At philly.com, Nathan P. Shrader, a Republican Committeeman from Philly’s Kensington community, has written what deserves to be considered a classic op-ed, entitled “Disappointed Republican talks about why he’s dumping Mitt.” Do read the whole thing, which concludes: “Einstein once said that “character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.” When nobody but a group of wealthy donors was looking, Romney took the opportunity to assail the patriotism, work ethic, decency and moral fiber of the people he seeks to lead. This isn’t character. This is despicable. My fellow Republicans, and all voters with a sense of right and wrong, should ditch Romney. He just isn’t worth it.”
Associated Press’s Jennifer Agiesta reports on the campaign to win ‘likely voters,” noting: “With six hard-fought weeks left in the campaign, just 7 percent of likely voters have yet to pick a candidate, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. When combined with those who are leaning toward one candidate or the other but far from firm in their choice, about 17 percent of likely voters are what pollsters consider “persuadable.”…That includes 6 percent who give soft support to Obama and 4 percent for Romney…Persuadables look a lot like other likely voters, and they’re similarly distributed around the country, which makes it tricky for the campaigns to specifically target them. About 52 percent are male and 48 percent female. They do skew slightly Democratic.”
Via Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly: ” Lyin’ Ryan is at it again, this time telling an audience of senior citizens that Obamacare includes death panels. Maybe he’s taking Sarah Palin’s advice that Romney/Ryan need to “go rogue.”
The New York Times editorial, ‘Voter Harassment, 2012,” describes how a tea party offshoot connected to the Koch brothers, “True the Vote” is expected to interfere with voting rights in minority precincts: “In 2009 and 2010, for example, the group focused on the Houston Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democrat. After poring over the records for five months, True the Vote came up with a list of 500 names it considered suspicious and challenged them with election authorities. Officials put these voters on “suspense,” requiring additional proof of address, but in most cases voters had simply changed addresses. That didn’t stop the group from sending dozens of white “poll watchers” to precincts in the district during the 2010 elections, deliberately creating friction with black voters.”
Despite the ‘war on early voting,’ Bill Turque reports at the Washington Post that “Early votes are expected to make up the majority of ballots cast in battlegrounds such as Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Colorado, where as many as 80 percent of all voters may be early. Two states, Oregon and Washington, conduct elections exclusively by mail, sending ballots to all registered voters about three weeks before the election…The volume of pre-Election Day activity is expected to surpass 2008, when about 33 percent of 131 million votes cast in the presidential contest were early.”
At Bloomberg Businessweek, John McCormick adds: “All of the key battleground states except New Hampshire and Virginia allow early, in-person voting, while all provide absentee ballots before Election Day…Voters in Ohio similarly can begin casting ballots on Oct. 2, in North Carolina on Oct. 18 and Nevada on Oct. 20. In total, six of the nine top battleground states will have early, in- person voting under way by the third debate between Romney and President Barack Obama on Oct. 22…More than half voted early in North Carolina and Florida, and 45 percent did so in Nevada, records show. Obama carried all four states.”
Ari Shapiro’s “Ads Slice Up Swing States With Growing Precision” at npr.org, the first of a two-part series, illuminates political ad strategy in the final six weeks of campaign 2012. Among Shapiro’s nuggets: “Jon Bross is the media director for Vladimir Jones. He says election season is always a test of his patience, and his flexibility. With TV rates skyrocketing, he has to look elsewhere…”Digital, cable television are excellent alternatives. Print media only sees, for example, 5 percent of the political ad dollars, so that market is a little bit more open for us,” he says. “You simply have to be more creative when the circus comes to town.”
At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky’s says of Romney’s campaign collapse: “…it isn’t happening because of Mitt Romney alone, or even the now-hated Stuart Stevens. It’s happening because of the factions and their guns. It’s happening because of a party and movement that are out of control and out of touch…Face it, Republicans: he was and is your best candidate, and he’s tanking now more because of you than because of him.” If Tomasky is right, a ‘wave election’ may be in the making.
Roger Bybee has an Alternet post, “Take a Look at What Paul Ryan Did to His Own Congressional District, and Be Very Scared for Your Country,” the teaser of which notes: “Child abuse and suicide is skyrocketing, the number of battered women has tripled, foreclosures have tripled, wages plummeting, and more.”
The ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Award for the last week goes to…

