So, here we go again with the bogus “working class hero” b.s. Mentions of Ryan’s “working class” appeal/background are starting to appear in reports by the more gullible MSM press. Romney and Ryan are even conspicuously shedding their neckties in joint appearances. “Aristocrats? Who Us?,” sort of like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor doing the “That’s right. We bad” prison perp walk in ‘Stir Crazy.”
Yes, Like a lot of upper-middle class kids, Paul Ryan had summer jobs as a teenager. But his father was a lawyer, he grew up in an affluent neighborhood and his family were owners of a multi-state construction company doing projects worth as much as 50 million dollars. It is doubtful that he ever worked a day on a construction site in his life.
Joan Walsh says it well in her Salon post, “Paul Ryan: Randian poseur “:

The other component of GOP fakery Ryan exemplifies is the notion that a pampered scion of a construction empire who has spent his life supported by government somehow represents the “white working class,” by virtue of the demographics of his gradually gerrymandered blue collar district. I write about this in my book: guys like Ryan (and his Irish Catholic GOP confrere Pat Buchanan) somehow become the political face of the white working class when they never spent a day in that class in their life. Their only tether to it is their remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of “other” people – the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand’s famous “parasites.” Since the ’60s, those parasites are most frequently understood to be African American or Latino – but they’re always understood to be the “lesser-than” folks, morally, intellectually and genetically weaker than the rest of us.

Reactionary that he was, Buchanan at least embraced protectionist trade policies popular with unions, an option not open to Ryan, who has cast his lot with the globalist out-sourcers Romney so ably personifies. Don’t bet that this ticket will get much traction in blue collar America.

It looks increasingly like another botched GOP vetting job behind the Ryan pick. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from Jennifer Bendery’s “Paul Ryan Only Passed 2 Bills Into Law In More Than A Decade” at HuffPo. One bill was a post-office renaming; the other was imposing a tax on archery arrow shafts. This is the Republicans’ big thinker?
Dems looking for a manageable soundbite on the Ryan pick should consider this one by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, reported in The Monitor: “As a member of the Budget Committee myself, I’ve had a front row seat to witness the architect of the Romney-Ryan budget…It suggests that we should end Medicare as we know it, shred the safety net for seniors in health care that we had in place for more than 50 years, turn Medicare into a block grants and send it to the states, which would really jeopardize seniors in nursing homes, potentially take 10 million students off of Pell Grants, cut health care, cut education.”
Or, try Paul Krugman’s take, from his NYT blog on “Galt/Gekko 2012“: “…Anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered…He is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine…Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.”
For bumper-sticker brevity, however, nobody is going to top President Obama’s zinger characterizing the Romney-Ryan economic plan as “trickle-down fairy dust.”
For least credible walkback on the Sunday political yak shows, I would like to nominate Newt for his comment on ‘Face the Nation’ that Ryan’s Medicare-to-voucher plan “is the right direction” for America — which is quite a stark contrast from his earlier characterization of it as “right-wing social engineering” and “too big a jump.”
Writing in Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Buffalo-SUNY Proff James E. Campbell makes an economic determinist argument that growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) is the most important economic statistic to watch in presidential campaigns. Campbell, a Republican, believes President Obama’s chances are fading with his real GDP stats. But the utility of his forecasting model suffers in this case by not factoring in Romney’s extraordinarily-high negatives, nor the quickening demographic transformation that is now underway.
Nader makes the definitive take-no-prisoners case for the $10 minimum wage.
A New York Times report by James B. Stewart sheds light on the possibility that Romney paid zero or very little in income taxes during the last decade: “…This summer the Internal Revenue Service released data from the 400 individual income tax returns reporting the highest adjusted gross income…Buried in the data is the startling disclosure that six of the 400 paid no federal income tax…The I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010…More than a quarter of the people earning an average of over $200 million in 2009 paid less than 15 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes.”
