Michael McLaughlin has a HuffPo update on the price of felon disenfranchisement laws across the U.S. Would you believe 5.85 million voters disenfranchised —600K more than in 2004? More than 4 million of them are no longer in prison. “A majority of felons and ex-cons blocked from voting reside in a core of six Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia — where more than 3 million people are banned from the rolls….7 percent of blacks are disenfranchised compared to 1.8 percent of the rest of the country…In Virginia, 20 percent of blacks can’t vote. In Florida, that number is 23 percent…”
If that wasn’t disturbing enough, see Steven Rosenfeld’s Alternet post, “Not Again! How Our Voting System Is Ripe For Theft and Meltdown in 2012.”
I side with those who believe that Dems need to exercise a little more party discipline, not so much with occasional renegade/mavericks, but with chronic DINOs and the worst offenders, like the five Dems who voted to repeal Obamacare and who also joined 17 other Dems in voting to hold Attorney-General Holder in contempt of Congress. Perhaps a point system that adversely affects their committee assignments.
Speaking of DINOs, sad that the once-promising and now retiring Sen. James Webb joins Joe Lieberman in opposing the President’s tax plan and taking a stand in favor of the 2 percent who earn more than $250K.
At his FiveThirtyEight blog, Nate Silver deploys a regression analysis to determine “Why Obama May Be Stronger Than His Approval Ratings,” but also notes that “the small set of voters who take a favorable view of Mr. Obama but do not approve of his job performance are very much worth fighting over for the campaigns.”
I suppose bipartisan congratulations are in order for Republican Senator Susan Collins on casting 5,000 consecutive votes, although a great many of them in recent years were in groveling service to the fattest of cats at the expense of working people. Collins’ achievement reminds me of the scene in “About Schmidt,” in which the proud mom played by Kathy Bates shows Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) her grown son’s framed certificate for good attendance in an electronics course.
In The Economist, “What’s Eating Appalachia?” probes the underlying reasons for Democrats’ failure to get traction in the region.
I like Timothy Egan’s ‘tribal analysis’ of constituencies favoring Obama and Romney in the NYT ‘Opinionator.’ I think he also hit on a particularly useful insight for ad-makers: “The two images — rich guy on a Jet Ski, skinny kid with Grandma at the Howard Johnson’s pool — tell you why Obama continues to hold a narrow lead in most of the swing states, despite the terrible economy. People don’t mind rich politicians; 75 percent of voters in a Gallup poll this week said Romney’s wealth would not be a factor…But a significant number are bothered by people who fetishize their wealth or use tricks (like offshore tax havens) to avoid the burdens of normal citizens. In that Gallup poll, one in five independents, a crucial block, said Romney’s wealth made them less likely to vote for him…The pictures of Romney and his fellow suits at Bain Capital ravenously stuffing bills in their mouths and pockets is repulsive for the same reason that almost two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Romney surrogate Donald Trump…This is the tribe that Obama has to connect with if he expects to win a second term. They fill their beer coolers with motel ice, because it saves a couple of bucks, and are looking for a president who has their back.”
Class warfare seems to be raging all across the Times op-ed page, where, Krugman takes on the 0.01 percent and their tax-avoidance heritage and even David Brooks gives the aristocracy a proper thrashing in his column, “Why Our Elites Stink.”

Like many Democrats, I was cheered to read Donovan Slack’s Politico report a couple of weeks ago about a Bloomberg survey, “Obama leads 53-40 in national poll,” outlier though it may have been. But what really lifted my spirits was an entry in the comments on the poll by a former math professor, Richard Schwartz. His succinct wrap-up provides a prime example of why political message-makers should draw from the insights of those who are not political professionals. Here are Schwartz’s comments, which should have pretty good shelf-life as pro-Obama talking points up through election day:

The poll results are not surprising when one considers a number of factors, including the following:
1. Mitt Romney and other Republicans are promoting policies similar to or often worse than those that had such disastrous results during the Bush administration, including converting a three-year major surplus, which was on track to completely eliminate the total federal debt, into a major deficit, creating very few net jobs (none in the private sector), and leaving the country on the brink of a depression, with an average of 750,000 jobs being lost during its last three months.
2. Republicans have obstructed efforts to get our country out of the tremendous ditch they left us in by voting no on and sometimes filibustering many Democratic proposals, some of which they previously supported and sometimes even co-sponsored. Hence, it is not surprising that a recent poll showed that 49% of Americans believe that Republican Congress members are purposely sabotaging the U.S. economy in order to defeat Obama and other Democrats, while only 40% disagree.
3.. Republicans support continued tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and highly profitable corporations, while basic social services that middle class and poor people depend on are being cut and teachers, police officers, fire fighters, and others are losing their jobs.
4. Republican legislators have voted against providing funds to save jobs of teachers, police officers, and fire fighters, providing unemployment benefits to long-time unemployed people, and providing medical benefits to 9/11 responders.
5. Republicans are generally in denial about the tremendous dangers from climate change, in spite of a very strong consensus in peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and statements by scientific academies all over the world, as well as the many wake-up calls we have been receiving in terms of severe storms, tornados, floods, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires, that climate change is a major threat, largely caused by human activities. Anyone who thinks that climate change is a hoax promoted by liberals should visit the website of the “Republicans for Environmental Protection.” (www.rep.org). This conservative group was only able to endorse four percent of Republicans in the 2010 U.S. midterm elections because so many Republicans are in denial about climate change and other environmental threats.
6. The Republican Party has moved far to the right under the influence of the Tea Party. There are very few moderate Republicans in Congress today.
7. While far more needs to be done, Democrats have enacted policies that have turned the economy away from the possible depression that the Bush administration left the U.S. on the brink of. More net private-sector jobs have been created already during the Obama administration than during the entire eight years of the Bush presidency.

As Schwartz concludes, “While Democratic policies have not always lived up to our hopes, largely due to Republican obstructionism, a return to Republican rule would be a nightmare. Hence, it is essential to vote Democratic in 2012.”
So there.

Undeterred by Charlie Cook’s skepticism about electoral college speculation, Veteran political analyst Albert R. Hunt crunches some numbers and takes a crack at it in his New York Times ‘Page two’ blog: “Under the scenario above Romney would have to win 80 of these electors while Obama would need to capture 52. If Romney carried Florida and Ohio, and North Carolina, he still would need to win 18 more electoral votes. If Obama wins two of the big three — Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio — he’s almost home..”
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake have a post at The Fix arguing that Dems have a 50-50 chance of holding the Senate in the November elections, which is a lot better than the common wisdom pundits shared a year or so ago. “No matter what happens,” say Cillizza and Blake, “it’s a near-certainty that it will be a thin majority for either side in 2013…”
Jennifer Skalka Tulumello has a long post up at The Monitor, “Polling: a look inside the machinery of public opinion surveys,” with a lot of inside skinny on the inner workings of Gallup that should be of interest to poll-watchers.
Nathaniel Persily has a worrisome post, “Meet the hanging chad of 2012” at The New York Daily News about the new problems with absentee ballots under the current wave of voter suppression laws.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the GOP’s all-out voter suppression campaign, Democraticunderground.com has an interesting article on “Stealing Elections through Manipulation of County Central Tabulators.”
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is mobilizing to turn out at least 12 million of America’s 22 million eligible Latino voters, many of whom will be voting in ‘battleground states.’ More on LULAC’s plans here and here.
Lois Romano of Politico has an encouraging profile of Obama’s “messenger in chief,” “top strategist and crisis manager,” Stephanie Cutter.
Paul Waldman’s American Prospect post “Mitt Goes into the Fog” shares an insight on Romney’s strategy: “When it became clear that Romney would indeed be the Republican nominee, people began speculating about how he would execute the “move to the center” that every nominee must undertake…Mitt hasn’t moved to the center, but he hasn’t stayed on the right, either. Instead, he’s just moved into the fog. You see, you can’t call Romney a flip-flopper if you can’t tell what he thinks about anything…If the economy continues to sputter, he might be able to win without saying much of anything about the country’s critical issues. But that in itself is a pretty risky chance to take.”
The best quote for Monday readers comes from Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, quoted from his appearance on ABC This Week yesterday, via Ben Jacobs Washington Monthly post “Unseemly and Disgusting“: “I’ve never known of a Swiss bank account to build an American bridge, a Swiss bank account to create American jobs, or Swiss bank accounts to rebuild the levies to protect the people of New Orleans.”

