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.”

Democrats are pounded on a daily basis by Republicans, who are eager to point out our failings and shortcomings. That’s the way it should be, and vice versa. Yet, attacks by a political adversary have limited value. They can be helpful in terms of identifying policies and ideas which need to be modified or corrected. But there is always a lot of partisan axe-grinding that comes with it and doesn’t merit much consideration.
For a political party to stay honest and keep faith with its principles, however, it should undergo periods of rigorous self-criticism from time to time, and the year after a presidential election is a much better time for it than the year or two just before one. Toward that end, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has a provocative HuffPo post that can serve as a good starting point for Democrats to assess where they are and where they need to go. Here’s some of Reich’s assessment regarding what Democrats should be about on two of the most critical issues, Social Security and Medicare:

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.
This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.
It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.
For over thirty years Republicans have pitted the middle class against the poor, preying on the frustrations and racial biases of average working people who can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try. In the Republican narrative, government takes from the hard-working middle and gives to the undeserving and dependent needy.
In reality, average working people have been stymied because almost all the economic gains of the last three decades have gone to the very top. The middle has lost bargaining power as unions have shriveled. American politics has been flooded with campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy, which have used their clout to reduce marginal tax rates, widen loopholes, loosen regulations, gain subsidies, and obtain government bailouts when their bets turn sour.
Now five years after the worst downturn since the Great Depression and the biggest bailout in history, the stock market has recouped its losses and corporate profits constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. Yet the real median wage continues to fall — wages now claim the lowest share of the economy on record — and inequality is still widening. All the economic gains since the trough of the recession have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; the bottom 90 percent continue to lose ground.
What looks like the start of a more buoyant recovery is a sham because the vast majority of Americans have neither the pay nor access to credit that allows them to buy enough to boost the economy…If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now — forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor. This need not be “class warfare” because a healthy economy is in everyone’s interest…
But the modern Democratic Party can’t bring itself to do this. It’s too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy.
It was Bill Clinton, after all, who pushed for repeal of Glass-Steagall, championed the North American Free Trade Act and the World Trade Organization without adequate safeguards for American jobs, and rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to a steady stream of rich executives.
And it was Barack Obama who continued George W. Bush’s Wall Street bailout with no strings attached; pushed a watered-down “Volcker Rule” (still delayed) rather than renew Glass-Steagall; failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive or bank because, according to his Attorney General, Wall Street is just too big to jail; and permanently enshrined the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent.

This not a blanket critique of Presidents Clinton and Obama. Clinton deserves great credit for having the wisdom to stay out of stupid, costly wars, which we have learned is not to be taken for granted. Obama has achieved a lot with unprecedented obstruction from Republicans, including the most significant health care reform since the 1960s. Former Speaker Pelosi is arguably one of the best House leaders ever.
But Reich is quite right that weakening Social Security and Medicare is not what America’s progressive party should be about. He points out that Dem leaders have been complicit in allowing the Social Security fund to be raided, chickened out on supporting reforms to help unions thrive and are now opening the door to “pre-concessions” weakening Medicare and Social Security. Reich believes Dems must stand firm in protecting these two key programs:

…Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever devised by the federal government, which is why Republicans hate them so much. If average Americans have trusted the Democratic Party to do one thing it has been to guard these programs from the depredations of the GOP.
Putting these two programs “on the table” is also tantamount to accepting the most insidious and dishonest of all Republican claims: That for too long most Americans have been living beyond their means; that we are rapidly approaching a day of reckoning when we can no longer afford these generous “entitlements;” and that prudence and responsibility dictate that we must now begin to live within our means and cut back these projected expenditures, particularly if we are to have any money left to invest in the young and the disadvantaged.
The truth is the opposite: That for three decades the means of most Americans have been stagnant even though the overall economy has more than doubled in size; that because almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top, most Americans haven’t been able to save enough for retirement or the rising costs of healthcare; and that because of this, Social Security and Medicare are barely adequate as is.