Geoffrey Skelley’s post “Less Than 50 Days to Go” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes a look at mid-to-late September Gallup RV polling relationship to final results for all 15 presidential elections since 1952, and notes: “The most obvious conclusion we can make from these data is that it’s better to be ahead at this point. Of the 15 elections between 1952 and 2008, only twice has a candidate who held a lead around this time failed to win the election.” Those two exceptions are Nixon in 1960 and Gore in 2000, who did in fact win the popular vote. Obama has a one-point lead in the most current Gallup poll of RVs, but is up higher in other polls.
WaPo’s Sean Sullivan has an encouraging update/round-up on Democratic prospects for holding their U.S. Senate majority.
Ditto for Eric Kleefeld’s Talking Points memo post “Senate Races Looking Up For Democrats” and Josh Kraushaar’s “Democrats Hold Momentum in Battle for Senate” at the National Journal.
Regarding the latest UMass Lowell/Boston Herald poll showing Scott Brown with a 4-point lead over Elizabeth Warren in the MA Senate race, coming after 5 other polls show Warren in the lead, poll analyst Mark Blumenthal puts it in perspective at HuffPo Pollster: “The five other polls have shown Warren leading by margins varying from two to six percentage points. Relatively small sample sizes likely contribute to the variation. All but one of the new surveys sampled from 400 to 600 likely voters, for reported margins of error ranging from +/- 4 percent to +/- 5 percent…When combined in the HuffPost Pollster Trend chart, designed to smooth out the random variation inherent in most polls, the new surveys show a virtual dead heat, with Warren just a half percentage point ahead of Brown (46.2 percent to 45.7 percent).”
Those who want to help Warren widen her very slim lead can do so at this ActBlue page.
At In These Times, David Moberg reports on the AFL-CIO’s innovative “RePurpose” GOTV program being mobilized in six battleground states. One interesting technique: ” …Union members can accumulate points for the electoral work they’ve done. They then exchange them…for the opportunity to strategically direct the campaign of any AFL-CIO-endorsed candidate or initiative…Knock on enough doors, for example, and earn the right to decide that more resources and volunteer time should go into phone banking for Obama…”
Jon Healey’s L.A. Times op-ed “Who knew Obama believed in redistribution? Umm, everybody” captures the “duh” reaction being heard at water coolers across America regarding the GOP-driven “expose.” He could have added that more Americans believe Romney, not Obama, is the more radical redistributionist, as indicated by recent polls opposing his support for additional tax breaks for the wealthy.
Deborah Charles of Reuters.com has an update on early voting as it begins in several states and she reviews the status of court challenges to Republican measures to restrict it.
At The Atlantic, Mariah Blake has a disturbing report on “The Ballot Cops,” the voter suppression activities of a group called ‘True the Vote,” which smells a lot like a modernized version of the Republicans’ disgraceful ‘ballot security’ campaigns of earlier elections.
Here’s a well-tailored headline Democrats need to broadcast far and wide: “Senate Republicans kill veterans jobs bill,” as reported by Joan McCarter at Daily Kos. Says McCarter: “The unemployment rate for Iraq, Afghanistan and Gulf War II-era Veterans–those who would have most benefited from the bill–is now at 10.9 percent, but Republicans blocked this bill because they don’t want anything that could remotely help anyone to happen under President Obama’s watch…That, and they don’t really give a shit about veterans, much like Mitt Romney, who called the men and women fighting in Afghanistan items on a laundry list.”