At Politico Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman write in “Romney-Ryan map has Florida at the center” that “The biggest danger for Romney is in Florida, with its must-win 29 electoral votes and heavy senior population, Republicans said it was crucial to inoculate voters on Ryan’s “Roadmap,” part of which would turn Medicare into a voucher-based system for future retirees…A well-placed source said Republicans recently did an extensive regression analysis war-gaming what states are most crucial given the polling…The single state that Romney absolutely had to have in all the various combinations: Florida.”
Paul Begala’s Daily Beast post “With Ryan, Romney Has the Plutocrat Ticket” concludes with what is so far the best line (and most disturbing image) about the Ryan selection: “And somewhere in hell, Ayn Rand is cackling with glee.”

Andrew Grossman reports at the Wall St. Journal on Obama and Romney campaign strategies “to Snag the Growing Number of Ballots Cast Before Election Day” in 30 states. For those who need to better understand the GOP’s war against early voting, Grossman notes that 47 percent of voters cast their ballots early in battleground states in 2008, up from 28 percent in ’04.
At Campaign for America’s Future, Dave Johnson asks “What Is The Calculation Behind Romney’s Campaign Of Lies?” Part of Johnson’s answer: “This is a key thing to get, the Romney campaign believes that they can win this election using lies and propaganda as “truths” to drive their campaign story. They are making the calculation that the right’s media machine has become sufficiently powerful for their version of reality to reach enough of the public, and that it is sticking in their minds as “truths!”…They are also making the calculation — so far validated by the media response — that there will be little if any pushback from “mainstream” media. They trust that the media will look the other way, report lies as “one side says X, the other says Y,” tell the public “both sides do it,” and say this is just par for the course.”
Dave Wessel of the Wall St. Journal’s ‘Washington Wire’ has an update on “The Vanishing Undecideds,” noting “in the last Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, only 8% of the voters failed to express a preference for one candidate or the other. And when pollsters probed, they found that 84% of those who said they’d vote for Mr. Romney today were “definitely” or “probably” going to vote that way; only 16% were “just leaning.” On the Obama side, the figures were even stronger: 91% of those polled said they’d “definitely” or “probably” vote to reelect the president; only 9% were “just leaning.” A New York Times/Quinnipiac University poll found only a sliver of voters in key swing states — 4% in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are undecided.”
Jonathan Chait ‘s “Class War and Romney’s Counterattack” at New York magazine reports on Romney’s “comically-mendacious campaign.” Among Chait’s observations: “One startling thing about the campaign is how little Romney has done to prepare himself for such an obvious line of attack…He’s allowed Democrats to define him by his wealth and heartlessness. He seems to have fallen into the trap of believing that the sentiments about wealth that prevail among movement conservatives reflect the beliefs of Americans as a whole…In place of his lackluster defensive exertions, Romney is instead mounting a hyper-belligerent offensive. If Obama attacks him for redistributing from the middle class to the rich, Romney will paint Obama as redistributing from the middle class to the poor…the political punch of this messaging derives from the fact that white middle-class Americans understand messages about redistribution from the hard-working middle-class to the lazy underclass in highly racialized terms.”
Jason Easely’s PolitcusUSA post “The Unlikeables: GOP Convention to Feature America’s Most Disliked Politicians” makes a pretty convincing case that the GOP convention is shaping up as a net downer for Romney.
Slate economics correspondent Matthew Yglesias writes that “…A bombshell report released last week by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center shows that Mitt Romney has given Democrats the greatest gift they could hope for – a Republican plan for a broad increase in middle-class taxes.” He explains the Urban-Brookings methodology and adds, “What you get turns out to be a substantial decrease in the after-tax incomes of households with less than $200,000 a year in income, to the tune of 1.2 percent of total income on average. Richer households, by contrast, will pay less in taxes than they do now.”
At the Kansas City Star Steve Kraske has an update on Senator Claire McCaskill’s race against Todd ‘Liberals hate God’ Akin, who wants to “privatize Medicare and Social Security…objects to the minimum wage and to federally backed student loans.” Akin has a slight lead at the starting gate. This may be 2012’s emblematic “money vs. reason” senate race.
MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ show seems to have deteriorated into a pro-Romney gushfest. Although it’s more substantial than other morning yak shows, the blustering-Republican-with-timid-moderates anchor table formula is a yawner. Maybe the show could be enlivened by more frequent guest spots for MSNBC’s impressive stable of assertive liberal commentators.
Good to see NC back in play in a new PPP survey. The state’s electoral votes could be determined by Dem GOTV in the Triangle and Triad regions of central NC.

Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs does an excellent job of keeping CNN’s Candy Crowley on point about Romney’s indefensible refusal to release his tax records, despite her effort to make Harry Reid the issue. Transcript here.
And give it up for Reid for using the GOP’s message du jour against them, as Catalina Camia reports at USA Today: “”They’re a bunch of cowards, and they’re avoiding the issue,” David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff, told Politico. “Lindsey Graham, Reince Priebus — they’re a bunch of henchmen for Romney, and they’re all reading off the same talking points. They couldn’t hold a candle to Harry Reid.” As Mark Halperin notes at Time magazine’s ‘The page’: “I think Republicans have misplayed this because they’re keeping it alive as Reid wanted them to. He doesn’t mind being called those names, he couldn’t care less, but it keeps the story alive.” Fun to see the Republicans’ legendary echo chamber backfire.
By the way, the tax records of President Obama and Vice President Biden are available right here, going back 12 and 14 years, respectively. Is it really to much to ask that a Republican presidential candidate be equally forthcoming?
Jason Lange of Reuters has an interesting survey of presidential election forecasting models and their track records.
For a possible explanation for the GOP’s increasing desperation, see the Daily Beast’s “Michael Tomasky on the (Possible) Coming Obama Landslide” One of Tomasky’s observations the GOP should find particularly worrisome: “Obama can lose the big Eastern four–Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida: all of ’em!–and still be reelected.”
Jon Soltz, a two-tour Iraq veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org., blogs at Think Progress on “Why Does Mitt Romney Want To Restrict Voting Rights For More Than 900,000 Ohio Veterans?” Says Soltz, “…Mitt Romney, by supporting the Ohio law that would do away with three days of early voting for all but those covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act (‘UOCAVA’), is supporting the restriction of voting rights for as many as 913,000 Ohio veterans…My question for Mitt Romney is simple: “Why won’t you join the Obama lawsuit in Ohio, and protect our veterans’ right to vote?””
It’s an oft-repeated bromide of politics that ‘a better-informed electorate strengthens Democracy.’ But Anthony Fowler and Michele Margolis have a post up at The Boston Review, that shows “How Informing the Voters Helps the Democrats.” As the authors explain, “Voters uninformed on party positions who received information increased their evaluation of the Democratic Party by 0.8 points and decreased their evaluation of the Republican Party by 1.4 points, relative to the control group that received no information.”
David Schorr argues persuasively at Democracy Arsenal that a robust discussion about the reasons for high unemployment is something Dems should be encouraging. Says Schorr: “The conventional wisdom has it backwards, every day we really talk about the economy is a good day for the Obama campaign.”
The “Let’s make lemonade” award for the last week must go to former Republican Secretary of Education William J. Bennett for his CNN post on Romney’s blundering excursion abroad, “On world stage, Romney showed smarts.”

If you’re a Democratic candidate or campaign worker, please read Bill Cotterell’s “Early voting: It’s not just rides to the polls any more” at The Florida Current for useful tips and insights about GOTV under today’s electoral parameters.
Joshua Holland has an interesting Alternet interview with Atlantic columnist and former Carter speechwriter James Fallows on the topic of false equivalency enabling in the MSM, the so-called ‘fact-checkers” and the now-routine abuse of the filibuster. Fallows observes “You have stories in responsible papers saying the measure lost 51-47, when the 51 were for it. You see offhand references that it takes 60 votes to pass the bill. So it’s the biggest recent amendment to the Constitution that’s happened just de-facto. We act as if it requires a super-majority to do anything…When this is described in the newspaper as being a “dysfunctional Senate,” it leads to the sense that there’s a coming-from-nowhere failure of government — as opposed to an actual strategy by one side to hamstring the other, and slow down the process of government.”
