Get the picture: California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is locked in a close race with Jerry Brown. With the help of well over $100 million, she´s survived an unexpectedly tough primary and has managed to avoid the sort of right-wing issue positions that Republicans elsewhere are avidly embracing. But in heavily Democratic California, one of the few states in which President Obama´s approval ratings have remained in positive territory throughout the year, Whitman´s chances depend very strictly on two factors: her ability to win independent voters, and to win a better-than-average share of Latino voters. On the Latino front, a lot rides on her performance in tomorrow´s secnd gubernatorial debate, cosponsored by Univision and broadcast in Spanish as well as English.
So it´s not exactly great news for the Whitman campaign that at this particular moment she´s enmeshed in a media furor over allegations that she knowingly employed an illegal immigrant as a domestic servant for nine long years, only to abruptly fire her after beginning her current campaign.
Calbuzz explains the potential fallout:

Team Whitman responded swiftly when word broke on TMZ that [attorney Gloria] Allred had called a press conference with “explosive” allegations by the candidate’s former maid. Strategists did their best to a) preempt the presser by sliming Allred, one of L.A.’s most notorious celebrity lawyers and b) argue through the media about social security cards, employment applications and a host of other documents that they insisted prove conclusively that eMeg is pure as the driven snow in the matter.
At the end of the day, despite her team’s yeomen efforts at damage control, Whitman had been knocked way off message and was entangled in a gnarly web of charges and counter-charges, caught in the worst position for any political candidate: defensively explaining herself.
As a political matter, the most significant impact of the flap on the campaign will come, in still-undetermined magnitude, in Whitman’s multi-million dollar effort to take enough Latino votes away from Democrat Jerry Brown to help push her over the top on November 2.

Aside from the danger of looking insensitive to Latino voters, Whitman must be concerned that indies, and even some conservative Republicans, won´t be real happy with her employment of an illegal immigrant for nine years. And the whole situation, of course, is a reminder of her wealth and privilege.
Republicans, of course, are claiming the furor was manufactured by California Democrats, if not the Brown campaign itself, but wherever it came from, it makes you wonder if this most methodical of candidates might have a few more gears ready to squeak between now and November 2. Jerry Brown, who has been in the public spotlight in California for forty years, and whose instinct is to take advantage of, not defensively cover up, attacks on his record and character, is probably a lot less vulnerable to this kind of news from nowhere.

As regular readers have doubtless seen, we’ve featured up in the “Noteworthy” box at the top of the page an October 2 rally by an impressively diverse group called One Nation Working Together.
It’s easy to think of this event as an effort to mobilize progressives prior to November 2, and it is that. But as Harold Meyerson suggested yesterday in a Washington Post column, it’s more than that, and in fact represents the kind of unified coalition that can sustain progressives over the long haul:

It signals a convergence of agendas among liberalism’s distinct activist groups. [Ben] Jealous, who has brought a new measure of dynamism and strategic savvy to the venerable NAACP, has prodded his organization and a number of African American church groups to support gay and lesbian rights. More middle-class environmental and gay and lesbian groups back the rally’s call for job creation through a range of Keynesian measures. All the groups involved this weekend have endorsed the legalization of undocumented immigrants.
The convergence of agendas is largely strategic. At the first spring meeting of the groups that planned this weekend’s march, Deepak Bhargava, who heads the Center for Community Change and is one of liberal America’s leading strategists, asked participants to “raise your hand if you can get your agenda through [Congress] by yourself.” Nobody did.

There are deeper reasons for this renewed coalition that go beyond the exigencies of today’s politics. The new sense of perspective that progressives brought to the 2008 elections has not gone away:

At least some of the convergence is also a function of generational change. The acceptance of gay and lesbian equality is highest among youth of all races and classes, as is support for a greener economy. The recession, meanwhile, has intensified liberal support for governmental job creation, not just for economic reasons but also because the recession has given rise to expressions of radical-right phobias that threaten immigrants and minorities — such as Arizona’s draconian immigration law — and that could thwart the agendas of every progressive constituency.

