In “Rasmussen Reports Loses Scott Rasmussen, But the Inaccurate Polls Will Remain” TNR’s Nate Cohn provides a sendoff many poll watchers will appreciate: “…His polls were biased toward Republican candidates in two consecutive cycles, outrageously so in 2012. He refused to interview voters with a cell phone, even though mounting research confirms they tilt toward Democratic leaning groups. He weighted his samples to a fantasy electorate where there are millions more white, Republican voters. And unlike Gallup, which is in the middle of an extensive post-election effort to improve its polling, Rasmussen’s post-election rethinking involved reweighting their tracking poll to the 2012 exit polls, even though you really, really can’t do that. Really embarassing stuff.”
Dem policy-makers should give Amy Sullivan’s Atlantic post “Why Jobs Go Unfilled Even in Times of High Unemployment” a thoughtful read, and come up with a credible job-training program. Among Sullivan’s points, “There are some observers who say that the idea of a skills gap is overstated, that vacancies persist because employers can’t find people with the skills they need at the rate they’re willing to pay. But it is true that employers complain they have a hard time finding workers with the skills they need. About 40 years ago, only one in four jobs required more than a high school education, but now about two in three jobs require more training. And workers now really need to think of learning as a lifelong task. That’s a huge shift from the days when you did one job that never changed for one employer and then you retired.”
The Koch Brothers may be unhinged wingnuts, but they can add, is one conclusion that might be drawn from this HuffPo report, which notes of their interest in purchasing Tribune syndicate newspapers: “…The prospect of their ownership had led to protests from people who were concerned they would use the papers to push their highly controversial political views…But sources told the Daily Caller that, after looking at Tribune’s finances, the Kochs had determined that the purchase wouldn’t be “economically viable.” They are not done yet, however, as one of their spokespersons stated, “”Koch continues to have an interest in the media business and we’re exploring a broad range of opportunities where we think we can add value. In terms of the Tribune, the Daily Caller story is accurate.”
Along with NC right-wing extremist Art Pope, the Koch brothers have a big influence on the tide of reaction in NC through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). For an update on ALEC’s influence in NC politics, read Jim Morril’s Charlotte Observer post, “Where the N.C. GOP got its agenda.”
But the Republican strategy of all-out voter suppression may not do so well in neighboring VA, as John Harwood reports in his New York Times post, “Demographic Shifts May Help Virginia Democrats.”
So what are the prospects for Dems pulling off a repeat of the 2012 strategy of supporting tea party candidates in the GOP senate primaries, which Claire McCaskill so adroitly deployed? Pretty good, apparently, as Noah Bierman explains in his post,”Democratic strategy promotes Tea Party rivals” at the Boston Globe.
Ditto for Democratic strategy in congressional races, as Cameron Joseph reports at The Hill in “Democrats hope GOP chaos in fall will help them win back House.”
The AFL-CIO is targeting six Republican governors for defeat, as Tom Guarino’s Monitor post “Top labor union aims to topple six GOP governors: payback or big risk?” explains: “The six governors are primarily from the Midwest: John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Scott in Florida, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and Scott Walker in Wisconsin, plus Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania and Paul LePage in Maine. Mr. Hauser [AFL-CIO spokesman Jeff Hauser] says the AFL-CIO will not neglect important state and congressional races in the rest of the country, but its “focus” will be those six battlegrounds where the majority of its 12 million members are located.”
E.J,. Dionne, Jr. has coined an apt term for the GOP’s shut-down-government freaks —“The Armageddon Caucus.” Dionne points out “The GOP has gone from endorsing market-based government solutions to problems the private sector can’t solve — i.e, Obamacare — to believing that no solution involving expanded government can possibly be good for the country…Ask yourself: If conservatives still believed in what both left and right once saw as a normal approach to government, would they speak so cavalierly about shutting it down or risking its credit?”
Only Five?

