As one of the most effective obstacles to social and economic progress in the U.S., the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has introduced a range of reactionary bills in the nation’s state legislatures, which bash immigrants, suppress voting rights, gut social programs and meddle with women’s reproductive rights, to name a few of their priorities. Regretfully, many of these bills have become law.
A number of progressive organizations have opposed these measures and fought against ALEC’s initiatives with mixed success. Unfortunately, millions of people have suffered because of ALEC-sponsored laws. What has been needed is a concerted effort, a coalition of progressive groups, working together to defend their hard-won legislative gains and put an end to ALEC’s reign. As Katrina vanden Heuval reports in her WaPo op-ed “Deepening the progressive bench.”:

While conservatives are skilled puppeteers, progressives are great at mobilizing people and channeling energy for the big fights, whether it’s putting the crisis of income inequality at center stage, or even electing a progressive president. But ALEC’s astonishing influence exposes the progressive Achilles’ heel: a lack of a similarly entrenched, nationwide infrastructure of state and local policymakers and advocates that can create and support lasting change.
…The progressive movement needs to build a bench that can play offense at the grassroots, local, state and national levels, and one that is positioned to pull every lever of power in our multi-layered political system. Without that, for every big union busting bill defeated, or every progressive president elected, there still will be hundreds of right-wing initiatives percolating through the political system, eroding our rights and unraveling our hard-earned progress.

Despite the ongoing threat of ALEC’s efforts to repeal and reverse progressive legislative gains at the state level, there is now reason for hope, as vanden Heuval explains:

“People are now looking to do what the right has done so effectively — coordinating ideas, narratives, legislators and activists to really push in a progressive direction,” says New York City councilman and Progressive Caucus co-chair Brad Lander. The good news is that this is already happening, resulting in key wins on paid sick leave, the minimum wage and gay and lesbian equality at the state and local levels…
It was in this spirit that Lander met earlier this month with other progressive city leaders from across the country, key allies and groups like Progressive States Network, New Bottom Line and PolicyLink, to discuss the creation of a national network focused on promoting local progressive action by sharing and spreading great legislative ideas. This budding network joins established organizations like the Center for American Progress, Working Families Party, Progressive Majority, and Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
At the same time, Progressive Majority director Gloria Totten and a range of allies are pursuing a complementary project called the Elected Officials Alliance to coordinate state lawmakers across issue and organizational lines. Ultimately, the goal is to link state and local officials to policy organizations, like the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN). All of these groups are aiming to build a counterforce to ALEC.
On the policy front, the centerpiece of the effort is an initiative called the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE), started by Center on Wisconsin Strategy director Joel Rogers. ALICE would offer model laws for both state and local legislators and support citizen-directed efforts like ballot initiatives, all based on the values of equity, sustainability and responsible government.

Once again it’s people power vs. right-wing money, and progressives are today launching a new initiative, “the 99 Percent Spring, a new movement led by a huge coalition of progressive organizations — from MoveOn.org to the UAW” planning to train 100,000 people in nonviolent action “to tell the true story of how the one percent’s financial excess and political abuse destroyed our economy.”
As vanden Heuval concludes “…Political leaders move to where the energy is. If we want to see lasting progressive change, we need to inject that energy, driven by ideas and strategy, into every level of the process. That’s what the growing networks of progressive legislators and the 99 Percent Spring are positioned to do.”
To find out more about the ’99 % Spring,’ click here.

Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, has a HuffPo article, “You Don’t Mean a Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing,” underscoring the point that presidential campaigns are not just about swing voters; they are about swing voters in swing states. As Kaplan explains:

Based on history and polling, Democrats can probably count on winning 14 states in November, for 182 electoral votes. (Those are Cook Political Report numbers, which most insiders cite, and they’ll change between now and the election, but as a snapshot, it’s close enough.) Republicans can probably count on 23 states, for 191 electoral votes, though some people think Arizona (11 electoral votes) without John McCain on the ticket is also up for grabs.
So ignore national polls. It’s only the 14 or 15 remaining states that really matter to campaigns. If you don’t live in one of them, your local airwaves won’t be carpet-bombing you with presidential attack ads, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney won’t be heading your way unless there’s money to be raised. Sure, they’ll have field offices in every solid and likely state, and they’ll say they’re taking nothing for granted, complacency is their biggest enemy, blah blah blah, but it’s not your vote they’ll be ardently wooing.
About 50 million presidential ballots were cast in the 15 swing states in 2008. By October, it’s a good guess that the voting populations in those states will be closely divided, with Romney and Obama each getting about 45 percent. It’s the 5 million lucky duckies who say they don’t know who they’ll vote for in November who’ll be getting the most campaign love.

