From Claire Cain Miller’s Upshot post, “Obama Says Family Leave Is an Economic Necessity, Not Just a Women’s Issue“:

The percentage of women in the labor force in the United States is declining, even as it continues to rise in other high-income countries…The United States is the only high-income country not to require paid leave for workers. Britain gives new mothers 52 weeks; Italy gives 22 weeks; and Japan gives 14 weeks. The president said the government would provide $2.2 billion to reimburse states for paid family leave programs, and called for Congress to pass a bill that would enable workers to earn seven paid sick days. His plan also included creating more child care and giving families a child-care tax cut of up to $3,000 per child per year.

At Demos, Sharon Lerner adds:

…Obama’s spotlight on paid family leave–or, rather, the lack of paid family leave–is incredibly valuable. Having time off to care for new babies is not just the law in the developed world, it’s policy in virtually every other poor country as well. (Yes, Afghanistan, Chad, and Vietnam are ahead of us on this) In the U.S., too, the idea of giving workers time off after having a new baby has wide appeal, though the support is easy to miss–both because proponents have been unsuccessful in getting paid family leave for almost a century, and because opponents tend to frame this as a typical partisan issue, with Democrats on one side and Republicans on another.
Paid family leave isn’t a typical partisan issue, though; it is a beloved policy on both on both sides of the aisle–or at least among voters in both parties. Recent polls show 55 percent of Republican women supporting The FAMILY Act, which would provide workers with up to 12 weeks off paid to care for a new baby or deal with their own or a relative’s serious illness. And 62 percent of Republicans as well as 70 percent of working men polled in 2009 agreed with the statement that “businesses should be “required to provide paid family and medical leave for every worker who needs it.”
Yet, while most Republicans see the value in paid family leave, Republican lawmakers still don’t for the most part, putting them in a politically untenable position that they won’t want to inhabit for long. By bringing the issue to the fore, Obama is garnering the approval of reasonable folks in both parties and drawing attention to the gulf between these Republican officeholders and their constituents. So when the White House highlights the fact that only 11 percent of workers are covered by formal paid family leave policies, for instance, they’re underscoring both the dire need for paid family leave–and the brute insensitivity of those opposing it.

Democrats can expect strong support from women in 2016, not just because of the popularity of our women leaders in recent opinion polls, but also because Republicans oppose nearly every reform that could make life a little easier for working women. What Republicans fear even more about President Obama’s paid family leave initiative is that it could give Democrats a strong edge with a constituency of growing importance — young parents and couples planning to have children.

A brief note from James Vega:
Since 2009 The Democratic Strategist has insisted on the unprecedented character of the extremism that has come to dominate the GOP, an extremism that incorporates not only extreme positions on issues but also extremist political strategies aimed at sabotaging the basic operations of government.
A current, startling example is the “Regulatory Responsibility Act,” passed without fanfare last week by the Republican majority of the House of Representatives and unopposed by any major GOP candidates or leader of the party. Here is a brief description of the legislation:

WASHINGTON — The House passed a measure Tuesday to dramatically restrict the government’s ability to enact any significant new regulations or safety standards, potentially hamstringing the efforts of every federal agency, the entire spectrum of public health and safety, worker health and safety, financial protections and consumer product protections. Opponents dub the measure a “stealth attack” because it targets obscure parts of the regulatory process but has such broad scope that it would affect all agencies, from independent regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission to executive branch agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

As the mainstream media moves further and further into 2016 campaign coverage and increasingly insists on describing various GOP candidates as representing a “moderate” or “sensible” wing of the party it is important for Democrats to energetically point out “stealth” proposals like this that illustrate the entire GOP’s unopposed hard-line extremist strategy of subtly sabotaging the government.
In this regard, a recent column in Time Magazine deserves close attention. Written by David Kaiser, a military historian who taught for 20 years at the Naval War College (as well as at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and Williams College) it argues the very startling thesis that the extremist strategy of the GOP is actually surprisingly similar to a classical method of guerilla warfare.
As Kaiser notes:

[The Republican success in the 2014 elections is] a new victory for a long-term strategy with a very surprising analog: the strategy that allowed the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to win the Vietnam War.
In one of his many books on the Vietnam War, the late historian Douglas Pike described the overarching Communist strategy, called dau tranh, or struggle, [one in which] the political aspects were always more important.
The Viet Cong always had more political workers than soldiers. They conducted motivational propaganda among their own troops, but also infiltrated and did whatever they could to make it impossible for the South Vietnamese government to function effectively. If they could reduce South Vietnamese society to chaos, they reasoned, the well-organized Communist party could easily take over.
Some years ago, I realized that that the Republican Party has been practicing its own kind of dau tranh for more than twenty years. Recently, the strategy has intensified. It has significantly weakened government at all levels and has a good chance of eliminating the remaining vestiges of the New Deal and the Progressive Era.
…Since winning the House of Representatives and taking away the Democrats’ 60-vote majority in the Senate in 2010, Republicans have made it impossible for large parts of the federal government to function. The genius of the Republican strategy is that it validates itself. Crippling government tends to prove that government does not work, and allows Republicans to argue that the nation would do better with even less government.
Democratic administrations on the other hand depend on the idea that government can help the people. Starving and immobilizing the government makes it look ineffective, which seems to validate Republican propaganda. Franklin Roosevelt created the modern Democratic Party by convincing every section of the country, from the agricultural south and the resource-rich west to the urban areas of the northeast and Midwest, that the government could help them. Now that belief has nearly disappeared in most of the Red states.
…Some months ago Mitch McConnell told a symposium hosted by the Koch brothers that if the Republicans win the Senate, a Republican Congress will use the budget process to defund every part of the federal government that they do not like…That would be the final triumph of several decades of dau tranh.

Republicans will of course respond that it is completely outrageous for anyone–even a professional military historian–to compare their strategy to that of insurrectionary movements whose objective is the deliberate sabotage of government. On this point Democrats can most heartily agree. It is indeed outrageous and the moment the GOP ceases to engage in such behavior Democrats will with great pleasure cease to draw the comparison.

The Republicans’ message du jour buzz term on the eve of President Obama’s SOTU is an oldie, but not-so-goodie: “Class Warfare.” Steve Benen explains it well at Maddowblog:

…Obama is prepared to focus on the growing wealth gap, economic inequalities, the concentration of wealth at the very top, and the fact that the recovery’s prosperity has not been broadly shared. And yes, the predictable, knee-jerk response from the right is to complain about “class warfare.”
But whether congressional Republicans are comfortable with this or not, it was Mitt Romney who told RNC members last week how concerned he is that “the rich have gotten richer” and “income inequality has gotten worse.” It was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who complained about a year ago, “Right now, the top 1 percent in this country, the millionaires and billionaires the president demagogues so much, earn a higher share of our national income than any time since 1928.”
Is it “class warfare” when a Democrat notices these national challenges, but sound thinking when a Republican notices? Or does it only count as “class warfare” because the president has presented a credible proposal to do something about it?

Good questions. Many a progressive Democrat would welcome a little more class conflict, since the gap between the super-rich and working people has grown alarmingly under Republican tax policies, union-bashing and wage stagnation.
In addition to their hypocrisy on the topic, Republicans have never gotten a lot of traction with the ‘class warfare’ meme. They hope to win over some small businessmen and women with it, but there is little evidence that ‘class warfare’ hysteria wins much support with this particular constituency. It’s pretty much a preaching-to-the choir ditty, of little interest to persuadable voters who are looking for substantive answers.
It’s equally unlikely that working families struggling to pay their bills and get their kids a better education are going to have much sympathy with the GOP meme-mongers ‘class warfare’ finger-pointing. Odds are they will find President Obama’s expected SOTU message calling for tuition-free community college, paid family leave, and a more significant middle class tax cut of considerably more interest.