Democrat McAuliffe is up 6 over Cucinelli in race for VA Governor, according to Quinnipiac University poll, report Laura Vozzella and Scott Clement at WaPo. “Among likely voters surveyed by Quinnipiac, Democrats outnumber Republicans 39 percent to 32 percent — the identical split found in Virginia exit polls in the 2012 presidential election.”
At Wonkblog Sarah Kliff has an ironic revelation: “A new poll finds that young Republicans are more likely to have health coverage through their parents’ policy than young Democrats, an option widely expanded under the Affordable Care Act…The poll comes from the Commonwealth Foundation, which has spent two years tracking how adults between the ages of 19 and 25 are reacting to the Affordable Care Act. Beginning in 2010, the health care law allowed young adults up to age 26 to stay covered under their parents’ health plans…The Commonwealth Foundation estimates that of the 15 million young adults that have insurance coverage through a parent, 7.8 million would not have qualified without this policy.”
GOP lunacy hits overdrive, as Michael Tomasky reports in his Daily Beast post, “Republicans Move to the Center? Nope, They’re Crazier Than Ever.”
Republicans have launched a total war on student voting in North Carolina, Ari Berman reports at The Nation. Here’s a good video clip on the topic, via berman, from The Rachel Maddow Show, which also spotlights an 80-year-old progressive warrior, who is fighting Republican disenfranchisement of strudents and minorities in NC:

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Republicans have done eveything they can to rig elections in NC, but they still may not be able to take away Kay Hagan’s Senate Seat, as Sean Sullivan explains at The Fix. Imnagine what shape they would be in without the gerrymandering and voter suppression.
WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. has a moving meditation on the 50th anniversary of MLK’s dream, which will be commemorated world-wide next week. As Dionne concludes, “We honor him best by sharing not only his hope but also his impatience and his resolve.”
At The Guardian, Vad Badham has an interesting and amusing post on Australia’s experience with compulsory voting, and why it might be a good thing for the U.S.
From Casey A. Klofstad’s “Talking About Politics Boosts Civic Participation“, via the Scholars Strategy Network and Demos: “My basic research finding is quite striking: students who were assigned to dorms in 2003 where they were exposed to political discussion by their randomly assigned roommate became more likely to join civic-minded student organizations such as student government, partisan political organizations, and community volunteer organizations. This effect lasted throughout their four years of college. More recently, I surveyed these same individuals during the 2012 election, and my newly collected data reveal that study participants who were exposed to political discussion as first-year college students are still more likely to be active civically nearly ten years later.”
Kevin Mahnken’s New Republic post, “Two GOP Operatives Reveal How to Turn Texas Blue” notes : “Local exigencies–finding those 250 county chairs and grooming the next Democratic railroad commissioner–are key in any state, but national trends (the Hispanic or Latino population grew by 43 percent over the last decade) and the sputtering of immigration reform are seen as potentially game-changing phenomena in Texas. Weaver [John Weaver of the McCain campaigns] advised Democrats to focus not merely to focus on Latinos, but also the newly minted Texans who relocate to the state for jobs and low cost of living. “People who are moving here from the West Coast, or the upper Midwest, or the East Coast, for economic reasons, they aren’t typical Southern Republicans either,” he said. “Those people are more moderate on social issues, and they see a [Republican] party that’s out of step with their values. Whether it’s a tsunami or not–for Republicans, you can still drown in it if you don’t fix it.”
New GOP scam: highlight diversity, even though they don’t have the numbers to back it up. Or as Nicole Greenstein puts it in her Time Swampland post “The Party of Old White Guys Changes Its Look.”

From Thomas B. Edsall’s NYT Opinionator post, “Marco Rubio’s Un-American Dream“:

The dilemma of the Republican Party as it struggles to pick its way through the immigration minefield and build Hispanic support is further complicated by the fact that polling data suggests that the most fruitful source of new voters for the party’s candidates is not Hispanics, but the white working class. It is already a Republican constituency, but the discontent of these voters with the Obama administration has been growing sharply.
…Ruy Teixeira, who specializes in analyzing political-demographic trends, has written perhaps the best description of the weaknesses of the white Republican strategy: the core target, the white working class, is “declining precipitously as a share of voters, down from 54 to 36 percent between 1988 and 2012.” At the same time, young white voters make up “the most liberal generation in the overall electorate by a considerable margin.”