At The New Republic, Nate Cohn has an encouraging observation: “…By Friday: we’ll be able to start assessing whether Obama’s post-DNC boost was a temporary bounce or a resilient bump…If Obama’s four point lead persists through the week, Obama should be considered a very strong favorite for reelection. While it might seem that the heart of the campaign is still to come, the candidate leading two weeks after the in-party convention has gone onto win the popular vote in every presidential election since Truman’s come from behind victory in 1948.”
More reason for Democratic high fives: “Obama has jumped out to an average lead of 3.1 percentage points in 10 national polls taken since Sept. 4. That’s triple the 1.1 percentage-point edge Obama held in polling conducted between Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate and the end of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla…Obama holds a lead in the polls in 11 of the 12 battleground states being contested by both candidates…The Republican nominee needs to capture at least eight of 12 swing states won four years ago by Obama to have a chance in an Electoral College,” according to according to Richard S. Dunham’s “Obama Leads in Electoral College Tallies” in the San Francisco Chronicle.
But Nate Silver takes a more sober view of recent polling data, putting unbridled optimism on hold until “Mr. Obama’s numbers hold at their present levels for another two weeks or so. Silver adds, “The forecast model is deliberately reading Mr. Obama’s polls a bit skeptically right now because we are still close enough to the conventions that there could be temporary effects from them.”
Hotline on Call reports that President Obama is in the ballpark, where he needs to be with white working-class voters: “Most notably, the national polls all showed the president at his target for reelection among white voters; Obama won 43 percent of whites in 2008 but is favored for reelection this year if he can clear roughly 39 percent. CNN/ORC showed Obama at 42 percent among whites, Fox News at 40 and ABC News/Washington Post at 41 percent. And a new poll from the Democratic outfit Democracy Corps showed Obama at 40 percent among whites without college degrees, the voters most resistant to the president in this campaign.”
Politico’s “Inside the campaign: How Mitt Romney stumbled” by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei is getting most of the ‘Romney Campaign in Disarray’ buzz, with it’s finger-pointing at Romney’s top strategist Stuart Stevens. Seems to me this lets the candidate off the hook for his blundering, which began well before the convention and continues afterward.
He looks like a good candidate, but isn’t it just a couple of months early?
At Bloomberg Businessweek, John McCormick’s “Romney Seeks to Blunt Obama Edge With Swing-State Latinos” reports that Romney is readying his pro-small business pitch to Latinos in battleground states, beginning with a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. McCormick reports “The Romney campaign has run Spanish-language television ads targeting Hispanics, including one called “No podemos mas” — translated to “We no longer can” — that contrasts with Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Yes, we can.” Limp.
Game on in NC, via early voting. Swing state IA begins this Saturday, along with half of the states.
Steve Kornacki reports at Salon.com on Elizabeth Warren taking the lead in the U.S. Senate race in MA in two new polls. Kornacki adds: “If the Warren-Brown race were for the governorship, an office that Massachusetts voters have been very willing to elect Republicans to in recent times, there’s little doubt that Brown would win. But because it’s for federal office, Warren has a better chance to harness the state’s aversion to the national GOP brand. We’ve seen a race like this before, when the very popular Republican Bill Weld – who was fresh of a gubernatorial reelection bid in which he racked up 71 percent of the vote – challenged John Kerry for the Senate in 1996. In a popularity contest, Weld would have won. But Massachusetts voters didn’t want to further empower Republicans in Washington, and Kerry survived by 7 points.”
This is a damn good — and important — question.

Ben Schreckinger reports in his post “Democrats Widen Enthusiasm Gap” at The National Journal that “Democrats are now significantly more engaged by the presidential race and view it more favorably than Republicans, according to a Pew survey published on Wednesday…Two-thirds of Democrats find the campaign “interesting” compared with only half of Republicans, while 68 percent of Dems find it “informative,” compared with just under half of Republicans, according to survey, conducted over the weekend by the the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.”
Nate Silver has a lot more to say about the “decline of the enthusiasm gap” at FiveThirty Eight, which leads him to conclude that “for now, our forecast has stabilized a bit, with Mr. Obama holding in the range of about a four-point lead in the popular vote and an 80 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.”
If you thought that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus might want to lay a little low for a while and let the wake of his hideously bungled convention quietly subside, you would be quite wrong. David Atkins cuts Priebus and his party no slack at Hullabaloo, regarding the RNC chair’s inane tweet “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.” Says Atkins: “That’s the actual, nominal head of the Republican Party speaking, not some radio shock jock…But this this is who they are, and what the official Republican discourse has been reduced to. It’s time the press started reporting the callous, lying extremism of the mainstream Republican Party for what it is.”
The Boston Globe piles on in today’s editorial “Romney’s comments raise doubts about his foreign-policy savvy,” as did The Washington Post editorial “Mr. Romney’s rhetoric on embassy attacks is a discredit to his campaign.”
In keeping with Romney’s dazzling display of diplomatic ineptitude, note that Russian President Vladimir Putin has thanked the GOP nominee for his myopic comment that Russia is our “number one geopolitical foe.” As Kirit Radia reports at abcnews.com’s ‘OTUS’ blog, Putin said, “I’m grateful to him (Romney) for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems,” Putin told reporters, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.”
Here’s some really great stats for the Obama campaign, from The New York Times editorial “Fewer Uninsured People“: “The Census Bureau reported on Wednesday that the number of people without health coverage fell to 48.6 million in 2011, or 15.7 percent of the population, down from 49.9 million, or 16.3 percent of the population, in 2010. Health experts attributed a big chunk of the drop to a provision in the health care reform law that allows children to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26. Some three million young adults took advantage of that provision, other surveys show.”
Add to that a new government report that the Affordable Care Act has saved health care consumers an estimated $2.1 billion in premiums, as Allison Terry reports at The Monitor..
Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes a sneak peek at an article taking an overview of 13 current political forecasting models in PS: Political Science & Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. Sabato’s summation: “…They vary widely, with eight of the 13 showing victory for President Obama and five seeing Mitt Romney as the next president. The chances of an Obama plurality range from a mere 10% to a definitive 88%. For whatever it is worth, the average of the models’ projected vote for President Obama (of the two-party total, excluding third-party and independent candidates) is 50.2% — a tiny advantage for Obama, but hardly ironclad.”
Lots of buzz about a new study of facebook as a GOTV tool. As John Markoff reports in the New York Times, “The study, published online on Wednesday by the journal Nature, suggests that a special “get out the vote” message, showing each user pictures of friends who said they had already voted, generated 340,000 additional votes nationwide — whether for Democrats or Republicans, the researchers could not determine. ”
In a more partisan vein, GOP-friendly consultant Vincent Harris reports at Campaigns & Elections on how Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ted Cruz used social media in his upset win of his party’s primary in Texas. Harris explains: “Most importantly, digital was baked into all aspects of the campaign from communications to political fieldwork to polling….Ted announced his candidacy for Senate on a conference call with conservative bloggers. Texas has a large network of active conservative bloggers and giving access to them was important to promoting Ted’s conservative message and helping generate buzz about his candidacy among the party base. Ted met with bloggers in person and via phone often, and the campaign created a robust blogger action center encouraging bloggers to post supportive widgets, and created a segmented email list to update bloggers from.” Dems take note.