In other words, the October 2 rally represents a lot more than a defensive gathering of diverse constituencies threatened by this year’s radical conservative upsurge, or by the possibility of Republican control of the House or the Senate. Just in time for the next presidential cycle, and what appears to be another high-stakes showdown between very different visions of America’s values and future, progressives have a fresh opportunity to rebuild old coalitions with new priorities, and once again make a credible claim to represent not just a political force, but a movement for change. That’s worth celebrating, no matter what happens on November 2.

It’s been obvious from the very beginning of this election cycle that Republicans would depend heavily on the tendency of voters to treat midterms as a referendum on the status quo, and the party perceived to be in power. This has in part liberated Republicans to get in touch with their inner Glenn Beck, creating a hyper-energized, even radical, conservative base while relying on “wrong track” sentiments to pull swing voters in their direction.
That’s why Sharron Angle’s latest tack in the bitter and dead-even NV Senate race is interesting: she’s mainly attacking Harry Reid for something she claims he wants to do in the future, according to this Politico take on the state of that campaign:

Angle’s team believes it has drawn blood over Reid’s stance on illegal immigration, most notably with an ad calling him “the best friend an illegal alien ever had,” and for backing Social Security benefits for illegal immigrants.
That prompted Reid’s campaign this month to launch its first response ad of the campaign against Angle, a sign that some said shows Reid’s awareness of his vulnerability on illegal immigration, an issue on which many independent voters take a hard line.

It’s certainly understandable that Angle would try to exploit popular sentiment on immigration. But it’s also a major distraction from the expected formula of blaming the state of Nevada’s economy, and unpopular enacted legislation of the last four years, on the Senate majority leader. Attacking Reid on what he supposedly wants to to in the future invites Angle’s opponent to enter the land of milk and honey: comparisons between the two candidates’ positions in which Angle, who is far out of touch with mainstream opinion on many, many issues–will not look good.
We’ll see how it all turns out, but on those occasions when Republican candidates stray from the safe ground of “referendum” campaigning and begin inviting comparisons with Democrats on where they would like to take the country, Dems should eagerly comply. We are all pretty sure the Republican Party of the future, once its agenda becomes clear, is not going to be very popular. Bringing that party into the present and making it the opponent is a very good idea.

Since at least the beginning of the 1990s, we´ve been hearing a refrain periodically, and with ever-increasing volume: There are too many polls out there! They´re confusing! And they are far too influential!
Today´s Poltico offers a good summary of this year´s complaints about polls. What makes them different is that they are not just coming from those who deplore the impact of polling data on candidates and elected officials: they´re coming from polling experts, too, and from pollsters themselves, some of whom seem to think the data pool is getting flooded with pseudo-information generated by firms with poor methodologies:

Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies put it bluntly: “Lots of them are simply lousy polls; they don’t accurately reflect younger voters, African-Americans and Latinos. This all contributes to underrepresenting Democrat support. Having said that, there’s a real debate about what will be the appropriate composition of the electorate.”

Unfortunately, all polls tend to get treated equally in the general political buzz:

The proliferation of public polling has also become a concern for many political professionals this cycle, as surveys often get the same free media attention whether they are done by established outlets or fly-by-night first-timers. And the headlines those surveys make influence not just campaign strategy but how voters make decisions.

It´s not just a matter of good and bad pollsters; there are legitimate questions about how to solve a variety of basic problems in obtaining a good sample and determining likelihood to vote:

{Mark} Blumenthal also said that the very real phenomenon of properly identifying voters when up to 30 percent of households in the country have only cell phones is adding significantly to the troubles with predicting who will vote.