Edsall adds that “For many Republican politicians, shifts in Hispanic voting have little relevance to their individual re-election prospects, and the importance of Latinos in presidential contests is a secondary concern.” Further,

The real issue facing the Republican Party in presidential elections is that it needs new blood. Mitt Romney lost to Obama by a 3.85 percentage point margin, 51.06 to 47.21 — that’s 5 million votes. The party can try to boost its backing among whites, a steadily declining share of the electorate, or it can try to boost margins among Hispanics. The truth is that a winning Republican candidate will probably have to do both.
Projections of the impact of immigration reform range from Jeb Bush — “immigrants are particularly important to help create more taxpayers to fund the safety net for the large, retiring baby boomer generation” — to the Heritage Foundation’s argument that immigration reform “would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion in new spending on entitlements and social programs.”
…A pro-immigration-reform candidate along the lines of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio will have to figure out how to balance the conflicting interests and values of a white and Hispanic coalition, just as the Democrats from 1968 onward have struggled to maintain — and win with — a biracial coalition, white and black….

All of which underscores the importance of Democrats reiterating their identity, loudly and clearly, as the party of both fair immigration reform and economic justice and opportunity for all working families. In doing so they will continue to make inroads with younger white working-class voters, solidify support among Latinos and highlight the Republicans’ inability to build consensus, even in their own party.

A good statement from Secretary of State Kerry about the horrific violence in Egypt. But shouldn’t Democratic leaders stand firm for respecting the results of free elections, even when we oppose elected officials’ theocratic policies? Otherwise, how can we be credible advocates for democracy?
There goes Gallup again with the “blame congress” meme, and the MSM gobbles up the bait. Not a peep here about which party voters blame more. Would it be so hard to ask the same respondents, “which party do you believe is more responsible for congressional gridlock?”
In his latest tweet, Rand Paul seems determined to set a new standard for denial regarding racial discrimination and voter suppression.
At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Geoffrey Skelley writes that “… There is little question that the upcoming fights over the future of Obamacare, the budget, the debt ceiling and immigration will sorely test Obama. The lack of meaningful action in Washington and the ugly clashes that are on the way may drag Obama down the same road as Truman, Johnson, Nixon and the younger Bush. On the other hand, the absence of a stalemated war and the possibility of continued (if slow) economic improvement may allow Obama to escape their path and tread one more similar to Ronald Reagan. In this polarized, partisan era, Obama will benefit from continued intense backing by Democrats and minority voters; his ceiling isn’t fixed, but Obama’s floor is relatively high.”
At The Daily Beast Jamelle Bouie has a good update on North Carolina Republicans’ all-out war to suppress African American and other pro-Democratic voters.
And at the Crystal Ball, Kyle Kondik reports on “Democrats catching breaks in North Carolina.” Says Kondik: “Democrats need a rallying cry for this race, and the Republican legislature has provided them with one; whether the Republican Senate primary voters do as well is an open question….The unsettled Republican field means, to us, that of the four incumbent Democratic senators running for reelection in states that Mitt Romney won in 2014 — Mark Begich (AK), Mark Pryor (AR), Mary Landrieu (LA) and Kay Hagan (NC) — Hagan is probably in the best shape at the moment.”
In Thomas Perez, it looks like Dems — and American workers — will have one of the strongest Secretaries of Labor ever, as AP’s Sam Hananel reports.
Here’s a good Kos cause. Help worst ever Speaker Johnny B. get back to work. As the Kos petition puts it, “To Speaker John Boehner: Dude, seriously, you’ve worked for just 87 days this year and you’re taking a five-week vacation? You’re golfing with Donald Trump while the House hasn’t voted on immigration reform or a jobs bill so far this year? Get off the golf course and back to work.”
Even the Wall St. Journal thinks Priebus is out of line.
Looking ahead to the 50th anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28th, Mijin Cha explains at Demos Policy Shop why “The March on Washington is as Relevant as Ever.” See also Gary Younge’s excellent Guardian post, “Martin Luther King: the story behind his ‘I have a dream’ speech.”