The reviews are already coming in regarding Romney’s ill-considered, shoot-from-the-hip response to the tragic attacks in Egypt and Libya, and it ain’t pretty. For a little taste, read Jack Mirkinson’s HuffPo post, “Mitt Romney Response To Libya, Egypt Attacks Called ‘Irresponsible,’ ‘Craven,’ ‘Ham-Handed,” in which he observes:

The Romney campaign drew fire on Wednesday morning for issuing a blistering statement condemning the American embassy in Egypt for speaking against an incendiary anti-Muslim film, even though the embassy made the statement before any attacks had taken place. NBC’s Chuck Todd, for instance, called the statement “irresponsible” and a “bad mistake.” ABC’s Jake Tapper said that Romney’s attack “does not stand up to simple chronology.”
National Journal’s Ron Fournier called Romney’s actions “ham-handed” and “inaccurate.”
Conservative pundit Erick Ericson, while disagreeing with Todd’s response, also warned Romney to be “cautious.”
Despite that criticism, Romney continued this line of attack in an appearance on Wednesday morning, saying that the White House had made a “severe miscalculation.”
This drew a fierce [tweet] response from analyst Mark Halperin: “Unless Mitt has gamed crisis out in some manner completely invisible to Gang of 500, doubling down=most craven+ill-advised move of ’12”

Even Ice Kween Peggy Noonan weighed in with a chilly scold, noting “I don’t feel that Mr. Romney has been doing himself any favors in the past few hours…Sometimes when really bad things happen, when hot things happen, cool words or no words is the way to go.”
At WaPo, Chirs Cillizza adds at ‘The Fix’: “Romney’s approach hands the Obama team an opening to cast the challenger as not ready for the job, someone who jumps to conclusions before all the facts are known. And, at least at the moment, that appears to be the stronger (political) argument”
Romney’s comments didn’t do much to encourage GOP congressional leaders to defend him, as Politico’s Scott Wong reports in his post, “Hill GOP leaves Romney out on limb on Libya” and Alex Seitz-Wald explains in “GOP leaves Mitt hanging ” at Salon.com.
Slate.com’s Fred Kaplan may have summed up Romney’s blundering “diplomacy” best in commenting:

…Imagine if Romney had called President Obama, asked how he could be of assistance in this time of crisis, offered to appear at his side at a press conference to demonstrate that, when American lives are at risk, politics stop at the water’s edge–and then had his staff put out the word that he’d done these things, which would have made him look noble and might have made Obama look like the petty one if he’d waved away these offers.
But none of this is in Romney. He imagined a chink in Obama’s armor, an opening for a political assault on the president’s strength and leadership, and so he dashed to the barricades without a moment of reflection, a nod to propriety, or a smidgen of good strategy.

If the reception Romney is getting across the political spectrum continues in similar vein, he may soon wish he was back in London during the Olympics, getting dissed by the Prime Minister, the Queen and pretty much every bloke from the East End to Notting Hill.