Targeting those 5 million swingers in swing states is not so easy, so presidential campaigns target “subsets,” as Kaplan explains:

…The Obama campaign, for example, has scenarios that start with the 246 electoral votes that John Kerry won in 2004, and then to reach 270, they have a “west path” (add Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Iowa); a “south path” (add North Carolina and Virginia); a “midwest path” (add Ohio and Iowa); and a Florida path.
Sure, there’ll be an intense effort by both sides to mobilize the highest percentage of their partisans in those states that they can. But getting 50.1 percent of the swing voters is the name of the game. In a big state like Florida, that’s around 420,000 people. But in Colorado, 125,000 voters may swing the election; in Iowa, about 75,000; in New Mexico, fewer than 45,000; in New Hampshire, fewer than 4,000. You get the idea. The presidential election could easily be decided by a crowd that wouldn’t fill the Rose Bowl.

As for the swing states swingers, Kaplan notes that they are not necessarily “ideologically centrist” and “their views are all over the map.” Many are emphatically not political junkies. “Unlike you, that’s not their idea of a good time.” But they are persuadable. Hence the never-ending search for messages that will resonate with them, especially in the final weeks of the campaign when most of them start tuning in.
Kaplan doesn’t say so directly, but he suggests that many of these highly-prized swing voters are, in fact, low-information voters. That raises the possibility that campaign resources might be better deployed in turning out the base.

A lot of people have been weighing in on the new Third Way study that contrasts a “fairness” agenda with an “opportunity” agenda and — not surprisingly — comes down hard in favor of the latter.
Ed Kilgore has two posts up at the Washington Monthly about this poll today and Jonathan Bernstein has one at the Daily Plum cleverly titled “Beware of “Swing Independents” bearing deficit reduction.”
I’ll just add one quick point here that has not been made elsewhere: last year a vast amount of polling was concerned with the debate between “deficit reduction” and “jobs” or “job creation.” In that polling and the related discusssion, this dichotomy was seen as the critical policy choice and political issue.
In the new Third Way poll, however, the issue of jobs has disappeared. The dichotomy is between “fairness” and “opportunity” — and the “opportunity” side of the ledger includes “economic growth” which is as close as the study gets to raising the issue of employment.
So all of a sudden it’s as if the vast debate of last year never happened nor did Obama’s shift in the fall to a more populist focus on jobs. When progressives were insisting that the focus should be on jobs, they were challenged by those who said dealing with deficits was more important. Now that the employment picture is improving and Obama is gaining support on the issue, job creation suddenly disappears from the list of issues championed by progressives against deficit-prioritizing centrists.
It’s hard not to feel that the terms of the debate are being subtly switched in the middle of the argument and that when progressives prove to be right on a particular issue, it’s suddenly edited out of the debate.

GOP political strategists Ed Goeas and Ed Gillespie have a memo, “The Disillusioned Obama Young Voter” which merits consideration by Dems charged with formulating a strategy to secure a strong pro-Obama youth vote in November. As the authors explain:

As part of our Target Voter Series, Resurgent Republic sponsored four focus groups among Generation-Y voters ages 23 to 30 in Raleigh, North Carolina and Columbus, Ohio. These voters self-identified as Independents, voted for President Obama in 2008, but are undecided on the generic presidential ballot today. Conducted by The Tarrance Group, the focus groups were split between voters ages 23 to 26 (those in college or new to the workforce in 2008) and 27 to 30 years old (those beginning their professional career in 2008).
In 2008, President Obama won two-thirds of 18-to-29 year olds (66 to 32
percent). This was following President Bush’s 9-point disadvantage among this age group against John Kerry in 2004 (45 to 54 percent) and a near tie between President Bush and Al Gore in 2000 (46 to 48 percent). Despite President Obama’s strong performance in 2008, young voters today tend to be the most negative about the direction of the country. Indeed, recent public polling reports 68 percent of 18-to-29 year old voters think the country is headed on the wrong track – a higher percentage than supported Obama four years ago

The authors concede that “young voters’ ongoing frustration does not mean that they will outright abandon Obama, as was evident in the Ohio groups, but it should call into question their reliability to turnout for him this November barring any changes.” They cite the differences in unemployment experienced by youth in Ohio and North Carolina and note a litany of predictable economic concerns shared by the young voters.
Looking toward the future, Gillespie and Goeas see trouble ahead for Dems regarding young voter concerns about rising gas prices and “a candidate who presents a solid plan backed with substantive change.” They may be overstating the case since other polls show President Obama enjoying solid support from young voters. But the memo serves as an informative preview of the GOP’s coming campaign to win/neutralize a critical mass of young voters.