Despite significant reforms, like the Affordable Care Act, the Democratic Party has folded on too many critical issues in recent years. If we allow Social Security and Medicare to be further undermined in return for puny concessions by Republican leaders, we can’t blame working people for wondering what, if anything we are willing to fight for.
Noting record wealth concentration in the U.S., Reich concludes,

…An increasing share of that wealth is held by a smaller and smaller share of the population, who have, in effect, bribed legislators to reduce their taxes and provide loopholes so they pay even less…The budget deficit “crisis” has been manufactured by them to distract our attention from this overriding fact, and to pit the rest of us against each other for a smaller and smaller share of what remains. Democrats should not conspire.

Democrats have benefited substantially in recent elections by growing extremism in the Republican Party. But we can’t count on ever-increasing tea party lunacy contaminating the GOP brand forever. That’s not much of a foundation on which to build a viable party going forward. If Democrats now cave on two programs as fundamental to the security of working families as Social Security and Medicare, we shouldn’t be surprised if they begin to look elsewhere for leaders who will serve their interests.

At The Atlantic Molly Ball asks “Has Obama Turned a Generation of Voters Into Lifelong Democrats?,” — and answers in the affirmative.
CAP’s President/CEO Neera Tanden and CAP senior fellows Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin have a WaPo op-ed “On government spending, GOP faces a reckoning,” which observes that Latinos, African and Asian Americans, as well as yougn voters, have little use for GOP government bashing and they provide the numbers to prove it. They add, “To conservatives’ discomfort, changes in attitudes about government cannot be finessed by softer words on immigration and same-sex marriage. Likewise, new leaders or better outreach and technology will not solve their problems with these rising voters. Perhaps that is why conservatives are being so adamant and extreme about cutting government: Tomorrow’s political terrain is likely to be less congenial to their anti-government fervor, and they want to accomplish what they can before the tide turns.”
It’s early for 2016 horse race heats, but Hillary beats Floridians Jeb and Marco by double digits in FL Quinnipiac University Poll conducted March 13-18.
Same poll shows 56 percent of Floridians, who have more concealed gun permits than any other state, support a nation-wide ban on the sale of assault weapons, with 41 percent opposed, reports the Miami Herald.
As yet another Bush prepares to run for president, The Nation’s Phyliss Bennis does a good job of succinctly relating the costs, human and financial of the Iraq war started by his brother: “…There was the lie that the US could send hundreds of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars worth of weapons across the world to wage war on the cheap. We didn’t have to raise taxes to pay the almost one trillion dollars the Iraq war has cost so far, we could go shopping instead…But behind these myths the costs were huge–human, economic and more. More than a million US troops were deployed to Iraq; 4,483 were killed; 33,183 were wounded and more than 200,000 came home with PTSD. The number of Iraqi civilians killed is still unknown; at least 121,754 are known to have been killed directly during the US war…More died from crippling sanctions, diseases caused by dirty water when the US destroyed the water treatment system and the inability to get medical help because of exploding violence.”
David Sirota has an interesting read up at Salon.com, “How to turn a state liberal: Colorado’s progressive miracle is a road map to a much brighter America. Here are 9 steps behind the transformation.” Sirota quotes Dean Singleton, “Denver Post publisher and longtime Republican power broker in Colorado”: “I think (the GOP) is dead in Colorado … It really doesn’t matter whom the Republicans put up. Republicans, in my view, won’t win another presidency in our lifetime …They pick candidates that aren’t in the mainstream … I think Colorado is probably a Democratic state from now on. It is a Democratic state today, and I don’t think it’s going back.”
It’s a little late, but support for filibuster reform is apparently growing to the point where Majority Leader Reid is making noises about bringing it back up…somehow. Greg Sargent, however, is unimpressed and says “Empty threats make Dems look weak and do nothing to discourage continued GOP obstructionism.”
TNR’s Nate Cohn explains why the Libertarian Lightweight is not going to mobilize young voters for the GOP.
At the NYT Opinionator Thomas B. Edsall’s take on “The Republican Autopsy Report” sheds light on the dicey future of the GOP. Calling the report “a remarkably hard-headed diagnosis of the party’s many liabilities,” Edsall succinctly enumerates the Republicans internal maladies as “ideological rigidity, its preference for the rich over workers, its alienation of minorities, its reactionary social policies and its institutionalized repression of dissent and innovation.” Edsall concludes that “What has yet to be determined is whether they are fighting over a patient who can be quickly resuscitated or a patient with a chronic but not fatal illness — or a corpse.”
Scalia is apparently campaigning for lead shill in the GOP echo chamber, an oddly undignified role for a self-described ‘textualist.”