Brian Bennett and Joseph Tanfani explain how “Immigration reform creates odd political alliances” at the L.A. Times. As the authors observe, “An unprecedented collection of political bedfellows has coalesced this year on the reform side of the immigration debate: liberal Latino organizations and Republican operatives, the Chamber of Commerce and labor unions, faith groups and high-tech companies. And as with the Sharry contribution, some left-leaning groups are financing Republican pro-immigration groups…During the first half of the year, reform backers outspent opponents in advertising by more than 3 to 1: $2.4 million to $700,000, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.”
At Bloomberg.com Ezra Klein asks and answers the question of the hour: “How Dumb Is Immigration Debate? This Dumb.”
Jacquellina Carrero’s NBC Latino post “Florida voter suppression is a disgrace” says it plain: “Why is Scott revisiting the idea of a voter purge? Because he is up for re-election in 2014, and his numbers are shaky. Many of his Tea Party supporters are unhappy about his decision to allow the expansion of Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. A June poll found Scott trailing former Florida Governor Charlie Crist in a hypothetical matchup (Crist is expected to challenge Scott next year). Only 35 percent of Florida voters say Scott deserves a second term. So in order to re-energize his conservative base, Scott is throwing Hispanics under the bus and taking on the mythical problem of non-citizen voting.”
True enough. But where in this era of widening economic inequality is the literature of class conflict?
In his PoliticusUSA post, “Republicans Are In a Full Blown Panic as the Affordable Care Act Grows More Successful,” RMuse writes, “…In New York, premiums are set to fall by roughly 50%, and in California, this author’s premiums fell by about 40% after 17 years of perpetual increases and that does not include rebate checks that began rolling in last year according to the 80/20 rule. It is the health law’s success stories like these that have Republicans in a panic and it is the third reason they are going all in to sabotage the ACA; it is successful.”
Nonetheless,, I hope this is true. One day a happier generation will look back on the pre-single-payer era policy of predicating the health security of millions on the quality of individual employers’ consciences as madness.
In his New York Times Opinion post, “How Twitter can help predict an election,” Fabio Rojas writes, “In a paper to be presented Monday, co-authors Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen and I show that Twitter discussions are an unusually good predictor of U.S. House elections. Using a massive archive of billions of randomly sampled tweets stored at Indiana University, we extracted 542,969 tweets that mention a Democratic or Republican candidate for Congress in 2010. For each congressional district, we computed the percentage of tweets that mentioned these candidates. We found a strong correlation between a candidate’s “tweet share” and the final two-party vote share, especially when we account for a district’s economic, racial and gender profile. In the 2010 data, our Twitter data predicted the winner in 404 out of 406 competitive races.”
Leading minimum wage hike opponent Walmart is definitely not a mighty job-creator, as Kathleen Geier shows at Washington Monthly.
At The Atlantic, Molly Ball addresses the question that has Republicans very worried: “Are Seniors Souring on the Republican Party? The GOP has lost more support among voters over 65 than any other demographic group in recent months, according to a new poll“. As Ball notes, quoting DCorps’ Erica Seifert: “The economy is the biggest underlying factor in the shift, Seifert said. In November 2010, 49 percent of seniors said Republicans were the better party on the economy; just 34 percent said Democrats were. In the July 2013 poll, the parties were essentially tied on this metric, with 43 percent saying Democrats and 42 percent saying Republicans.”
Not a bad analogy, actually.