At The Nation Eric Alterman cuts through the fog in his post, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans AND the Media Are the Problem.” and his punch line resonates: “If you want the truth about today’s Republican Party, I suggest you watch HBO’s The Newsroom. You won’t find it on the news.”
Nate Cohn’s TNR blog “Why Romney’s Numbers Aren’t Dropping” provides some reassurance that Romney’s high “floor” in the 45 percent ballpark in most recent opinion polls is not worth worrying about — unless he starts showing numbers a few points higher on a consistent basis.
In his New York Times column, Charles M.Blow makes a cogent argument that “This year, we may have to take the polls with an even larger grain of salt than usual,” as a result of widespread voter suppression of “poll respondents who think that they will able to vote for President Obama in November, but may not be allowed to do so.”
Howell Raines wonders at CNN.com “When did the GOP become the whiners?” It’s been that way for a while, but it does seem to have gotten worse in the last year or two. Says Raines: “For the rest of this election season, if Democrats are smart, they’ll keep reaching into the Lee Atwater bad-boy trick bag and let the season’s reigning choir of complaint blend its many voices: the charismatic duo of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the tea party, the anchors and panelists of Fox News and now the hapless Rich Gorka.”
Please Romney, do this. Visit lots of Staples stores. That’ll shore up your ‘regular guy’ cred and lock up the middle class vote, big time.
It’s just a snapshot, but it’s a good one. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight forecasting model gives Obama a 2.1 percent bump up, thanks to improved personal income growth.
You go, Dubya. Americans are eagerly awaiting your economic advice. As Democratic consultant Paul Begala says of the new ‘Bush Institute’ book being peddled by Dubya, “The book is titled The Four Percent Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs. You gotta hand it to Bush. Either he was born without the moral compass that engenders humility or he has one sick sense of humor. To start with, let the record show that George W. Bush was in fact president of the United States for eight years. And for those eight years economic growth averaged not four percent, but 2.04 percent. For Bush to attach his name to a book claiming to be a recipe for economic growth is what we Texans call chutzpah.”

Corruption is a usually better issue for Democrats, since Republican candidates are more likely to get caught with fingers in the till. But it could be a great issue this year, since a Gallup poll released today finds that “Eighty-seven percent of respondents said that reducing corruption in the federal government is an “extremely important” or “very important” priority for the next president, compared to 92 percent who said the same about creating good jobs,” reports Politico’s Tim Mak’ in “Poll: Corruption is No. 2 issue for 2013.”
Yes, Dems do advertise to influence Republican primaries (and no doubt vice versa). AP’s David Espo spotlights senate races in MO and WI to illuminate the strategy.
Eric Sapp’s “The Unreported Political Implications of Pew’s Religion Poll” offers a fresh perspective for Democrats on polling and punditry about religious values in politics. Sapp argues, “Democratic faith outreach shouldn’t look like what the religious right does. When our outreach works, it’s authentic and humble and focused on relationships and clearly-articulated values. And when it works we win because when American voters understand what our core values are, the vast majority recognize they are the ones they share. But we can’t count on voters to figure it out. And as the Pew poll shows, we can’t expect them to ignore the lies from the Right if we ignore them.”
So here we have a Linda Chavez op-ed entitled “Stoking the fire of class resentment,” which I flag here as a typical example of GOP meme-mongering trying to shame voters into thinking that any form of opposition to current income inequality is a form of “class envy.” Dems need to say it plain; We are not against people getting wealthy as a result of their hard work. But we do strongly oppose the worsening exploitation of working people so stockholders can reap exorbitant profits and CEO’s can literally make hundreds of times what their workers earn.
At The Guardian U.K., Heather Hurlburt explains why “Why Mitt Romney’s sabre-rattling on Syria signifies nothing.”