Ralph Nader can always be counted on for a blistering critique of Democrats and the Democratic Party from its left. The latest case in point would be his “The Serial Ineptitude of the Democrats” post at Counterpunch. And as usual, he makes some good points, among them:

Victory in politics often goes to those who have the most energy and decisiveness, however wrongheaded. The Republicans have won these races for years. To paraphrase author and lapsed Republican, Kevin Phillips, the Republicans go for the jugular, while the Democrats go for the capillaries.
The Democrats are tortured daily by Republican leaders, Speaker John Boehner and Eric Cantor but they do not go into these politicians’ backyards in Virginia and Ohio to expose the unpopular agendas pitched by these Wall Street puppets.
One would think that politicians who side with big corporations would be politically vulnerable for endangering both America and the American people. These corrupt politicians promote corporate tax loopholes and side with insurance and drug companies on costly health care proposals. They defend the corporate polluters on their unsafe workplaces, dirty air, water and contaminated food, push for more deficit spending in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, neglect Main Street based public works-repair-America-jobs programs, support high-interest student loans, cover for oil industry greed at the pump, and are hell-bent on taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beats.
…The Democrats should be landsliding the worst Republican Party in history. Talk about extremists. There are virtually no moderate or liberal Republicans left in Congress after being driven out by their own party hard-liners. So this Republican Party, united over their extremism, should be very easy to challenge.

Those are some of the nicer things Nader has to say about Democrats in his Counterpunch post. He takes Dems to task for their limp support of a needed minimum wage hike and their failures to “Get tough on Wall Street and corporate crime, protect pensions, end the wars, tax the corporate and wealthy tax-escapees, launch community-based public works programs, provide full Medicare for all, expand health and safety programs, to name a few.”
There’s no danger, however, that Republicans will leverage Nader’s critique, since they are much worse than Democrats on all of the issues he touches on. Some might argue that, in a way, Nader’s critique positions Democrats at the political center, where they need to be. In any event, it wouldn’t hurt Dems if they toughened up their populist creds a little along the lines Nader has suggested.
I’ve never blamed Nader for Gore’s loss in 2000, as have some of my Democratic friends (Looks to me like it was stolen by voter suppression). But I do wish Nader had run in Democratic presidential primaries over the years, which he might have won or, at least pushed the intra-party debate to the left. Nader hates the Democratic party so much, it seems as if he would rather see it replaced than fixed.
Nader will likely never challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination in future elections. But I hope that someday, some equally-eloquent challenger with similarly fierce populist instincts will enter the fray and put some of Nader’s legitimate concerns on the actual agenda.

