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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: March 2013

The big change in the conservative argument about debt and deficits

This item by James Vega was originally published on March 29, 2013.

Paul Krugman’s column today points out an important change:

Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It’s as if someone sent out a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness….
…There has, of course, been no explicit announcement of a change in position. But the signs are everywhere. Pundits who spent years trying to foster a sense of panic over the deficit have begun writing pieces lamenting the likelihood that there won’t be a crisis, after all.
…What happened? Basically, the numbers refuse to cooperate: Interest rates remain stubbornly low, deficits are declining and even 10-year budget projections basically show a stable fiscal outlook rather than exploding debt.

Krugman goes on to discuss the new rationales now being put forward as replacement arguments for why America needs to immediately and radically cut Social Security, Medicare and other social safety net programs. But, from a strategic point of view, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider just how much of a setback this change really represents for the forces that were trying to whip up a panic.
There has never been any argument (even from Krugman) that there is indeed a long term need to update and improve the American social safety net – not to dismantle it but to reinforce it for the future. These long-term issues are largely the result of demographic and other gradual societal changes that require carefully structured reforms to current programs.
But the essence of the “debt panic” strategy was to exploit the financial crisis of 2008 in order to demand massive and immediate, ideologically motivated reductions in the funding for those programs or even to achieve their effective elimination. The same groups and individuals that had kept a discrete and diplomatic silence about the ballooning deficits during the Bush era suddenly switched to the “crisis” message the moment Obama was elected. The plan shared by a wide range of conservative and business groups was essentially to “piggyback” the attack on the social safety net on the huge economic dislocations caused by the crisis in order to convince the public that immediate action was required.
It almost worked. Conservatives could have gotten a hugely advantageous deal back in the Spring of 2011 if the congressional GOP hadn’t decided to reject the first “grand bargain” Obama offered and chose instead to bet the farm on defeating him.
You have to put yourself in the debt crisis gang’s shoes to visualize what a huge fiasco this represents for them. Millions of dollars, massive organizational efforts, hundreds of TV appearances and thousands of articles, commentaries and op-ed pieces were all focused on the goal of building support for massive and immediate budget cuts that could be pushed through quickly, before the crisis atmosphere passed. But now, as Krugman says, the moment has slipped by and the debt crisis gang has to start all over again to come up with a basically new rationale.
To put it simply, from their point of view, the 2008 financial crisis offered the opportunity of a lifetime to rip a big gaping hole in the social safety net and because they overreached, they’ve let it slip away. For progressives, a moment of pleasurable schadenfreude is not inappropriate or unwarranted.


PPI’s Arkedis: Five Challenges Dems Should Address

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on March 23, 2013.
At The Atlantic, Jim Arkedis, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, has a post “Memo to Democrats: Never Mind the GOP, Here’s What *We* Need to Fix: The left is crowing over Republican disarray. But the progressive advantage isn’t as entrenched as many of them seem to believe.” Arkedis describes the upbeat mood of many Democrats in the wake of the RNC’s self-flagellating “Autopsy”:

“After notching a victory last November against weak competition, it’s tempting to be content with our advantages in organizing, data analysis, and candidate quality, and to kick back and enjoy the Republican civil war…While much of the country wishes a pox on both parties these days, President Obama’s major policy positions — on handling the economy, budget negotiations, social issues, or national security — are at least less toxic to voters than the GOP’s.

