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.”

That U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan often stretches the truth to make his points comes as no great revelation to politically aware progressives. But it appears that his jaw-dropping whoppers in his vice presidential nomination acceptance speech have set a new standard for political prevarication.
As Chris Bowers explains in a Daily Kos e-blast:

…It’s a rare day when the media takes a break from he said / she said journalism to point out that Republicans are just flat-out lying. However, Paul Ryan was so blatantly and repeatedly dishonest in his speech last night that dozens of major media outlets spent the day slamming him.

Bowers links to a Kos post, “Lyin’ Ryan: The Media Push Back” by Middlegirl, which includes links to an extraordinary 25 articles calling out Ryan for his lies. I’ve seen half a dozen others, and I’m sure our readers can add even more to the list. “Lyin’ Ryan” googled up 31,700 hits this morning.
When you look at all the downers of the GOP convention, Romney’s nothingburger acceptance speech, Christie’s snarling invective, Eastwood’s lame joke and others, nothing seems quite so emblematic of their campaign as Ryan’s shameless bundle of lies. The GOP message machine clearly believes that even easily-refuted lies will stick, given adequate repetition.
Rummage through American history, and see if you can find another candidate of either party who earned such a disparaging nickname. In this case it is richly-deserved– Lyin’ Ryan.

David Corn has some perceptive observations in his Mother Jones article, “With Ryan Speech, Romney Campaign Goes Full Tea Party” including “They’re in a mania,” one former Bush adviser said about the Romney campaign. They think America is ready for a grand reconfiguration of its social insurance system”…With such language–which was vetted by Romney Central Command–Ryan was not pressing the obvious case that Romney is a pragmatic Mr. Fixit who could be a competent steward of the still-struggling American economy. He was announcing that he and Romney aim to remake American society. He was essentially issuing a declaration of ideological warfare: Government is the enemy of freedom and the cause of the nation’s economic woes; it must be crushed. And, yes, taxes must be slashed for all, which would include those on the highest rungs…”
I have mixed feelings about this notion. Certainly, the number of boring speeches should be reduced, as well as the over-hyped “suspense” in conventions when the big issues and choices are already decided, especially since veep selections are nowadays rubber-stamped. The two major political conventions also drain too much media attention and resources, which could be better spent on more in-depth issue reportage. Still, a real political party has to gather and hammer out principles sometime, not that today’s party platforms are all that consequential. Might this be done better in the years between presidential elections?
Lest you remain unaware of how trifling, paranoid and bizarre the Republican platform is, read Adam Serwer’s “The 5 Weirdest Bits in the 2012 GOP Platform” at MoJo.
Ed Kilgore has a revealing post “Affirmative Action baby” about the GOP’s race card strategy, in which he nails the Rovian subtext in Republican attacks on Obama: “…The “affirmative action” meme implicitly endorsed by the likes of Karl Rove has such a nasty undertone: You, white Americans, tried to give those people a chance, but you know what? They turned out to be exactly what you always suspected, even in that half-black, cleaned-up, over-educated version named Barack Obama! So screw ’em!” Kilgore adds, “…it infuriates people like Rove that their conservative-majority-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see was derailed in 2008 by this Ivy League black dude from Hawaii. They can’t believe he beat them fair and square, so they’ll say he’s predictably failed in hopes that they can get the course of history back on track. ”
In addition to impressive Latino GOTV preparation in Arizona, Republicans have another development to worry about. At the Hill Cameron Joseph quotes Sen John Kyl: “Ron Paul has totally taken our [state] party over…His folks have taken over half of our party, as a result of which we are split down the middle, totally ineffective, screwed up.”
Juan Cole writes at his Informed Comment blog about Romney’s sabre-rattling towards Iran, concluding that ” Military action in the Gulf would certainly send gasoline/ petrol prices sky high and possibly further derail world recovery from the deep global recession.” Could be the premise for a compelling campaign ad.
This can’t be legal.
Nick McClellan and Chris Kirk have a fun graphic up at Slate.com answering the question: “What Are the Most Republican States?” There are no shockers, but the rankings are interesting nonetheless.
And while at Slate, check out Dave Weigel’s “The Last Gasps of the Ron Paul Movement” which addresses “how the GOP’s new rules are meant to make sure no one rises to replace him.” The interesting question is whether or not Paul can be muzzled by the GOP giving his son, Rand Paul, some sort of bribe.
You couldn’t ask for a better capsule description of Romney’s business legacy than the title of David Moberg’s In These Times article “How To Succeed in Business Without Adding Value.” Moberg concludes his argument with what could be a useful soundbite: “…Even when a private equity firm “succeeds” (usually after buying an above-average business), much of their gains are reaped simply by transferring large amounts of wealth to themselves. The losers are usually the companies they acquire, their investor partners, taxpayers, government agencies and workers-ultimately, the entire economy.”