It’s regrettable that the U.S. Senate could not muster the requisite 60 votes to insure passage of an assault weapons ban, even after the spate of horrific shootings, including the mass murder of children in Sandy Hook Elementary school. It is sadder still that Majority Leader Harry Reid could not even get 40 Democrats on board. But Democratic senators who had the courage and vision to serve as co-sponsors of the bill, which is sponsored by Senator Diane Feinstein merit a tip of the hat. If your senator isn’t on the list, you can call him/her and ask why at (202) 224-3121.
Current Senate cosponsors
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.)
Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.)
Senator Mo Cowan (D-Mass.)
Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)
Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.)
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)
Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii)
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)
Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)
Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.)
Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)
Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.)
Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)
Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.)
Senator John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii)
Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
The bill would have banned specific semi-automatic weapons and ammo clips, including those used in recent massacres.
But a version of the assault weapons ban may get a vote. As Ed O’Keefe and Phillip Rucker report in the Washington Post:

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) is working with other Democrats to find potential GOP co-sponsors for a revised bill with exceptions for firearm exchanges between family members or close friends. But talks have been hampered by disagreements about whether to establish a record-keeping system for non-commercial gun transactions.

“I think we have growing momentum on our side,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal. “Newtown was a call to action and I think we’ve made tremendous progress. Three-plus months ago, this issue was politically untouchable. This time is different.”

At Daily Kos Elections, David Jarman’s “Renters make good Democrats, and other demographic observations” offers some useful insights. Lots of interesting discussion in the comments section as well.
Could it be clearer? Even a conservative-commissioned poll shows it. As Alexander Burns reports at Politico, “The YG Network polling, conducted by the GOP firm McLaughlin & Associates, found that 38 percent of Americans name the “economy and jobs” as the issue of greatest importance to them. Twenty percent named “deficit and debt” as their top concern, and 16 percent pointed to health care…”It is important to note that ‘economy and jobs’ is almost twice that of ‘deficit and debt,'” pollster John McLaughlin notes in the report.”
This story probably deserves more attention from both the media and Democratic strategists than it is going to get: A new guest worker proposal under discussion in talks between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and organized labor would link foreign worker visas to the unemployment rate.
Sen Rob Portman’s about-face notwithstanding, Nate Silver reports that ” only 25 percent of Republican voters supported same-sex marriage in Pew’s poll last year, barely changed from 21 percent in 2001.”
Republicans don’t like it. But a pro-Democratic group is launching a new website, C-Quest.org, which “will feature original video and local coverage of the sequester’s effects,” reports Aaron Blake at Post Politics.
Greg Sargent finds “A moment of real clarity in the fiscal debate,” after reporters corner Speaker Boehner and Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy. Sargent concludes from the interviews: “…now sinking in that: 1) Republicans are not getting the entitlement cuts they want without agreeing to new revenues; and 2) Republicans are explicitly confirming that there is no compromise that is acceptable to them to get the cuts they themselves say they want. The GOP position, with no exaggeration, is that the only way Republican leaders will ever agree to paying down the deficit they say is a threat to American civilization is 100 percent their way; they are not willing to concede anything at all to reach any deal involving new revenues to reduce the deficit, or to get the entitlement reform they want, or to avert sequestration they themselves said will gut the military and tank the economy.”
Wonkblog’s Danny Hayes has an insightful post on attitudes toward the death penalty — and the role of the MSM in transforming the way people think about it.
Speaking of the MSM, am I nuts, or is CPAC getting an awful lot of ink, air time and bytes for an organization representing an ideology that was overwhelmingly rejected by voters in the last election? (See, for example, what you get when you click on National Journal’s ‘Politics’ link. Hard to imagine a liberal organization getting equivalent coverage)
E. J. Dionne, Jr. puts the conservative disconnect with political reality in perspective: “Do they honestly think voters will endorse the military spending they seek even as they throw 40 million to 50 million of our fellow citizens off health insurance and weaken health coverage for our elderly? Can they continue to deny that their goal of an internationally influential America demands more revenue than they currently seem willing to provide? Have conservatives on the Supreme Court pondered what eviscerating the Voting Rights Act would do to the image of our democracy around the globe?…Would they rather waste the next three years than make any further concessions to a president the voters just reelected?”
I’m glad someone else noticed.