However, cautions Arkedis, “Not so fast. That attitude guarantees the next defeat will come much sooner than Republican disarray suggests. Now is the time for Democrats to engage in some serious introspection of our own.” He posits “five issues Democrats must consider to ensure the 2012 victory isn’t squandered,” including:

First, progressives need to make serious investments in intellectual firepower…The army of analysts employed by the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and Cato Institute. According to the most recent data available at Guidestar.com, these conservative research and advocacy organizations raise over $140 million a year. Their left-leaning and much younger counterparts at the Center for American Progress, Third Way, and the Progressive Policy Institute (where I am a senior fellow) together lag behind with a meager $40 million annual haul combined.
Closing the gap is possible but requires buy-in from on high…concerted efforts to steer donors toward allied think tanks.
Second, the Democratic Party must avoid an impending woman problem — not to mention a Latino problem, a gay problem, and a youth problem…All these groups could waver if Democrats continue to exploit them as coalition building blocks and pocketbooks, rather than integrating them as full partners.
Should immigration reform fail — a high risk in any Congress, let alone this one — many Latino groups will sour on President Obama no matter where fault lies. Witness Hispanics’ disgruntlement with the administration until it backed off on forced deportations. That’s why Democrats must broaden their focus to other issues Latinos care about beyond immigration — such as small-business empowerment, leadership development, and increasing personal wealth.
Third, Democrats need to expand their coalition, particularly among faith voters and lower-income whites. As I’ve written elsewhere, polling shows that religious voters, particularly Catholics, are more open than ever to progressive faith-based messaging. And it’s maddening to watch lower-income whites vote for Republican social positions and against their own economic interests. Targeted messaging to make a distinctly progressive pitch to these two often-overlapping communities on faith and social welfare will fray the conservative coalition even further.
Fourth, the party has to push digital and organizing innovations down-ballot…State legislatures are the key to controlling redistricting, and that’s the key to controlling Congress. National Democrats’ massive digital and organizing edge will be wasted if they are not shared with and adopted by candidates running for state legislatures.
Finally, the party needs to avoid the intramural fistfight brewing over “Organizing for Action,” the president’s campaign apparatus that has morphed into a voter mobilization and advocacy organization — in other words, sort of but not exactly what the Democratic National Committee already does…OFA and the DNC need to come to an understanding of their responsibilities, and share those decisions with party operatives.

Arkedis concludes on a hopeful note, saying Dems are in a “healthier place” than their adversaries, but adds “…Remember who won that race between the tortoise and the hare — and make sure it’s not repeated with the elephant and the donkey.”


Celebrating the Sequester and “Standing With Rand”

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on March 8, 2013.
By most conservative media accounts, this has been a banner week for the Republican Party, snapping it out of the malaise it’s been wallowing in since last November. The week began with Republicans deciding to celebrate the appropriations sequester as a major victory for The Cause. It ended with the conservative movement and the vast majority of Republican elected officials in Washington (not to mention RNC chairman Reince Priebus) deciding to celebrate Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of CIA nominee John Brennan as a great blow against Obama’s tyranny.
As they enjoy themselves this weekend, it’s worth noting the rather significant side-effects of these two ideological benders. By embracing discretionary spending cuts and brushing aside a “grand bargain” with the president, Republicans also kicked to the curb their one realistic opportunity to secure the “entitlement reforms” they’ve spent most of the last three years demanding as the most crucial step towards fiscal responsibility and limited government. It’s hard to see where they go next in the fiscal battle, unless they want to lurch towards a government shutdown or debt default.
As for their mid-week “Stand With Rand,” Republicans managed to produce three significant results: (a) forcing the White House to renounce any legal theory enabling the president to do something there is zero evidence he wants to do: launch drones at American citizens on American soil; (b) making a complete hash of their own positioning on national security and civil liberties; and (c) making the very favorite politician of the John Birch Society a conservative movement hero and a viable presidential candidate for 2016.
This is a good example of how pursuing short-term tactical maneuvers can lead a political party into a long-term strategic trap. It will be interesting to see how quickly their better minds figure that out.


The big change in the conservative argument about debt and deficits

Paul Krugman’s column today points out an important change:

Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It’s as if someone sent out a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness….
…There has, of course, been no explicit announcement of a change in position. But the signs are everywhere. Pundits who spent years trying to foster a sense of panic over the deficit have begun writing pieces lamenting the likelihood that there won’t be a crisis, after all.
…What happened? Basically, the numbers refuse to cooperate: Interest rates remain stubbornly low, deficits are declining and even 10-year budget projections basically show a stable fiscal outlook rather than exploding debt.