Jonathan Chait has a provocative post up at New York magazine, and if his theory is right, Republicans may be in for an unpleasant shock. Noting President Obama’s seeming confidence in the face of numerous polls showing a close election, Chait speculates:

The best explanation I can muster is that the polls are assuming a much different, and more GOP-friendly, electorate than either party. ABC’s poll assumes that 78 percent of registered voters are white. That is … a whole lot of white people. The white share of the electorate has been dropping steadily for more than twenty years — from 87 percent in 1992 to 83 percent in 1996 to 81 percent in 2000, 77 percent in 2004, and 74 percent four years ago. Ron Brownstein’s recent reporting suggests that both campaigns expect an electorate that’s about 74 percent white. The same problem seems to appear in numerous other polls. Many of them don’t release their racial breakdowns, but those that do seem to imply electorates far whiter than the campaigns are banking on. As pollster Mark Blumenthal has exhaustively shown, Gallup has systematically underweighted the number of minorities in its polls, due to technical issues related to the difficulty of finding and weighting poll respondents.
Now, we don’t know what the racial composition of the electorate will look like. But it is utterly key. Assuming the 74 percent white makeup, and further assuming that Obama’s standing among nonwhite voters holds up as it has with high consistency, then Romney needs to win white voters by more than 20 points, perhaps by around 22 points, in order to prevail. Few polls show him doing that. The ABC poll has him winning whites by eighteen points.

It’s possible that Obama’s confident demeanor is just a reflection of his cool — the guy just doesn’t rattle easily. He has a touch of the FDR temperament in that respect. But Chait may be on to something, considering the explosive growth of the non-white electorate. It’s quite possible that the demographic breakdown analysis of most pollsters is lagging behind reality.
None of which changes the priority challenge facing Democrats — to launch the most extensive and intensive GOTV mobilization of the base constituencies in the history of the party.