For those who missed it last week, kiljoy Charlie Cook has some discouraging, but hard to refute words for those of us who have engaged in the folly of electoral college bean-counting months ahead of the general election: “It is a source of constant amusement to me that so many people obsess – as if fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube – over the various combinations of states that could get either President Obama or Mitt Romney to the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College. The guilty include pros at both ends of the political spectrum; people who ought to know better; and armchair analysts who seem to think that they can crack the magic code.”
Yet also at the National Journal, we have Josh Kraushaar’s “Electoral Map Math Favors Romney.” Go fig.
Once again at the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein’s “More Swing State Storm Clouds for Obama, Romney” offers this mixed bag observation: “The NBC/Marist Polls showed Obama holding only a narrow advantage over Romney in Michigan (47 percent to 43 percent) and North Carolina (46 to 44 percent) while the two men are running dead even in New Hampshire (45 percent to 45 percent). Of those three, Michigan is by far the most important for Obama…The best news for Obama, of course, is that he’s ahead in two of the new states and even in the other. The bad news is that his vote share stands below 50 percent in all three of the new states surveyed…And just as in the Quinnipiac polls, Obama’s approval rating doesn’t crack the 50 percent barrier in any of the three new surveys, either: He’s at 48 percent in Michigan, 47 percent in North Carolina and 47 percent in New Hampshire. Those aren’t ominous numbers, but neither are they entirely reassuring.”
They call the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare,” but do read Eleanor Clift’s richly-deserved tribute to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose creative leadership and determination was pivotal in making sure that tens of millions of American will soon have real health security.
Attention Democratic oppo watchers: To understand how the Republicans may leverage the “budget reconciliation process” to destroy the ACA, read “A Strategy to Undo ObamaCare” in the Wall St. Journal by Keith Hennessey, Bush’s director of the National Economic Council.
Nice tribute here to a rock-solid southern progressive Democrat, the late Andy Griffith.
All the elaborate legal arguments about why Roberts upheld the ACA strike me as myopic. IMHO Roberts calculated quite correctly that this was his the best chance he was likely to get to lead and frame a legacy. Had he gone the other way, Justice Kennedy, who is reportedly livid about the Roberts’ ruling, would still be the belle of the ball. Instead, from now on, it’s “the Roberts Court,” and Justice Kennedy is just another reactionary jurist — unless he gets off the GOP bandwagon.
What’s this, a Republican Governor opposing voter suppression? Not so much because of discrimination against Latinos and African Americans. He says he “appreciates the issue of ensuring voters are eligible and U.S. citizens, however, this legislation could create voter confusion among absentee voters.”
Micah Cohen continues with FiveThirtyEight blog’s series on Presidential Geography with a profile of Georgia, where Obama got 47 percent of the votes in ’08. Cohen notes that “The number of minority residents in Georgia has increased dramatically, particularly in the Atlanta area. Black residents made up 31 percent of the state’s population in 2010, up from 26 percent 2000, and the percentage of Hispanic residents increased to 9 percent, from 5 percent.” However, notes Cohen, “Through 2012, the voters Democrats have gained in Georgia from the state’s growing minority groups have largely been canceled out by the white voters the party has lost. Indeed, Mr. Obama has just a 3 percent chance of winning Georgia’s 16 electoral votes according to FiveThirtyEight’s current projections.”

Greg Sargent reports on the decision of five Republican governors to screw impoverished and working people out of the health care they are supposed to get from Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Sargent explains:

Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.

…And counting. Sargent rolls out the breakdown estimates for the five states, with Florida leading the pack with more than 683,000 citizens at risk by Governor Scott’s threat. Sargent adds,

Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out…Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.

if there is a silver lining behind the shameful threats of the five Republican governors, it is that there is a good chance that their actions will provoke mass demonstrations in at least some of their states, hopefully right in front of the gubernatorial mansions, where possible. And wouldn’t it be justice, if those demonstrations were lead by people with serious health problems, bringing along their oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, dialysis machines and other health care devices, joined by nurses and hospital workers in uniforms for exactly the kind of photo ops these governors don’t want?
Perhaps the key player in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the Republican Medicaid-bashers would be the nurses unions, which did such an outstanding job of making former Governor Schwarzenegger eat crow in CA over staffing ratios in hospitals.
In a way, the five governors are daring sick and needy people to protest against being targeted for health hardships. Given the large numbers of those threatened in these states, it’s an arrogant dare they may regret very soon — as well as on November 6.

