From HuffPo Pollster Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy report on “The Surprising Takeaway From A Poll About Polls“: “Three out of four (75 percent) said they perceive polling to be biased. Only 4 percent reported “a lot of trust” in polling companies — and nearly half (46 percent) expressed distrust — in the midst of a conversation with an employee of a polling company…As such, the perceptions of bias may not signal further doom and gloom for pollsters. If anything, they suggest that the few who do participate in surveys will share their true beliefs, even when it might offend the pollster. And that, in a perverse way, may amount to a bit of good news.”
At USA Today Martha T. Moore and Catalina Camia explore how the “Syria vote will ripple through 2014 campaigns,” particularly the senate seats now held by Mitch McConnell and Mark Pryor.
Meanwhile, “Obama Faces Barrier in His Own Party on Syria” by NYT’s Jeremy W. Peters reviews the challenges the president is facing in getting Dems to support a strike against the Assad regime: “Those who are deeply conflicted about how to proceed include liberals who are ordinarily suspicious of using military force but feel compelled to punish President Bashar al-Assad of Syria over accusations that his forces staged a chemical attack against civilians. There are also members who represent primarily minority and urban districts where the president’s word carries a lot of weight but voters are preoccupied with how spending cuts are hurting public assistance and threatening Social Security and Medicare.”
The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent has some sound advice for the president with respect to winning public support for a strike against the Assad regime: “…It would seem that if the administration wants to rally the public, the focus should be on less on persuading people that Assad is guilty of gassing his own people and more on persuading them that the response to it would have an impact and entails minimal risk.”
Ezra Klein’s interview with Rep. Brad Sherman sheds light on the same topic. Says Sherman “I would say it will require two things. One, he needs to quickly propose a different resolution that is extremely narrow. It needs to authorize only what he says he wants to do. If instead the lawyers and planners in the administration say they want a resolution that authorizes anything they might want to do, they’ll fail. Second, I think he’ll need to go on TV, in primetime. The active public is against this. I don’t know a member of Congress whose e-mails and phone calls are in favor of this.”
Bill Barrow of the Associated press reports on Democratic strategy in upcoming elections in the south: “As Democrats try to curtail GOP dominance in the South, the party’s top recruits for 2014 elections are trying to sell themselves as problem solvers above Washington’s partisan gridlock…They’re casting the Republicans’ anti-government mantra and emphasis on social issues like abortion and gay marriage as ideological obstacles to progress on “bread-and-butter” issues like public education, infrastructure and health care…That goes beyond their usual effort to distance themselves from President Barack Obama and national Democrats, and it’s the closest thing the Democratic Party has to a unified strategy in the region beyond simply waiting for demographics to shift in the long term to ensure they can compete with Republicans.”
At The Fix Sean Sullivan explains why “Why Lincoln Chafee’s decision not to run for reelection is more good news for Democrats”
Also at The Fix, Chris Cillizza reports on “The era of the recall,” noting “The recall election, once reserved for forcing out elected officials accused of a crime, ethics violations or gross misconduct, has become an overtly political tool. Since 2011, voters in four states have successfully mounted petition drives to recall state legislators over new laws curbing the influence of public unions, or expanding the reach of background checks on gun purchasers…The number of recalls has spiked dramatically in recent years. Of the 32 successful recalls in the United States since 1911, one third — 11 — have taken place since 2011. Of the 21 recall efforts that succeeded in forcing a sitting elected official back onto the ballot, but failed at the polls, 13 have taken place in just the last two years.”
Here’s a headline for Dems to savor: “Ohio Republican Party Goes to War With Itself, Leaving 2016 in Doubt” by The Daily Beast’s Dennis Freedlander.