James Hohmann has a perceptive post up at Politico, which sheds some light on the presidential preferences of swing voters. Noting a new poll of “swing Independents” in a dozen ‘battleground states’ by Global Strategy for Third Way, Hohmann explains:

The majority of those who call themselves politically independent typically lean toward one major party or the other, but about 15 percent of the total electorate (roughly 40 percent of independents) are thought to authentically swing between parties.
Obama won 57 percent of this group in 2008. In this poll, which took place in mid-March, he led Romney 44 percent to 38 percent. those who prioritize growth and ‘opportunity’ against those who prioritize redistribution and ‘fairness.’
Yet when asked to assign a number on a scale of one to nine (one being liberal, nine being conservative and five being moderate), the swing independents put themselves at an average of 5.2 — slightly right of center — ranking Romney at 6.1 and Obama at 3.9.

Hohmann ads that “Obama is viewed favorably by 57 percent. Only 41 percent of the swing independents said the same for Romney.” But he also notes an edge in generic ballot for Republicans over Democrats and a 39-35 percent margin favoring Republicans among “swing independents.” Hohmann also discusses the differences over Democratic messaging among “those who prioritize growth and ‘opportunity’ against those who prioritize redistribution and ‘fairness.'” Hohmann explains further,

The independents were angriest about congressional gridlock, the national debt and Wall Street bailouts — in that order. But a higher percentage said they were “worried” about the next generation’s ability to achieve the American Dream and America falling behind its global competitors than Wall Street bailouts.
…In surveys and focus groups, Third Way has consistently found that independents in the battlegrounds see “fairness” differently than elites inside the Beltway. Asked what was “the most fair” of three options, 36 percent of swing independents said making the wealthy pay higher taxes, 33 percent said making everyone pay a flat tax and 27 percent said it would be fairest to make everyone (no matter how little they earned) pay something in taxes.
Asked whether fixing the budget deficit or reducing the income gap is more important, swing independents preferred the former 57 percent to 38 percent. Even emphasizing that the focus on income inequality is “to help the middle class” did little to move to the needle in the poll.

Hohmann quotes Lanae Erickson, the deputy director of Third Way’s social policy and politics program, who says of President Obama “He really needs to pivot and make sure that he’s focused on the opportunity message much, much more than the fairness message if he’s going to get it heard by these folks.”