Donovan Slack reports at Politico that the new Reutrers/Ipsos poll finds that support for the Affordable Care Act is up 5 percent overall as a result of the Supreme Court ruling affirming the constitutionality of the law.
I don’t know if the study cited here attributing the loss of 13 Democratic House seats in 2010 to votes on health care is on target — it seems like the conclusions are a little overstated. I don’t doubt that there was some political carnage because of it, but factors like demographic change and GOTV would be pretty hard to sort out. In any case, additional tens of million of Americans getting coverage is well worth the price.
Ezra Klein rolls out a scenario under which Romney, if elected, and the Republicans could repeal the ACA, even if they don’t have a filibuster-proof senate majority: “Romney won’t have 60 votes in the Senate. But if he has 51, he can use the budget reconciliation process, which is filibuster-proof, to get rid of the law’s spending. One objection to that is that budget reconciliation is supposed to be used for laws that reduce the deficit, and the Congressional Budget Office would score repeal of the Affordable Care Act as increasing the deficit by about $300 billion.”
At the Plum Line, Greg Sargent nails Mitch McConnell for his callous lack of concern for the 30 million Americans who would lose coverage if the ACA is repealed, revealed in McConnell’s dodgy interview with Fox’s Mike Wallace.
Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, has a good read at HuffPo on the topic of messaging tips, among them: “…D’s have a natural messaging advantage, if they’re willing to get the balance right and meet people where they are. And where is that? The fact is that most people recognize a central role for government in certain, prescribed areas: things like retirement security (even Tea Partiers!), health care, public goods (parks, infrastructure, education, safe food and water), and regulating excessive power…The opposition runs from this, and they can and should be framed as advocates of YOYO economics (“you’re on your own”). If Democrats can’t make a simple, convincing case that there are key areas where “we’re in this together,” then they all need to go meet somewhere and not come out until they can do so.” See also Bernstein’s section on “People Aren’t Stupid; They are distracted.”
Joshua Holland has an Alternet interview with messaging guru George Lakoff, co-author with Elisabeth Wehling of “The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic.” From one oif Lakoff’s respnses: “What’s happened in this country is that language activates that moral system. The moral system is realized in frames. Frames are conceptual structures that we use to think in context. Language is defined in terms of those frames. When you use language that is conservative it’ll activate conservative frames which in turn activates conservative moral systems and strengthens those systems in people’s brains. That’s been happening for the past three decades. Conservatives have a remarkable communication system and a language system that they’ve constructed. They get out there and use their language and frames and repeat them over and over. The more they repeat it the greater their effect on people’s brains. Democrats don’t do that and as a result the conservatives have framed almost every issue.”
Stat wiz Nate Silver has more good news for Obama and the Dems, with respect to his prediction model: “President Obama, who got good news in Thursday’s health care ruling, received more overnight on Friday when European leaders agreed to terms on a bank bailout. That sent the S.&P. 500 up by 2.5 percent on the hopes that this will reduce some of the downside risk in the economy…Since the stock market is one of the economic variables the model considers, Mr. Obama’s probability of winning the Electoral College rose with the European news, to 67.8 percent, his highest figure since we began publishing the model this month.”
Justin Moyers “It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!” at the Washington Post ‘Speed Read’ has a collection of quotes by James Carville and Stan Greenberg from their new book of the same title.
At The Nation, Robert Reich has a juicy takedown of the GOP nominee in waiting, laden with quotable graphs. I’ll just go with this one: “..Romney is the only casino capitalist who is running for president, at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us–just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing..”

Here comes the “See, we told you Obamacare was nothing but a big tax” whine from Republicans, coupled with more angry pledges to “repeal Obamacare.” It’s really the GOP’s only option, given Chief Justice John Roberts’s ruling that the Act’s provision requiring all Americans buy health insurance is not a mandate; it’s a tax, fully authorized by the Constitution.
As a tax, it’s small ‘taters in comparative terms. The Congressional Budget Office estimates for the cost of the ACA are in the $94 billion per year for the first ten years range, less than the tax cuts for the wealthy that Congress passed during the Bush administration. And let’s not forget that the $94 billion doesn’t take into consideration all of the financial benefits of a healthier population. Republicans are going to have a very tough sell with the “big tax” argument.
Looking at it another way, American consumers spend an estimated $75 billion per year on soft drinks — and that figure doesn’t include additional hidden costs, such as expensive health care problems, like tooth decay, obesity-related illnesses and diabetes.
So what are the Republicans going to do? Run against Chief Justice Roberts, as well as Obama? Even the most optimistic general election scenarios don’t include the GOP emerging from November with the 60 Senate seats needed to stop a filibuster. Even if they did, do they really want to drag the American public through another excruciating and protracted debate about health care, particularly since they have no alternative plan.
What they are going to do about it is whine for a couple of months to gin up wingnut animosity, until they realize that the value added in terms of votes is close to nil. They’ll trot out the repeal pledges every now and then for an applause line from their knee-jerk ideologues. But they know that the voter mobilization potential of a repeal campaign is very limited from now on.
In the heated debates ahead about repealing the ACA, Dems should always point out that the law was approved by a super-majority, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court and the opposition has no alternative plan. More importantly, the ruling provides cause for celebration, and not just because of the political victory for President Obama. As Andrew Rosenthal puts it in his New York Times blog, “The Affordable Care Act will provide insurance for tens of millions of working people and it will eventually help rationalize and bring down the costs of health care for everyone.”

