Even if there is a government shutdown, it won’t delay the implementation of Obamacare, reports Linda Feldman at The Monitor: “The ACA is funded mostly through multiyear and mandatory spending, so a failure to agree on annual appropriations wouldn’t touch its funding.”
So here’s the GOP’s equally-doomed “Plan B” for killing Obamacare, according to Linda Mascaro of the L.A. Times: “Top Republicans want to get the legislation back to the House in time to give Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) an opportunity to attach new healthcare repeal amendments that might have a better chance at achieving GOP policy goals.”
Meanwhile, Erika Eichelberger reports at Mother Jones that “The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), known as the Motor Voter law, says that DMVs and other state agencies that provide public assistance have to provide voter registration services. The Obama administration has said that means that both the state-run exchanges, and the federally-run exchanges that are being rolled out in states where Republican governors have refused to set them up, will have to comply with the Motor Voter law. But now it appears that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is wavering on whether it will require the 35 federally-run exchanges to offer voter registration, according to a recent report by the left-leaning policy shop Demos and the voting rights organization Project Vote.”
At The Atlantic Molly Ball writes about the Heritage Foundation’s transformation from once-respected conservative think tank into a safe house for lowbrow partisan hackage.
From Emily Swanson’s HuffPo Politics post, “Americans Think GOP Mostly Helps the Rich“: “…According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll…51 percent of Americans think Republicans are most interested in helping the rich, while 28 percent said they’re most interested in helping the middle class. Another 7 percent said the GOP is most interested in helping the poor….Americans overall were roughly evenly divided on what they think the Democratic Party is up to. Twenty-eight percent said the party works for the rich, 27 percent said the middle class, and 25 percent said the poor.”
In his Op-Ed at The Hill Former Republican Senator Judd Gregg says: “Most Americans these days are simply ignoring Republicans. And they should. The self-promotional babble of a few has become the mainstream of Republican political thought. It has marginalized the influence of the party to an appalling degree.”
At Mother Jones, David Corn explains why “Obama is the most wily tactician in the nation’s capital since Lyndon Johnson.”
I’m not Sure Stefan Hankin has proved his thesis in his Washington Monthly post “How Democrats Lost the Colorado Recall Election.” But his argument is interesting: “A post-election analysis by the Atlas Project (here) determined that together the Democratic campaigns and outside groups had spent almost $2.3 million on both races, while their Republican counterparts merely spent a little over $500,000…This is not to say that the campaigns in Colorado should have given up TV advertising completely. However, in a low turnout election, in an off year, at an odd time, where mail ballots were not allowed, Democrats and their allies, decided to air 3,569 commercials instead of investing more resources in determining which voters they needed to turnout and which voters they needed to persuade to vote in these elections.”
The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman has a bit of a jaw-dropper in the title of his post, “Politico Published More than 30 Articles about Ted Cruz Today.” A good subtitle might have been “Bomb-Thrower Scams MSM with Nothingburger.” Waldman explains “most people who are not Republican activists/primary voters will within a few weeks forget what this whole thing was about. They’ll remember that that guy Cruz got up and talked for a long time, and it had something to do with Obamacare. And that’s about it.”