The recent New York Times editorial on “Jobs and Politics” offers some salient insights in the wake of the latest unemployment figures, including “…The Republican agenda misdiagnoses the cause of slow job growth, blaming taxes and regulation, while championing more tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of the banks and other businesses as a cure. Those policies, however, are precisely the ones that were in place as the bubble economy of the Bush years inflated, and then crashed, with disastrous consequences. They are the problem, yet they are all that Mr. Romney and his party have to offer…”

Ezra Klein debunks the myth that the unemployment rate dropped because of an increase in the number of ‘discouraged workers.’ Klein shows that the number of discouraged workers actually decreased between July and August.

The new Reuters-Ipsos poll brings good news for President Obama. In addition to edging Romney by 4 points on the “if the election were held today” question, the President is seen as better on jobs, according to Reuters’ Alina Selyukh: “..Asked which of the two “will protect American jobs,” 32 percent of independent registered voters picked Obama, while 27 percent sided with Romney…Among all the 1,660 registered voters surveyed, Obama scored 42 percent compared to Romney’s 35 percent…Obama’s ranking in that category has climbed steadily over the past two weeks of the daily poll, starting with 34 percent on August 28, reaching 40 percent on September 7 and peaking Sunday.”

Matt Bai has a long article in the New York Times Magazine mulling over different answers to a question a lot of pundits are thinking about “Did Barack Obama Save Ohio?”
In his post, “The Washington Post’s Feckless ‘Fact-Check’,” at The Nation Eric Alternman calls out WaPo’s Glenn Kessler for being “the single most aggravating example of the press’s lack of interest in keeping anyone honest anymore…Today he’s the perfect example of a well-worked ref: an unwitting weapon in the Republicans’ war on knowledge and, sadly, a symbol of the mainstream media’s failure to keep American politics remotely honest–or even tethered to reality.”

Chis Kromm has another good post, “From Clinton to Castro: Democrats’ Southern strategy reaches out to both older and newer South” up at Facing South. regarding former President Clinton’s role, Kromm observes “Kevin Alexander Gray, a civil rights activist also from South Carolina, compares Clinton’s role with appealing to white voters to how Democrats used to deploy the Rev. Jesse Jackson when trying to mobilize African-American voters. “They used Jackson to ‘vouch’ for white Democrats to black audiences,” Gray told Facing South. “Clinton is vouching to whites for Barack Obama…”Bubba’s” mission of appealing to whites, including whites in battleground Southern states, exists in delicate balance with another key goal of this week’s convention: to win over the increasingly diverse South of the future. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviews Kromm and Kevin Alexander Gray right here.

Bloomberg’s Tom Schoenberg has an encouraging report on “Republicans Losing Election Law War as Campaign Ramps Up.” Schoenberg explains: “All told, across the U.S., there are at least eight challenges to state voter-identification laws, six to state redistricting plans, four to early voting restrictions, four to voter roll purges, two to registration rules and two to ballot disqualification measures…The challengers so far have won favorable rulings in about 10 of the cases.”

In his post, “Bad Economy? Blame It on Mitch McConnell and the GOP,” The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky says what many Dems, including yours truly, want President Obama to do: “…The smart and aggressive thing to do is to call out the people who’ve been blocking attempts at progress…One of the Democrats’ biggest strategic mistakes of the last two years has been their unwillingness to say plainly and openly that Republicans don’t want to see jobs created as long as Obama is president…Imagine if Obama called out Mitch McConnell personally for that infamous comment of his. The base would be in heaven, and voters in the middle would at least see him standing up for himself, not letting himself get kicked around.” I would only add that, if the President doesn’t want to do it, then have his surrogates start doing it loud and often until it becomes common wisdom, even among low information swing voters.

Josh Goodman has an interesting report on “Democrats seeking comeback in state legislatures” at The Seattle Times. Goodman explains: “In November, three-quarters of the nation’s state legislative seats will be on the ballot. With only 11 governorships up this fall, it’s the legislative races that will do the most to determine the direction of state policy over the next two years…The 2012 elections give Democrats their first chance to bounce back nationally from the Republican landslide victories in 2010, which gave the GOP more legislative seats than it has had since 1928. As of this June, Republicans outnumbered Democrats in state legislatures 3,975 to 3,391..”

As the polls narrow, we are hearing increasing talk about how to reach “the low-information voter.” Fortunately, we have The Onion to shed light on the question in this nifty clip on “In the Know: Candidates Compete for the Vital Idgit Vote.”