Lawrence Tribe predicts that the High Court will uphold Obamacare. Robert Reich agrees. But only 10 percent of Americans think they are right, according to this Economist/YouGov poll.
if the Court sinks the ACA, Do read Joan McCarter’s case at Daily Kos that Medicare for all is the best way to go. “A Medicare for all platform allows the Democrats to run against the activist Supreme Court, to run against the horribly unpopular Romney-Ryan Medicare plan, to provide the real contrast between the parties that many voters have struggled to see. And it would excite the hell out of the Democratic base; it would give us something to fight for. What’s the worst that could happen? Republicans calling Medicare socialism?”
Sorry, Mitt. Regarding your campaign’s “off the record private meeting” with Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, there will be no retraction of the Washington Post expose of Bain’s “pioneering” role as an American jobs out-sourcer, reports Dylan Byers at Politico. As one commenter on Byers’ report put it “…Heckuva job, Mittens. You drew attention back to the report, and got nothing in return. Brilliant!”
For a good activist antidote to outsourcing, join the AFL-CIO’s “Bring Jobs Home” campaign. According to AFL-CIO Now’s Mike Hall, The upcoming mobilizations will highlight the Bring Jobs Home Act, legislation introduced by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) in the Senate (S. 2884) and by Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) in the House (H.R. 5542). “The legislation would eliminate tax breaks allowing companies to deduct expenses associated with moving operations overseas, while still encouraging them to assist displaced workers. It also would provide a tax credit to corporations that bring jobs back to the United States.” Text JOBS to 235246 to get info and action alerts.
David A. Graham’s post, “How Outsourcing Backlash Could Swing the Election in Key States” at the Atlantic has an instructive revelation that Dems can leverage: “Columbia political scientist Yotam Margalit…did a more detailed study of the 2004 election and found that outsourcing can be a potent issue: “Between 2000 and 2004, the electoral cost to the incumbent of a marginal job lost due to foreign competition was, on average, more than twice as large as the effect of a job loss resulting from other causes (e.g., domestic competition).” In other words, unemployment hurts an officeholder seeking reelection, but unemployment from jobs shipped overseas is much worse.”
Well, this is encouraging, and not a minute too soon.
Nate Cohn makes a sobering argument at TNR that, contrary to much recent reportage, “No, We Don’t Have Evidence of An Obama Advantage In The Electoral College.”
On the other hand, Jacob Weisberg has a point in arguing “Between the end of the primaries and the start of the conventions, presidential campaigns are message wars. Both sides test slogans and proposals while trying to frame their opponents in memorably unfavorable ways. In this phase, President Barack Obama has been the clear winner.”
And just to hone the messaging a bit, Dems, stop blaming “congress,” and start blaming Republicans in congress.
The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll offers some data to support the assertion that the Obama ad campaigns in swing states attacking Romney are working. “The obvious conclusion here is that the negative TV ads pummeling Romney in the battleground states…are having an impact,” conclude NBC’s political unit in their “First Read” morning briefing…The data in the NBC-WSJ poll certainly backs up that sentiment. A month ago in those same 12 swing states, Romney averaged a 36 percent favorable and 36 percent unfavorable rating. Now, he is at 30 percent favorable and 41 percent unfavorable. Attitudes about Romney’s business background, a target of numerous ads run by the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action super PAC, are more negative in swing states…That’s despite the fact that Obama and his allies are being outspent by Romney and his allies on the air right now.”