Harold Meyerson ponders a depressing scenario — what Dems and progressives should do if Romney and the Republicans win control of the white house or all branches of government because of racially-driven voter suppression, i.e. a return to ‘electoral apartheid.’ Says meyerson: “…What should Democrats do if Romney comes to power on the strength of racially suppressed votes? Such an outcome and such a presidency, I’d hope they contend, would be illegitimate — a betrayal of our laws and traditions, of our very essence as a democratic republic. Mass demonstrations would be in order. So would a congressional refusal to confirm any of Romney’s appointments. A presidency premised on a racist restriction of the franchise creates a political and constitutional crisis, and responding to it with resigned acceptance or inaction would negate America’s hard-won commitment to democracy and equality.
Nate Cohn’s TNR post “The Case of Pennsylvania’s Missing Ads” probes the curious decline in GOP ads on PA’s airwaves, even though the Obama campaign does not see the keystone state as a sure thing. Could it be that the GOP’s internal polling points toward the midwest as a better bet?
You’ve probably heard versions of the argument that lost cause campaigns should be funded anyway, if only to keep the GOP from allocating their economic resources to more competitive campaigns elsewhere. Dennis S provides some instructive examples PolitcusUSA in his post, “When Underdog Democratic Candidates Don’t Fight Like Hell, Many Republican Candidates Benefit.”
it is gratifying that the “Mitt the Twit” meme appears to be sticking in Europe. Even better, however, First Lady Michelle Obama is getting raves for her grace, class and diplomatic acumen at the Olympics. As Sarah Jones reports at PoliticusUSA: “The Evening Standard called our First Lady a smashing success, “As a lesson in good natured statesmanship – if not to say simple manners – it was a masterclass.” They continued, “For Michelle Obama cast aside stuffy protocol to join in the fun and games to celebrate today’s opening of the Olympic games with more than 1,000 children.”

In her CNN post, “GOP’s Obama obsession will lose it the election,” TDS Advisory Board member Maria Cardona has a few choice comments about the GOP’s xenophobic rhetoric, including: “As an American Latina born in Colombia, I recoiled at this language, the same way I did in 2008 when Bachmann used it. It reminds me — and I suspect it reminds many other Latinos in this country — of the lengths to which many in this Republican Party have gone to marginalize those who represent the new and changing demographics in the United States…Given that experts say Romney needs at least 40% of the Latino vote to win, this is an odd strategy for someone who enjoys Latino support in the low 20s…”
Concerning Elizabeth Warren’s challenge to defeat Se. Scott Brown in Mass., Adam Carlson reports that “HuffPost Pollster’s current trend estimate of the race, which takes into account all available public polling, shows Warren ahead by 2.5 points (43.5 percent to 41.0 percent), which is essentially unchanged since the beginning of 2012,” which is within the margin of error. This race is a top priority for GOP fat cats, who fear Warren’s savvy about their financial shenanigans. Dems who want to help elect one of the smartest progressive candidates of 2012 can do so at Warren’s ActBlue web page.
It’s a little late, but good for eBay and UPS for recently joining the growing list of advertisers to quit sponsoring Rush Limbaugh. According to Jason Easley’s report at PoliticusUSA, Limbaugh’s remaining sponsors include Lifelock, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Kia, Papa John’s, Home Depot, Angie’s List and NBC-TV. More on the boycott at the StopRush Project.
Although Jews are a fairly small demographic group in the U.S., they could well be a pivotal voting bloc in Florida, where they are an estimated 7-8 percent of the overall turnout in recent years, with a turnout rate of 96 percent of eligible Jewish voters in 2008, when Obama received 78 percent of the Jewish vote, Reuters reports. Nearly a half-million Jewish voters reside in South Florida.
And at HuffPo, Chris Weigant speculates that it’s just possible that GOP voter suppression may backfire in Florida, because of it’s disproportionately large senior population.
Nate Silver’s latest calculations at his FiveThirty Eight blog bring some good news for President Obama: “…As of Tuesday afternoon, President Obama’s lead in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls was 1.3 percentage points over Mitt Romney….Mr. Obama led by a mean of 3.5 points in the RealClearPolitics averages for the 10 states (Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, Michigan, New Hampshire and Wisconsin) that are most likely to determine the election outcome, according to our “tipping point index.””