Krugman has a well-titled must-read, “The Gullible Center” for all your friends who identify themselves as “centrists” and worship at the church of false equivalence. Among Krugman’s insightful observations: “…Centrists should be lavishing praise on the leading politician who best fits that description — a fellow named Barack Obama…But the “centrists” who weigh in on policy debates are playing a different game. Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties — even if these reasonable people don’t actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.”
The Economist shreds the “slippery slope” arguments against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, interestingly enough from a conservative point of view.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s “Obama levels straight shots at Supreme Court and Ryan budget” has a spot-on comment regarding Obama’s Spring offensive, noting, “Progressives would be wildly irresponsible if they sat by quietly while a conservative Supreme Court majority undid 80 years of jurisprudence. Roosevelt wasn’t a wimp, and Obama has decided that he won’t be one, either. Conservatives are unhappy because they prefer passive, intimidated liberals to the fighting kind.”
Chris Cillizza quotes Democratic pollster Dave Beattie: “A common thread that reflects this populism is the anger at out-of-control big government echoed by the tea party and the anger at out-of-control big business echoed by the Occupy movement,” said Dave Beattie, a Democratic pollster. “The commonality of ‘anti-big’ ties both together.” Except true populism recognizes that “Big government” is more of a political hallucination with respect to the U.S., compared to other industrial democracies.
Wanna help expose the funding behind Super-PAC’s? ProPublica has a way you can do it.
Dems will be encouraged by a Demos report, “Corporations Under Pressure To Curb Political Spending,” noting that Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Kraft have dumped their memberships in ALEC thanks to a corporate accountability campaign led by Color of Change and revelations that ALEC is behind the “stand your ground laws.” A “Shareholder Spring” lies ahead, with actions at Bank of America, Target, Sallie Mae, 3M, and other companies.
I get Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Emanuel Cleaver’s point that amped-up rhetoric like “War on Women’ can turn off some potential swing voters, but I think it’s more for women to decide if it’s too much of an exaggeration. But there’s not much room for doubt that GOP policies contribute to violence toward women.
David M. Shribman’s “The Republican political battles you cannot see” in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette takes a peek at the ‘class struggle’ inside the GOP between the ‘managerial wing’ and the ‘movement conservatives.’ He also notes the internal contradiction of a party “chary of government involvement in the economy but open to government restrictions in social and cultural life,” a bit of a problem for libertarian-leaning Republicans.
Here we go with Romney’s bogus march to the political center. Thomas B. Edsall’s “Romney the Centrist” at the NYT has an analysis.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
If the Supreme Court overturns key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, it will precipitate the largest confrontation between the Court and a president since the mid-1930s. Yes, the Court prevented Truman from seizing the steel mills and forced Nixon to give up the tapes. But in those instances the decision ended the controversy because the President chose not to prolong it.
Not so this time: President Obama has signaled his intention to make the Court a central issue in the fall campaign if it guts his signature policy achievement. Although this may be a shrewd short-term political calculation, it raises troubling questions about a president’s broader responsibilities to the constitutional order he is sworn to uphold.
There are good reasons why, if Obamacare is indeed overturned, it would be tempting for the President to mount an all-out attack on the Court in the presidential campaign. First, defeat typically energizes the losers more than victory does the winners. A negative decision by the Court would enrage liberals who have been lukewarm about the ACA and the Obama presidency. And the president would have no trouble channeling this renewed passion toward electoral mobilization.
Second–and more fundamentally–the American people have soured on the Court. Surveys done in the past two years find that three quarters of the respondents believe that justices’ political and ideological views sometimes influence their decisions. The Gallup trend question–“Do you approve or disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job?”–shows a 15-point decline, from 61 percent to 46 percent, in public approval of the Court since mid-2009. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released last month found only 23 percent of the people expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Supreme Court, versus 30 percent in the presidency (and only 6 percent in Congress). In other words, the Court is vulnerable to political attack.
But there are times when a president should refrain from exploiting a political opening, and this is one of them. The polarization of our politics has already produced a governance crisis; ours is a political system that finds it increasingly difficult even to perform routine functions, let alone agree on solutions to large problems. The inability to act decisively has gotten so bad, in fact, that it verges on a legitimacy crisis as well. The American people have withdrawn their trust from nearly all our governing institutions, and most believe that the government officially based on “We the people” responds instead to a myriad of narrow special interests.
An all-out attack by Obama on the Court, and its institutional role in American public life, would only make things worse–especially if it is framed in terms appropriated from his adversaries. On Monday, the President echoed conservatives’ long-standing critique of “judicial activism,” referred to the justices as an “unelected group of people,” and characterized the overturning of a law passed by a “democratically elected Congress” as an “unprecedented, extraordinary step.”
The president used to teach constitutional law, so he surely knows better. Although justices are nominated and confirmed by elected officials, the founders deliberately insulated the Court from everyday politics. They are “unelected” so they can do their job without being answerable to transient public sentiment. That is because their job is to judge democratically passed laws against constitutional standards and to serve as guardians of those standards, even when it is unpopular. But since judging requires judgment–since it is not mechanical–it is inherently controversial. One person’s judicial activism is another’s constitutional fidelity.
So if the Court does invalidate the individual mandate, Obama should take the conversation in a different direction. He should seize the opportunity to place this constitutional controversy in a broader context–to remind the American people that the substantive political agenda that conservatives are proposing is that of a return to the pre-New Deal era. This is as true of Republicans in Congress, who want to dismantle the welfare state, as it is of the “originalists” in the Supreme Court, who want to abandon the interpretation of the Commerce Clause that became a consensus after 1936 and made possible many of the programs Americans now cherish and take for granted. The 2012 election, he could argue, is a choice not just between two budgets or even two social philosophies, but also between a conception of government adequate to address the problems we face today and a conception that faces backward, not forward. Obama can pay deference to the Court’s prerogative to challenge legislation while attacking the vision of jurisprudence that is currently motivating its interventions.
I sincerely hope that it doesn’t come to this. In my previous column, I urged John Roberts to adopt a view of his role as chief justice that is informed by his responsibility for the legitimacy of the institution over which he presides. Especially in the context of the past decade, another decision split 5-to-4 along ideological lines might well convince the American people that their aspiration for a Court above normal politics is hopelessly naïve. But if that decision comes to pass, it is the president’s responsibility to minimize the damage by speaking to the people’s hopes rather than their fears, to their patriotism rather than their anger. That’s what Obama at his best has always done. And that’s why he was elected.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I wrote a book that came out in early 2009 called, “The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be,” that talked about the history of the American political debate. One of my fundamental arguments was that conservatives are using the same arguments against modern day progress that their ideological ancestors used against the progress we made throughout history. What I underestimated, though, is how fiercely and broadly the modern conservative movement is trying not only to block advances in progress, but to actually roll back the gains of our history. Things that had seemed long settled only a few years back when I wrote that book are now being fought over anew, and not by trivial people on the fringes of our politics but by most of the leaders in the Republican Party.
Over the last couple of years, we have seen the Supreme Court overturn 100 years of precedent in dramatically expanding corporate political power, and have seen Supreme Court Justices imply in oral arguments that Medicaid might be unconstitutional; we have seen leading Republican presidential candidates openly calling for the repeal of child labor laws, argue for letting the states ban contraception, and say that Social Security is unconstitutional and a Ponzi scheme; there was a Republican governor and presidential candidate, Rick Perry, who opened the door to his state seceding from the union; there is a Republican senator who called for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although he later pulled back from that under intense pressure); and the Paul Ryan budget, passed twice by the Republican House and unreservedly endorsed by their presumptive, ends Medicare and Medicaid as we know them, and calls for a 95 percent cut in domestic spending over the next four decades.
This was the stuff of the extremist fringe — the John Birch Society, the militia types, the neo-Confederacy fan boys in the South, the Ayn Rand apostles, the Christian Dominionists — until fairly recently. But this group of outside-the-mainstream ghouls has become the twisted heart and soul of the 2012 Republican Party.
President Obama’s speech this week went after the extremists who control the Republican Party hard, and he nailed it. As a history buff, and someone who wrote at length about the original Social Darwinists in my book, I was glad to see him explicitly tie Ryan and Romney to their Social Darwinist ancestors:

This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether. It is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline.

Just to give you a flavor of the original Social Darwinists, their intellectual founder was British writer Herbert Spencer, who happily applauded the divine right of Kings and “anyone who can get uppermost”. He attacked democratic forms of government, as well as trial by jury, where “12 people of average ignorance” would dare to sit in judgment of great corporations or wealthy people. In the U.S., the leading Social Darwinist was a Yale professor named William Graham Sumner, who said that every society had a choice between only two alternatives: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest” or “un-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.”
It is ironic that the modern Republican Party is a place where most of its adherents reject Charles Darwin’s ideas on science yet have embraced them fully on economics. Here’s the problem, though: Darwin was a scientist, not an economist. His ideas have been accepted, and have thoroughly stood the test of time, in the realm of science. But when applied to economic policy in the U.S. in the 1880-90s, the 1920s, and the Bush era at the turn of this century, they have caused economic depressions and the massive destruction of the middle class every time.
President Obama’s messaging on this is right where it needs to be. This paragraph is beautiful:

In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. That’s how a generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known. That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they made. That’s why research has shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

This is an election where it is very clear that people are going into the voting booth unhappy with the economy and with both parties. For the most part, they aren’t going to have faith in anyone on the ballot, and they aren’t going to be feeling optimistic about winning the future. They are going to need to see a clear contrast. On the one hand, they need to understand just what the Republicans are offering: a Social Darwinist, Ayn Randish future where all the benefits go to the wealthiest, who got that way because they are the “fittest” — where only the wealthy “job producers” get any benefits at all from government. On the other, they need to see Democratic candidates from the presidential level on down who they believe will fight without pause or fear for the middle class and those trying to climb the ladder up into it. From the looks of the president’s speech Tuesday, that is exactly what we will get.