Manu Raju and Byron Tau report at Politico that Democrats are exploring ways to leverage Super PACs “to dedicate huge resources to usually low-key state races to help their respective parties change the partisan makeup of legislatures across the country.
Tell it straight, rag of record. It’s Kamikaze Republicans, not “Kamikaze Congress.”
This will probably shock his tea party base. It’s not quite as assertive as McCain’s “In the United States Senate, we will not repeal or defund Obamacare. We will not. And to think we can is not rational,” but it does appear that some Republicans are making a break to join the reality-based community as regards the Affordable Care Act.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. reports on why two more Republican governors have seen the light on Obamacare.
At Op-Ed News, James Thindwa notes in his post against felon-disenfranchisement, “A study by sociologists Chris Uggen and Jeff Manza found that former felons could have changed the outcomes of seven U.S Senate elections between 1978 and 2000.” Thindwa adds “Progressives could tip the scales in this internecine struggle and cause a tectonic shift in the incarceration debate. An important source of energy and inspiration is the army of grassroots and legal organizations that blocked, diluted, repealed or postponed anti-voter laws in 14 states over the last two years. Another key model is creative action such as North Carolina’s “Moral Mondays.” The weekly rallies and civil disobedience right at the seat of state power brought national focus to the state’s nefarious voter suppression laws and lowered Gov Pat McCrory’s approval ratings from 48 percent to 39 percent. This organizing model could be especially effective if it incorporated real institution building and expansive voter registration.”
Rand Paul is clearly hoping that his libertarian philosophy will resonate with young people, many of whom like libertarian views on social issues, like same-sex marriage, pot and isolationism. But the ‘Achilles heel’ of libertarian philosophy with respect to young people is opposition to environmental protection, and that’s exactly where Paul should be challenged. On his website, Paul, who tried to gut the Cross State Air Pollution Rule in 2011, also writes on his website: “By subsidizing certain new energies like solar and wind we distort the marketplace and make it impossible for companies to know what is really the most efficient solution.”
At Media Matters for America Meagan Hatcher-Mays skewers the Wall St. Journal for for shameless distortion in explaining the decline of labor, while ignoring the role of anti-labor court decisions and state legislation. Her article also explains some key reasons behind the erosion of the middle class in the U.S.
Vague poll questions are generally useless from a policy-making point of view, none more so than “Do you think gun control laws should be made more or less strict than they are now?” Down in the fifth graph of this post, however, we get “A HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted in August found that 79 percent of Americans support universal background checks, including for gun shows and private sales.”
Good forum here. The Catholic right is going to have a cow.