Matea Gold of the L.A. Times D.C. Bureau reports on President Obama’s message to Organizing for Action Founder’s Summit yesterday, which is right on target: “The only idea here that we’re promoting is the notion that if the American people are speaking out, organized, activated, that may give space here in Washington to do the kind of work — hopefully bipartisan work — that’s required…But in order to do that I’m going to need all your help.” Gold adds, “…The organization is drawing on his campaign’s data, technology and staff as it seeks to build a grass-roots force to back him on issues such as gun control, immigration reform and the budget.”
At The Washington Post, Lori Montgomery reports “…107 House Democrats — more than half the caucus — have signed a letter declaring their “vigorous opposition to cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.” And the complaints are likely to grow louder as Republicans press Obama for more details about his proposals to charge wealthy seniors more for Medicare coverage and to implement the Social Security inflation change, known as the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI.”
Here’s a Wonkblog graphic comparison of the Senate Democrats budget (sponsored by Patti Murray) and Paul Ryan’s House budget.
In his ‘Conscience of a Liberal’ blog, Paul Krugman observes that the Ryan budget “produces a lot of front-loaded austerity, in part because it keeps the tax hikes that finance Obamacare while cancelling the Medicaid expansion and exchange subsidies. The result would be a lot of fiscal drag in 2014 and 2015 — years when the U.S. is very likely still to be in a liquidity trap, so multipliers will be large. This particular “Path to Prosperity” is, in the short to medium term, very much a path to continued depression.”
John Dickerson’s Slate post, “Is Obama Setting a Trap for Republicans?” probes white house strategy in the budget negotiations. Sure, the president would like a grand bargain on the budget, and he has to try for one, knowing full-well that the Republicans could string him along for a while, then sink the negotiations at any time. In that event, Obama has the cover he needs to hang tough and reveal, once again, that the Republicans can’t govern because they won’t compromise — not a bad meme for 2014.
The Republicans’ clueless arrogance toward working people is well-reflected in this account “The Lesson of Mitt Romney’s 47-Percent Video: Be Nice to the Wait Staff?” by Chris Good of ABC’s ‘The Note.’ As Good puts it in his opening and closing sentences: “Mitt Romney may have lost the presidency because he offended a bartender” and “Perhaps candidates should be more careful about what they say around servers, because sometimes the 47 percent is bringing out the food.”
At Roll Call, Abby Livingston posts on “The Unusual Suspects: DCCC Hunts for Outsiders.” Livingston credits the DCCC with reaching beyond traditional sources for candidate recruitment in the Committee’s new ‘Operation Jumpstart.’ Says DCCC Executive Director Kelly Ward: “We look for solutionists, people who have a track record of solving problems in that community or have a story that really resonates with the voters in that community — mayors, business leaders, veterans.” OK, but a wider net couldn’t hurt.
Boo hoo about Intrade’s big fold. But Nate Silver reports that betting on political outcomes is very much alive elsewhere. “Most of these sites are not open to Americans…But they tended to perform more rationally than Intrade over the course of the 2012 campaign, with their prices more closely tracking polls, prediction models and news events.” But their traffic is peanuts, compared to the mother of all casinos — Wall St.– and Silver shows how politics is reflected in stock market prices.
At The New York Times ‘Opinionator,’ Thomas B. Edsall explores in impressive detail how the three different methods of measuring poverty used by politicians lead to serious problems in formulating policy: “The lack of definition in our definition of poverty is part of the problem; it helps to answer the question of how the richest country in the history of the world could have so many people living in a state of deprivation.”
Here’s hoping that Sen. Rand Paul will serve as a ‘useful idiot’ spolier in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, garnering just enough votes in key states to help deny their most electable candidate, whoever that may be, the nomination. Given the GOP’s venerable tradition of silly or malevolent veep candidates, Paul may yet find himself in that slot, which is a scary enough “heartbeat away” scenario. But he is not likely to top the ticket, as Michael Gerson argues in his WaPo column, “Rand Paul masks his true worldview.”