This is a problem that´s been especially apparent in Survey USA´s state polls this year, which frequently show young voters going heavily for Republican candidates, apparently because of exceptionally small samples of such voters.
The big question, though, is whether there´s simply too much information out there, or perhaps not enough. The biggest change in polling this years is the frequency of state polling, particularly by Rasmussen, which has deployed a controversial likely-voter model all year long, and has typically shown a stronger Republican vote in general election trials than other pollsters. SUSA´s recent record of showing relatively strong Republican performance has intensified the impression–true or false–of an impending Republican tsunami; the implosion of Research 2000 eliminated what was once a counter-weight in the polling averages that most analysts and many campaigns rely on. PPP heavy entry into state-level polling this year has been helpful, in that the firm´s abundant disclosure of non-top-line data and its relatively “balanced” results lend it credibility.
In any event, a bit of thought should make it plain that the real problem here is not with any excess of polling data, but with its limitations, and moreover, with the media and partisan spinners who fail to conduct minimal analysis of top-line results. The Research 2000 fiasco was in retrospect a good thing, insofar as it showed that knowledgeable analysts were capable of policing the field to some extent. Unless polls begin to converge between now and November 2, we are going to have some clear winners and losers in the polling profession, and perhaps greater pressure for disclosure of methodologies and data, and some sounder conclusions about how to deal with common problems in sampling and surveying.

In the midst of a very sensible and useful article on why federal spending always seems to go up, Paul Waldman makes an important point about the disconnect between conservative rhetoric and the raw facts:

Our federal spending has increased by a few points in the last two years (from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product in 2008 to 24.7 percent in 2009), but it is still small compared to that of our friends in Europe. Of course, that doesn’t tell us what the optimal level of government is. Perhaps you believe that the French or Swedes or Danes, with a public sector about 50 percent larger than ours, are terribly oppressed by their governments. It’s hard, though, to argue seriously that an increase of 4 percentage points of GDP takes us from blessed capitalism to dystopian statist nightmare….

A big part of the problem, Waldman notes, is that Republicans have as many ´budgetary “sacred cows” as Democrats, most notably the defense budget. Beyond that, as the “pledge to America” demonstrated last week, most Republicans continue to shy away from serious Social Security and Medicare cuts, particularly so long as they can convince voters that ´”welfare” or “waste, fraud and abuse” or “bailouts” or “earmarks” are a vastly larger proportion of federal spending than they actually are.

Politicians can fulminate all they want about the $2 million earmark or the silly sounding $150,000 research project. But the truth is that government spending is going to continue to rise, because neither Democrats nor Republicans really want government to get smaller — at least not badly enough to cut it in a meaningful way. It can rise at a slower or faster rate, depending on the decisions we make (the biggest source of future spending is Medicare and Medicaid, a problem the Affordable Care Act begins to tackle). But no matter who wins the election this year, or in 2012, or in any other year, it’s going to keep growing.

It´s understandable that Republicans want to disassociate themselves from the spending booms of the Bush administration, but the plain truth is that they do not unambiguously favor a set a policies that would have led to a significantly different level of spending. And if, as some Tea Party activists and candidates demand, the GOP really does come out for smaller government by privatizing Social Security and Medicare and eliminating federal involvement in education and environmental protection, Republicans will soon find that the popularity of their anti-spending rhetoric will collapse faster than you can say ´”Barry Goldwater.”

Nestled in his interview with Rolling Stone`s Jann Wenner is an important reminder from the President of the United States about the historical context within which to properly view today´s right-wing media:

The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.

The President could have gone on to point out that in the era of the Hearst newspaper empire, and before that, in the years stretching back to the beginning of the Republic, Americans typically dependend entirely on highly partisan media for most political information–basically, whatever newspapers happened to be available in a given locale. In cities with multiple daily newspapers, one´s political party affiliation was a major determinent of the newspaper of choice. But there was little or no pretense that there was some ´”objective” source of political information, and little choice at all outside the major cities.
For the most part, people decide to watch Fox News today for the same reasons that a New Yorker in the late nineteenth century chose to read the Times or the Tribune as opposed to the World or the Sun. As the President implied, telling Fox viewers the network isn´t exactly “fair and balanced” is largely a waste of time; ideologues view reality through an ideological prism in any event. Explaining that Fox`s point of view is wrong and destructive is a more fruitful approach than imagining there is some model of objectivity to which all news sources should conform. At least nowdays virtually all voters do have a choice of where to obtain information, and the best antidote for Fox viewers is to accidentally stray elsewhere on that cable guide and get exposed to a whole new world, and world-view.

