The following post by Democratic strategist James Carville, is cross-posted from the Carville-Greenberg memo:

When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was “the quality of the inmates.” The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but – in my opinion – the Republicans have an inmate problem.
Slightly more sympathetic, my colleague Stan compares the Republicans to an “endangered species.” But we agree that the strange political obsessions of the Republican base – from denying global warming to defending assault weapons – continue to doom any moderate politicians within their party. How should Democrats seize the political opportunity created by Republican extremism?

If Michael Tomasky is right in his Daily Beast post, “Why Republican Efforts to Block Obama Won’t Work This Time,” The Republicans’ long run of fear-driven domination of U.S. politics has nearly run its course. Tomasky cites three factors that will likely prevent them from making a comeback, like they did in 2010:

…The jobless rate is falling at a decent clip, the Fed is evidently strongly committed to getting it down to 6.5 percent, confidence is up, and all the rest of it. Republicans will have no bleak numbers to bleat about. America won’t be doubting Obama’s ability to get results on his most important task. If the positive indicators keep going up, so will Obama’s job approval numbers, and Republicans will find the audience for their economic critiques to be both smaller and less persuadable.
Second, they can’t get away with the just-say-no, Berlin Wall of opposition in the same way they did four years ago. Oh, don’t get me wrong. They’ll still do it. But I don’t think they can get away with it without paying a hefty political price. After four years of no, the party now has the reputation it has rightly earned, as less willing to compromise than Obama, less trusted than he is, and just less well-liked. The broader American public is going have a lot less patience for GOP obstructionism than it did the first time around.
And third, and maybe most of all–the country has changed culturally. Four years ago, conservatives, liberals, and centrists alike all assumed that middle-of-the-road Americans were, while not Dittoheads, pretty conservative by default. Among the political class, this has meant–for pretty much my entire adult lifetime–that your average American was likely to embrace conservative arguments about the culture, and that Democrats had to be crazy to do anything but meekly suggest that they more or less agreed with a caveat or two.
But no more. With each new day that the election recedes into the past, it becomes more and more apparent just what a watershed it was. No, it wasn’t a realignment election according to the standard political science definition. But it was in a way even bigger than that. The election was a cultural watershed moment. All the old dog-whistle tricks, hating on gay people and all that, failed utterly. After decades of struggle and activism and fights and losses for the liberal side, a switch got flipped in November. Middle-of-the-road voters just stopped buying right-wing fear-mongering.

Tomasky goes on to argue that the Republicans will begin to wake up to the reality that they have to compromise on some key issues to survive as a competitive party, or, worse:

Second, they won’t budge. In this case, Obama is not going to be able to steamroll them. They still control the House, and they have a large enough minority in the Senate to filibuster. And history suggests that they’ll probably win some seats in the 2014 elections, especially with more Democratic senators up for reelection than Republicans. But such small victories as they get over Obama will exact a price. The more obstructionist they are–against a newly popular president, riding a decent-to-good economy, trying to pass common-sense proposals that most Americans support, like higher tax rates at the upper-end and reform of the immigration laws–the more they will look, to more and more Americans, like a knot of toads that you wouldn’t want to put in charge of cleaning out the garage, let alone running the country.

Another very possible scenario that could benefit Democrats is a standoff between the toads and the compromisers, leaving the GOP embroiled in internecine warfare, while the Democrats leverage their new unity into a filibuster-proof majority. All three scenarios bode well for the Democrats.