The following article is by Erica Seifert of DCorps:
When Congress returns from summer recess next week, legislators will face big choices on military intervention in Syria, raising the debt ceiling, funding the government, and broadening Americans’ access to health care.
These are big issues, but we also believe that Congress shouldn’t forget the women’s economic agenda – “When Women Succeed, America Succeeds” — which was announced by House Democratic women in July. This agenda contains a package of policies to address pay, work and family balance, and childcare. The proposed policies include paycheck fairness, raising the minimum wage, support for job training and education, paid family and medical leave, and affordable childcare, among other initiatives. These policies would address the most fundamental economic challenges for middle-class and working women.
While we find that the economy no longer works for working people regardless of gender, we also know that women face unique challenges. The ways in which American families earn income have changed dramatically over the last 30 years, but the laws, assumptions, institutions, and structures that govern the economy have not. This has left many women on the edge–or struggling to keep up with demands at work and costs at home.
In late July, Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund tested these policies and found that not only are the individual policies incredibly popular, they are even stronger as a whole package. This agenda has the power to move the vote and to motivate unmarried women to turn out next November.
Why? In our March survey, 60 percent of unmarried women said the national political debate was not addressing the issues most important to them. It’s no wonder — two thirds (65 percent) of unmarried women said they had to make major changes at the grocery store to make ends meet, 40 percent said they had received reduced wages, hours, or benefits at work, and 40 percent said they had been forced to move in with family or had family move in with them. But women rarely hear about policies to address these pocketbook realities. This agenda will do just that.
The women’s economic agenda has broad and intense support – and set out new areas for winning broad engagement. Among all voters and among unmarried women, 3 of the top 4 most popular Democratic policies offered were part of the women’s economic agenda (the fourth was Medicare, which is also central to women’s economic stability). It is incredible to note that Democrats have not put these policies together as a package until now, given how strong they are among all voters and among the voters whose support they most need in 2014.
In short, a Democratic agenda focused on pay, opportunity, and support for working moms outperforms a Democratic agenda that does not include these policies — and far outperforms the dominant Republican agenda. It can powerfully move voters’ perceptions of which party is better on the economy, better for the middle class and working people, and better for women. This is true among all voters, all women, unmarried women, and the Rising American Electorate. It is not only the right thing to do for women, children, and families — it is the right thing to do politically.

The Republicans have had a delightful summer, despite their miserable approval numbers, doing very little, other than wallowing in fantasy scenarios, well-described by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson:

As the August recess unfolded, Republicans — including a number of prospective presidential candidates — contemplated whether to shut down the government as a protest of Obamacare and whether to refuse to honor the nation’s debt as a cri de coeur against Obamacare or the deficit or Obama himself or perhaps modernity in general. These issues were debated at length, if never quite in depth, on right-wing talk radio and Web sites. That nobody but the hard-core Republican right seemed stirred by shuttering the government and defaulting on the debt mattered not at all.
If the American right increasingly seems to occupy an alternative planet, that’s largely because its media outlets — we can throw Fox News into the mix — dwell on stories so exquisitely calibrated to excite the right that they may not be stories at all. The New Black Panther Party? The Epidemic of Voter Fraud? The calculated perfidy of Benghazi? The impeachable crime of Obamacare (a socialist scam actually modeled on a proposal from a conservative think tank 20 years ago)? It’s not the editorials and opinionating of right-wing broadcasters and journalists that are driving the right into fantasyland. It’s the tales they spin into stories and the time and space they devote to events that never actually happened or that they surreally misconstrue.

It’s been quite a frolic for the fantasy party, earning Speaker Boehner the crowning achievement of his career as least-productive speaker in U.S. history, while his GOP brethren in the Senate did almost as little. If you had to pick a famous painting that would depict the essence of their languid, hazy days of summer, Bruegel the Elder’s “Land of Cokaigne” would do.
But alas, reality eventually intrudes, as Meyerson writes:

By seeking congressional approval for military action against the Syrian government, President Obama has accomplished something that the nation hasn’t seen in some time: He’s compelled Republicans to divert their attention from their concocted crises to an issue of actual substance…By throwing the Syrian conundrum to Congress, Obama has at least confronted Republicans with a real-world choice. Since Saturday, the drumbeat for closing down the government has been muted in its usual haunts.
That’s why the coming collision of libertarian fantasies with reality will be instructive. Can a congressman vote to defund the government and approve a military action in the same month? Or vote to authorize cruise missile attacks while insisting the government default on its debts? All these issues will soon come before Congress in rapid succession.