Krugman goes on to discuss the new rationales now being put forward as replacement arguments for why America needs to immediately and radically cut Social Security, Medicare and other social safety net programs. But, from a strategic point of view, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider just how much of a setback this change really represents for the forces that were trying to whip up a panic.
There has never been any argument (even from Krugman) that there is indeed a long term need to update and improve the American social safety net – not to dismantle it but to reinforce it for the future. These long-term issues are largely the result of demographic and other gradual societal changes that require carefully structured reforms to current programs.
But the essence of the “debt panic” strategy was to exploit the financial crisis of 2008 in order to demand massive and immediate, ideologically motivated reductions in the funding for those programs or even to achieve their effective elimination. The same groups and individuals that had kept a discrete and diplomatic silence about the ballooning deficits during the Bush era suddenly switched to the “crisis” message the moment Obama was elected. The plan shared by a wide range of conservative and business groups was essentially to “piggyback” the attack on the social safety net on the huge economic dislocations caused by the crisis in order to convince the public that immediate action was required.
It almost worked. Conservatives could have gotten a hugely advantageous deal back in the Spring of 2011 if the congressional GOP hadn’t decided to reject the first “grand bargain” Obama offered and chose instead to bet the farm on defeating him.
You have to put yourself in the debt crisis gang’s shoes to visualize what a huge fiasco this represents for them. Millions of dollars, massive organizational efforts, hundreds of TV appearances and thousands of articles, commentaries and op-ed pieces were all focused on the goal of building support for massive and immediate budget cuts that could be pushed through quickly, before the crisis atmosphere passed. But now, as Krugman says, the moment has slipped by and the debt crisis gang has to start all over again to come up with a basically new rationale.
To put it simply, from their point of view, the 2008 financial crisis offered the opportunity of a lifetime to rip a big gaping hole in the social safety net and because they overreached, they’ve let it slip away. For progressives, a moment of pleasurable schadenfreude is not inappropriate or unwarranted.


Obama Uses Bully Pulpit to Call for Action vs. Gun Violence


From Peter Baker’s New York Times report on the President’s statement today:

Standing in front of mothers of gun victims invited to the White House, Mr. Obama scolded lawmakers for not embracing the most sweeping of his ideas and objected to the notion that the country has moved on three months after 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“Less than 100 days ago that happened, and the entire country was shocked and the entire country pledged we would do something about it and this time would be different,” Mr. Obama said, his voice rising with indignation. “Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”
The president’s remarks came as his proposal to reinstate an assault weapon ban has faltered in the Senate and another proposal to expand criminal background checks appears in trouble as well…The Senate is preparing to begin a floor debate on gun laws when lawmakers return the week of April 8.

The broad coverage the president is receiving with this video clip provides good example of how to use the bully pulpit to generate public pressure on congress to act.