Dems need a net gain of 18 seats in 2014 to win back control of the House of Reps, which sounds like a tall order given the mid term election historical patterns. But doing so is the president’s top political goal going forward, and Pennsylvania is a crucial battlefield. But Robert Vickers ‘ “Analysis: Obama’s midterm strategy could pose problems for Corbett” in the Central Pennsylvania Patriot News writes: ” While the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report currently ranks the Pennsylvania governor’s race as a “pure toss-up,” all the state’s congressional seats are ranked “safe” or “favored” for the incumbent…However, all three “favored” seats are Republican-held, and appear to be part Obama’s midterm strategy…Democrats have prioritized two of those “Republican favored” districts – freshman U.S. Rep. Keith Rothfus’ 12th district seat, and two-term U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick’s 8th district seat. Fitzpatrick reclaimed the seat last year after losing his first re-election effort.” Vickers reports that Dems are also looking at winning two other seats in the ‘burbs outside Philadelphia.
At Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg notes four House districts Dems should be able to pick up with better candidate recruitment.
Associated Press has an update on the “challenging terrain” Dems face in holding their majority in the U.S. Senate next year. Dems are placing their hopes on “polarizing primaries” for the GOP.
The Bangor Daily News has an editorial defending the voting rights of prisoners, who have been convicted of the most serious crimes (Only Maine and Vermont allow that right), and also providing an informative discussion of the pros and cons of the policy.
According to Lily Kuo’s Quartz post, Electronic voting is failing the developing world while the US and Europe abandon it “In the US and Western Europe, more states have been opting out of electronic voting systems and returning to paper out of worries over the number of glitches and, as we’ve reported before, the inability to verify that electronic votes or the software on machines have not been manipulated…In the US 2012 election, 56% of voters cast paper ballots that were optically scanned (pdf. p. 75) while only 39% used electronic voting machines. Similarly in Europe only two countries-Belgium and France-use electronic ballots. Out of eight European countries that have experimented with electronic voting, six reverted back to paper ballots.”
Some Dems got scammed by Rand Paul’s grandstanding. But MoJo’s David Corn ain’t having it. Neither is Alternet’s Joshua Holland.
Ralph Nader tries to answer a provocative question, “Why Are Democrats So Defeatist?” As Nader explains: “The leadership is still reluctant to represent the more than three-quarters of the American people who want big business to be held accountable for its special privileges, reckless behavior and disregard for people’s livelihoods. Many senior Democrats are settled in their own safe seats and care little about the overall prospects of the party winning a majority in the House.”
At the Wall St. Journal, Phil Izzo has a revealing statistic to ponder: “7.1%: What the unemployment rate would be without government job cuts.”
GOP-driven deficit hysteria is arguably the most destructive force in American politics. Krugman’s Saturday column, “Dwindling Deficit Disorder,” has some cogent thoughts on the topic, including: “…In fact, the deficit is falling more rapidly than it has for generations, it is already down to sustainable levels, and it is too small given the state of the economy. ..the facts about our dwindling deficit are unwelcome in many quarters. Fiscal fearmongering is a major industry inside the Beltway, especially among those looking for excuses to do what they really want, namely dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security…The deficit is indeed dwindling, and the case for making the deficit a central policy concern, which was never very strong given low borrowing costs and high unemployment, has now completely vanished.”
I think not.