Seniors over age 65 were 23 percent of the turnout in 2010, up from 19 percent in 2006. In 2006, they evenly split their votes between Democratic and Republican House candidates. In 2010, they favored Republican House candidates 59 percent to 38 percent. According to Administration on Aging, three in five people over age 65 are women. African American persons made up 8.3 percent of the older population. By 2050, the percentage of the older population that is African American is projected to account for 11 percent of the older population. In 2008, Latinos were 6.8 percent of the older population.. Minority populations are projected to be 23.6% of the elderly by 2020.
For an interesting history of senior voter turnout from 1952-2000, read Andrea Louise Campbell’s “How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State.”
Emily Brandon’s “States with the Best Older Voter Turnout” at U.S. News notes the following: “Senior citizens are much more likely than younger people to show up on election day to cast ballots. Nationwide, 61 percent of people age 65 and older voted in the 2010 election, compared to 46 percent of all citizens. Here are the states where retirees were the most likely to vote in the November 2010 election.” According to Brandon, Washington state lead in 2010 with 77 percent of over-65 voters turning out, followed by: ME (76%); MT (74%); ND (75%); CO (74%); WI (72%); SD (70%); MN (70%); OR (71% of over 75); AK (69%).
In another article Brandon notes, “But even in the states with the lowest older voter turnout–Georgia, Virginia, and Indiana–more than half of citizens age 65 and older voted” in 2010. Perhaps Georgia and Virginia are trending purple as a partial result of lower than average senior turnout.
Hard to say how much of the following is lip-service and how much is straight talk. In 2004, Tucker Sutherland, editor of seniorjournal.com reported, “Counter to the political stereotype of seniors as single-issue, self-interested voters, a strong majority of American grandparents say they will be casting their vote this election day with the interests of their grandchildren in mind,” according to the new Ipsos-Public Affairs poll released today by the non-partisan group, GrannyVoter.org… Only 26 percent said they make up their mind on Social Security and Medicare mostly on the basis of how it will affect them in the short-term.
“As of April 2012, 53% of American adults age 65 and older use the internet or email” and “as of February 2012, one third (34%) of internet users age 65 and older use social networking sites such as Facebook, and 18% do so on a typical day,” according to a Pew Internet and American Life post, “Older adults and internet use” by Kathryn Zickuhr and Mary Madden. The figures represent a significant uptick in facebook and internet use by seniors. This could be a significant trend because “a single get-out-the-vote message sent to 61 million Facebook users on Election Day 2010 influenced 340,000 people to cast ballots when they otherwise would not have, according to the findings of a massive social experiment,” reports LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas in her post, “Facebook Friends Carry Huge Influence on Voter Turnout.”
With senior voters, it’s apparently not all about bread and butter issues. As Robert H Binstock notes at Medscape.com, “During President Reagan’s first term in office, 1981-1984, he presided over a freeze in Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment and proposed additional direct cuts in benefits (Light, 1985). When Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, the Democratic campaign against him highlighted these actions to portray the President as an enemy of Social Security. Yet…older voters substantially increased their support for Reagan from 54% in 1980 to 60% in 1984, paralleling the large increase provided by the electorate as a whole.” Of course the difference could also be attributed to incumbency.
Here’s how photo i.d. laws reduce senior voter turnout. An estimated 18% of seniors don’t have identification, according to Jodeen Olguín-Tayler of Caring Across Generations.
Among seniors who intend to vote, the tide appears to be turning blue. In “Why Seniors Are Turning Against The GOP” DCorps’s Erica Seifert reports, “There’s something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP…In 2010, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21 point margin (38 percent to 59 percent). Among seniors likely to vote in 2014, the Republican candidate leads by just 5 points (41 percent to 46 percent.)…Seniors are now much less likely to identify with the Republican Party. On Election Day in 2010, the Republican Party enjoyed a net 10 point party identification advantage among seniors (29 percent identified as Democrats, 39 percent as Republicans). As of last month, Democrats now had a net 6 point advantage in party identification among seniors (39 percent to 33 percent)…–More than half (55 percent) of seniors say the Republican Party is too extreme, half (52 percent) say it is out of touch, and half (52 percent) say the GOP is dividing the country.”
Brent Roderick’s “Identify and Reach Senior Citizen Voters” at the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) ArcWatch focuses on a “geospatial” approach to segmenting America’s nearly 40 million eligible voters over 65. Rooted in “the theory that people seek and live near others with the same tastes, lifestyles, and behaviors,” ESRI helps clients target such senior segments as “Prosperous Empty Nesters,” “Rust Belt Retirees,” “Senior Sun Seekers” and the “Social Security Set.” Hey, it might be fun to look at “Aquarian Elders” (older hippies).