Political Strategy Notes

If you thought outright partisan political hackery was beneath the dignity of the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, you would be wrong.
Geoffrey Skelley, Political Analyst at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball crunches the numbers and concludes. “…Unlike the proposal to award electoral votes by congressional district — a plan that the Crystal Ball’s Alan Abramowitz found would have elected Mitt Romney in 2012 even though President Obama won the national popular vote by about 5 million votes — a proportional allocation system, used nationally, might track more closely to the national vote than the current system.” Scant comfort, that. Why not direct popular election?
Also at Crystal Ball, Kyle Kondik argues that the South Dakota and West Virginia Senate races are the ones to watch in assessing whether or not Dems can hold the senate in 2014. If these races are polling close a month or two before election day, then Dems have a good chance of holding their Senate majority.
Matthew Dowd’s argument here that Dem 2016 front-runners are a little long-in-the-tooth compared to the GOP presidential field lacks demographic analysis of the 2016 electorate.
Good to see that a coalition has turned the heat on VA Gov. McDonnell to restore voting rights of at least some ex-felons who have served their time. Felon disenfranchisement is one of the more effective methods of politically-motivated voter suppression. But making Republicans defend it on camera for those who have served their time is a good way to expose the petty partisanship and moral equivocation of GOP office-holders.
Anyone still harboring doubts that the Bush-Cheney administration was the worst ever, should watch this CSPAN video featuring Linda J. Bilmes, author of “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.” Bilmes now projects the actual cost to hit $5 trill when all the bills are finally paid.
This story has another disturbing statistic, “less than five minutes” — the length of time it took to massacre 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which should haunt the hearts those who opposed the ban on assault weapons and hopefully encourage them to do the right thing next time.
Karthick Ramakrishnan, author of four books on immigration, race and politics, has a L.A. Times op-ed explaining why the U.S. Supreme Court could create a major mess if they decide in Lepak vs. City of Irving that it’s ok not to count non-citizens in drawing political districts.
I nominate “angry at Washington” (and it’s equally-mindless kin, “blame Washington” and “disappointed/unhappy with Washington”) to be the lamest, most vapid false equivalency meme parroted by journalists and pollsters since the dawn of The Republic. IMHO, those who promote it merit placement in one or more of three categories — stupid, lazy or corrupt.
If there is a better ‘toon than this one about the High Court’s DOMA deliberations, I’d like to see it.


Republican Suppression of Latino Voters Still at Full Throttle

Republicans leaders have been stumbling all over themselves lately, desperately trying to put a kinder mask on their immigration policies in order to woo more Hispanic voters. When it comes to voting rights for Latinos, however, it’s clear that the GOP is more committed to suppression than ever, as Zachary Roth explains it in his MSNBC post “Wave of voter suppression measures target Latinos.” Says Roth:

…While the national GOP has said it will focus on reaching out to Latinos, Republicans on the ground have taken a very different tack: In recent years, a host of voter suppression measures across the country–from purges of voter rolls, to citizenship requirements to ID laws like the one Riddle backed in Texas–have appeared to target Latinos.
“Voter suppression laws and policies threaten to relegate Latino voters to second-class citizenship and impeded their ability to participate fully in American democracy,” warned a 2012 report on Latino voter disenfranchisement by the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group.
Since the civil-rights movement, the public face of voter disenfranchisement has generally been black. African-Americans have been more systematically victimized by efforts to restrict voting than any other group. But while blacks last year appeared to recognize that they were the targets of restrictions on voting, and responded by turning out at a rate few pollsters expected, advocates for Latinos say many don’t yet understand that their rights are at risk.
“There is a lot more work to do in the Hispanic community to get them to connect the dots between the voter suppression movement and their emerging political power,” Juan Cartagena, the president of Latino Justice, told MSNBC.
It’s no coincidence that these threats to Latino voter participation come at a time when the group’s political power is growing rapidly. Latinos now make up 10% of all eligible voters in the U.S., and with 60% of all new citizens in the coming years projected to be Latino, it’ll soon be much more. And because Latinos still punch far below their numerical weight–in 2010, just 31% of eligible Latinos voted, compared to 49% of non-Latino whites and 44% of African-Americans–they’ve got plenty of room to grow.

Republicans know Latinos gave Obama 70 percent of their vote, so they are pulling out the stops to obstruct them at the polls. As Roth adds,

As the targets of these voting crackdowns has expanded to include Latinos, so too has the rationale used to justify them, which now often focuses on the need to prevent non-citizens from voting. But, as with other forms of alleged voter fraud, there’s little evidence to suggest that’s happening. A lengthy investigative report by the Carnegie-Knight initiative found just 56 accusations of non-citizens voting since 2000. Of those, just one ended in a conviction.
Still, broad efforts targeting non-citizens are the next big thing in the “election integrity” movement. Hans Von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who has done perhaps more than anyone else to push the case for photo ID and similar measures, told PBS last year that laws requiring people registering to vote to prove their citizenship are “the very next stage after photo ID.”