Most alert Democrats are aware that our party has been out-organized in too many states where we should be stronger. But the really bad news is that it’s probably worse than we thought. That’s the conclusion that is hard to avoid after reading Patrick Caldwell’s post “Outmatched” at The American Prospect.
Elated as all Dems were to re-elect President Obama, the painful truth is that we have failed to match the Republicans at the state level. They have paid much more attention to building political political infrastructure, and it is starting to pay off, big time.
Like many Dems, I had been worried about this trend for a while, noting mounting GOP gains in state legislatures. 2010 was a wake-up call. But what really brought it home to me was the recent fiasco in Michigan. As Caldwell explains:

It seemed unfathomable that Michigan, once the cradle of a thriving and unionized American workforce, could have turned overnight into a right-to-work state. But then many traditions have been upended since the 2010 midterm elections in which Republicans took control of both legislative chambers in 26 states. (Though a few states flipped sides in the November election, that number still holds.) Longtime progressive and purple states, newly under Republican control, have turned into Texas-lite. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislature stripped public employees of collective-bargaining rights. In Maine, Governor Paul LePage and a Republican-held legislature cut health benefits for the poor. Early this year, Republicans in North Carolina (a state under Republican control for the first time in more than a century) approved cutting unemployment benefits by a third.

Credit the Republicans with politically-astute powers of observation and a commitment to exploit weaknesses of their adversaries. They spotted our achilles heel — relatively weak state parties in a few big states — and made the most of it. Demographic trends are very much on our side. But demography is destiny only up to a point — and then it isn’t anymore. History is replete with examples of forces with superior advantages getting shellacked by smart strategy. It applies to politics as well as military conflict.
Caldwell explains how the Republicans mobilized some of their statewide takeovers:

Several groups can be thanked for the rightward swing in state policy. Progressives have lately focused much of their attention on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded alliance that crafts model policy and even bills for state legislators (it had done so in secret for almost three decades until Freedom of Information Act requests revealed the extent of its work in 2011). But in Michigan’s case and others, key policy ideas had been incubating for years–sometimes decades–across a more loosely knit but effective web of conservative think tanks working at the state level.
Sitting atop this coalition is the State Policy Network (SPN), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. “We’re a service organization dedicated to encouraging state-focused think tanks,” Meredith Turney, the group’s director of strategic communications, said by e-mail, “so we spend most of our time in the states, not D.C.” Thomas Roe Jr.–a member of Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet” of informal advisers, longtime board member for the Heritage Foundation, and founder of his own think tank, the South Carolina Policy Council–started the organization in 1992.
SPN’s modest budget–$5.1 million in 2011, according to the latest available figures–pales in comparison to the Heritage Foundation’s roughly $80 million annual budget, and it operates with a light touch. Unlike ALEC, which dictates corporations’ policy interests from the top down, SPN does not enforce strict adherence to a particular dogma. Affiliates have latitude to pursue the occasional heterodox project; the Texas Public Policy Foundation, for example, normally pushes for minimal taxes and regulations (the think tank receives all of the proceeds* from Rick Perry’s pre-presidential campaign book) but also advocates for criminal-justice reforms and reductions to prison sentences. Still, the group’s members have worked together to push what they call free-market principles. Theirs is a long-term mission, requiring years of advocacy to convert what often start out as fringe concepts into palatable policy.
Various state-level think tanks in the network have also served as launching pads for Republican politicians. As a 2007 National Review article on SPN pointed out, before Jeff Flake successfully ran for the House of Representatives in 2000, he served as executive director of Arizona’s Goldwater Institute; Mike Pence oversaw the Indiana Policy Review Foundation before he entered the U.S. House in 2001. As of January, Flake is now a U.S. senator and Pence the governor of Indiana.