Greg Sargent’s Plum Line post “How to win the war over Obamacare” explains why ‘mend it, don’t end it’ is the most viable strategy for Dems contesting the estimated 35 house seats that are in play next year.
Keith Griffin writes in his Facing South post, “in the Deep South and Florida, Republican governors and state legislatures have turned down the funding, citing cost concerns and philosophical opposition to the safety net insurance program, which was signed into law on July 30, 1965. In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, the move will exclude 2.7 million low-income residents from Medicaid eligibility, according to the Urban Institute.” If that doesn’t give Dems some leverage with southern voters, what will?
Democrats, do you know what your charge card is doing while you are asleep?
Odd that this Gallup Poll of Immigrant and U.S.-Born Hispanics did not factor in citizenship or RV’s among the variables. Good, nonetheless, that “Hispanics in the U.S. identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by about a 2-to-1 margin, regardless of whether they were U.S.-born.”
This Fox News Poll, conducted though it was by both Democratic and Republican pollsters, strikes me as biased towards Republicans, with 38% of respondents who “think of yourself” as a Democrat, vs. 37% Republicans. But the questions about attitudes toward recipients of public assistance are nonetheless interesting. For example, 94 percent of respondents said they are “Okay” with “a laid-off worker who wants a job and doesn’t have the money to feed his family” receiving food stamps.
At last, some very good news for the AFL-CIO.
At the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore addresses growing evidence that senior voters are getting fed up with the GOP: “If the trend holds, this is a very big deal, folks, not just in the long term but in the immediate future. It’s the grip the GOP had on white seniors that made the 2010 GOP landslide possible, and which had convinced most attentive observers that Republicans possessed a big advantage going into 2014 no matter what was going on across the issue landscape, given the disproportionate turnout of seniors in midterms.”
David Brooks makes a case for some, gasp, “modest paternalism.” Expect splenetic denunciations from Rand Paul, Ted Cruz.
Another great Krugman column, with a clear prescription for Democratic messaging: “…What we’re looking at…is the normal aftermath of a debt-fueled asset bubble; the sluggish U.S. recovery since 2009 is more or less in line with many historical examples, running all the way back to the Panic of 1893. Furthermore, the recovery has been hobbled by spending cuts — cuts that were motivated by what we now know was completely wrongheaded deficit panic. …We need to stop talking about spending cuts and start talking about job-creating spending increases instead. Yes, I know that the politics of doing the right thing will be very hard. But, as far as the economics goes, the only thing we have to fear is fear-mongering itself.
Always thought Santorum was a little weird, But this remark is bizarre.

So what are the political ramifications, if any, of Jeff Bezos’s purchase of he Washington Post? Dave Weigel addresses the question directly in his Slate.com post, “Jeff Bezos, Inscrutable Libertarian Democrat“:

.. Bezos’s investments in political and ideological causes are eclipsed many times over by that of the Kochs, or the Scaifes, or the Soros, etc. But he’s earned a reputation as a libertarian with a targeted style of giving. He’s donated to the Reason Foundation, which publishes the first magazine that hired me, Reason. He gave $100,000 to the campaign to beat an income tax in his own Washington state — and he won.
Sure, his candidate giving record is more mixed. In 1998, he gave $2000 to Sen. Patrick Leahy’s smooth re-election bid. In 2000, he spread $1000 to Rep. John Conyers, $1000 to Sen. Spencer Abraham, and $1000 to Washington Sen. Slade Gorton — one Democrat, two Republicans. Right after Gorton was felled by Sen. Maria Cantwell, he gave $2000 to the Democrat. He gave $4200 more to Cantwell as she put together her 2006 re-election, and he’s given to both of Sen. Patty Murray’s campaigns since he made his fortune: $2000 in 2003, $4800 in 2010. That’s $15,000 over a decade, a fraction of what he gave in order to stop an income tax.
What explains the Democratic tilt? Bezos doesn’t give many interviews about his politics, but turn your eyes to the donation he gave to the successful 2012 campaign to legalize gay marriage in Washington. Bezos and his wife gave $2.5 million. Nothing we know about Bezos suggests that he differs much from the coastal/Acela policy consensus — which is to say he doesn’t differ much from the editorial board of the paper he owns now.
But he’s not used to owning a media corporation with a strong union culture, like the guild at the Post. That’s the first clash I’m interested in.