Roth explains that “Latinos are less likely than non-Latino whites to have a driver’s license in the first place, meaning they’d need a copy of their birth certificate or passport when registering. Those aren’t documents that most people carry around with them at the mall or other locations where voter registration drives tend to take place.” He adds that there is no system in place “to ensure that naturalized citizens–who are disproportionately Latino–aren’t wrongly targeted.” In addition,

…A 2006 study by the Brennan Center found that 16% of Latinos don’t have an acceptable ID, compared to just six percent of non-Hispanic whites. In Texas, where a 2011 voter ID law was blocked by the federal government, more than 400,000 Latinos–nearly 10% of the state’s massive Latino population–live in counties without an office that issues IDs, the Justice Department found.

Suppression of Latino voters continues unabated in key states, like Florida and especially Texas, notes Roth, where Republicans have pretty much declared all-out war against Latino voters:

Nowhere has the fight over Latino political power been as intense as in Texas, where even the redistricting process has been used as a weapon. A federal court found last year that Texas intentionally discriminated against Latinos in its 2011 plan, deliberately carving up districts held by minorities, while protecting those held by Anglos. Lawyers fighting the plan “have provided more evidence of discriminatory intent than we have space, or need, to address here,” a three-judge panel wrote.
Indeed, Lone Star State Democrats say that Republicans have made a decision to give up on Latinos and instead work to keep them from the polls, just as they have with African-Americans.
“They’ve come to the conclusion that they’re not going to win the Latino vote,” Texas Democratic party chair Gilberto Hinojosa told MSNBC. “That for them to develop policies that attract the Latino vote, they automatically alienate the biggest part of their base. So the only way they can avoid the inevitable is to delay Latino voter participation.”

It’s a cold calculation. Republicans know that suppressing Latino votes in Florida and Texas offers them their best chance of winning back the white house. But making kinder, gentler noises about immigration is not likely to fool many Latino voters, who know that the GOP remains wholly dedicated to disempowering their community at the polls.


DFA ‘Purple to Blue Project’ to Cut GOP Edge in States

In his Politico post, “Progressives must focus outside D.C.,” Jim Dean, chairman of Democracy for America, writes that DFA “is launching its Purple to Blue Project, a national, multi-year effort to win state House and Senate chambers across the country by making so-called “purple” state legislative seats decisively Democratic…”
Noting that “Republicans currently hold a lopsided 58 percent of all state legislative chambers in the country,” Dean adds that the DFA initiative kicks off in Virginia:

We’re launching the Purple to Blue project by focusing on this year’s elections in Virginia’s House of Delegates and, in particular, five key “purple” districts currently represented by Republicans. The first two of the five Purple to Blue candidates we’ll be in endorsing in Virginia this year are local activist and mom Jennifer Boysko in Delegate District 86 and retired Air Force Officer John Bell in Delegate District 87. These are races tailor made for progressives’ unique grassroots approach, happening in districts where you don’t need big media buys to win and knocks on the door from committed volunteers can make the difference.

Dean points out that winning all these seats won’t flip the Virginia House of Delegates to Democratic control won’t, but,

…It gives us a chance to figure out what works ahead of the critical state races happening in Michigan, Pennsylvania and elsewhere in 2014. It is also a critical step in preparing for the big fight in 2015 for the Virginia State Senate…The success of the Purple to Blue project in the Old Dominion would allow progressives to send a clear message across the Potomac to Republicans who think their legislative colleagues in the states have some “great” ideas: Namely, that waging a legislative war on women, working families, and voting is a sure path to defeat at the ballot box — in every state and at every level of office….