Never mind, as Meyerson notes that “the U.S. government has obligations to the American people even more fundamental than seeking to stop the use of chemical weapons that are killing innocents in a foreign land. It provides pensions to the elderly, health coverage to the old and the poor, and, in a few months, it will help Americans without health insurance buy private coverage. It has obligations that conservative opposition has kept it from meeting — among them, repairing and modernizing the nation’s infrastructure and creating the jobs (say, by repairing the infrastructure) that the nation’s private-sector employers are unable or unwilling to create.”
As Meyerson concludes,

…Now Syria has popped the balloon of their insular summer. Right-wing Republicans may decide not to authorize a strike because they want to embarrass the president, but even they must know that there’s more at stake than their war on Obama: life and death; the future of a crumbling country and a volatile region; our own security as well as U.S. credibility. There may even be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in what passes for their philosophy.

As the Republicans’ summer of sloth comes to a close, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the GOP has devolved into a party which finds it easier to address conflicts in distant nations than the health, welfare and security of Americans.

From Khalil Abdullah’s post, “How to fight the ‘biggest wave of voter suppression’ since 1965” at The Louisiana Weekly:

Voting rights advocates are responding in four main ways. Litigation continues to be the critical bulwark against the implementation unfair voting practices, but, …litigation is expensive and is sure to test of the resources for the organizations like…the ACLU, Brennan Center for Justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Leadership Conference, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and others that champion voting rights.
Secondly, public demonstrations and civil disobedience could raise public awareness about the unjust or disparate impact of newly proposed or enacted laws. The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the North Carolina chapter of NAACP, had some success in rallying protesters against HB 589 and other legislative actions through Moral Monday demonstrations each Monday in Raleigh….The Rev. Joseph Lowery, 91, a former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, used the bully pulpit at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last week to promote the Voting Rights Project, a new 50-state initiative…
A third front of organizational activity focuses on pressuring Congress to take up the issue of devising a new Section 4 formula so that Section 5 can be fully restored…Section 5, the strongest oversight measure of the Voting Rights Act, allows the Department of Justice to challenge proposed changes in election laws before they could be implemented, if those changes could be shown to have discriminatory impact on minority voters. But it was the findings under Section 4’s formula that triggered the DOJ action… “By invalidating Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the court has effectively eliminated Section 5 federal oversight,” wrote David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “The current U.S. House of Representatives will almost certainly NOT provide a new definition for Section 4 coverage, and so Section 5 is out for the foreseeable future.”
…While all three prongs of a voting rights offensive may be in play, ultimately, the endgame in voters’ rights may be the passage of a Constitutional amendment explicitly guaranteeing the right to vote. Currently, that right is only implicit under federal law. Resources, again, may be the determinant of whether such a movement can be sustained.

There should also be a fifth ‘front’ in the war against voter suppression — the most energetic voter registration campaign ever launched in key states, which would add leverage to progressive movements for voter protection and reform. Clearly, the outcome on all fronts will be more favorable if Democrats can mobilize a substantially better-than-expected turnout in 2014 and unseat Republicans in congress and state legislatures and governorships.

In his Labor Day column in the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr. noted a very disturbing milestone, which cries out for action:

…New York Times labor writer Steve Greenhouse has noted, until 1975, “wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of our nation’s GDP.” But in 2012 they fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Those who make the economic engine run are receiving less of what they produce. And it’s not because employees aren’t working harder, or smarter. From 1973 to 2011, according to the Economic Policy Institute, employee productivity grew by 80.4 percent while median hourly compensation after inflation grew by just 10.7 percent.

Dionne goes on to cite an encouraging protest, which addresses the issue and may open up a new path of action for the labor movement:

Thursday’s one-day strike of fast-food workers in dozens of cities was one of the new forms of labor creativity aimed at doing something about this. The folks who serve your burgers are demanding that instead of an average fast-food wage of $8.94 an hour, they ought to be paid $15. Assuming two weeks of unpaid vacation, this works out to $30,000 a year, hardly a Ronald McDonald’s ransom.
The protests have the benefit of putting low-wage workers in the media spotlight, a place they’re almost never found in a world more interested in the antics of Miley Cyrus and Donald Trump. “They want a raise with those fries,” the New York Daily News cheekily led its story on the strike.
Key unions are helping to organize these efforts, but they don’t necessarily expect formal union recognition. They want to raise wages, which is what could happen if the public responds. Companies have been frantically painting themselves green to attract environmentally conscious customers. Employers might discover, to paraphrase the old McDonald’s slogan, that their workers deserve a break today if consumers (who are also workers themselves) started pressuring them to be more employee-friendly.

