Today is Earth Day, which led me to some ruminations on the lost bipartisanship of this commemoration at Washington Monthly:

It’s Earth Day, and also the 45th anniversary of the annual event identified with the modern U.S. environmental movement. But for the people running for the GOP presidential nomination, it’s just another day to run away from Mother Earth.
At Bloomberg Politics, Mark Drajem has a useful round-up of the views of all the major presidential candidates on global climate change and associated issues….
In terms of current positions, though, there’s less disagreement than meets the eye:

Observers would have to squint hard to detect any movement among the main Republican candidates. They all back the Keystone XL pipeline, embrace the boom in U.S. oil and gas production, say the economy trumps climate action now and, among those that answered, say a deal to cut emissions between Obama and China is one-sided and toothless.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the first Earth Day in 1970 are also old enough to remember when environmentalism was a thoroughly bipartisan cause. Yes, even then there were conservatives who criticized the commemoration or hinted darkly at its un-American nature–it was held, after all, on the centennial of Lenin’s birth! I recall National Review editorially suggesting the best way to celebrate Earth Day was: “Pick up a beer can. Throw it at a pollutocrat.” Like the rest of movement conservatism, this fringy attitude towards environmental protection has very nearly conquered all in today’s GOP. It would be nice if Earth Day were again bipartisan, but if not, then it’s another thing to add to the list of high stakes for the next election–maybe at the very top.

From Greg Sargent’s Plum Line post, “Morning Plum: Obama and the health law get some good poll numbers“:

The new Kaiser Family Foundation monthly tracking poll finds that Obamacare has edged ever so gingerly into positive territory: 43 percent of Americans approve of the law, while 42 percent disapprove of it.
That’s the first time the law has been in positive territory since the last presidential election. More to the point, it’s the first time the law has been in positive territory since implementation of the law began and it suffered hideous roll-out problems, followed by months and months of GOP hyping of every Obamacare horror story Republicans could find (or invent).

About time you say. Sargent adds, “46 percent of Americans overall want to move forward with implementation of it or expand it, versus 41 percent who want it scaled back or repealed. Independents are evenly split.” But he also cautions, “This is only one poll. The HuffPollster averages show the law is still a bit underwater.”
Yet, despite the non-stop Republican assault on Obamacare and their promises to offer a better alternative, which does away with individual mandates while providing protection for people with pre-existing conditions, “more than 50 months after first making such promises, they still have not hit on a consensus alternative that would do both of those things,” reports Sargent. It appears that the GOP is getting ossified internally by it’s own strategy of legislative paralysis.
Sargent concludes,

…if the Kaiser poll is right, only Republican voters remain fixated on doing away with the mandate as a leading priority — along with junking the law entirely. Meanwhile, the Kaiser poll shows that various improvements to consumer protections — which is to say, building on the ACA, not scrapping it — rank as the highest priorities for everyone else.

In the 2016 Republican convention, they will still be bashing away at Obamacare, calling for repeal and replacing it with nothing but vague promises about something better. It should be a revealing moment for alert swing voters, affirming that this is a political party which shows no signs of being able to unite behind anything resembling a credible health care alternative — a pathetic reality after 8 years of relentless Obamacare-bashing.

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:
Elizabeth Warren has given her fair share of great speeches, and has written some outstanding legislation on reforming Wall Street, but her speech on April 15 to the Hyman P. Minsky Conference was the best Wall Street policy speech I have ever heard her, or anyone, ever give. It was comprehensive without being a laundry list of in-the-weeds wonkiness. It laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need to do these reforms, and it was politically compelling as well.
Her politically compelling argument laid out a strong philosophical rationale for why we need these reforms. Perhaps most importantly, she did all this while masterfully refuting the hackneyed attacks about her being anti-business, anti-growth, and anti-market forces.
Warren’s series of proposed reforms would be a major and much needed boost to an economy still held down by the Wall Street abuses that brought on the collapse of the massive housing bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, and the hardest hitting economic slowdown since the Great Depression. Here is an outline of her proposals:

• Hold financial institutions and individuals accountable for cheating customers
• Close the auto loan loophole and extend CFPB oversight to auto dealers
• Stop financial fraud recidivism by preventing any institution from entering into a non-prosecution agreement or deferred prosecution agreement if they are already operating under such an agreement
• Deter future financial fraud by imposing a mandatory minimum monetary penalty at least equal to the profits generated by the illegal conduct and strengthening judicial review of deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements
• Strengthen enforcement by requiring the Fed’s Board of Governors to vote on all major supervisory and regulatory matters, and giving each Governor his or her own staff
• Stop financial institutions from passing risk on to taxpayers
• Cap the size of financial institutions as originally proposed by Senators Brown and Kaufman
• Reinstate the barrier between commercial banking and investment banking as proposed in the 21th Century Glass-Steagall Act
• Improve market discipline by restricting the Fed’s emergency lending authority
• Change tax policies that encourage excessive risk-taking and financial instability
• Close the bonus loophole that allows financial institutions to write off billions in executive bonuses each year
• Limit highly leveraged financial institutions from fully deducting their interest payments
• Institute a targeted financial transactions tax
• Create simple, structural rules for regulating the shadow banking sector

There are a number of important policy goals here, of course: basic fairness to consumers, a more level playing field for everyone, ending the era of the Too Big To Fail banking system, holding cheaters in the financial system more accountable, keep taxpayers from being on the hook for the big banks’ risky speculation, and discouraging excessive risk-taking. All of those these are incredibly important things that will make the financial system in this country far more healthy. At the heart of this agenda, though, is one simple idea: making the financial markets work better. As Warren says in her speech:

“…without some basic rules and accountability, financial markets don’t work. People get ripped off, risk-taking explodes, and the markets blow up. That’s just an empirical fact – clearly observable in 1929 and again in 2008.
The point is worth repeating because, for too long, the opponents of financial reform have cast this debate as an argument between the pro-regulation camp and the pro-market camp, generally putting Democrats in the first camp and Republicans in the second. But that so-called choice gets it wrong. Rules are not the enemy of markets. Rules are a necessary ingredient for healthy markets, for markets that create competition and innovation. And rolling back the rules or firing the cops can be profoundly anti-market.
Right now the Republicans are pushing an anti-market agenda.”

Warren hits the nail on the head. To be pro-business and pro-market, you have to some rules that guarantee a level playing field, you have to have cops on the beat, and you have to have a regulatory and judicial system willing to actually prosecute the businesses who actually break the rules — no matter how big, wealthy, and powerful those businesses are in the marketplace and political system. Market competition does not work if one business is so big and powerful that it can squeeze out its competitors, and if the rules give unfair advantages only to the richest and most politically powerful.
The people who refer to Elizabeth Warren as anti-business just don’t get it. What she is in reality is anti-predator, anti-cheater, anti-monopolist, and anti-cronyism. If you have a fair system that regulates those market and competition-stifling things, then it helps the vast majority of businesses to fairly compete. What this speech reminds us is that Elizabeth Warren is a pro-business, pro-market progressive.
Here’s a link to the text of the speech, and here is the speech itself:

From “Democrats’ hunt for the white working-class male voter,” Doyle McManus’s L.A. Times column: “…[Stan] Greenberg has proposed adding another piece to the Democrats’ message: a more serious commitment to both campaign reform and a leaner, more efficient federal government…White working-class voters “are skeptical of government and skeptical of Democrats,” he told me last week. “They’re surprised to hear Democrats say they want to change politics and change government.”..That message, he said, “is a precondition to reaching them on other issues.””
For the definitive in-depth take on Democratic prospects for winning more votes from this pivotal demographic, you won’t find more astute, data-driven analyses by a host of top experts than the essays in TDS’s The White Working-Class Roundtable Newsletter.
Susan Page reports at USA Today that “In a nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, those surveyed say by 51%-35% that it’s no longer practical for the Supreme Court to ban same-sex marriages because so many states have legalized them. One reason for a transformation in public views on the issue: Close to half say they have a gay or lesbian family member or close friend who is married to someone of the same sex.”
At cbsnews.com Rebecca Kaplan profiles former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s strengths and weaknesses as a voice for Democratic progressives in the presidential primaries ahead.
In “Will you miss the biggest story of the 2016 presidential election?,” Taegan Goddard notes at The Week: “…Obama’s political skills were only a small part of why he ultimately won. It was his strategy of competing in and winning early caucus states — places like Colorado, Idaho, Kansas and Minnesota — that allowed him to rack up delegates…In the general election, “the Obama campaign could reach nearly all of the young people in America through Facebook. Democratic strategists also realized that Romney had a minimal presence on Facebook, so they could run a mostly positive campaign about Obama with very little competition from their opponent.” So Goddard cautions: “Don’t immediately dismiss all process stories you see over the next 18 months. Just question whether you’re getting the right ones.”
Here’s one reason why the Libertarians are not going to be a unified force for Republicans in 2016.
The GOP’s top union-basher, Scott Walker tries out ‘regular guy’ optics, reports Robert Costa at The Washington Post: “Calling voters “folks” and boasting about his cut-rate suits from Jos. A. Bank…Pointing to his rolled-up blue sleeves, Walker said he has been buying “shirts like this” for decades and that he is a devoted fan of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which he plans to ride through New Hampshire’s 10 counties.” Can the NASCAR hat be far behind?
Those who would dismiss the argument that demographic trends strongly favor Democrats in the 2016 election should ponder the concluding sentences from E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s latest column: “In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of the white vote and he carried independents. In 2004, this would have elected him president. In 2000, it would have given him an Electoral College landslide. In 2012, it gave him second place.”
It’s not that most voters want to “soak the rich” or favor “income redistribution.” Ditch the jargon and try asking them if they favor more fairness in taxation and better wages for the poor.

I’m not sure if Dana Milbank got caught up in the frenzy of a spirited rally or if he got it right in his WaPo column “The Populist Capture of the Democratic Party.” Headline writers often overstate the content of the copy that follows. Yet, Milbank’s report on the pending “Trans-Pacific Partnership” trade agreement almost matches the dramatic announcement in the title:

A quartet of senators and a dozen members of the House took the stage in a park across from the Capitol midday Wednesday to join hundreds of steelworkers, union faithful and environmentalists in denouncing President Obama’s bid for fast-track approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
“I’ve never seen a trade agreement that is more secretive than this one,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told the crowd. “What are they hiding? What they’re hiding is a huge shift from democratically elected governments to corporations all over the world, and that’s why we’re fighting.”

A parade of speakers echoed Brown’s denunciation, and Milbank reports that “The upcoming battle over fast-tracking and the Trans-Pacific Partnership shows how dramatically the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has shifted.” He adds that “a best-case scenario has them winning only 10 of the 46 Democrats — and an even smaller percentage of House Democrats, despite aggressive lobbying by the usually passive White House.”
Milbank cites the bad taste residue left by NAFTA and the shrinking number of political moderates remaining the the Democratic Party, along with the rallying of populist ideas in concert with the ascendancy of Elizabeth Warren. He believes Hillary Clinton will have to accommodate some populist concerns to unite the party, if she wins the presidential nomination for 2016. Many observers believe the agreement will pass, nonetheless, owing mostly to Republican support.
Politico hyped up the “Democrats’ civil war over free trade” in a post by Adam Behsudi, noting:

The open warring among Democrats over fast-track trade legislation, and the party’s broader existential crisis on free trade, grew more pronounced Thursday as senior lawmakers announced a breakthrough on the trade bill. Many Democrats still feel the burn, 20 years later, of lost manufacturing jobs from the North American Free Trade Agreement — pushed through by former President Bill Clinton — and they fear another Democratic president is on the verge of turning his back on working-class Americans by negotiating a trade deal that would send jobs overseas.

Let’s not forget that the followers of both former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin and the populist Democrats of the 90s voted for Bill Clinton on election day decades ago. Further, what gets overlooked amid all of the “let’s you and him fight” reportage about the trade deal is that, if we had a Republican majorities in the House and Senate that would actually negotiate in good faith, it would be possible to forge a trade deal that everyone could live with. But it would have to accommodate the concerns of Democratic leaders, such as Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), who is quoted in Behsudi’s article:

“The single biggest economic issue facing American families is that jobs do not pay enough to live on,” she said following the Trade Promotion Authority bill’s introduction on Thursday. “Fast tracking the TPP would make it easier for corporations to offshore Americans jobs and force our workers to compete with those in Vietnam making less than 60 cents an hour.”