At The Nation, however, John Nichols thinks the Bezos buy is more of a yawner, at least compared to other recent developments concerning media and politics. As he writes in his post, “Big Media Story Isn’t Bezos and the Post, It’s the RNC Threatening CNN, NBC“:

Partnerships between the networks and the major political parties are a far greater concern than the ownership of newspapers by new generations of rich people. By cutting deals with the parties to host “exclusive” primary debates, and by accepting the parameters established by the two major parties for fall debates, the networks defer to the political establishment in the worst of ways.
It’s time for the networks, wealthy and powerful entities that they are, to declare independence from the major parties. If they want to partner with the League of Women Voters, which remains honorably committed to fairness and openness, that’s great. If they want to work with groups such as Common Cause, or state-based good government organizations and, yes, newspapers, that’s terrific.
But the network partnerships with the parties reinforce the worst status quo instincts–in our media and our politics. Americans should be interested in who owns newspapers, but they should be indignant about an arrangement that has television news operations negotiating with, partnering with and being threatened by political parties.

Me, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that you can buy one of the most influential newspapers on the planet for a paltry $250 mill — less than the cost of a single B-1B bomber.

There is comcern about implementation of the Affordable Care Act in both parties, report Scott Bauer and Thomas Beaumont at the Associated Press. But some Republican governors, Like Indiana’s Terry Branstad, are beginning to get real. As Maryland’s Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley is quoted it in the article, “Nothing could be more complicated than doing what we were doing before, which was to throw away more and more money on more expensive care for worse results.”
In his WaPo column, “Religion challenges left and right,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. argues that Dems may be missing a significant opportunity by not paying attention to the growing number of religious people who are embracing progressive values, as well as the progressive economics of the new pope.
At the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Craig Gilbert discusses the political implications of the dramatic increase in one-party states — to 37 from 19 a decade ago — in context of the gridlock on congress. “Half the states now have veto-proof legislative super-majorities for one side,” say the authors. “This is a striking new landscape in state politics. It stands in sharp contrast to a national government often paralyzed by partisan discord. And it coincides with a burst of ambitious, partisan policy-making in which red and blue states are governing in increasingly divergent and often controversial ways.” If the gridlock continues unabated at the federal level, expect to see an increasing percentage of the resources of the two political parties directed toward state races. The GOP has one-party control of 23 states, compared to 14 for Dems.
Share this story about senior citizens getting busted for singing in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s police state with any senior voters you know. Do check out the two videos with the story.
The Atlanta Constitution’s Jay Bookman has a few choice words about the integrity of House majority Leader Eric Cantor, who is trying to convince people that the Affordable Care Act will compromise their medical privacy by giving confidential information to the I.R.S.: “It is also a bald-faced, blatant lie, a lie that exposes the moral bankruptcy of the case that Cantor and others are attempting to make. There is no conceivable means under federal law for the IRS to access “the American people’s protected health care information,” and he knows it. His intent is to foster paranoia and distrust in the government, and if he can’t make that argument by telling the truth, he is perfectly willing to make it by telling falsehoods.”
Patricia Borns’s “Florida health care reform informers organize” at The Bradenton Herald provides an inkling of the kind of constructive activism that is needed at the state level to get consumers educated about taking advantage of Obamacare:”Seventy-eight percent of Americans have no idea there’s a health marketplace,” Enroll America State Director Nick Duran said. Team members, many hired within the past two weeks, must be ready to recruit and train volunteers, bring local partner organizations on board, and start knocking on doors by the statewide “weekend of action” event starting July 27…Florida Blue plans more than 3,000 seminars to demystify the new health reform guidelines…Nationally, Enroll America is funded by Kaiser Permanente, Families USA and other top donors to President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.”
Michael Tomasky gives former Obama re-election campaign manager Jim Messina a richly-deserved skewering for selling out to Britain’s tories.
Sam Hananel’s “Reinventing unions: Labor leaders get creative to halt decline in membership” at the Daytona beach News-Journal provides an excellent update on the new strategies being deployed in re-invigorate the labor movement. Notes Hananel: “Unions are helping non-union fast food workers around the country hold strikes to protest low wages and poor working conditions. They are trying to organize home day care workers, university graduate students and even newly legalized marijuana dealers. Members of a “shadow union” at Wal-Mart hold regular protests at the giant retailer, which long has been resistant to organizing…The actions in New York, Chicago, Detroit and other cities are being coordinated by local worker centers, nonprofit organizations made up of unions, clergy and other advocacy groups. While not technically labor groups, they receive generous financial support and training staff from the Service Employees International Union and other unions.”
It’s official. Chris Cillizza points out in this video that this is the least productive House of Reps, ever, or at least since they started counting bills passed. Under Boehner’s leadership only 22 bills have passed the House during this session.
Jonathan Bernstein talks sense at Salon.com in his post ” All the pundits are wrong: Conventional wisdom says the GOP has a grip on the House, but can’t win the White House. Here’s why both are wrong.” Bernstein explains: “…It’s not far-fetched to imagine a relatively good year for Democrats in 2014, breaking even or losing a handful of seats, followed by a Democratic presidential landslide in 2016. Or, even more plausibly: Republicans reclaim the White House in 2016, but prove as unable to govern as they were the last time they tried, yielding a Democratic landslide in 2018. Indeed, it’s not hard at all to imagine a relatively weak economy producing a GOP sweep in 2016, a Republican imposition of strict austerity in 2017, and the economic collapse that goes with austerity soon afterward.” Unfortunately, argues Bernstein, the presidency can also be up for grabs.