Dionne explains that the protest is linked to the growing movement for a higher minimum wage and “a living wage” for all American workers. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask in this era of soaring corporate profits and growing economic inequality. Dinonne continues,

This is part of a larger strategy to insist that tax dollars not be used in ways that hold down wages. Thus did the group Good Jobs Nation file a complaint this summer alleging that food franchises at federal buildings in the nation’s capital have ignored minimum-wage and overtime laws. The overall objective, as the National Employment Law Project has suggested, should be to use federal contracts, concessions and subsidies as leverage toward a higher-wage economy.
There’s a new idea that brings these approaches together: “Pre-distribution.” The term was coined by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker as an alternative to “redistribution” that involves “government taxes and transfers that take from some and give to others.”
Redistribution is necessary, but Hacker thinks that a more promising long-term solution is to begin changing “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” We need a fairer distribution “even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits.

It’s a simple idea, much in keeping with American principles of economic fairness. As Dionne concludes, “The genius of the labor movement has always been its insistence that if the law genuinely empowered workers to defend their own interests, the result would be a more just society requiring fewer direct interventions by government.”

So far, President Obama is playing alert political chess with respect to Syria, much to the disappointment of his adversaries. Earl Ofari Hutchison has a perceptive post up at HuffPo crediting President Obama’s deft strategy in seeking congressional approval for air strikes against Syrian president Assad’s regime. As Hutchinson explains:

If Obama had bowed to the initial GOP demands to take military action before getting congressional approval, GOP leaders would have jumped all over him and blamed him for not getting that approval — and they wouldn’t have stopped there. They would have also blamed him for any real or perceived failure to remove the Assad regime, or failure to sufficiently degrade his military to enable the rebels to defeat it, or for igniting a blowback that would further strengthen the hand of al-Qaeda linked radical Islamist factions fighting to topple Assad.
They would have sanctimoniously waved the provision in the Constitution that strictly forbids a president from engaging in any military action in the absence of an actual or imminent danger of an attack against the United States. The president does have authority under the 1973 War Powers Act in some situations to wage limited war with a strict time constraint on it without congressional approval but even here at least on paper the president must report to Congress on the action. The GOP rendered this a largely moot point when it switched gears and hoisted the demand that Obama take no action without congressional approval.
Obama recognized the damned if I do, damned if I don’t trap that the GOP had laid when he tossed any decision to strike Syria back to Congress. But even this didn’t silence Obama’s GOP critics. They quickly trotted out the line that Obama wasted time by not consulting Congress in the first place, and that this further contributed to the muddle in Syria. The GOP’s shallow, and self-serving gyrations to hammer Obama notwithstanding, the truth is that the type of unspecified intervention that the GOP demanded Obama take would have had potentially disastrous unintended consequences from killing innocent civilians to further stirring anti- American hatreds in the Middle East while doing nothing to rid Syria of Assad. The Obama administration would have had to answer for those consequences.

Hutchinson then reviews the history of the U.S.’s multi-trillion dollar military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting “The sobering reality was that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the most expensive wars in US history with the returns on both problematic” and adds that “Obama recognized that the Iraq war was an ugly and shameful page in U.S. history and that millions of Americans were furious and frustrated by it.”
These realizations, concludes Hutchinson, enabled President Obama to avoid “the GOP’s politically cynical demand that Obama intervene in Syria” which “would be foolhardy at best and utterly disastrous at worst.” Now, observes Hutchinson, the President “won’t have to make a one man stand on Syria with all the perils and pitfalls that that would have engendered. Not the least being the trap that the GOP had hoped to set for him.”
Obama may yet take emergency military action against Syria, with or without congressional approval. But, if he does, at least he can say he sought approval beforehand. Score the Republican’s cynical gambit foiled by Obama’s adroit strategy.