It’s clear that Clinton, or any other potential Democratic presidential candidate will have to take a stronger stand against trade agreements that sacrifice American jobs. That’s a message point that will likely resonate with swing voters.

It’s pretty well-established that one of the “fundamentals” that damaged Democrats in 2014 was a big lag between improving economic indicators and public perceptions of how the economy was performing.
Well, now the perceptions are catching up, and I discussed the implications today at Washington Monthly:

This new finding from Bloomberg Politics‘ polling (as reported by Margaret Talev) is a pretty big deal, assuming it holds up as a trend:

Americans are becoming more optimistic about the country’s economic prospects by several different measures. President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy is being seen more positively than negatively for the first time in more than five years, 49 percent to 46 percent—his best number in this poll since September 2009.

Here’s the under-side of that optimism, though:

[T]he national survey of 1,008 adults, conducted April 6-8, also reveals that about three-fourths of Democrats and independents, along with a majority of Republicans, say the gap is growing between the rich and everyone else—and a majority of women want the government to intervene to shrink it. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

So it may well be that Hillary Clinton’s talk about inequality isn’t just a response to progressives unhappy with Obama’s “centrism,” but a theme we’ll be hearing more of both from her and from Obama himself as the obvious thing for a left-of-center pol to talk about when the overall direction of the economy is looking better. It also probably means that we’ll hear Republicans continue their awkward efforts to suggest shrinking government will unleash upward mobility. All in all, optimism about what a Democratic president is doing plus concerns traditionally associated with Democrats is a pretty good public opinion backdrop for a Democratic non-incumbent.

To put it another way, improving perceptions of the economy amid growing worries about inequality not only strengthens the case for another Democratic presidency but undermines the GOP’s case that it’s “time for a change.”

Thomas B. Edsall reports in his column at The New York Times that public attitudes about the redistribution of wealth have taken a conservative turn in a number of recent surveys. While some may argue that this indicates Dems should moderate their policies in a conservative direction, it could also be taken as a challenge to better educate the public about proposals to spur a more equitable distribution of wealth.
Political consultant Matt L. Barron explains at The Hill why Democrats should pay more attention to rural voters.
The good news for Hillary Clinton at this juncture, according to Kyle Kondik and Larry J. Sabato of The Crystal Ball is that she is the undisputed Democratic front-runner for President in 2016, with no “second-tier” opposition in sight. The bad news is that she is the biggest, earliest target her adversaries could hope for. If her front-runnership holds up, Dems could benefit significantly by not having a divisive primary season. But the GOP will have the advantage of highly-focused, Hillary-bashing message repetition over a long period of time, and their nominee could benefit from battle-testing and party unity based on weakness-eliminating competition.
UK politics appears as divided as our own, but Labour seems to have some serious mo — even in Thatcher’s old stronghold, reports Dave Hill at The Guardian.
Aamer Madhani makes a strong case that voter turnout the recent election in Ferguson is more cause for concern for progressives than celebration.
At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Greg Bluestein reports on the emerging Democratic majority — in Georgia: “I sometimes feel like Georgia flies under the radar,” said Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress. “But things are changing there so quickly.”…The analysis was done by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute and William H. Frey from the Brookings Institute…shows that Georgia could become a majority-minority state in 2025 and that minorities could outnumber whites among eligible voters by 2036…A narrow majority of students in Georgia’s public schools are now non-white and the data show that the proportion of white children could diminish to about 30 percent by 2060…”Blacks have more proclivity to vote in one direction than Hispanics or Asians,” said Teixeira. “It’s definitely changing the character. And one thing that will really make a huge difference in Georgia is if white voters vote more liberally. You don’t need much of a shift in the white vote for there to be a tipping point.” Bluestein’s article has nifty charts also.
The moral case for a gas tax hike is clear in terms of the environment and the need to fund transportation upgrades. But the political case is more problematic — especially for Dems. Janel Forte of Medill News Service explains why.
My hunch is that the headline for Nate Cohn’s upshot post is half-right that “Big Money From Super PACs Is Eroding the Power of Parties” — in the sense that the GOP has benefitted far more from super PACs. Cohn’s point is more about insider party “elites” losing their kingmaker power to the uber-PACs.
Will some wealthy Democrat please give this young man a lot of money?