The following, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Amid the hoopla and the crapola that will be the Republican party convention this week, it is important to note again the tough times of the great (but shrinking) American working class. They are the people, at least the white members of it, to whom this Republican convention is speaking. The Republicans have gone completely off the rails in terms of the extremist, hyper-individualist policies they are proposing, but hard pressed middle income folk are open to their ideas not because they think they sound good, but because of the economic pain they are feeling.
A lot of voters are just sick to death with both political parties, because their lives keep getting tougher and tougher and no one inside the beltway seems to care. This has been going on for a long time now, check out this incredible chart.
The folks who did the chart did it to highlight the incredible hyper-inflation over the last few decades of college tuition, which has soared more than twice as fast as even the outrageous growth of health care costs, and it is a dramatic reminder of why just borrowing from your parents, as Romney has suggested to students, isn’t going to work for most people. But the entire chart is a reminder of the way middle income families have been continuously squeezed over the past few decades — especially when you keep in mind that something not on the chart, wages, have been essentially flatlined as compared to inflation over that same period. Middle class folks got a little bit of a reprieve during the Clinton years in the ’90s when new jobs were being created at a record rate and wages were edging up a little, but the Bush years were pretty weak for the first seven and then horrible at the end. The fact that this recession hit so hard and has been so deep and long lasting has created a bitterness and despair among middle income Americans. For decades now their wages have been flat, while energy, health care, and tuition for their kids has gone through the roof. You add the last five years of being slammed by this recession, with the price of their homes declining and full time jobs harder and harder for them and their kids to find, and people are in a foul mood. No wonder they are reluctant to support the incumbent running for re-election.
Fortunately for us Democrats, we have Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and this freak show we call the Republican party running against us. Their economics come from Bain Capital and Ayn Rand fantasy novels: make a few people richer than God by laying workers off, slashing benefits, out-sourcing work, and manipulating the tax code while sending the money into secretive off-shore accounts. Their ideas on social issues are even more incredible: one Senate candidate talks about women not getting pregnant during rape, another incredibly equates rape with having a child out of wedlock, and their VP candidate refers to rape as a “method of conception.” They want to privatize Social Security, voucherize Medicare, and block grant Medicaid, ending almost 80 years of guaranteed retirement security for senior citizens and the disabled, and use the savings to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
Poll after poll, focus group after focus group, make clear that that American people by wide margins and with strong emotion reject these ideas. Literally the only things Romney-Ryan and the Republican party have going for them are the massive edge in dollars for advertising, the voters’ tendency to distrust the generic concept of government, and the natural instinct of voters to kick out whoever is governing in a time of hard economic times. Those are 3 big things to have going for you, and the Republicans are doing everything they can to maximize those advantages. But everything else — Romney’s record at Bain Capital, the Romney-Ryan budget, the Medicare debate (which the Democrats are very likely to win given the polling I have seen), the rape/abortion/contraception/women discussion, Romney’s immigration platform which continues to drive Latinos away, and just the general sense that the Republicans have moved so far right that it’s scaring people- is playing for Democrats. The challenge is that most swing voters are low information voters and more easily swayed by misleading ads being run at saturation buy levels by Romney’s big money friends.
The dynamic as we watch the Republican convention is that given this set of dynamics, the Romney campaign has decided on a gin-up-the-base all right wing all the time strategy. They have made the political calculation that the swing voters left in this race are the working class whites who have been hit hard by this economy, people not likely to agree with them on the specifics of the Romney-Ryan budget plan if they knew them but who are unlikely to know those details. They know they need to fire up their base to vote, and if they mix in some 1980s-style welfare queen ads into their generic ads on Obama being to blame for all their economic problems, that they might be able to appeal to both swing and base voters.
So this convention and this entire Republican election strategy is going to be ugly. Voters don’t support Romney and Ryan’s policies, so to get elected they will have to do some pretty dirty deeds.
Meanwhile the core problems that are crushing the American middle class are not going away. The Republicans only answer is the kind of winner-take-all Bain-onomics that will finish that middle class off. The Democrats had better be ready to win this debate, and if they do, they had better be prepared to actually deliver for the middle class.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s Washington Post op-ed “Can Romney show he’s more than a politician?” unearths some Republican convention history to show just how far the GOP has fallen. Dionne notes that Romney’s father, Michigan Governor George Romney actually walked out of the convention speech in 1964 in protest against Goldwater’s extremism. He then quotes from New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s speech to the same convention terming the views of the Goldwaterites “wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the Republican Party in the best of a century’s traditions.” Dionne adds, “Nothing better captures the absolute victory of the forces of Goldwaterism than a Romney triumph on the basis of Goldwater’s ideas.”
For an excellent article title, look no further than Joseph A. Palermo’s HuffPo post, “The Republican National Convention: Where Social Darwinism Meets Theocracy.”
Ryan may be laying the macho blue collar hobby stuff on just a tad thick, as Andrew Romano reports at the Daily Beast, quoting Ryan thusly: “My veins run with cheese, bratwurst, a little Spotted Cow, Leinie’s, and some Miller. I was raised on the Packers, Badgers, Bucks and Brewers. I like to hunt here, I like to fish here, I like to snowmobile here. I even think ice fishing is interesting.”

 Romano adds “Two days later, Ryan took his introduction tour to Lakewood, Colo., where he somehow managed, over the course of a 20-minute speech, to mention working at McDonald’s, filling the gas tank on his truck, camping and fishing with his family” and “I got a new chainsaw,” Ryan told the magazine. “It was nice. It’s a Stihl.”
Smart people make a pretty convincing case that Rove still runs the GOP