In trying to assign responsibility for the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that has followed, Democrats sometimes forget what they were saying before September of 2008: that middle-class Americans were losing ground throughout the two terms of the Bush administration.
Ron Brownstein reminds us of the bigger picture in a column utilizing new Census data. The recent economic troubles, he notes, simply exacerbated a already bad situation for all but the wealthiest Americans:

From 2000 through 2009, the Census Bureau found, the median income (measured in inflation-adjusted dollars) declined by 5 percent for white families, 8 percent for Hispanic families, and more than 11 percent for African-American families. That’s almost unimaginable over an entire decade. From 1991 through 2000 (again in inflation-adjusted dollars) it had risen by 13 percent for whites, 19 percent for Hispanics, and 28 percent for African-Americans.
Similarly, the total number of Americans in poverty increased by nearly 12 million in the last decade, more than obliterating the 4.1 million reduction during the 1990s. Especially troubling is that the number of poor children jumped by 3.9 million — again, more than erasing the 2.8 million decline during the 1990s.

No wonder even Republicans don’t much like to tout the 2000s as a period of great progress, preferring to go back to a fictional version of the 1980s for inspiration. But any comparison of the economic records of the 1990s and the 2000s should create some pretty obvious implications for current policy debates, as Brownstein suggests:

It’s worth noting that this dismal performance occurred almost entirely after the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were in place. That record offers little reason for confidence that extending the tax cuts will ignite recovery, as their advocates argue. The economy produced more vibrant and broadly shared growth in the 1990s after Bill Clinton raised taxes than it did after Bush cut them. That doesn’t mean that tax hikes are a panacea; but it certainly suggests that tax cuts are not.

The only thing that would surely be accomplished by making the high-end Bush tax cuts permanent is to accelerate even more the ever-growing inequality of the 2000s. And if Democrats cannot find a way to criticize inequality without engaging in the kind of “class warfare” that turns off some middle-class voters, they certainly aren’t trying very hard. Most Americans know it’s been a long time since they’ve gained any economic ground, and counting once again on bribing the wealthiest Americans–those the GOP refers to as “job creators”–to lift the economy is a scam that should get easier and easier to expose.

According to the settled and conventional view of things, Democrats are in trouble in this midterm election in no small part because progressives, unhappy with the Obama administration’s timidity and/or pro-corporate leanings, plan to stay at home. This is, indeed, the central conviction at the heart of all the talk about an “enthusiasm gap” between Democrats and Republicans.
That’s why Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen’s recent post on Obama approval ratings among his own 2008 voters is so very interesting.

Our national poll last week- which is conducted with registered, rather than likely, voters- found that 88% of people who voted for Obama still approve of the job he’s doing.
It’s a different story with likely voters in the 16 states we’ve polled since switching over to LVs for our horse race polling in mid-August. Only in 3 of those states- Alaska, North Carolina, and Texas- has Obama maintained that level of popularity with people who voted for him. And in several key states where Democrats are having a lot of trouble it’s dropped quite a bit.

So disgruntled 2008 Obama voters aren’t, by and large, progressives who are planning on sitting on their hands November 2. They are likely voters who are straying into the Republican column, even as many satisfied Obama voters don’t bother to go to the polls. That’s certainly how Jensen sees it:

What these numbers suggest to me is that Democrats staying home aren’t necessarily disappointed with how things have gone so far. The Democrats not voting are more pleased with how Obama’s done than the Democrats who are voting. And when you’re happy you simply don’t have the sense of urgency about going out and voting to make something change. That complacency, more than the Republicans, is Democrats’ strongest foe this year.