Caldwell goes into much more detail in his article about the particulars of conservative think tank strategy, noting that “SPN advises member think tanks on fundraising and running a nonprofit and helps train them in communicating ideas.” What is starkly clear from his article is that these think tanks excite and energize their constituencies to an impressive extent, apparently more than do their progressive counterparts. He quotes Mark Schmitt noting that “there’s more of them and they’re bigger” than are liberal think tanks. They also relate to constituencies at the state level more effectively.
Schmitt notes further that conservatives may have a natural advantage at the state level to some extent, being more about “states rights.” Caldwell adds that Dems tend to spend more money on causes than strengthening our organizational capacity. he concedes that there have been pro-Democratic think tanks successes, like Policy Matters Ohio, which “provided the analytical backbone for a voter-approved amendment in 2006 that automatically ties the state’s minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index” and Washington state’s Economic Opportunity Institute, which mobilized “a coalition that convinced Seattle to pass a paid sick-day policy.” yet, as Caldwell adds,

…Still, for all the individual victories, the broader change pushed by conservative state think tanks has eluded progressives. “Since we’ve really had a retrenchment of economic rights over the last generation,” says Amy Hanauer of Policy Matters Ohio, “and a retrenchment of economic equity, it’s hard to make the case that liberal think tanks have been very effective on the economic front.”

Dems need to face the fact that, going forward, we are likely to have very few candidates as charismatic and/or capable as President Obama. He is an exceptionally-strong candidate for reasons that have nothing to do with his race. It is entirely possible that the Republicans will run a better-prepared presidential candidate in the not too-distant future. If Dems don’t have a stronger infrastucture at the state level than we do now to check the GOP, we could pay a dear price.
It doesn’t have to be that way — especially if the Democrats will now pay closer attention to building state-wide institutions that can support progressive causes and candidates. Nor does it mean we have to do it the way the Republicans did it. We have to draw on our unique strengths and repair our particular weaknesses. But we must be every bit as creative and driven as the Republicans have been. However we do it, this is a challenge we must accept to prevent a Republican takeover of all America’s political institutions and to make the most of our demographic advantage in forging a better future for our party and the nation..

Organizing for Action has made a very smart decision — not to take corporate contributions, and, even better, to report all contributions of $250 and more, including the names of donors each quarter. OFA Chairman Jim Messina announced the decision in a CNN.com op-ed.
It’s a pretty gutsy move. Rachel Weiner reports at WaPo: “As a 501(c)4 non-profit social welfare organization, the group can raise unlimited funds and is not subject to Federal Election Commission disclosure rules.” Messina explains further:

“We believe in being open and transparent…That’s why every donor who gives $250 or more to this organization will be disclosed on the website with the exact amount they give on a quarterly basis. We have now decided not to accept contributions from corporations, federal lobbyists or foreign donors…We’ll mobilize to support the president’s agenda, but we won’t do so on behalf of political candidates.”

Wealthy individuals can still make contributions to OFA, though their names will be made public, unlike the policy of the right-wing Super-PACs. The new, more transparent OFA policy on limiting and revealing contributions should improve the organization’s populist creds while making the shadowy and secretive conservative groups look like they have something to hide, which is exactly the case.
OFA has already launched “a six-figure online advertising campaign aimed at getting Republican lawmakers to support stronger background checks on gun purchases,” notes Weiner.
Openness and transparency in reporting contributions always enhances an organization’s credibility, especially when in stark contrast to the policy of its adversaries. It remains unclear, however, whether the MSM will now challenge the conservative PAC’s to make a commitment to greater openness in reporting their sources of support.