E. J. Dionne, Jr. sheds light on the Colorado recall of two state senators who supported modest gun safety laws: “[Colorado state Senate President John} Morse also cautioned proponents of stricter gun laws around the country not to read too much into a low-turnout election. He stressed the impact of a court decision that effectively barred mail-in ballots in the contests. Since 70 percent of Coloradans normally vote by mail, the ruling gave the highly energized opponents of the law a leg up. The latest count showed that Morse was defeated by only 343 votes, although Giron’s margin of defeat was wider.”
You knew progressives opposed making Larry Summers the new Fed chair, but “Wall Street types and business economists” too? According to Tim Mullaney’s report on a USA TODAY survey, “56% of the 42 economists said they preferred Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen for the top job. Conservatives who favor a good sound business administration wanted the quiet, liberal academic Yellen because she’s closely identified with easy-money policies that have served Wall Street well.”
Nothing glazes the eyes over so quickly as discussions of the intricacies of budget battles, critically important though they are to the quality of life experienced by millions of Americans. At Huffpo Sam Stein’s “Democrats Torn Over Strategy For Government Shutdown Fight” explores the debate over the budget baseline and the concerns of progressives about setting the bar too low. “Our argument is that it should not be ok to accept this spending level, not even in the short run,” said Michael Linden, Managing Director for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress…”It seems to me it would be a real mistake for Democrats to help Republicans pass something that basically endorses the sequester … the continuing resolution should be agnostic on the sequester…”
From Susan Page’s USA Today report on the latest Pew Poll on Obamacare: “There has been a full-court press from Day One from the opposition to characterize and demonize the plan,” says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, who wrote about the GOP efforts in a 2012 book about Washington he co-authored, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. “The campaign against the law after it was enacted, the range of steps taken, the effort to delegitimize it — it is unprecedented. We’d probably have to go back to the nullification efforts of the Southern states in the pre-Civil War period to find anything of this intensity.”
Bloomberg’s Ford Vox, a physician at at the Shepherd Center for brain and spinal-cord injury in Atlanta, has a devastating portrait of Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s war on Obamacare, which leaves 650,000 citizens of his state without any help getting health care coverage. Vox writes that “Deal is leading the bandwagon of largely Southern state leaders in blocking implementation of the health-care law,” even though “Georgia’s governor was for state-based health-insurance exchanges before he was against them” and “he declared that it was his “hope” that the committee would find a way for the state to so. His change of heart came in November 2012, after Real PAC started raking in large donations from the health-care industry.”
But Devin Leonard’s BloombergBusinessweek Politics & Policy post on “Obamacare’s Corporate Boosters” includes some good news for those who see Obamacare as a positive step toward separating health security from employers: “…As the House GOP continues to push the line that Obamacare is bad for America and bad for business, some of the nation’s largest employers are undermining the message. Bloomberg News reports that General Electric (GE) plans to curtail benefits for some of its retirees and move them into government-run health-care exchanges. More recently, IBM (IBM) and Time Warner (TWX) said they would steer some of their retirees into privately run health-care exchanges. How long will it be before they simply give their employees a yearly check and let them shop for coverage on government-run exchanges?”
Lauren Fox’s US News post “In Montana, Democrats Might Have Found Their Guy” addresses Dems’ prospects for holding the senate seat being vacated by retiring Max Baucus: “Several Democrats in the state confirm John Walsh, Montana’s lieutenant governor, is now the top recruit who will make his final decision in upcoming weeks. He spent time in Washington this week meeting with party leaders…Walsh, a member of the Montana National Guard, an Iraq War veteran and a bronze star recipient, breaks a lot of stereotypes…”It’s an exciting turn of events,” one Democratic operative says. “You look at John Walsh and you see a salt of the earth leader. He’s not a politician. Montanans like that.”
At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky explains why you get creeped out when Republican leaders talk about the Administration’s Syria policy: “…I’m not very interested in being lectured that Bashar al-Assad has no real intention of giving up his chemical weapons by the very same people who a decade ago were pushing this country into war–and having the deranged gall to call the rest of us unpatriotic–on the argument that there was no possible way a monster like Saddam Hussein had given up his chemical weapons. Barack Obama has been forced to spend about 70 percent of his presidential energies trying to repair crises foreign and domestic that these people created, and forced to do so against their iron opposition on all fronts; and now that he’s achieved a diplomatic breakthrough, they have the audacity to argue that he sold America out to Vladimir Putin? It’s staggering and sickening.”
What’s this, tentative expressions of, gasp, hope from a couple of Republicans that President Obama’s Syria policy will turn out well? Writing in the New York Times, Michael D. Shear quotes Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee: “It’s hard for anybody to pooh-pooh the idea that we may be on the way to a diplomatic solution.” Republican, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin says “I hope it works out. I truly do. If he succeeds with this framework, people have to give him credit.”

Steve Benen’s “Revenge is a dish best served coherent” at Maddowblog explains what the Republicans and their media minions are too warped to admit. Responding to a post at The Hill entitled “Putin gets his revenge on Obama,” Benen writes:

Let’s take stock of what happened this week: (1) the United States threatened Syria, a Russian ally, over its use of chemical weapons; (2) Syria then vowed to give up its chemical weapons; and (3) Russia has committed itself to the diplomatic process the United States wants, which is intended to guarantee the success of the Syrian disarmament plan.
So, Obama, at least for now, ended up with what he wanted, which was then followed with more of what he wanted. If this is Putin exacting revenge, I suspect the White House doesn’t mind.

