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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Political Strategy Notes

Steve Chapman of Real Clear Politics has the best line yet said about the Republicans likening the current I.R.S. dust-up to the Nixon’s Administration’s abuse of the agency to harass political adversaries: “…Equating the two is like concluding that babies are like poisonous snakes because some of them have rattles.”
For a president who “has just weathered one of the worst weeks of his time in office,” in the words of The Fix’s Chris Cillizza, Obama’s approval ratings are looking pretty decent in this latest CNN poll.
Derek Thompson has it at The Atlantic: “A Simple Graph That Should Silence Austerians and Gold Bugs Forever.”
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight post “New Audit Allegations Show Flawed Statistical Thinking” crunches I.R.S. auditing by income data and shows why Peggy Noonan is wrong to imply that conservatives are more likely to experience I.R.S. abuse.
Sarah Jones’s “ABC’s Jonathan Karl is an Alumnus of a Conservative Media Training Program” at PoliticusUSA raises questions about the cred of ABC’s sr. political correspondent’s “now infamous Benghazi email lie.”
Sarah Kliff has a must-read Wonkblog post, “When Medicare launched, nobody had any clue whether it would work,” which puts all of the current criticism of Obamacare into much-needed perspective. Kliff’s post includes images of newspaper articles showing how attitudes toward Medicare evolved.
Michael Lind has an informative primer on “How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government” at Salon.com.
“The increase in African American turnout, rather than simple byproducts of the changing demographics of the electorate or Obama’s popularity among Black voters, should be attributed to election reform legislation and enforcement over the last twenty years and aggressive targeted outreach by organizations in communities of color. Federal election reforms like the National Voter Registration Act of 1993(NVRA) or so-called “Motor Voter” law and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) as well as similar efforts at the state level reforms like same day registration and early voting, expanded and eased voter registration.” So says Michael Jackson in his post, “Increased Voter Turnout in Communities of Color & the Myth of ‘The Obama Effect‘” at Demos Policy Shop.
Robert Kuttner’s HuffPo post, “Needed: A Mass Movement for College Debt Relief,” illuminates a strategy that could give Dems added support from young voters.
It appears that we have a new frontrunner in the “most useless opinion survey ever conducted” competition.

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