As the nation braces for one of the most important Supreme Court decisions ever, E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains how the public debate was framed: “The ACA is the victim of a vicious cycle: Obamacare polls badly. Therefore, Democrats avoid Obamacare, preferring to talk about almost anything else, while Republicans and conservatives attack it regularly. This makes Obamacare’s poll ratings even worse, which only reinforces the avoidance on the liberal side…The media have abetted the problem, but this is partly a response to the impact of the vicious cycle on how the issue has been framed. As a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has shown, terms used by opponents of the law, such as “government-run,” were much more common in the coverage than terms such as “pre-existing conditions.”
At CNN Politics, Gregory Wallace explores the ramifications of the term “Obamacare.”
Everyone will undoubtedly be playing Monday Morning quarterback when the decision is released. As for Democratic strategy, at WaPo Peter Wallsten cites “the ‘musket defense’ supported by Harvard Law proff Lawrence Tribe and others: “To defend the health-care mandate, for instance, the government could have cited past measures such as a 1792 law signed by President George Washington requiring able-bodied men 18 or older to purchase a musket and ammunition. Several scholars, even former president Bill Clinton, have cited the 18th-century law as an example of an individual mandate that happened to be imposed by a president with impeccable originalist bona fides.”
Regarding the ACA mandate, at Talking Points Memo Brian Beutler notes the ‘adverse selection’ problem: “The prevailing view among policy experts and industry insiders is that if the mandate falls, the rest of the health care law becomes unsustainable. A phenomenon known as adverse selection will dominate the insurance market when younger, healthier people opt not to purchase insurance, premiums will spike, and the market will enter a death spiral…” If that happens, why not amend the act with an irresistible tax incentive for younger workers to “buy in”?
MSM bias in reporting on appeals courts ruling on the constitutionality vs. unconstitutionality of the ACA has been even worse than you think, according to this well-documented report from Media Matters: “A majority of federal rulings on the substance of President Obama’s health care reform law have found it to be constitutional, including the law’s mandate that individuals purchase health insurance. But a Media Matters review of the five largest newspapers and the flagship CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news programs finds that the media overwhelmingly focused on rulings that struck down the law in whole or in part — 84 percent of segments on the broadcast and cable programs reviewed and 59 percent of newspaper articles that reported on such rulings — while largely ignoring rulings that found it constitutional or dismissed the case.”
OK, here’s the headline for an Associated Press story by Jennifer Agiesta: “Poll: 1-in-4 uncommitted now in White House race.” Here’s a sentence that appears about 2/3 into the story “Overall, the poll found that among registered voters, 47 percent say they will vote for the president and 44 percent for Romney, a difference that is not statistically significant.” (toplines here) If you suspect that the headline will become the poll meme, and far fewer will read the article, you are not alone.
For an informative case study of how Republican Governors suppress voting rights by executive order, read AP’s “Iowa governor strips voting rights from thousands of felons, restores few.”Gov. Branstadt requires felons who have served their time to submit a credit report with the application to restore their voting rights. As a result, “…8,000 felons in Iowa have finished their prison sentences or been released from community supervision, but less than a dozen have successfully navigated the process of applying to get their citizenship rights back, according to public records obtained by the AP. Branstad’s office has denied a handful of others because of incomplete paperwork or unpaid court costs.”
Could this headline and the poll behind it be an indication that voters may indeed be ready to penalize congressional Republicans for ‘gridlock, obstruction and paralysis’?
Susan Page’s report on “Latinos Strongly backing Obama” quotes an ad strategy tip from Sylvia Manzano, a political scientist at Texas A&M University: “Running an ad that says, ‘I would never vote for Sonia Sotomayor,’ ‘I would veto the DREAM Act’ — those are really easy things to crystallize and repeat…”
For a disturbing look at how out-of-state, right-wing money is being marshalled to defeat one of the best progressive U.S. Senators, see David Callhan’s “Private Wealth and the Public Interest: Sherrod Brown Under Attack.” This could be the marquee state-wide race for ‘people power’ vs. big money. Dems in states where their Senate race is pretty much decided may want to help out Sherrod Brown at this ActBlue page.