These shameless voter suppression efforts –even for Republicans — in North Carolina may actually reflect an encouraging trend — that the state President Obama lost by the smallest of margins in 2012 is turning blue so fast Republicans are running scared and getting desperate.
Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future, has a warning for Democrats at HuffPo: ” The rising American electorate is looking for help: a forward strategy that will rebuild the country, educate the young, put people to work, capture a lead in the green industrial revolution that is sweeping the world, while insuring that the rewards of growth are widely shared. This requires fierce battles with those standing in the way — not simply the Tea Party zealots, but Big Oil and Big Pharma, Wall Street and the global corporate lobby that will spend lavishly to protect their privileges and subsidies. Without that vision and courage, the rising American electorate will continue to sink together. And Democrats will discover that a status quo party has little attraction to voters looking for change.”
I do hope the Organizing for America ‘List’ is as powerful as this conservative e-rag says it is.
At the New York Times Opinionator, Thomas B. Edsall’s assessment of “The GOP’s Digital Makeover” shows why the Republicans’ top-down culture may be a barrier to their achieving digital parity with Dems: “…The biggest obstacle facing the Republican Party may be how to get its leaders, including those in charge of the R.N.C., to accommodate and accept the freewheeling approach to innovation — the invention of invention — that made the digital revolution now transforming American politics possible in the first place.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. rallies progressives to save background checks from Republican obstruction. “…Gun-control advocates need even more discipline, and they cannot stop organizing after this fight is over. It will take years to build the kind of muscle the gun lobby has. Doing so will create the political space for other measures, including an assault weapons ban.”
If Elizabeth Colbert-Busch can make the word ‘integrity’ the issue, this U.S. House contest should result in a Democratic pick-up. It’s not just Mark Sanford’s philandering and lying about it; it’s his abuse of taxpayer money. As Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand put it in a fund-raising e-blast for the Democrat: “This is the same Mark Sanford who, as governor, disappeared from office and used taxpayer money to visit his mistress.”
Bob Shrum’s Daily Beast post, “Be Afraid, GOP: Hillary Clinton Is Back and She Will Beat You in 2016” has me thinking maybe we should put all this Hillary euphoria to work sooner, rather than later — and send her out to help rally women to elect Dems to congress, like Elizabeth Colbert-Busch.
At The Plum Line, Greg Sargent reports on a new pro-Democratic messaging initiative: “The American Bridge 21st Century Foundation Web site, “C-Quest,” which is “designed to focus attention on how the sequester is impacting actual communities around the country, as a corrective to the Beltway’s emphasis on the sequester as a political story, one that the White House has supposedly botched by over-hyping the sequester’s impact…The Web site is also accompanied by a Web video that collects local news segments from around the country on the sequestration’s cuts, and makes the point that Paul Ryan’s budget cuts would dwarf those of the sequester:”
David Callahan’s “The Right Way to Create Jobs” at Demos ‘Policy Shop’ has an argument every Democratic congressional candidate should be able to articulate, particularly in the 7 states that have an unemployment rate above 9 percent: “…Huge numbers of construction workers lost their jobs when the housing bubble imploded, and many of these people are still unemployed. In fact, construction workers have the highest jobless rate of any group of workers — 15.7 percent, over twice the national rate and three times higher than most white-collar professions. So infrastructure spending would help those workers who are still suffering most from long-term unemployment…We tried a surge in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. How about one at home?”
You go, guys.