In this short clip MLK concludes one of his best speeches on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama at the conclusion of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for Voting Rights. As we celebrate the 30th Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, the film “Selma” seems to be gathering momentum for a “Best Picture” Oscar, accompanied by debate about LBJ’s level of support for the Voting Rights Act. I come down in the middle: It’s true that LBJ would not have fought for it and signed it in 1965 without MLK’s determination. But give Johnson some credit for coming up with visionary leadership when it counted.
At The Hill Ben Kamisar’s “Lawmakers Reflect on ‘No’ Votes on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday” surveys the current and past attitudes of current Republican members of congress who voted against the MLK holiday at the federal or state level. Three of them, Sens. McCain, Hatch and Isaakson say they regret their vote.
At Latin Post Michael Oleaga reports on his interviews of LULAC and Rock the Vote leaders and discusses “How to Mobilize Latino Millennials After Midterms.”
Livia Gershon’s “Why Democrats Can’t Figure Out White Working-Class Voters” at vice.com marshals a combination of revealing anecdotes and analysis to shed some interesting light on the Democrats’ quest for a bigger bite of this elusive demographic. Among Gershon’s insights: “Depending on how you define the white working class, you can come to a wide variety of conclusions about voting patterns. But spend too much time thinking about these details, and you miss a major piece of the puzzle: The huge number of white working-class people, and lower-income people of all races, who don’t vote at all…Elisabeth Jacobs, the researcher, said that if we want to understand how class affects voting as we look toward 2016, the gap between voters and non-voters is in some ways more important than the party breakdown. “If you’re talking about the white working class versus the white working class voters, you’re talking about very different universes of people,” she said.”
Here’s great headline that encapsulates a good idea from WLRN, a PBS affiliate in south Florida: “Democrats’ Free Tuition Strategy: Unleash Eager Parents Against Reluctant GOP” by Rick Stone.
Looks like conservatives are trying to brand Rep. Chris Van Hollen as “Robin Hood” for his new tax plan which would reallocate some income from the wealthy to the middle class. Maybe that’s not such a hot idea, since Robin Hood has been a hero to working people for centuries.
Michael Tomasky’s explains in his Daily Beast post, “The Biggest, Most Important 2016 Debate” that “…Wage stagnation is basically a Democratic issue, one that most voters would probably trust the Democrats to do a better job on than Republicans. Although of course, if it comes to be October 2016 and wages are still as flat as they’ve been since the crash, that could be a problem for the Democrats. So what they need to do is frame wages not as a post-crash, Obama-era problem, but instead to make sure Americans know that this is a deep historical problem, and that the moment to address is right now…The Democratic Party wasn’t always much good at articulating a theory of economic growth that could counter the Republicans’ trickle-down argument. They’re finally finding their voice on this. And so, the real importance of the next election is not the Supreme Court, not climate change, not foreign policy, crucial as all those things are. It’s that it could write the obituary of supply-side economics. ”
Ohio progressives must now prepare for a brutal battle against Republicans’ all-out assault on unions — and middle-class economic security in the buckeye state.
“Simple”might be a stretch. But Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake present a plausible path for Dems to retake a U.S. Senate majority in 2016.