There’s been some commentary in the media about the extra sadness and irony of this latest horrific school shooting coming during the Christmas season, but according to the book of Matthew in the Christian Bible, the first Christmas was one of intense sadness and pain due to unthinkable violence, as well. According to this account, King Herod heard about the birth of a baby prophesied to be “a leader who will shepherd my people Israel,” and he immediately saw this as a potential threat to his family’s, and Rome’s, power. Herod ordered the killing of all male children under the age of two years old. Matthew then refers back to a verse from the prophet Jeremiah:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted
because they were no more.
All Americans with a living heart today are weeping for our children, sobbing and lamenting those beautiful children and their teachers slaughtered in Sandy Hook on Friday. Our little ones are being killed in front of our eyes: why aren’t we doing something to stop it? My weeping is turning into anger, but not only at the NRA and the gun industry (which are as inextricably locked together as the machinery of one of their automatic gun killing machines) and the politicians who worship at their altar, but at Democrats too gutless to lift a finger to try and end the madness.
The ironic thing is that the politics of the gun issue is actually a plus for Democrats willing to take this on. When Bill Clinton pushed through the Brady Bill and the ban on assault rifles in his first term, his vote among rural and small town voters in 1996 actually went up in comparison to 1992. In fact, with the NRA in all-out attack mode and running against a rural state, small town icon Bob Dole, Bill Clinton did better among rural and small town voters than any Democratic candidate since LBJ in the ’64 landslide, and far better than all the Democratic presidential candidates who haven’t mentioned a peep about gun control since.And with the 52 plus majority Obama has gotten twice being overwhelmingly urban/suburban, women and people of color, the gun control issue just doesn’t have the capacity to shave much from a Democratic majority at the national level.
There are a couple of reasons Democrats are so terrified of this issue, and both of them are based far more on fear than fact. One is that the 1994 tide that swept the Democrats out of power after being in control of the House for 40 years did include a lot of Democrats from the South, where the gun issue mattered a lot. But those seats are mostly not coming back anyway, and it is clear that based on the 2006/8 House majorities that we can win a majority in the House, as we can in presidential elections, by winning big in the parts of the country where guns are not only not a negative, but can help us win votes.

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From Bob Herbert’s post, “War at Home” at Demos ‘Policy Shop’: “Our hearts should feel broken every day. A few days after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, in which 32 people were killed, I had lunch with Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund. “We’re losing eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day,” she said. “As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”
Remember the 223-caliber Bushmaster rifle used in the Washington D.C.-area sniper shootings? Same gun was used at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Nate Silver’s “In Public ‘Conversation’ on Guns, a Rhetorical Shift” provides an interesting data-driven analysis of the terminology the media uses to discuss gun control and related issues, noting “Those who advocate greater restrictions on gun ownership may have determined that their most persuasive argument is to talk about the consequences of increased access to guns — as opposed to the weedy debate about what rights the Second Amendment may or may not convey to gun owners.”
Blair Hickman, Suevon Lee and Cora Currier have a good round-up on “The Best Reporting on Guns in America” at ProPublica.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. sounds the call: “If Congress does not act this time, we can deem it as totally bought and paid for by the representatives of gun manufacturers, gun dealers and their very well-compensated apologists…We should begin with: bans on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons; requiring background checks for all gun purchases; stricter laws to make sure that gun owners follow safety procedures; new steps to make it easier to trace guns used in crimes; and vastly ramped-up data collection and research on what works to prevent gun violence, both of which are regularly blocked by the gun lobby.”
Also at WaPo, Brad Plumer explores “Why are mass shootings becoming more common?”
The questions raised in this video clip about the possible role of certain antidepressants and psychiatric drugs merit consideration.
Michael Cooper’s “Debate on Gun Control Is Revived, Amid a Trend Toward Fewer Restrictions” at The New York Times discusses some of the formidable obstacles to enacting meaningful gun control legislation.
At The Nation Sasha Abramsky has a short, but instructive interview with Professor Garen Wintemute, Baker-Teret Chair of Violence Prevention, at the University of California at Davis medical school. Among Wintemute’s suggestions: “…Require a background check for all firearm purchases. Forty percent of gun sales in the U.S. do not involve a background check. Number two, we improve the data on which those background checks are run, so somebody whose mental illness is known in one state, that mental illness is known in all states. Improving the mental health records database would help us identify seriously mentally ill people so that they can’t buy guns…Expand the criteria we now use for denying the purchase and possession of firearms…Under federal law we do not ban people from purchasing firearms for alcohol abuse…We don’t ban people from purchasing firearms who have long records of violent crimes when those crimes are misdemeanors. If I beat my partner, I am prohibited [from gun ownership] for life. If I beat you up, nothing happens; I can buy guns the next day.”
Jamelle Bouie makes the Salient point in his American Prospect article, “Gun Control, No Longer the Dems’ Electoral Kryptonite: Democrats don’t need rural white guys to win anymore.” Says Bouie, “On the presidential level, at least, Democrats don’t need to worry about alienating their coalition…With all of that said, the calculus is different for congressional and state-level Democrats, some of whom can’t afford to alienate traditionally gun-owning groups. But in those cases, of course, the Democratic Party’s flexibility is a big asset.”