Ron Brownstein’s National Journal article, “Public to Congress: Bend, Don’t Break” reports on the latest United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, indicating “a notable uptick in the share of Americans who said they prefer political leaders who “make compromises with people they disagree with” over those who “stick to their positions without compromising.”” Perhaps it’s a measure of false equivalency conflict-aversion on the part of the pollsters that they apparently didn’t even ask the rather important question, “So, which party do you blame for the lack of compromise?”
Scary headline of the day: “New GOP-Backed Voter ID Law Could Keep 43 Percent Of Philly Voters From Polls” by Talking Points Memo’s Ryan J. Reilly. The story also notes that “the percentage of Philadelphia voters who lack a current form of Pennsylvania-issued identification far outnumbers any other part of the state.”
Stat comparison of the Day, via Mother Jones: Between 2000 and 2010, there were 649 million votes cast in general elections, 47,000 UFO sightings, 441 Americans killed by lightning and 13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation.
In his post at Media Matters for America, “Note To WSJ: Romney Didn’t Build The Olympics On His Own,” Simon Maloy collars the Wall St. Journal for shamelessly gushing that Romney’s leadership as CEO of the ’02 Winter Olympics “remains one of the clearest examples of how he sought to transfer his corporate-restructuring experience to a public institution, a theme that runs through the heart of his challenge to Barack Obama.” The WSJ article conveniently neglected to mention that the games were supported by hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government.

Former FL Gov. Charlie Christ, the maverick Republican (now independent) who extended voting hours, increased the number of days people could vote and restored registration rights for felons, says it plain: “There are lines that should not be crossed; meddling with voting rights is one of them. It is un-American and it is beneath us.”
Nate Silver addresses a worrisome question for Dems in his FiveThirtyEight blog, “Is Minnesota a Battleground Again?”
Silver also believes Obama is doing well in Florida, and sees FL “in an essential three-way tie with Pennsylvania and Virginia for second place on the list of the most important states. (All of these states rank below Ohio.)”
There seems to be growing buzz about the Obama campaign spending its dough too fast, while not bringing in adequate additional revenues to remain competitive in the home stretch, as Peter Nicholas and Danny Yadron note in their Wall St. Journal post, “Obama’s Burn Rate Worries Some Democrats.”
Robert F. Bauer, general counsel to Obama for America and the D.N.C., has a post on a topic of potentially decisive consequence in bellwether Ohio up at the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s web page, “The fight for early voting in Ohio.” As Bauer explains, “…In 2010, almost one-third of the early votes were cast within a week of Election Day, well over 90,000 of which were cast within the last three days before Election Day. And these early voters are more likely to be women and seniors, and to have lower incomes, than those who vote on Election Day.” Despite a referendum showing overwhelming support for early voting, “the Ohio General Assembly…took away in-person early voting for most voters over this critical three-day period…the legislature is now providing different deadlines for different early voters. Some voters may vote from the Friday through the Monday before the election; most may not. The United States.” The issue is headed fort he courts.
Here’s a link to send to your friends who have gone all chicken little about Europe’s economic woes — Esther Zuckerman’s ‘Stat of the Day’ post at The Atlantic, “Boston Has a Bigger Economy Than Greece.”
Those who have had some experience with recurring nightmares will find James Warren’s Daily Beast post, “Bill Daley Asks: Is Obama Campaign Ready for Recounts?” troubling. Warren quotes Daley, a former white house chief of staff, Dept. of Commerce secretary and Gore’s 2000 campaign chairman: “It’s not the same as preparing, as Democratic lawyers do, for Election Day voter harassment,” Warren adds that Daley believes “that the possibility of a Florida replay wasn’t on the campaign strategists’ radar screen…Looking back, Daley concedes a few organizational missteps by the Gore camp in Florida, most notably not having a legal and media team on board more quickly…In fact, after the Florida ambiguity arose, the Gore camp reached out to a Florida law firm, only to later learn that its partners had second thoughts and would not help Gore, Daley said…The bottom line was that not having a firm locked in further in advance delayed by a crucial day or two the needed preparations by Gore during an inherently frenzied period.”