Benen acknowledges that Putin’s op-ed made a splash, although the significance of it was overstated in the melodramatic headline. As Benen puts it, “I don’t imagine President Obama was reading the NYT with breakfast yesterday, telling those around him, “Putin wrote a newspaper piece? And it chides the United States? I’ve been foiled by my strategic better! Curses!”
The GOP spin machine shifted into overdrive, whining about having “to take our leadership from Mr. Putin,” as House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon put it. Benen responds:

The U.S. told Russia we intend to do something about the threat posed by Syria’s chemical weapons; Russia is now working on helping eliminate that threat. In what way does the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee sees Americans taking our leadership from Putin?

Of course no Republican spin du jour would be complete without an even more melodramatic contribution from Peggy Noonan, who wrote that Putin “twisted the knife and gloated, which was an odd and self-indulgent thing to do when he was winning.”
Benen reiterates for the reality-challenged that “the possibility that the Obama White House is actually achieving its strategic goals with these developments is apparently unimportant — Noonan and other Republicans are too overwhelmed by the belief that Putin got his revenge by writing an unpersuasive and inconsequential op-ed in a newspaper.”
Benen also notes “the right’s increasingly creepy affections for Putin.” He sees “the elements of a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts — the right decided in advance that Obama’s rival must be impressive because he’s Obama rival, so they work backwards to make their thesis look more impressive.”
Benen adds that “Tucker Carlson heralded Putin for “riding to President Obama’s rescue” while Russia “humiliates the United States.” Charles Krauthammer added that it’s Putin’s government that’s “playing chess here with a set of rank amateurs.” Now, explains Benen, “every development is then filtered through the conservative prism that says Putin is President Tough Guy Leadership. The Russian gently rebuked the U.S. in an op-ed? Then conservatives must be right about Putin’s impressiveness!”
Putin’s macho hangups notwithstanding, he didn’t get where he is by being stupid. He knows that forcing Obama into a corner where he has to strike Syria could be his downfall as well. Further, he has no reason to think that helping the Republicans, who are held hostage by tea party lunacy, would be good for Russia. He has carefully crafted what looks like a win-win scenario. In chess terms, he looked at the board and concluded that, in this case, a draw is a win. The smarter Republicans know this and they are livid.
It’s all a silly twist on Rove’s dictum that Republicans must hit Democrats where they are strongest. But it’s an increasingly tough sell, as unfolding developments make the President’s strategy look savvy. As Benen concludes, “this might be more persuasive if Obama weren’t getting exactly what he wants right now.”

CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser reports that, “With the clock ticking towards two crucial deadlines, a new national poll indicates congressional Republicans would shoulder more blame than President Barack Obama for a possible government shutdown.” Steinhauser continues, “Only a third would consider President Barack Obama responsible for a shutdown, with 51% pointing a finger at the GOP – up from 40% who felt that way earlier this year,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.”
Those who believe that political ads don’t matter much should read Michael Barbaro’s New York Times article about “The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race.”
According to Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, “An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide…The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes…And it made grants of $236 million – meaning a totally unknown group was the largest sugar daddy for conservative groups in the last election, second in total spending only to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together spent about $300 million.”
In his New York Times column, “That Threat Worked,” Nicholas D. Kristof credits President Obama with sound strategy in asking for support for military strikes in Syria. Kristof argues, “while it seems that neither Congress nor the public has any appetite for cruise missile strikes on Syria, it will be critical to keep the military option alive in the coming weeks or Russia and Syria will play us like a yo-yo.”
We knew the gender gap was a major factor in presidential elections. But now Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley report at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “We went back and looked at hundreds of exit polls since 2004 in presidential and Senate races and found that 87.5% of statewide Senate and presidential races featured a clear gender gap, which on account of poll error we are defining as the Democratic candidate doing at least three net percentage points better with women than with men.”
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas is running a symposium on “middle-out economics,” exploring theory and policies based on the idea: “Where conservatives say investing in the top 1 percent drives growth, we say that investing in the broad middle does it.”
Steven Greenhouse and Jonathan Martin of the New York Times shed light on labor union problems with Obamacare. The authors quote Terence M. O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union, who explained “If the Affordable Care Act is not fixed and it destroys the health and welfare funds that we have fought for and stand for, then I believe it needs to be repealed…We don’t want it to be repealed. We want it to be fixed, fixed, fixed.”
PPP’s Tom Jensen has an interesting take on the PPP polling mess, flagged by Dave Nir of Daily Kos: “We did a poll last weekend in Colorado Senate District 3 and found that voters intended to recall Angela Giron by a 12 point margin, 54/42. In a district that Barack Obama won by almost 20 points I figured there was no way that could be right and made a rare decision not to release the poll. It turns out we should have had more faith in our numbers because she was indeed recalled by 12 points…What’s interesting about our poll is that it didn’t find the gun control measures that drove the recall election to be that unpopular. Expanded background checks for gun buyers had 68/27 support among voters in the district, reflecting the overwhelming popularity for that we’ve found across the country…And voters were evenly divided on the law limiting high capacity ammunition magazines to 15 bullets, with 47% supporting and 47% opposing it. If voters were really making their recall votes based on those two laws, that doesn’t point to recalling Giron by a 12 point margin…We did find on the poll though that voters in the district had a favorable opinion of the NRA by a 53/33 margin. And I think when you see the final results what that indicates is they just did a good job of turning the election more broadly into do you support gun rights or are you opposed to them.”
From the Gallup Poll conducted September 5-8: “…The 48% who name an economic issue as most important problem is down from 63% in the first month of this year. And, as Congress reconvenes to debate issues related to the nation’s debt and deficit, anxiety related to these issues has fallen dramatically…” Despite the Syria crisis, writes Gallup’s Andrew Dugan, “Nonetheless, the economy in general remains the No. 1 U.S. problem according to Americans, followed by jobs and unemployment, dissatisfaction with government, and healthcare.”

The responses to President Obama’s speech on intervention in Syria from pundits and politicos left and right have been predictable enough thus far. But this Washington Post op-ed from a politically-moderate former president and Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter, who kept the U.S. out of war, should be of interest:

It is no reflection on the president that he expressed his decision clearly to our citizens and to the world, properly sought congressional concurrence and has done his utmost to implement his decision by securing necessary votes in the House and Senate. All U.S. presidents have been forced to endure highly publicized rejections of major proposals concerning both domestic and international issues. This is to be expected in any democratic nation, as has occurred recently in Britain and might soon happen in France.
…The international community should take concerted action to discourage or prevent a repetition of this crime. Although Security Council condemnation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is not possible because of division among world leaders about who is responsible for the atrocity, and a strong condemnatory resolution is likely to be vetoed, the ultimate goal of deterring future use of weapons of mass destruction would be greatly enhanced if the major powers were unanimous in their commitment.

In an interview with NPR’s Michelle Martin, former World Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo offered this observation and suggestion:

I think it’s very important that President Obama took a firm stand. Without that energy – without that will – nothing would happen today. In the last month, nothing happened. So that’s first point – very important President Obama moving. What the world will do what the Obama administration should do is to discuss it. The idea that something should be done is the first point….
…My idea is use the International Criminal Court as a future threat. So my idea is tell me all the actors, because it’s not just Assad. People say it’s Al Qaeda – other groups committing crimes, OK. Everyone, the idea will be you have to understand from the first of January 2014, the International Criminal Court will investigate any crimes. So, stop the crimes now or you will be prosecuted.
And to make this threat serious, we have to say and we will enforce the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. Whoever is indicted will be arrested and we will find a way to arrest them. So that could make the difference. That I think could happen….The way to include the International Criminal Court is a Security Council resolution. The U.N. Security Council could decide. So the idea I’m discussing is, if the U.N. Security Council decide to do it in the next three months – so we will start the adjudication in three months – then you create a different environment because if you’re not stopping the crimes, you go to jail. And people in Syria are committing crimes to gain power. So if they know they go to jail, they will stop…
…What I saw as a prosecutor, when the world is united, they can stop the crimes. If China, Russia, U.S. and everyone is united, they can stop the crimes in Syria. So we have to build this community. And in some way, President Obama triggered this new moment. We have to take advantage of the moment.