It’s too late to do much about it until next year, but at Washington Monthly’s ‘Political Animal’ blog TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore makes an important, if overlooked point about the renewed talk about filibuster reform: “…Our friends in the MSM continue to struggle to call a filibuster a filibuster, and instead persist in talking about bills being “voted down” in the Senate because they don’t receive 60 votes. If it takes live demagoguery on the Senate floor to make it obvious what’s going on, maybe it’s worth the effort.” Kilgore adds, “But in any event, progressives should not shut up about filibuster reform until something significant is actually done about it.”
This Economist ‘Lexington Blog’ post on “The politics of purity” argues that the GOP’s current deliberations about their primary system will do more to determine their political future than all of their agonizing ideological reappraisals.
Some good talking points for gun control advocates in this report by Yamiche Alcindor of USA TODAY on a new study by Boston Children’s Hospital, based on data from all 50 states between 2007-10: “States with the most laws had a mortality rate 42% lower than those states with the fewest laws, they found. The strong law states’ firearm-related homicide rate was also 40% lower and their firearm-related suicide rate was 37% lower…The study also found that laws requiring universal background checks and permits to purchase firearms were most clearly associated with decreasing rates of gun-related homicides and suicides.”
Timothy Noah’s “If Democrats Want to Solve the Sequester, They Should Move Left” at TNR argues, that, while centrist policies are good for winning elections, “If Democrats shift leftward, their governing prospects will improve because Republicans will shift leftward, too. Then compromise with Republicans will produce acceptably centrist results.”
In his Otherwords.org op-ed, “A global spotlight on voter suppression,” Ron Carver, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow and former Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee field organizer, raises an issue that Justices Roberts and Kennedy ought to think about in their deliberations on the fate of the Voting Rights Act. Carver quotes from a letter signed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa and human rights luminaries from 22 countries: “America’s leadership in voting rights has been a beacon of hope for millions around the world who have made their own sacrifices for freedom and democracy…Beyond your borders, the global march toward justice will suffer grievous harm should you surrender to those who seek to disenfranchise American citizens.” Gutting the law could do serious damage to U.S. credibility as an advocate of democracy.
At the Columbia Journalism Review Brendan Nyan continues his discussion on “The third party fever dream, revisited” regarding prospects for the emergence of a viable third major political party amid growing public grumbling about both parties.
Daniel Marans, an executive producer for Take Action News has “An Open Letter to MSNBC: Disclose Ed Rendell’s Conflicts of Interest” up at HuffPo. Marans takes MSNBC to task because Rendell, a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, “as co-chair of the Fix the Debt campaign…frequently uses his platform as an MSNBC analyst to call for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” Rendell is a frequent commentator on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ program, which has a lopsided pro-austerity bias.
Those who have been searching for a sensible progressive analysis of how to insure Social Security solvency without inflicting unfair burden on working people should start with Thomas B. Edsall’s New York Times ‘Opinionator’ post “The War On Entitlements,” which includes a persuasive case for lifting the payroll tax cap.
You already knew that the wealthy have different economic policy priorities than average working people. But this data-rich Demos report, “Stacked Deck: How the Dominance of Politics by the Affluent & Business Undermine Economic Mobility in America” documents the process with exceptional clarity.
Taegan Goddard takes a stab at a daunting task, selecting the “10 dumbest things Republicans said last month,” the most bizarre of which may be Alan Keyes assessment of the rationale behind the president’s gun control proposal: “They are going to cull the herd, so that instead of having billions, we’ll only have hundreds of millions of human beings on the face of the planet.”