At ‘The Fix,’ Aaron Blake reports on “The incredible shrinking — and increasingly valuable — undecided voter,” noting that “Just 6 percent of Americans say there is a good chance they will change their mind about their pick in the 2012 presidential race — a reflection of the divided nature of American politics and the few voters who are actually persuadable…Another 13 percent say that it’s possible but unlikely that they will change their minds…That’s a more polarized electorate than we saw in either 2004 or 2008.”
For a revealing take on the scope and consequences of offshore tax havens, don’t miss John Nichols post at The Nation, “Broke? Not if Governments Tax the $21 TRILLION Rich Have Offshored.”
Dem ad-makers should take a gander at satirist Will Durst’s post up at the Torrington (CT) The Register-Citizen for one way to have some fun with Romney’s record and his denials. Says Durst: “The presumptive GOP nominee finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to convince skeptical voters someone can serve as a firm’s president, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, sole stockholder, junior janitor and cafeteria server in a plastic hairnet and still have absolutely nothing to do with the direction of the company or anything that’s going on. You might say he’s invoking a modified Wall Street bankers’ defense…Also, during the period in question, Romney sat on the board of a corporation called LifeLike, which co-incidentally seems to be his campaign slogan. But we’re pretty sure they had nothing to do with his construction. They make dolls, not puppets.”

At Slate Matthew Ygelsias clarifies Democratic strategy re tax cuts: “…You write two bills. One is called the “Middle Class Tax Cut Extension Act of 2012,” and one is called the “Middle Class Tax Cut of 2013.” One says the Bush tax will be partially extended; the other says that having expired the Bush tax cuts will be partially reinstated. You hold one in your right hand and the other in your left hand, and you keep trying to get votes on the one through Dec. 31, 2012, and start trying to get votes on the other starting on Jan. 2, 2013. That’s a plan that’s guaranteed to work if Democrats win the election in November, and obviously nothing’s going to work if they lose.”
And give it up for Sen. Patty Murray, for adding moral clarity to the discussion, as quoted in Jonathan Weisman’s post at NYT’s ‘The Caucus’: “If we can’t get a good deal, a balanced deal that calls on the wealthy to pay their fair share, then I will absolutely continue this debate into 2013 rather than lock in a long-term deal this year that throws middle-class families under the bus.”
Of course Grover “The Pledge” Norquist doesn’t like it. But it sounds like some Republicans may be getting ready to jettison his stale act, come the new year.
You won’t find a better explanation of Romney’s ambivalence about talking about Bain than Jacob Weisberg’s “The Pain in Bain” at Slate.com. A sample: “Romney, on the other hand, doesn’t much want to defend creative destruction. He boasts about building Bain, but won’t discuss it in detail because it opens up a conversation about those same unattractive consequences: lost jobs, bankruptcies, private pensions dumped onto the federal government. In the case of China, Romney has tried to outhawk Obama, promising to launch what would amount to a trade war beginning his first day in office. When it comes to Detroit, Romney has backed away from his principled position that failed businesses should be allowed to fail. He’s in a corner, because he thinks it’s politically unsound to say what he really believes.”
At HuffPo and current TV, former MI Gov. Jennifer Granholm ably skewers Romney for his blatant hypocricy in sneering at those “who want free stuff,” while leveraging huge tax breaks for his Bain projects.
Naureen Khan has an encouraging interview with Democratic strategist Mark Mellman at The National Journal, which includes this observation: “Romney has more to worry about than Obama does. If you look at white voters overall, if Obama is able to hold on to the minority votes he got last time, he can win with less than 40 percent of the white vote. The truth is, in 2010, when Democrats were getting clobbered, they got 38 percent of the white vote, so getting 40 percent of the white vote is not that hard for the president.”
At the Crystal Ball, Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik see a dead-heat battle for control of the U.S. Senate, including the possibility of “a coin flip battle where the coin, when tossed on Election Day, might land on its side, in the form of a 50-50 Senate. That would require the vice president, whoever that is, to tip the coin one way or the other..”
