s a pattern of this activity. I think that’s what concerns people because what you don’t want to have happened is Americans lose faith and trust in their institutions…

Sargent responds that Roger’s dicey meme represents “a critical moment of candor. The most important thing here is not the individual scandals; it’s the sense of a “pattern” of activity that creates the risk.” Sargent adds that “The goal is to create an overarching atmosphere of scandal, because this intensifies pressure on news orgs and reporters to hype individual revelations within that framework with little regard to the actual importance or significance of each new piece of information.”
But Sargent sees “stirrings of a media backlash to the GOP overhyping of all of these scandals.” He notes that both the Post and the Times have not taken the GOP Koolaid and have instead responded with nuanced reporting taking a more sober perspective, debunking exaggerations and putting the incidents in historical perspective. He notes that even moderate/conservative journalists, like Howard Kurtz and Ron Fournier are refusing to take the GOP bait and blasting the Republicans for their flimsy, overhyped evidence.
Sargent reiterates that “The goal of Issa and others here is to create an atmosphere of scandal, with the deliberate aim of obscuring the importance of the details of the actual scandals themselves.” When all of the “scandals” have run their course, voters may decide, along with a growing chorus of the media, that Republicans have squandered their taxes on bogus investigations with no results, rather than legislating needed reforms.

We dig Igor Volsky’s Think Progress post, “GOP Survey Of Young People Reveals They Support Progressive Policies,” which notes:

The College Republican National Committee released a report on Monday outlining the major challenges facing the GOP as it seeks to rebrand and redefine itself in the aftermath of the 2012 election…But a close reading of the 90-page report finds that young people have strong disagreements with Republican policies — including large parts of former candidate’s Mitt Romney’s platform — and are far more likely to support progressive positions.

Among the 11 examples cited by Volsky:

1. GOP economic polices are to blame for the recession. “Although ‘Republican economic policies’ is the factor least likely to be viewed as playing a major role in causing the crisis, this is mostly due to young Republicans in the sample hesitating to pin blame directly on their own party, and an outright majority of young people still think those Republican policies are to blame – hardly an encouraging finding.”
3. Increase taxes on the wealthy. “Perhaps most troubling for Republicans is the finding from the March 2013 CRNC survey that showed 54% of young voters saying ‘taxes should go up on the wealthy,’ versus 31% who say “taxes should be cut for everyone.”
5. Expand universal health care coverage. “Many of the young people in our focus groups noted that they thought everyone in America should have access to health coverage. In the Spring 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics survey of young voters, 44% said that “basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it.” … As one participant in our focus group of young men in Columbus put it, “at least Obama was making strides to start the process of reforming health care.”
8. Democrats are more responsive on student loans. “Many focus group members did think that Democrats were responding to the student loan crisis. “I think they’re more in tune to what we need right now with student loans, getting a job, fixing the housing market and the environment,” observed one participant from Orlando, with another adding that he had “heard Obama once say, oh, he has student loans, he went to school, he knows what we’re going through.”
10. Bush’s wars blew up the deficit. “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan themselves, however, were largely viewed as having been a net negative for the U.S. In fact, during focus group discussions about the recession, one respondent said she felt that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had contributed in part to the economic crisis.”

The other examples are equally-encouraging for Dems. It appears the GOP youth outreach department has an exceptionally daunting task ahead.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I have been bemused for many years by the peculiar mindset represented by D.C.-centrism. I have written about it a number of times over the years, in my book “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be” and in many of my blog posts. D.C. Centrism embraces what the political establishment, especially including the big special interests who tend to control this town, thinks is right, even when the vast majority of Americans are opposed to it. For example, cutting Social Security, something 80 percent of Americans oppose, is a classic example of D.C. centrism. Another example is focusing obsessively about the deficit while ignoring new measures to create jobs, which is the reverse of what voters want the government to focus on. Bailing out, and now subsidizing, the Too Big To Fail banks is yet another example. And these three examples really just scratch the surface — there are so many ways that D.C. Centrism is different from what the centrist position of real voters is.
I was thinking about all this again over the last week while I was out in my home state of Nebraska, where the Senate and governor races are wide open. While traveling around the state talking politics with folks, I was also doing email conversations with friends about the South Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Minnesota, and Oregon Senate races. In all of these cases, the political situation goes against D.C. conventional wisdom, as candidates and potential candidates scramble the usual political labels and dynamics. Let’s look at the situation in all of these races.
Six years ago, in both Minnesota and Oregon, openly progressive/populist challengers Al Franken and Jeff Merkley took on well-funded Republicans with reputations in D.C. as centrists in classic swing states (both of them have been on target list for both parties in most of the presidential campaigns over the last 30+ years). D.C. conventional wisdom rated them both very long shots — after all, how could a centrist in a swing state lose to lefties like Franken and Merkley? But both Democrats ran aggressively populist campaigns, attacking the incumbents as beholden to big-money special interests. Both won, and both have served in the Senate just as they ran, as bold and unapologetic populist progressives. And you know what? Both enter this election cycle as very well-positioned for their re-election battle in 2014.
Iowa is another classic swing state, one of the closest states in each of the last four presidential elections. With Tom Harkin retiring, Democratic Congressman Bruce Braley is running to replace him. Braley is so populist that he founded the Populist Caucus in the House, and if wins he will carry on Harkin’s progressive politics in the Senate. You would think that such a candidate would be in a tough race, and one may yet develop, but so far every leading Republican that party leaders have tried to recruit into the race have turned them down, and Braley is likely to win.

Read more…

Is it just me or does this seem a bit odd. Leading, serious progressive commentators – Greg Sargent, Mike Tomasky, Jon Chait, Ed Kilgore, Paul Krugman and others are all seriously debating the arguments put forth by “Conservative Reformers” – guys like Ross Douthat , Reihan Salam, David Frum and Josh Barro while at the same time Charles Krauthhammer, George Will, Jennifer Rubin and other leading conservative columnists are completely ignoring the topic.
And what about the conservative political and mass media leadership? You know, Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? Bill ‘Reilly? The Rushbo? What’s their response to these thoughtful critiques?
Nada. Omerta. No comment. Mums da Woid.
The whole thing is sorta like watching a spirited debate over the burgers at McDonald’s versus Wendy’s conducted entirely among vegetarians or regarding the latest New York fashion trends conducted entirely among nudists. It may be interesting to observe (especially the latter, if it’s on U-tube) but it’s hard to see what possible difference it can make as long as all of the real players in the GOP simply refuse to join in.