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The tragedy in Connecticut forces America to confront a simple question: Why should we allow easy access to a weapon of mass destruction just because it could conceivably be referred to as a “gun”?
I count myself among the many Americans who at various points in their lives have owned and used long guns — hunting rifles and shotguns — for hunting and target shooting. No one I know in politics seriously proposes that ordinary Americans be denied the right to own those kinds of weapons.
But guns used for hunting have nothing in common with assault weapons like the ones that were used last week in the mass murder of 20 first-graders — except the fact that they are referred to “guns.”
Rapid-fire assault weapons with large clips of ammunition have only one purpose: the mass slaughter of large numbers of human beings. They were designed for use by the military to achieve that mission in combat — and that mission alone.
No one argues that other combat weapons like rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) or Stinger Missiles should be widely available to anyone at a local gun shop. Why in the world should we allow pretty much anyone to have easy access to assault weapons?
Every politician in America will tell you they will move heaven and earth to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet we have allowed the ban on this particular weapon of mass destruction to expire. As a result, a terrorist named Adam Lanza was able to have easy access to the assault weapons he used to kill scores of children in minutes.
Let’s be clear, Adam Lanza was a terrorist just as surely as he would have been if we were motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology. It makes no difference to those children or to their grieving families whether their loved ones were killed by someone who was mentally deranged or by someone who believed that by killing children he was helping to destroying the great Satan.
When an individual is willing — or perhaps eager — to die making a big “statement” by killing many of his fellow human beings, it doesn’t matter what their motivation is. It does matter whether they have easy access to the weapons that make mass murder possible.
And after last week, can anyone seriously question whether assault weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction? If Lanza had conventional guns — or like a man in China who recently went berserk, he only had knives — he would not have been physically capable of killing so many people in a few short minutes.
Of course you hear people say — oh, a car or an airliner can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction — many things can become weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question after 9/11 that we know that this is true. But cars and airliners have to be converted from their primary use in order to become instruments of mass death. It takes an elaborate plot and many actors to take over an airliner and it isn’t easy to methodically kill 27 people with a car.

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In the video clip below Michigan State Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) explains his opposition to House Bill 4054, which made Michigan a so-called “right-to-work” state. The bill was fast-tracked through the state House in one day without a committee hearing or a word of testimony.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The chattering class is fond of far-fetched theories that lead to lots of intrigue, and one fanciful idea that has been floating around lately is that Scott Brown is ready for a comeback.
The hypothesis is that if John Kerry is nominated to President Obama’s cabinet, then Brown would be a strong contender to fill Kerry’s seat. It has even been speculated that Senate Republicans went after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice so harshly just to improve Brown’s chance at a comeback.
If you look at the facts, though, you’ll see that Brown is far from the sure bet to win another contest that Republicans hope he is. Consider the following:
Who lost by a bigger margin than almost any candidate in a competitive Senate race in the country?
Scott Brown. The 7.5-point loss he suffered at Elizabeth Warren’s hands was even worse than the 5.5-point loss for Brown’s fellow Republican Richard Mourdock in Indiana–that’s right, the guy who said pregnancy from rape is “something that God intended.” In short, as convenient as it is to refer to the Massachusetts contest between Brown and Warren as a close race, Brown took a beating.
Who was the only incumbent in the entire U.S. Senate to lose in 2012?
Scott Brown. Every one of Brown’s colleagues in the Senate who vied for reelection managed to win. That includes Bill Nelson in the swing state of Florida. That includes Democrat Jon Tester, who held onto his seat in Montana. That includes Bob Casey in the perennial battleground of Pennsylvania. It includes the other Senator Brown — Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Scott Brown proved himself uniquely inept in his failure to fend off his challenger — and to in fact lose by 7.5 percent. And remember, this wasn’t months or even years ago — this was last month.
Who lost to Elizabeth Warren by the same margin that William Weld lost to John Kerry?
Scott Brown. Weld and Brown both lost by approximately 7.48 points, but Weld was going up against a popular two-term incumbent, whereas Brown was the incumbent facing a first-time political candidate. For all the talk about his special campaign skills and positioning, nothing in the results was very special.
Who in the Massachusetts Senate election appeared to pick up no last-minute support or votes from undecided voters?
You guessed it: Scott Brown. Dozens of polls conducted in the seven months leading up to Election Day show that Brown hovered around the 46 percent mark the whole time. Of course, 46 percent is what Brown actually ended up with on Election Day. In other words, Brown made no progress during his campaign, despite an enormous war chest of roughly $30 million to spend on it.
These facts tell only part of the story, though. What’s most damning to Brown’s future prospects isn’t the margin of his defeat. It’s the campaign he ran and the issues he stood for.
Time and again during the 2012 election, Brown showed that he is dangerously out of step with the people of Massachusetts and more in line with the Tea Party supporters who helped him win back in 2010. Opposing the Buffett Rule, supporting tax cuts for the wealthy, backing the Blunt Amendment to limit people’s access to contraception and health care — Scott Brown dug in on each of these positions and has shown no sign of changing during the lame duck session in Congress.
And on top of his out of sync policy positions that cost him the last race, Brown also ran a pretty despicably negative campaign. He shattered his nice-guy image — something that propelled his fluke 2010 victory — by focusing the majority of his efforts on personal attacks against Warren. And in one of his final television advertisements, he even went after Warren’s so called support for “illegal aliens.” At a time when the national GOP is desperately searching for an answer to its Latino problem, it’s hard to imagine why anyone sees Scott Brown as the Republicans’ future more than they do Mitt Romney.
Scott Brown won his special election in 2010 because the people of Massachusetts didn’t know who he really was. Once they did, they made clear by compelling margin that they don’t want him to be their senator anymore. Pundits have long bought into the hype of Brown’s pick-up truck and barn jacket more than voters, and the 2012 election proved that.