The battle for the Senate looks even more important in light of Stuart Rothenberg’s latest ‘Roll Call’ assessment of Dem’s prospects for winning back control of the House of Reps.
The National Journal’s ‘The Next America’ blog spotlights “5 Bellwether House Races to Watch” (CO-6; FL-18; IA-3; NV-3; and OH-16).
At Dissent, Nelson Lichtenstein ponders an important question for America’s future, “Can This Election Save the Unions?”

Democratic hopes for winning back control of the House of Reps are nearly shot, owing in large part to diminished prospects in CA, where Dems had hopes to pick up as many as 8 House seats, but now 1 or 2 seems more realistic as a result of the new independent redistricting system and/or Democrats’ failure to front strong enough candidates, reports Dan Walters in the Modesto Bee.
Aaron Blake and Rachel Weiner suggest a similar outcome in their post at The Fix, “The Terminal Ten: The most vulnerable House seats in the country,” Six of the ten are currently held by Democrats.
At The American Prospect, Jamelle Bouie takes a look at the big picture surrounding all of the fuss about presidential campaign war chests and spending and sees only a “marginal” benefit in the presidential race, but adds “If you want to know where money will have its greatest effect, look to congressional elections. A few million dollars in a few states can–and likely will–mean the difference between the status quo, or an ability to direct the nation’s agenda..”
Caroline Winter has a long — and revealing — Bloomberg Businessweek piece on “How the Mormons Make Money,” which sheds some light the church’s vast holdings and Romney’s business ethics and values.
Drew Westen,author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” presents a strong case for enacting the Fair Elections Bill in his NYT Op-Ed, “How to Get Our Citizens Actually United,” and he suggests a messaging strategy: “Voters aren’t interested in “process” issues. They want to know about outcomes. Voters from right to left will tell you, for example, that they overwhelming reject the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to allow unlimited, anonymous money to flood our political system. But getting them worked up about election laws isn’t easy. You have to connect the dots to something that matters to them — like the fact that once-middle-class workers have seen their incomes drop by nearly 8 percent in three years and their wealth disappear by a staggering 40 percent. And you have to make sure they believe that the problem is not, as the right would have it, the extravagant pensions of teachers like my 82-year-old mother (who taught for over 30 years before retiring from the Atlanta city schools), but the actions of bankers and C.E.O.’s who’ve engineered a system that is decimating the middle class.”
If this new Gallup poll is right, Dems have some work to do in convincing voters who have health insurance that their health security won’t be damaged by the Affordable Care Act.
Paul Begala crunches some numbers about ‘swing voters’ at The Daily Beast,’ and concludes: “…The whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states….Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it…Who are these people, these few, these proud? Well, pollsters tell us swing voters are mostly women. They are younger–which blows away the myth that the president has the youth vote locked up. Older voters, like older consumers, are just more set in their ways. Young people are more persuadable about nearly everything. Many swing voters have a high-school diploma but no college degree. And a chunk of them are Hispanic.”
A new poll by The Hill indicates that President Obama’s tax proposal has the support of a plurality of voters. As Sheldon Alberts reports at The Hill, “The Hill’s poll found likely voters support Obama’s $250,000-a-year threshold, although by a relatively narrow margin…Forty-seven percent said existing tax rates should be extended only for families earning less than $250,000, while 41 percent believe they should be extended for everyone.” Maybe increasing the cut-off to $400k would win him more support.
I don’t know why we never see or hear about political ads that focus on the difference between political parties, instead of individuals. In their recent book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” Ornstein and Mann have a paragraph that should make it an easy sell to sentient swing voters: “One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier –ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.”
Nate Silver does the math at his FiveThirtyEight NYT blog and concludes of new voter i.d. laws, “I do think these laws will have some detrimental effect on Democratic turnout.” But he adds, “Pennsylvania, for instance, went from having no voter ID laws to a strict photo ID requirement. Based on the academic studies, I estimate that this will reduce turnout by about 2.4 percent as a share of registered voters. And based on my formula to convert changes in turnout to changes in the popular vote, I estimate that this would reduce President Obama’s margin against Mitt Romney by a net of 1.2 percentage points.”