At The Hill, Russell Berman and Erik Wasson report on signs of (gasp) bipartisanship emerging within the GOP, or at least from House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers. Wasson and Berman note that “Rogers called for a bipartisan deal that would replace the unpopular sequester with something bridging the gap between the House budget and Senate spending measures he said were too costly to pass the lower chamber.”
Greg Sargent argues the latest round of GOP attacks against Obamacare could be the dying gasps of a doomed campaign. “By holding countless repeal votes, and by continuing to insist Republicans will continue targeting the law for elimination, Boehner and other GOP leaders are only keeping alive the hope that Obamacare will be destroyed before it becomes part of the American landscape…They’ve been feeding the repeal monster for literally years now. Even if a government shutdown does happen, of course, Obamacare won’t be defunded. But plenty of other damage will be done in the process. If GOP leaders can’t control this monster, it’s on them.”
Dem digerati should read Beth Reinhard’s National Journal post, “Why Democrats Are Laughing at the Republican Digital Strategy — And Why They Shouldn’t Be.” Reinhard reports that the new GOP system “can merge different campaign spreadsheets on one data platform. That means canvassing lists, phone banks, fundraising reports, event sign-in sheets and social networks are all integrated with outside data for highly detailed profiles of voters and supporters.”
Reinhard has another good article at the National Journal, “Democrats Using Voting Rights Issues to Protect Senate Majority,” which observes “Jotaka Eaddy, senior director of voting rights at the NAACP, said the backlash against voter ID laws nationwide was one reason turnout among black voters topped white turnout for the first time in 2012, 66.2 to 64.1 percent…”It’s important that we move our outrage into action, and I expect to see a similar impact on the 2013 and 2014 elections,” Eaddy said. “A lot of people will go to the polls with this issue in the forefront of their minds, and if Congress fails to act there will be serious repercussions.”
This new PPP poll should have Mitch McConnell worried.
At The Guardian, Harry J. Enten reports that “Felon voting rights have a bigger impact on elections than voter ID laws.” Enten explains, “A study of felon voting patterns (pdf) from 1972 to 2000 found on average 30% of felons and ex-felons would vote if given the chance, and about three out of four would vote for the Democratic nominee for president. This would have doubled Al Gore’s margin in the national vote…In terms of pure numbers, 137,478 of African-Americans in Alabama, 107,758 in Mississippi, and 145,943 in Tennessee are kept from voting.”
On the same topic, see Josh Israel’s “Felon Voting Restrictions Disenfranchise More Minority Voters Than Voter ID Laws” at Think Progress.
Shanta N. Covington explores an important distinction in the debate about voter suppression, “The difference between ‘impact’ and ‘intent’ on your right to vote” at MSNBC.com.
Here’s a hopeful note, from Deborah Foster’s PoliticusUSA post, “Can Government Pick Up Where Unions Left Off?“:”Across the country, municipalities, counties, and increasingly some states have passed worker-friendly laws like living wages, paid sick leave, expanded family leave acts, bereavement leave bills, and pregnancy disability provisions. At a time when unions are increasingly neutered, workers should turn their attention to local government to put in place rights already enjoyed in most other Western democratic nations. One way to strengthen this process is to identify the grassroots victories in these local communities as steps in an overall movement with its own identity, not unlike the grassroots movement to gain same sex marriage rights by chipping away at the discriminatory laws that blanket the country. The distance to the goal always seem formidable at the start, but as progress is made here and there across the country, soon we could have a groundswell that gives us national remedies.”
You go, guys.