Since convention ‘bumps’ tend to evaporate, there may not be any measurable impact of the GOP and Dem conventions on election day. In terms of lasting, but immeasurable impressions, few would argue that the GOP convention could help Republicans much. If there is any edge, it would probably go to the Democrats. In his Wapo column, “The tale of two conventions favors Obama,” Eugene Robinson puts it this way “…Frankly, in terms of speechifying, any one night in Charlotte was better than the whole week in Tampa…It’s not that the Tampa hall lacked enthusiasm; it’s that the Charlotte hall seemed absolutely on fire.”

In his Politico post, “Conventional warfare: Why Democrats won,” former Republican Congressman/’Morning Joe’ host Joe Scarborough says the conventions may prove more consequential than many pundits believe: “Maybe there seemed to be such a disparity between the two conventions because the Republican Party has never been the least bit excited about its nominee. Or maybe it’s because Democrats were simply blessed with a deeper bench of political athletes in 2012. But whatever the reason, Republicans were lapped by their rivals and may ultimately pay in November for botching Mitt Romney’s debut…And that means that these conventions will have mattered — a lot.”

TDS managing Editor Ed Kilgore shares one particularly encouraging observation about the convention in his Washington Monthly post, “Table Set“: “The only thing I’m really confident about is that the “enthusiasm gap” we’ve been told about the entire cycle may have largely dissipated… After Charlotte it appears Democratic “base” voters are going to be “fired up and ready to go.” They need a skillful organization to give their enthusiasm its maximum electoral clout.”

In his FiveThirtyEight post “Obama Would Be Big Favorite With ‘Fired Up’ Base,” Nate Silver explores the implications of the gap between ‘likely’ and ‘registered’ voters for each party. Although Republicans have a smaller gap, reducing the gap among Democrats should give Obama a more significant edge in electoral votes.

Lee Fang of The Nation reports that Obamacare repeal advocate and GOP veep nominee Paul Ryan has made an under-the-radar request for Obamacare funding for a clinic in his congressional district.

A couple of fun stats re the Dem Convention. The Daily Beast reports that: 1. More than 25 million people watched Clinton’s speech, while only 20 million people watched superbowl champs the New York Giants vs. the Dallas Cowboys 2nd half, and 2. Twitter reports 52,756 tweets in the minute following Obama’s speech — a new record for a political event.

It may be a hoax, but hacker-extortionists are reportedly threatening to release Romney’s tax records.

At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Geoffrey Skelley discusses the ramifications of the Virginia State Board of Elections ruling that former Rep. Virgil Goode, the Constitution Party’s conservative nominee, has qualified for the state’s presidential ballot. Skelley’s bottom line: “…the only way Goode will truly be a spoiler is if the Virginia result is decided by just a relative handful of votes.”

I’ll close this week with a shout out to a couple of under-appreciated progressive heroes. Give it up for the DNC’s tough workhorse Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for overseeing the most well-organized Democratic convention, maybe ever. Also MSNBC President Phil Griffin for whipping all other cable networks, including Fox and CNN, with MSNBC’s coverage of the Democratic convention, and, beyond that, for having the mettle to put together the best progressive news programming in TV history.

In his New York magazine column, “Obama’s Non-Disappointing Presidency,” Jonathan Chait takes on a common complaint of many progressives that President Obama’s first term failed to meet their lofty expectations, and finds his liberal critics awash in political myopia. Chait begins by conceding the part of their argument that is correct:

…Plenty of things have gone wrong. Most of them are outside Obama’s control: a worldwide economic collapse, a brilliantly executed Republican strategy to withhold cooperation for everything, and a series of self-defeating bungles by the Democratic Congress (which has somehow escaped the endless orgy of liberal self-recrimination.) What’s more, Obama has screwed up plenty of things himself, most notably his doomed strategy of trying to secure a deficit agreement in 2011, his failure to keep pressing on financial reform, and his broad acceptance of the Bush administration’s civil liberties rollback.

Comparing Obama’s first term accomplishments to president Clinton’s much-trumpeted achievements, however, Chait explains:

I expected Obama’s legislative record to exceed Clinton’s, but by less than it actually did. The domestic reforms embedded in the stimulus alone — the scope of which is described in Michael Grunwald’s book The New New Deal — did more to reshape the face of government in areas like education and energy than Clinton managed in eight years. Then you had health-care reform (which I hoped would pass, but would not have been shocked to be filibustered to death), financial reform (which I expected to fail completely), gays in the military, and so on. It is true that, as stimulus, Obama’s economic recovery bill was not nearly large enough to restore full employment. But for some perspective on its scale, recall that Clinton (facing a sluggish recovery from a far milder recession) proposed a $19.5 billion stimulus as his first major legislative measure, negotiated it down to $15.4 billion, and finally saw the whole thing collapse. In that light, Obama’s $787 billion bill looks like a fairly impressive political achievement.
Now, perhaps comparing Obama to Clinton’s record is setting the bar too low. Yet you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson to find a Democratic president who effected as significant change as Obama has, and L.B.J.’s presidency was not exactly an unmitigated blessing.