Run, Wendy, Run, say national Dems. Win or lose, she could energize the Texas Democratic Party. Even apart from her much-celebrated filibuster against an anti-abortion bill, Sen. Davis has a really good story, as Trip Gabriel reports in the New York Times: “Raised by a mother with a sixth-grade education after her father left, she became a single mother herself, living in a mobile home. She worked her way through community college, won a scholarship to Texas Christian University and eventually graduated from Harvard Law School…She served nine years on the Fort Worth City Council before defeating a Republican incumbent for the State Senate in 2008…Ms. Davis’s number crunchers are telling her, in essence, that if she can win her Senate district — much of Fort Worth and its suburbs — she can win statewide. It is the only district out of 31 in the state that is a true battleground, not drawn to protect one of the parties…In winning re-election in November, Ms. Davis outpolled Mr. Obama in her district by 15,000 votes. She appealed to ticket-splitters, who preferred Mitt Romney on the presidential ballot by 8 points. Many were white suburban women, independents who were not driven by wedge social issues like abortion, Ms. Davis’s advisers determined.”
For what ought to be the last word on the absence of Republicans at the 50th anniversary commemoration of Dr. King’s dream, check out James Wimberly’s link-rich post, “How Today’s GOP Celebrated MLK’s Speech” at the Washington Monthly.
Jonathan Weisman has a New York Times update on the candidacy of Michelle Nunn for the U.S. Senate seat now held by the retiring Saxby Chambliss, which many believe could be the Democrats’ best hope for a pick up. The relatively young Nunn has already done more good for her potential constituents than all of her rivals in the GOP clown car put together. As Weisman writes, “She co-founded Hands on Atlanta, a volunteer organization, and led the Points of Light Foundation, the volunteer group started by former President George H. W. Bush. Organizing is in her blood, she says. Her first effort after declaring her candidacy was to mobilize thousands of volunteers — even before she develops a policy platform beyond a promise of bipartisan cooperation and fiscal rectitude.”
In the Virginia Governor’s race, it’s all about turning out the base, as Ben Pershing and Fredrick Kunkle report in the Washington post. Here’s why: “Only Virginia and New Jersey elect their governors the year after presidential contests, and turnout typically seesaws as a result. In Virginia, the proportion of registered voters who voted careened from 75 percent in 2008 to 40 percent in 2009 — a record low for a gubernatorial contest — back to 72 percent last year…”You have to do much more work to figure out who to target in a 45 percent turnout election” than in a presidential year, said Jeremy Bird, Obama’s 2012 national field director.”
Alabama Dems have a plausible strategy for ending Republican domination in the state legislature, according to Tim Lockette’s Anniston Star report, “Rural east Alabama race key to Democrats’ 2014 strategy; Wounded party hoping to blunt GOP supermajority“: “The district [S-13], now represented by Sen. Gerald Dial, is one of five Senate seats targeted by a prominent Democratic group in its strategy to bring Alabama Democrats back from near oblivion. And it’s the only Senate district where a Democrat – Heflin resident and union representative Darrell Turner – has so far emerged to challenge a sitting Republican…”This is doable,” said Mark Kennedy, leader of the group Alabama Democratic Majority. “It’s not a mountain too steep to climb.” No ActBlue link yet.
How public opinion shakes out on U.S. military intervention in Syria: “According to the Pew Research Centre, 56% of Republicans support military action compared with 46% of Democrats; 24% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats are opposed…While these are not majorities in opposition to intervention, they are sizable portions of the American public.” Ben Adler explores the conflict over intervention among progressives in his post, “Why liberal America is in two minds over military action” at The Guardian.
In his Labor Day column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. notes that a new grand strategy may be emerging for organized labor, with an intensified effort to increase the minimum wage in the fast foods industry to complement a more fair distribution of taxes. “There’s a new idea that brings these approaches together: “Pre-distribution.” The term was coined by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker as an alternative to “redistribution” that involves “government taxes and transfers that take from some and give to others.” …Redistribution is necessary, but Hacker thinks that a more promising long-term solution is to begin changing “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” We need a fairer distribution “even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits.”
Also recommended, for an even broader vision for organized labor and progressives, “Back to Basics on the Question of Labor” by Wake Forest proff David Coates at HuffPo.
This New York Times editorial rolls out a pretty good Labor Day agenda for Dems: “…What’s missing are policies to ensure that a large and growing share of rising labor productivity flows to workers in the form of wages and salaries, rather than to executives and shareholders. Start with an adequate minimum wage. Provide increased protections for workers to unionize, in order to strengthen their bargaining power. Provide protections for undocumented workers that would limit exploitation. Add to the mix regulations to prevent financial bubbles, thereby protecting jobs and wages from ruinous busts. Adopt expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in troubled times to sustain jobs and wages.”
But The Wall St. Journal wins the award for the most ridiculous headline of the month (August) with this slam dunk: “A Wish for Labor Day: Visionary Union Leaders: Unions have won key battles, but they are losing the war by insisting on inflated wages.”