Chris Matthews raised some eyebrows on MSNBC last night, when he accused Sen. Ted Cruz of “political terrorism,” provoking an argument with McCain’s senior campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, who said, in essence, it’s a term that should be reserved for those who actually try to kill their adversaries. Schmidt preferred “demagogue” and “irresponsible.”
In my view they were both right. Matthews was correct in saying that much of the behavior of key GOP leaders is intentionally destructive and designed to paralyze government into dysfunction and chaos. That meets some of the requirements of terrorism. But Schmidt is also right in saying that applying the inflammatory term to political dialogue implicitly trivializes the damage that murderous political terrorists have done worldwide.
Credit Matthews with a perceptive observation. Current Republican strategy does have significant sociopathic elements, which should be condemned by all responsible citizens, not just us partisan Democrats. But to most people, I would guess that using the term “political terrorism” to describe Republican legislative obstructionism is rhetorical overkill which demonizes adversaries. You never help your case by overstating descriptions of your opponent’s behavior.
When rising Democratic star Rep. Alan Grayson called his Republican opponent, Daniel Webster, ‘Taliban Dan,’ in the 2010 congressional race, Grayson apparently hurt his own cred with a number of voters. Sure he had a point, in that his opponent urged making divorce illegal and forcing abused women to remain in their marriages, not so unlike Taliban policy towards women. But using the term may have contributed to Grayson’s defeat in that election. Thankfully, Grayson was elected in 2012 to a different district, proving that you can recover from verbal blunders, if you learn the lesson.
In his Washington Monthly post, “Nihilism or Principle,” Ed Kilgore notes that top journalists including James Fallows and Jonathan Chait may have strayed into rhetorical overkill territory in describing the behavior of GOP leaders as “nihilism.” The term sort of fits much recent Republican behavior, particularly the knee-jerk opposition to anything Obama, regardless of the consequences. But nihilism, as Kilgore observes, entails an absence of ideology, while the GOP is heavily laden with extremist ideologues, with Cruz as exhibit A.
It’s not all that hard to visualize McConnell and Boehner being portrayed in an SNL skit as the nihilists in “The Big Lebowski.” Boehner does seem to relish with nihilistic gusto his recent anointing as the least productive Speaker, maybe ever. If Republicans have not quite earned the “nihilist” designation, some of them seem to be dabbling in the nihilist spectrum.
Nor is it too much of a stretch to argue that Republicans are flirting with both “political terrorism” and “nihilism.” But I don’t think there is much benefit in pushing the terms as memes, and Dems can hurt their cause by doing so. It’s quite enough that the GOP richly deserves the “obstructionist” designation, which even its defenders sometimes affirm. The term resonates well because it is wholly, not partially accurate.
With respect to Dems calling out Republicans for “sabotage,” however, we are on very safe ground. You would be hard-pressed to find a more accurate one-word term to describe the current strategy of Republican congressional leaders. The GOP’s proclivity for sabotage is unprecedented in scale, beyond blocking the progress of legislation. They are now into preventing the implementation of duly-enacted laws at every opportunity, consciously thumbing their noses at the Democratic process and the American people. That may not literally be anarchy, political terrorism or nihilism. But the trend is disturbingly in that direction.
For now, however, the wisest course would be to pass on attacking Republicans with terms that don’t quite fully apply and which sound like unjustified ad hominem attacks. Better, Democrats continue to call out Republicans for gridlock, obstruction, paralysis and sabotage (GOPS), terms which resonate with more accuracy every day.