I LOL’d when I first read Dave Zirin’s post in The Nation referring to “Koch Brothers’ meat puppet Governor Rick Snyder.” Something about the image of a meat puppet parroting the barely-disguised voice of his corporate master was funny. But then came the awful realization that the description was depressingly accurate.
The Republican party is now full of elected officials who are utterly shameless about copying and pasting ALEC’s agenda into state law. Not one of the GOP’s state-wide executives has yet had the gonads to stand up and say to the Koch brothers, Norquist and others of their ilk “Go to Hell. Nobody elected you greedheads. I’m doing what is best for the people of my state.” I’m a little ambivalent here. If such a Republican ever came forward from the cowering shadows where his GOP brethren grovel, he might prove to be a serious threat to the Democrats.
But that’s a remote possibility, considering the current Republican landscape. There are zero Republican leaders today who reflect the moral seriousness of ‘Newsroom’s’ mythic Will McAvoy, which is conservative, but unbought and unbossed. America would be better off if there were a few, because it would challenge Democrats to higher levels of conscience and integrity, and both parties would be stronger.
At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky cites a post by Theresa Riley at Bill Moyers’s web site, which exposes some of the rancid origins of the GOP’s union-bashing agenda:

The Detroit News reports that after requests from Grover Norquist and others, Snyder switched sides on the issue. United Auto Workers President Robert King said in an interview, that the Koch brothers and Amway owner Dick DeVos “bullied and bought their way to get this legislation in Michigan.”
In an editorial headlined “Drinking the Kochs’ Kool Aid,” the Detroit Free Press was unable to account for the governor’s change of heart, but offered some theories on the motivations of State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville. He may have been under pressure, the newspaper said, from the anti-union Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), both financially supported by the Koch brothers. ALEC’s model right-to-work bill “mirrors the Michigan law word for word.

Tomasky adds that “I’ll give them credit for a certain perspicacity. Norquist and the Kochs and others on the right are constantly taking the pulse of state legislatures to see where potential opportunities arise. ALEC, cited above, is the vehicle for much of this activity.” Democrats have to own that we have been out-organized and out-worked in too many states where Dems should have working majorities. Governor Meat Puppet has provided us with a sobering end to our 2012 victory gloating and a reminder that unions are critical to the future of the Democratic party.
As Tomasky concludes, “Democrats can’t afford to leave this fight to unions. The ultimate goal here is to weaken not just unions, but the Democratic Party. So the Democrats–the national party, the money people, and so on–have no choice but to put some muscle into this fight, starting today.”

In news and views from my blogging post at the Washington Monthly:
While there’s been plenty of progressive coverage of the “right-to-work” coup in Michigan, some observers may be missing the big picture beyond Republican legislators on the brink of losing seats following big-money orders to rush through some obnoxious legislation. Along with other anti-union measures in the Midwest, the outrage in Lansing represents the conversion of the entire GOP to a southern-fried theory of economic development whereby anything that reduces business costs is a “pro-growth measure,” even if it helps promote lower living standards. And while Michigan GOPers did quite literally “race to the bottom” in enacting these laws, it’s the marathon race to “low road” economic strategies infecting Republicans in nearly every state and in Washington that’s the more alarming trend.
Meanwhile, national Republicans continue their own internal “race to the bottom” in ruling out any significant ideological explanation for their 2012 electoral defeat. A new RNC-created panel charged to look high and low at every conceivable party problem like an “octopus with a thousand tentacles” is focused on money and mechanics instead of the GOP’s rotten core ideology.