So the disparity in current likelihood to vote between Democrats and Republicans in part represents a “complacency gap” as much as an “enthusiasm gap.” You’d think it would be relatively easy, particularly as Election Day approaches, to convince satisfied Obama voters that the president and the country are in pretty hot water if Republicans retake Congress. But time’s running out for making that case, and sometimes voters need to be reminded graphically of the consequences of civic negligence, whether it’s rooted in happy or unhappy sentiments.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
One intriguing thing about the Republican Party’s “Pledge to America” is that it doesn’t include that many goodies for the Tea Party–or, more precisely, that it concedes far more to the Tea Party in terms of rhetoric than actual policy.
Here’s the breakdown: The preamble and foreword are dominated by dog whistles and direct appeals aimed at the Tea Party movement. It contains all sorts of grave, don’t-tread-on-me rumbling about the unprecedented emergency facing the country, the arrogance of Washington Democrat elitists, and the righteous indignation of the people, as expressed “in town halls and on public squares.” There’s a big shout-out to constitutional originalism, and particularly to the Tenth Amendment, which many Tea Partiers rely on when they claim that states have the right to nullify expansions of federal power. In general, the language suggests that the Obama administration is not simply wrong, but lacks legitimacy.
The rhetoric also bows to the religious right–which overlaps heavily with the Tea Party Movement–with references to “protecting life” and “traditional families.” It also includes a finely tuned dog whistle that places the Declaration of Independence, with its references to the Creator and to natural rights, on a par with the Constitution as a founding document.
But when it comes to specifics, the Pledge limits its wrath to reversal of the Obama administration’s policies. By vowing to repeal TARP, the authors promise to carry their counterrevolution all the way back to September of 2008, but that’s it. There’s nothing about repealing No Child Left Behind or the Medicare prescription drug benefit, both of which have been routinely denounced by Republican congressional candidates this year. And the document doesn’t contain any proposals touching on the broader Tea Party agenda of revoking “unconstitutional” policies and practices dating back to the New Deal. Even though most Tea Party-affiliated GOP candidates have embraced a phase-out of Social Security and Medicare, or other radical changes to our welfare system, all the Pledge contains is vague language about “accountability” in these programs. It doesn’t even tout Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher proposal, and its one real reference to Medicare attacks the alleged benefit cuts contained in the health reform legislation. In other words, the White House is right to accuse Republicans of simply wanting to “take America back to the same failed economic policies that caused this recession”–but they haven’t gone back any further than that. That’s how thoroughly the House GOP has eschewed the more radical stance of the conservative movement and its Tea Party base.
Given all the dodges on spending, not to mention the document’s monomania about making Bush tax cuts permanent, it’s perhaps not surprising that it fails to promise a balanced federal budget, or even the hoary symbolic demand for a balanced budget constitutional amendment (which the Contract With America did contain in 1994.) As Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein quickly pointed out, the Pledge is about as good a recipe as can be devised for actually increasing deficits and debt, not to mention perpetuating a weak and inequality-ridden economy.
The reaction to this document from the conservative commentariat has been mixed, but generally negative. The editors of National Review rather defensively called the Pledge an improvement on the Contract With America because it promised actions rather than just votes on the House floor. More typical was the reaction of RedState blogger Erick Erickson:

The entirety of this Promise is laughable. Why? It is an illusion that fixates on stuff the GOP already should be doing while not daring to touch on stuff that will have any meaningful longterm effects on the size and scope of the federal government.
This document proves the GOP is more focused on the acquisition of power than the advocacy of long term sound public policy.

This is a stark illustration of the divide between professional Republican politicians and Tea Party movement activists. It can’t bode well for Republican unity that the House started out by identifying with the spirit of 1776, but clearly prefers the spirit of 2007.