The following article is cross-posted from a DCorps E-blast:
The 2014 election was a devastating defeat for the Democratic Party, with consequences that may be felt for many years to come. Even so, we wrote in the aftermath of the 2014 election, “Despite the deep losses of 2014, the partisan predispositions of the Democratic coalition remain very much intact. There just is not any reason to think the compositional changes will not continue their long-term trends – and the Rising American Electorate will be key.” This prediction certainly holds true in this survey, as the Obama coalition asserts itself in dramatic fashion. But it is also shocking how quickly other changes produce a profoundly different America than the one that showed up last November.[1] On almost all measures, Democratic numbers improve on this survey, beginning with voters’ overall mood. Right direction numbers jump nearly 10 points since the election and are likely to improve further with the growing economy and falling price of gasoline. Numbers also rebound for President and the Democratic Party. Democratic messages and Democratic policies out-muscle Republican messages and Republican policy, suggesting room for further advances. Meanwhile, the honeymoon for Boehner and McConnell barely lasted through the wedding reception as negatives for both, and the Republican Party as a whole, grow sharply. Most striking, the Tea Party Republican is back, defining the Republican brand.
These changes and the emergence of the Obama presidential year electorate leave the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead of Mitt Romney (49 to 43 percent) and well ahead of Jeb Bush (52 to 40 percent). Voters’ hostility to George Bush’s brother is one of the more notable outcomes of this survey.
Given her support among white college educated women and strong support among most RAE voters, Clinton can win a national election without competing among white non-college voters; but this outcome would likely leave most of the Republican 2014 gains intact. Obviously, a lot can change over the next 22 months, but questions at this point are whether the Democratic presidential candidate can grow and protect her lead, and whether 2016 can build a big enough win to recover congressional and down-ballot losses from the 2014 cycle.
The answers to those questions depend in large measure on two overlapping dynamics: Democrats’ ability to build on and consolidate their support among RAE voters and Democrats’ ability to improve on their dismal performance among white working class voters. On the combined measure, Clinton opens strong among RAE voters–unmarried women, people of color, youth–winning 64 percent of RAE voters overall and 62 percent of unmarried women. Obama won 67 percent of unmarried women in 2012, however, and Clinton’s margin among white unmarried women (just 1 percent) is unimpressive. The news here is less edifying for Democrats among white working class voters.
President Obama won 40 percent of these voters in 2008 and 36 percent in 2012,[2] and Democratic Congressional candidates won only 34 percent of the white working class vote last year. Clinton fares no better, winning just 35 percent of white non-college voters and 37 percent of non-college white women on the combined measure.
Critically, the goals of maximizing support among unmarried women and minimizing Republican support among white non-college voters overlap. Nearly a quarter of white non-college voters are unmarried women. The key to both groups is about getting the economy right. Overall, Democrats lead the Republicans on every issue tested in this survey, except the economy, which is the most important one. White non-college voters and white unmarried women are much more pessimistic about the direction of the country (76 percent wrong track among white non-college voters); both believe the road to the middle class is blocked for them. Progressives need to understand what they once understood–rising tides do not lift all boats and gains at the macro-economic level do not necessarily improve the economic prospects of these voters.
Both unmarried white women and white non-college voters prioritize jobs that pay; both focus on protecting Social Security and Medicare and college affordability. Critically, there is no evidence in this survey that the Democratic focus on the “women’s economic agenda” undermines support among white working class voters or white working class men. In fact, some of the gender-specific messages and proposals–equal pay, paid-sick time, help for working mothers–test as well or better among white working class voters as the non-gender-specific proposal. For both groups, this election needs to be about helping working men and women.
It also needs to be about reform. These are people who pay a lot in taxes, but do not believe the government works in the interests of middle families. They see special interests dominating government, often at their expense. They also see waste and inefficiency and are convinced they do not get their money’s worth out of Washington. Reform messages do as well for Democrats as broader economic messages and work particularly well among white working class voters. Reform policies constitute the most popular Republican policy proposal tested, and one of the most popular Democratic policies tested among unmarried women.
In one of the most important and interesting findings in this survey, a reform message opens votes up to a progressive economic narrative. Voters who heard the reform message before hearing the Democratic economic messages were more than 10-points more likely to describe the Democratic framing as “very convincing” as voters who heard the Democratic framing first (43 percent very convincing and 32 percent very convincing, respectively).
For Democrats, this represents an incredibly optimistic study. The road back may not be as long as many in the Party feared. But this road requires some improvement among white working class voters and some consolidation among base voters like white unmarried women. This means speaking directly to the economic experience of these voters, not the experience of Wall Street, focusing on the plight of the middle class and forwarding a set of policy options that directly improve the economic lives of these still-struggling families. And this road will likely be made much easier if Democrats make a serious effort on a government and campaign reform agenda.
Read the Full Memo
[1] The survey of 950 likely 2016 voters was conducted from January 7-11, 2015. Voters who voted in the 2012 election or registered since were selected from the national voter file. Likely voters were determined based on stated intention of voting in 2016. Data shown in this deck is among all 2016 likely voters unless otherwise noted. Unless otherwise noted, margin of error for the full sample= +/-3.2 percentage points at 95% confidence. Margin of error will be higher among subgroups. 50 percent of respondents were reached by cell phone, in order to account for ever-changing demographics and trying to accurately sample the full American electorate.
[2] From Center for American Progress: http://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ObamaCoalition-5.pdf
____________________
This research was a joint project of Democracy Corps, Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, and the Voter Participation Center. The Voter Participation research related to nonpartisan questions regarding policy topics
Democracy Corps is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people. It was founded in 1999 by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. Democracy Corps provides public opinion research and strategic advice to those dedicated to a more responsive Congress and Presidency. Learn more at www.democracycorps.com
Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund (WVWVAF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501 (c)(4) organization founded in 2005 and dedicated to increasing the voting participation and issue advocacy of unmarried women. Learn more at www.wvwvaf.org
The Voter Participation Center (VPC) is a research-driven, results-oriented nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing the participation and amplifying the voices of unmarried women (women who are single, widowed, divorced or separated) and other historically underrepresented groups in our democracy. The mission of the VPC is to boost the civic engagement of unmarried women, people of color and 18-29 year olds–the three demographic groups who comprise the Rising American Electorate (RAE) Learn more at www.voterparticipation.org.