Chait then notes the shortcomings, as well as the major achievements, of every Democratic president of the post-World War II period, including some of the unsavory compromises they had to make. Regarding the sainted JFK, Chait adds:

…After his assassination, Americans came to look back on Kennedy’s presidency through a golden-hued nostalgia, which is what allows writers…to present Kennedy as a glamorous poet-king who represented something larger than the pedestrian struggles that actually consumed his presidency…That feeling, more than a legislative record, is the missing quality so many people long for in Obama — the sense of a presidency filled with glamour and purpose, not tedious negotiations with the Senate Finance Committee…The Kennedy myth perfectly embodies the amnesiac quality of that longing. Kennedy’s presidency was experienced as a frustrating series of half-measures and moral compromises.

More the sober realist than the Democratic myth-polisher, Chait explains, “There can be fleeting moments of inspiration, but the lived reality of politics can never feel inspiring…I’m not disappointed in Obama at all. His first term has actually exceeded my expectations.”
It’s another eye-opening column by Chait. I would only add that in this context, the Affordable Care Act, its significant shortcomings notwithstanding, is an historic accomplishment that provides more health security for millions of Americans. If Democrats will now rally behind the president and lengthen his coattails, it can be amended and made even better.

The Democratic convention in Charlotte is beginning to generate some decent coverage of political dynamics in the southern states. When President Obama won the electoral votes of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, along with 47 percent of the popular vote in Georgia back in 2008, his victory provided a compelling rebuttal to the “skip the south” strategy going forward. As a northern refugee now living in the sunny south, however, I’m not sure that the scope and pace of the demographic transition now underway even in the deep south is yet well-understood.
Fortunately, some good reportage on the topic has recently emerged. Start with Chris Kromm’s Facing South post, “As Goes the South: Your convention guide to Southern politics 101,” which explains:

…while states in the Mountain West had similarly large percentage increases, Southern states are bigger and had larger increases in total numbers. That trend appears to be continuing: The Census Bureau estimates that the states adding the most people between 2010 and 2011 were Texas (529,000), California (438,000), Florida (256,000), Georgia (128,000) and North Carolina (121,000)…Southern states gained eight Congressional seats and Electoral College votes in post-Census redistricting and reapportionment. Today, nearly one-third of the total Electoral College votes needed to be elected president come from Southern states — and that share will likely grow in the future.
In other words, bypassing the South (for Democrats) or taking the region for granted (for Republicans) is not an option for any party interested in a winning political strategy.

With respect to the explosive growth of Latinos in the 13 southern states, Kromm adds:

Nine of the 12 states with the fastest-growing Latino/Hispanic populations in the 2010 Census were in the South. The political clout of Latinos is clear in a state like Florida, where Latino eligible voters increased by two-thirds over the last decade and now make up nearly 17 percent of the state’s voters. But the Latino electorate is also growing in North Carolina, with registrations doubling since 2008 and making up two percent of voters — enough to sway a close election…The key here is a registration gap. In North Carolina, for example, about 60 percent of eligible Latino/Hispanic citizens aren’t registered to vote. (For great information on the Latino vote, visit www.latinovotemap.org.)

And, the African-American vote is pivotal for Dems, especially in the south, As Kromm says:

Half of the nation’s African-Americans live in Southern states. An under-reported story of the 2010 Census was the growth of black communities in the South — including an acceleration of return migration from cities in the North and Midwest. The growth is especially clear in cities: Six of the 10 urban areas with the biggest increase in African-Americans were in the South, including Charlotte (number six, 121,500-person increase) and two in Florida (Miami, where the black population grew by 191,700, and Orlando, by 100,600)

In a recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aaron Gould Sheinin noted that,

In January 2001, Georgia’s electorate was 72 percent white and 26 percent black, while Hispanics made up less than two-tenths of 1 percent, according to data compiled by the secretary of state. As of Aug. 1, those numbers had changed dramatically.
Blacks now make up 30 percent of active registered voters while whites are at 60 percent. Hispanics make up nearly 2 percent of the electorate after seeing their registration numbers increase from just 933 in 2011 to 85,000 as of Aug. 1.