What is interesting about Ocampo’s idea is the notion that the threat of punishment for atrocities, when grounded in solid international commitment, could be more powerful than punishment itself in preventing future use of chemical weapons. It would also set a precedent that could help deter future tyrants from gassing civilians.
It’s easy enough to be cynical about Russia and China doing the right thing regarding chemical weapons in Syria. But it’s hard to see a successful outcome without their support. Both nations stand to benefit from stability in Syria.
Credit Ocampo also with the insight that, despite all of the Obama-bashing going on from the right and the left regarding his threat to Assad, the President has raised the dialogue to a new understanding that “something should be done.” The Republicans will never give him due credit for it, but the stage is now being set for diplomatic progress and creative conflict-resolution, two alien concepts for their party.

Brookings senior fellows William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck have a good read at The Washington Post, (adapted from their article in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas “How to save the Republican Party, courtesy of two Democrats.” the authors explain why even good Democrats should care about making the Republican party better: “…Our democracy is better off with two healthy political parties willing to debate fiercely — and then reach honorable compromises. A Republican Party dominated by a new generation of reform-minded conservatives who care more about solving problems than scoring points would be a huge step toward restoring a federal government that can govern….”
Steven Greenhouse has a NYT update on organized labor’s two-pronged approach toward enhancing unions growth and influence: experimenting with different levels of membership and a more energetic effort to build coalitions for political change.
Also in the Post, George Will predictably snarls, along with the higher-brow Hillary-haters, at another Clinton candidacy. But he gets in a potent dig at the prospect of a Christie presidency, riffing of an incident in which the NJ governor got down and dirty with a NY Daily News sportswriter. “But who wants to call the person “Mr. President” who calls a sportswriter an “idiot”?,” asks Will. Put another way, do voters really want to be reped by a bellowing gasbag at future G-20 summits? “So’s yer muddah, Putin.”
At the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein’s “Bad Bet: Why Republicans Can’t Win With Whites Alone” notes an often overlooked point: “Greenberg, who polled for Bill Clinton, says Obama faces unique problems among whites both because of his race and the gruelingly slow economic recovery. “Those things together make me think these white numbers [for Democrats] are not the new baseline–that they are much more likely to go up than down,” he says…Veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres is no less dismissive. “Any strategy that is predicated on [consistently] getting a higher percentage of the white vote than Ronald Reagan got in 1980 is a losing strategy,” he says.”
Yes, every effort toward bipartisanship by House GOP leaders should be encouraged. But, as Keith Brekhus points out at PoliticusUSA that the failure of House Republicans to support Speaker Boehner and Majoritry Leader Cantor on the Syria resolution provides yet another example of their limp leadership. Says Brekhus: “…They have demonstrated that they have lost control of their own caucus, because the number of GOP representatives who have chosen to join them in support of the policy can almost be counted on one hand. Of the 232 House Republicans not named Cantor or Boehner, a grand total of six of them, have joined in expressing support for the authorization of force in Syria…as the mutiny spreads within the GOP ranks, Boehner and Cantor are spiraling deeper and deeper into political irrelevancy.”
At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky spotlights the “brazen hypocrisy” of Republicans on U.S. military intervention in Syria, noting “The Gold Weasel Medal goes to Marco Rubio, as others such as Tim Noah have noted. Back in April, Rubio thundered that “the time for passive engagement in this conflict must come to an end. It is in the vital national security interest of our nation to see Assad’s removal.” Removal! Obama’s not talking about anything close to removal. So that was Rubio’s hard line back when Obama was on the other side. And now that Obama wants action? Rubio voted against the military resolution in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.”
Nobel prize for Economics laureate Joseph E. Stglitz makes a strong case for Janet Yellen to head the Fed, including his belief that she does not suffer from “cognitive capture” by Wall St. and he adds, “Ms. Yellen has a superb record in forecasting where the economy is going — the best, according to The Wall Street Journal, of anyone at the Fed. As I noted earlier, Mr. Summers’s leaves something to be desired.”
Credit President Obama with overseeing significant progress toward energy independence for the U.S. As Bill Scher writes at Campaign for America’s Future: “In many ways President Obama’s energy policies have been a huge success. Carbon emissions are down. Oil consumption is down. Renewable energy consumption is up. North America is projected to be effectively energy independent by 2020, and the United States by 2030.” On the other hand, adds Scher, “renewables still amount to a paltry portion of our overall energy usage, with wind and solar power producing only three percent of the nation’s electricity. In other words, this is the area that has the most room to grow, the most potential for creating green jobs and further slashing our carbon pollution.”
Yikes, now they want to privatize the money.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has made a fairly strong argument against U.S. military intervention in Syria. From his blog, via Reader Supported News:

Even if the President musters enough votes to strike Syria, at what political cost? Any president has a limited amount of political capital to mobilize support for his agenda, in Congress and, more fundamentally, with the American people. This is especially true of a president in his second term of office. Which makes President Obama’s campaign to strike Syria all the more mystifying.
President Obama’s domestic agenda is already precarious: implementing the Affordable Care Act, ensuring the Dodd-Frank Act adequately constrains Wall Street, raising the minimum wage, saving Social Security and Medicare from the Republican right as well as deficit hawks in the Democratic Party, ending the sequester and reviving programs critical to America’s poor, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and, above all, crafting a strong recovery.
Time and again we have seen domestic agendas succumb to military adventures abroad – both because the military-industrial-congressional complex drains money that might otherwise be used for domestic goals, and because the public’s attention is diverted from urgent problems at home to exigencies elsewhere around the globe.

Reich goes on to add, quite rightly that “a strike on Syria may well cause more havoc in that tinder-box region of the world by unleashing still more hatred for America, the West, and for Israel, and more recruits to terrorism. Strikes are never surgical; civilians are inevitably killed. Moreover, the anti-Assad forces have shown themselves to be every bit as ruthless as Assad, with closer ties to terrorist networks.”
Reich deplores Assad’s use of chemical weapons, but warns against the U.S. getting bogged down in a “slippery slope,” which almost always accompanies military action that purports to be limited.
Reich is a good writer, and his points are well-stated. Regarding his concern about squandering Obama’s “limited amount of political capital,” needed to advance his domestic agenda, however, Ed Kilgore has an instructive post on “Obama’s ‘Political Capital‘” up at Washington Monthly, in which he observes:

…Seriously, what sort of “political capital” does the president have with congressional Republicans? They committed to a policy of total obstruction from the day he became president and picked up right where they had left off the day he was re-elected. Obama’s only options in dealing with the GOP are to offer them cover for compromise when he must and hand them an anvil to speed their self-destruction when he can. But he has no “political capital” to spend.

A good point. Another problem with Reich’s argument is that he offers no suggestions for alternative action. Is doing nothing about atrocities with chemical weapons really our best option? Nothing?
Part of the argument against military intervention is well-stated by Reich and other writers. But, the anti-interventionist argument could use a little more heft. There may indeed be nonviolent alternatives, and perhaps some input by leading nonviolent strategists like Dr. Gene Sharp could open up the dialogue. Certainly the Syrian resistance to Assad could benefit by applying some of Sharp’s ideas, as did the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising in 2010-11. In the future, at least, the U.S. could invest in training pro-democracy movements in nonviolent strategy and action.

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.