Republicans have announced they will hold their 2016 National Convention from July 18-21 next year. This decision both reflects and creates some significant strategic considerations for both parties, as I discussed at Washington Monthly:

It’ll be the earliest national convention since the Democratic confab that nominated Bill Clinton in 1992, and the earliest Republican convention since you-know-who’s nomination in Detroit in 1980 (don’t imagine we won’t hear a lot about that!).
In announcing the dates, RNC chairman Reince Priebus seemed to suggest the main rationale for the relatively early convention was “access to crucial general election funds.” It’s not clear if he was talking about public matching funds that are only made available once a nominee has been chosen; that seems a bit anachronistic, since both major-party nominees rejected public funding in 2012 and there’s no particular reason to think they’ll accept them along with spending limits this time around. He could, alternatively, be talking about access to privately-raised hard money that are subject to separate primary and general-election contribution limits. Either way, in this post-Citizens United era, it sounds like a blast from 1996.
When it first arose the idea of an early GOP convention seemed linked to a push by the RNC to compress the entire nominating process. Indeed, the talk then was of a June convention, in conjunction with wrapping up the primaries in April or early May. But here’s why June didn’t work out, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

[T]he Republican National Committee’s selection of Cleveland last July came days before NBA star LeBron James announced that he was returning home to Ohio.
James’ Cavaliers play their games at Quicken Loans Arena, which will be the main site for convention programming. His return increased the probability of Cleveland playoff basketball into June — a prospect that made the arena’s pre-convention availability to Republican planners and Secret Service uncertain.

Hah! Can’t imagine the business of nominating The Next President of the United States would trump the NBA playoffs!
In any event, the early speculation has been that Democrats will go the other way and once again hold their convention in late August or early September, creating a large hiatus (filled partially by the Olympics) and also giving Ds a chance to stage-manage a “bounce.” They could even emulate the Republican gambit in 2008 of announcing the nominee’s running-mate well before the convention–say, the day after the GOP confab–to step on any GOP “bounce.” Either way, they’ll have plenty of time to think about it.

I’ve always thought forming the party ticket much earlier than the conventions is a good idea, both for strategic purposes and to avoid what happened to the GOP in 2008.