Dean explains further that, “Politically, the current state of affairs leaves us with a Republican party that has a deeper bench and huge advantage when fielding candidates for higher office.” However, he continues “There’s little doubt that running and winning an election is the best kind of practice for running and winning elections in the future.”
Former Vermont Governor and DNC Chairman Howard Dean has committed $750,000 to the ‘Purple to Blue Project.’ HuffPo features an extended discussion in the video below:

At The Washington Post Jonathan Bernstein adds,

…Kudos to Dean for attempting to find something useful to do with campaign money. I’m hoping it pushes more PACs and individual donors from both parties to make similar commitments. The presidential campaigns will get along just fine with even a tenth of the money they spent in 2012. Getting some money into down-ballot races is both a more useful way to use your resources, and good for democracy to boot.

Democrats who want to support Democracy for America’s ‘Purple to Blue Project’ can do so right here.


Obama, Shinseki Must Cut VA Wait Times — Soon

One of the mysteries of modern politics is the public’s high tolerance for the crappy treatment veterans have been getting when they get back home. Ask just about any American how he or she feels about veterans having to wait 600 days to get their claims addressed, as they do in a number of states, and she or he will tell you it’s an outrage. But somehow it’s never much of a factor on election day. But if something isn’t done to address this issue very soon, that could change on election day 2014 and 2016.
One reason it could change is that Vets now have an eloquent, energetic and committed advocate in Paul Rieckhoff of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who is now making the rounds to just about every talk show on television (see here for example). American Vets now have an advocate who knows how to work the media.
Republicans, of course, will be quick to blame the Democrats, since it has gotten worse in recent years, owing mostly to the backlog build-up and inadequate budgeting for veterans’ programs when they come home. VA head General Shinseki is talking about reducing the backlog by 2015, which does not sound acceptable, even though it may be a prudent answer, given his short-staffed resources. To paraphrase the Democratic strategist Bob Strauss, “that dog won’t hunt,” as the VA backlog becomes more of an issue, as now seems likely.
It’s pretty bad when today’s veterans describe their benefits system as “Delay, Deny, Wait till I die,” as was reported recently on the Rachel Maddow show. Joe Klein’s Time magazine article about the wait times was entitled “Shinseki Stonewall.” Klein argues that, at the very least, claims should be processed according to severity. “Why should an Army Ranger who suffered a 100% debilitating traumatic brain injury in Konar Province three years ago still be waiting for his disability check? Why should that Ranger have to wait behind a Vietnam veteran, who is filing a 3rd time claim to get his disability for post-traumatic stress raised from 50% to 60%?”
As a kid, I can remember getting medical care at local military hospitals, which everyone seemed to agree were the best. Our family shopped at the military commissary for groceries and saved about 20 percent over a comparable tab at the supermarket. There was veterans support for home loans, college education and other life expenses. We even used the swimming pool at one military installation. I never heard any complaints about wait times for anything. All of this because my father was a WWII vet, even though it was 12 or so years after the war ended. Today, most of these benefits have been shredded or reduced.
Of course, back then the income tax rates for the wealthy were significantly higher. There is no question in my mind that the tax cuts and austerity policies that accelerated during the Reagan era and after have hurt veterans badly. The political questions that remain include: Will President Obama be getting increasingly bad press for the wait times, or will he be able to speed things up very soon? Will he take the opportunity to explain to the public how Republican obstruction of the budget process has hurt veterans benefits and wait times?
These are tough questions. But better to address them now, than let them become a big issue that could hurt Dems in the next elections.