The following article by TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeia, is cross-posted from Think Progress:
Don’t look now, but the Republican Party may be vanishing before our very eyes.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it is the case that the number of Americans willing to directly identify with the Republican Party is reaching historic lows. The Pollster.com rolling average of GOP party identification now stands at 22 percent and has been declining fairly steadily for the last several years. The latest poll from Pew Research Center — perhaps the most reliable of all pollsters — has the GOP down to only 19 percent identification:
[see chart here] What’s going on? President Obama’s approval rating has been declining and is now “underwater” (higher disapproval than approval). The GOP, of course, has been single-mindedly dedicated to opposing him. They are particularly committed to opposing Obamacare, which on the surface seems like an even juicier target, averaging just 40 percent approval in recent polls. Indeed, they are so dedicated they have voted 40 times to repeal it and now are threatening to shut down the government unless the program is defunded. You’d think that beating up on these not-so-popular targets would yield more, not less, identification with the GOP. Where’s the love?
Maybe they’re placing their bets on the wrong horse, especially when it comes to Obamacare. Start with the fact that roughly a third of the opposition to Obamacare stems from the view that the program isn’t liberal enough rather than too liberal. That doesn’t fit with the GOP’s blow-it-up paradigm. Nor do recent polls that show an average of only 35 percent saying they want to repeal Obamacare as opposed to keeping it as is or with changes.
A recent Hart Research/SEIU poll on voter attitudes toward the ACA makes the point even more clearly. As Hart Research puts in in their memo on the poll:

Voters feel intensely negative toward Republican candidates who have worked to repeal or undermine the law, especially those who are unwilling to help their constituents take advantage of the benefits and protections available to them under the ACA….Seventy-one percent of voters express unfavorable feelings toward “a Republican who, as an elected official, refuses to help individuals and small businesses understand how best to deal with Obamacare and take advantage of its benefits.”….Two-thirds of all voters (including 60% of undecided voters) have an unfavorable impression of “a Republican who repeatedly voted to cut the funding needed to effectively implement the law, and refuses to provide information to employers and individuals about it.”

No wonder the GOP’s anti-Obamacare shenanigans aren’t helping their brand with the public. The point is underscored by another finding from the Hart survey:

Our generic congressional trial heat shows a relatively narrow, three-point advantage for Democratic candidates (44%) over Republicans (41%) nationwide. However, when the choice in the 2014 election is presented as “a Democrat who favors fixing and improving Obamacare rather than repealing it altogether” versus “a Republican who wants to totally repeal Obamacare,” voters favor the Democratic candidate (51%) over the Republican candidate (36%) by 15 percentage points.

Thus it would appear that the more the GOP pursues their anti-Obamacare crusade, the more damage they do to themselves. Indeed, when combined with their destructive opposition to immigration reform, popular gun regulations, and any expanded efforts to revive the economy, it’s hard to think of a group of voters they could alienate who they haven’t. That’s why we see their party identification hitting 20 percent or below. If Republicans ever want to see their party identification climb back up to respectable levels, instead of sinking slowly in the west, they’d be well-advised to re-think their current strategy, especially their obsession with repealing Obamacare.