Given recent polling and turnout patterns, it appears that, if Dems can win just three out of ten white voters in Georgia, they can take the state’s electoral votes. Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, cited in Gould’s article, doubts that the demographic changes will swing Georgia to Obama this year, but the odds favoring Dems will improve significantly in future elections. Meanwhile the Obama campaign is running plenty of TV ads in Georgia, and they have 57 paid organizers on the ground in key neighborhoods in GA, reports Gould.
In his AJC article, “Democrats try to make inroads in South,” Wayne Washington quotes Republican U.S. Sen Lindsay Graham’s surprisingly candid assessment, “The demographics race, we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
Kromm concedes that the conservative rural vote is a still powerful factor outside southern cities. But the cities are where the growth is accelerating. He adds that voter suppression and anti-immigrant legislation remain potent Republican tactics to undercut demographic transition favoring Democrats. He could have added that, if not for draconian felon disenfranchisement laws, Florida (520,000 African American voters disenfranchised) and Virginia (242,000 Black voters disenfranchised) would likely be blue on political maps.
If President Obama can win two of the three southern states he won in ’08, he will probably be re-elected. Regardless of the outcome of November 6 election, however, Republicans will be unable to stop the emergence of purple and possibly blue states in the south as early as 2016.

We celebrate Labor Day on the eve of the Democratic convention, with President Obama addressing the United Auto Workers today in swing state Ohio. The Washington Post leads off with a Labor Day editorial about the people who really “built that” and a reminder to Romney and the one-percenters, quoting from Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier“: “…It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.”
At The American Prospect, Amy Dean mulls over the decision to hold the Democratic convention in Charlotte, in the “least unionized state in the country.” Unions don’t like it. Yet they know that Democrats must pick off a southern state to stop a Romney victory, which would bring disaster to the labor movement.
If anyone has any doubts about what the Republicans have in store for labor unions, Mike Hall reports at AFL-CIO Now that “For the first time ever, the Republican platform calls for national “right to work” for less law…Today, workers and employers are allowed to enter into voluntary agreements that allow the workers to choose to join a union by signing recognition cards and if the majority does, the employer will recognize the workers’ choice. The Republican platform calls for banning that practice…The Republican platform calls for a California-like Prop. 32 law that would ban the use of payroll deductions–including voluntary–by union members who want to contribute to their union’s political activity…At least today, Republicans no longer mask their hatred of workers and their unions.”
In his WaPo op-ed, Harold Myerson adds, “…If the war that business and Republicans are waging on labor isn’t defeated, good jobs will continue to dwindle and work in America will grow steadily less rewarding.”
In her Labor Day message at HuffPo, American Federation of teachers President Randi Weingarten explains the stakes for American teachers in the November election: “The choice is between a president who fought to keep 300,000 teachers on the job and a Republican candidate who says he would only keep the Department of Education around to use as a club against unions…Rather than support workers at home or investments in public schools, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan support the Bush-era tax cuts for the very wealthy. They want to hand over our schools to private corporations.”
Meanwhile, Mark Trumbull writes in his article on “The Silver Collar Economy” at The Monitor that the trend of seniors working longer, with many taking lower-wage jobs to get by, is squeezing out job opportunities for young people.
At ProPublica, Amanda Zamora, Blair Hickman and Cora Currier, have a round-up post, “Happy Labor Day. Here’s the Best Reporting on Worker Safety” about a much neglected issue of concern to millions of workers, which lays bare the consequences of the Republican war on regulation.
John Nichols reports at The Nation on “Paul Ryan’s Labor Day Promise to American Workers: Candy and a Sports Schedule.” Nichols explains: “As he marched with other politicians in the Janesville Labor Day parade, the congressman was confronted by Wisconsin workers who were struggling with high unemployment and bleak prospects. A man was videotaped asking what his representative planned to do to aid Ryan’s unemployed constituents. “So what should I have to work for to get a job?” the man asked. “Should I have to work the same wages as in China? Should I have to work for $1 an hour?” Ryan tried to brush his questioner off. But when the man persisted, Ryan said, “C’mon, we’re all here to have a good time.” When he was reminded that it was Labor Day, which would seem to be an appropriate time to discuss unemployment and the condition of workers, Ryan finally offered something: “Would you like some candy?” Ryan asked. “Would you like a Packer-Badger schedule?”
At Daily Kos, Laura Clawson’s “Why unions? To fight for good jobs and against inequality” has a reminder for Democrats that the most powerful weapon they have in the struggle against inequality is organized labor. “As unions have declined, income inequality has risen, and that’s no coincidence. Union members or not, workers benefit from a strong labor movement. And yes, road or building or bridge, workers built it.”