Political Strategy Notes

At The Nation Rick Perlstein gives the old “demography is destiny” cliche a proper shredding, arguing that, while demographics favor Democrats at the moment, any talk about inevitability is foolish chatter, especially since “a more immigrant-friendly Republican Party” by 2016 is a possibility, which could cut just enough into the edge Dems currently have with Latinos.
Perlstein has another good post at The Nation, “Right and Left in Democratic Politics: The Long View,” in which he urges his fellow progressives to get real and acknowledge the conservative/moderate flank of the party as a continuing reality: “…Study them–take them seriously. Don’t let them play the underdog; that just advantages them, too. We’re in a fight here–always have been. They think they are the party–just as confidently as we believe we’re the party. The only way to make our vision of this party a reality is to work for it–and not to act surprised when their side works for it, too.”
For those who would like to see some solid data that verifies what you have suspected for months, Andrew Kohut, former president of both the Pew Research Center and the Gallup Organization has an opinion piece up at the Washington Post, “The numbers prove it: The GOP is estranged from America.”
Do read Rebecca Dana’s story at The New Republic, “Slyer Than Fox The wild inside story of how MSNBC became the voice of the left
Democrats have a chance, at least, to pick up a senate seat in GA, where Saxby Chambliss is retiring and the Republicans are looking at a divisive primary, which is well-described in Russell Berman’s post “Tight-knit Georgia Republican delegation starts to fray over Senate race” at The Hill. President Obama got 46.9 percent of the vote in Georgia in November. Unfortunately, however, Dems don’t have much in the way of charismatic alternatives, with Rep. John Barrow mentioned most often as a possibility.
Good to see the DNC getting involved in fighting back against the Republican scheme to award electoral votes “based on their percentage of the popular vote, instead of the current winner-take-all system. Two electoral votes would be awarded to the statewide winner.”
At Salon.com Michael Lind has a few thoughts on “Defeating useless rich people: Taming wealthy, unproductive “moochers” will require a populist campaign to stop them. Here’s how we can do it.” Says Lind: “…we need an Anti-Rentier campaign that would unite unlikely groups: owners of productive businesses as well as workers, populist conservatives and liberal reformers. An Anti-Rentier movement would distinguish businesses that make profits by providing worthwhile goods or services in innovative ways from rentier interests that passively extract exorbitant tolls and fees from the economy without adding any value…The Anti-Rentier tax agenda would seek to raise capital gains taxes on rentiers while lowering the tax burden on American workers and the profits of productive businesses.”
Here’s a switch. Joseph M. Schwartz Dissent article, “Social Democracy for Centrists” observes, “The Economist, long identified with libertarian economic ideals, lauded the “Nordic model” in a cover story last month as a “centrist” economic path for global capitalism. Long hostile to “tax-and-spend” social democracy, the publication’s change in tack arises from its recognition that austerity policies are deepening the economic crisis and that the inequality and declining social mobility of “free-market,” Anglo-American capitalism threatens the very legitimacy of the capitalist system that the Economist holds dear…The magazine praises Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway for accomplishments often touted by social democrats–low poverty rates, egalitarian distribution, and efficient public services. But the magazine argues that these are now “centrist” societies because they balance their budgets, allow for consumer “choice” within their public services, and nurture risk-taking entrepreneurs. The Economist sheepishly admits that these countries funnel over 50 percent of their GDP through the public sector (versus a meager 30 percent in the United States and 36 percent in Great Britain)…”
Ronald Brownstein’s “The Man Who Could Turn Texas Blue: Rick Perry” explains “…Gov. Rick Perry, back from his stumbles in the 2012 GOP presidential race, has insisted that Texas will not accept the federal money provided by President Obama’s health care law to expand Medicaid coverage….Texas Democrats are too weak to much affect the Medicaid debate. But if state Republicans reject federal money that could insure 1 million or more Hispanics, they could provide Democrats with an unprecedented opportunity to energize those voters–the key to the party’s long-term revival. With rejection, says Democratic state Rep. Rafael Anchia of Dallas, Republicans “would dig themselves into an even deeper hole with the Hispanic community.””
Heather K. Gerken of Yale Law School has an interesting proposal at Scholars Strategy Network: “The United States would benefit from a new Democracy Index that makes our shortfalls visible for all by ranking states and localities based on how well they run their elections…This index would function as the rough equivalent of annual rankings of colleges and universities in the U.S. News and World Report. It would focus on the concrete issues that matter to all voters -How long did you spend in line? How many ballots got discarded? How well is the registration process working? The Index would also include regular, objective measures of the election process.”