One of the meta-messaging challenges of our age is to defend the idea that key government programs do indeed represent “public investments” that produce tangible outcomes worth measuring–for good or for ill. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

Conservatives have for years mocked the use of the term “investment” for public expenditures, arguing that it’s just a cosmetic code word for “spending,” and an effort to borrow on the respectability of entirely non-germane business practices. But to the extent that public spending is explicitly aimed at producing non-immediate payoffs, it is ridiculous not to view–and then to measure–the future return on “investment.”
So even as Republicans perpetually seek to deride, devolve, or demolish Medicaid as ineffective welfare for those people, along comes a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research evaluating the long-term impact of covering children under Medicaid. And as reported by The Upshot‘s Margot Sanger-Katz, the results are impressive even if you limit the “payback” to measurable contributions to the beneficiaries’ earning power and subsequent tax payments:

The study used newly available tax records measured over decades to examine the effects of providing Medicaid insurance to children. Instead of looking at the program’s immediate impact on those children and their families, it followed them once they became adults and began paying federal taxes.
People who had been eligible for Medicaid as children, as a group, earned higher wages and paid higher federal taxes than their peers who were not eligible for the federal-state health insurance program. And the more years they were eligible for the program, the larger the difference in earnings.
“If we examine kids that were eligible for different amounts of Medicaid over the course of their childhood, we see that the ones that were eligible for more Medicaid ended up paying more taxes through income and payroll taxes later in life,” said Amanda Kowalski, an assistant professor of economics at Yale and one of the study’s authors.
The results mean that the government’s investment in the children’s health care may not have cost as much as budget analysts expected. The study, by a team that included economists from the Treasury Department, was able to calculate a return on investment in the form of tax revenue.
The return wasn’t high enough to pay the government back for its investment in health insurance by the time the children reached age 28, when the researchers stopped tracking the subjects. By that age, the Treasury had earned back about 14 cents for every dollar that the federal and state governments had spent on insurance. But it did suggest that, if the subjects’ wages continued to follow typical trajectories as they aged, the federal government would earn back about what it spent on its half of the program by the time the children reached 60 — about 56 cents on the dollar, calculated using a formula that took into account the time value of money.

These calculations do not, of course, include the ROI of healthier, happier lives.
Paul Krugman looks at this study and relates it to the Republican drive for “dynamic scoring” of tax measures in Congress–which means including estimates of the economic activity they believe tax cuts will produce along with their positive affect on revenues.

While Krugman is right to suggest the “dynamic scoring” fight provides a good opportunity to counter-punch with the “public investment” argument, that argument is important to progressives on its own. Instead of accepting the false premise of an irrepressible conflict between government as inherently good and government as inherently bad, Democrats should be prepared to argue that key investments are indeed effective by any honest accounting, and are irreplaceable by the invisible hand of markets or any other substitutes.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The last couple of days have been a provocative view of the near-term future of American politics. There are four major teams on the scene at the same time, coming from four different corners of the field, and they all have some amount of political juice. How they end up interacting and competing with each other will be the driving political story for quite a while into the future.
On the Republican side, there is the increasingly conservative — but apparently never extreme enough — establishment wing of the party led by Boehner and McConnell and the big business lobby, and there is the Tea Party anti-establishment wing. The establishment guys, pretty much all guys, have the upper hand for now but clearly got a little surprised by the strength of the anti-Boehner rebellion in the Speaker election.
Knowing the strength of the Tea Party gang in primary election fights, they are a force to be reckoned with for the foreseeable future — as evidenced by the fact that the Republican Party’s establishment has moved so far to the right on most issues in the last five years. The establishment team certainly has embraced the Ayn Rand worldview so popular with the tea partiers, as evidenced by how on day one, they passed a rule that will probably result in cutting benefits and stealing from the disabled.
The biggest policy difference between the two wings of the Republicans is that the establishment wing invariably does whatever the big business lobby want them to do, even if it violates small government and free market principles — note how the Wall Street provision snuck into December’s budget bill that caused all the trouble allows more bailouts of the biggest banks’ riskiest bets — which isn’t exactly Adam Smith’s idea of free market economics. Tea Party types have been railing against these kinds of Wall Street bank bailouts since the last round of them in 2008. The biggest political difference is that the establishment will go along with the company line when push comes to shove, while the Tea Party still doesn’t mind-blowing up Congress to get what they want.

Read more…