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A worthy challenge for the MSM, from Jeff Jarvis’s “Reporters: Why Are You in Tampa?” at HuffPo. Jarvis asks: “I challenge every journalist in Tampa for the Republican convention — every one of the 15-16,000 of you — to answer this: Why are you there? What will we learn from you? What actual reporting can you possibly do that delivers anything of value more than the infomercial — light on the info, heavy on the ‘mercial — that the conventions have become? Would you be better off back at home covering voters and their issues? Can we in the strapped news business afford this luxury?”
With the internet attracting increasing face-time and political ad time being gobbled up on TV and radio, Dave Nyczepir’s “Know your online ad options” at Campaigns & Elections has an interesting discussion on the benefits of “pre-roll,” “mid-roll,” “post-roll” and banner ads.
Ed Kilgore wonders at The Washington Monthly if maybe all of the fuss about the “enthusiasm gap” is pointless, since “”Enthusiasm” which exceeds the willingness to cast a ballot only matters if it is communicable to other voters” and because “You only get one vote. And if your passion is part of a political message that repels swing voters, and helps mobilize the other party’s base, then it may be worth even less than nothing.”
Jonathan Chait’s “Team Romney White-Vote Push: ‘This Is the Last Time Anyone Will Try to Do This‘” at New York magazine illuminates Romney’s grand strategy — “To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988…a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.” And this cynical strategy assumes a comparable turnout of white voters, which is by no means a sure thing. Nate Silver, for example, cites “An Above-Average ‘Likely Voter Gap’ for Romney.”
Alternet’s Peter Montgomery takes an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the loons behind the Republican platform lunacy, subtitled “they’re breaking out the crazy down in Tampa.”
The Republican ticket is betting a lot on the white working-class, but there’s an important constituency they better not write-off as a lost cause. Ron Brownstein explains why in his article at the Atlantic, “Romney’s Big Challenge: Win White-Collar Suburban White Voters” As Brownstein puts it, “During the primaries, Romney’s supporters argued that his buttoned-down demeanor and managerial pedigree positioned him to recapture voters in white-collar suburbs now tilting Democratic. Even with his working-class gains, Romney probably won’t win unless he proves them right.”

It’s a measure of how extreme and radical the Republican party has become that one of progressives’ favorite centrist/false equivalency whipping boys, Thomas Friedman, now recognizes that the GOP leadership has gone starkers. Here’s Friedman, from his recent NYT column, “We Need a ‘Conservative’ Party“: “We are not going to make any progress on our biggest problems without a compromise between the center-right and center-left. But, for that, we need the center-right conservatives, not the radicals, to be running the G.O.P., as well as the center-left in the Democratic Party.” Better late than never.
Is it just me, or does this much-hyped, but poorly-reported and rather extreme outlier of a forecast smell a wee bit funky?
According to the latest AP-GfK poll, reported by AP, most Americans disagree with the above-noted forecast at this point: “Asked to predict the race’s outcome, 58 percent of adults say they expect Obama to be re-elected, whereas just 32 percent say he will be voted out of office.” The poll also gives Obama a 47-44 edge over Romney.
For some clear thinking about the problem of slack youth voter participation, I highly recommend Ann Beeson’s ‘Campaign Stops’ post, “Scared Straight — Into the Voting Booth” at the NYT. Beeson, senior fellow and lecturer at the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas, explains: “Three causes are worth exploring. First of all, many young people just don’t see the connection between voting and their commitment to improve their communities, advocate for a cause, or change the world. Secondly, there are very real grounds for political cynicism. And finally, let’s face it, civic engagement can be a snore.” She’s also got some interesting remedies the Democratic party would be wise to explore.
Looks like there has been an uptick in kinder public attitudes toward children of undocumented workers, which should encourage Democratic candidates to speak out in their behalf a little more boldly.
At HuffPo, Sam Stein has an encouraging post, “Obama 2012 Campaign Helped By MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO Super PAC Alliance.” The partnership, which was launched on Tuesday, brings together two organizations with a combined total of 17 million members to mobilize what could be the most extensive GOTV ground game ever, with an estimated 400K volunteers and 1.5 million phone calls.
The ‘Akin effect’ seems to be reverberating down-ballot. Birds of a crackpot feather…
Kenneth P. Vogel’s Politico post, “Liberal group targets Koch brothers with $500K ad buy,” suggests that Dems should monitor how much traction they can get from attacks on Big Money like Patriot Majority’s ad campaign targeting the Koch Brother’s attempt to flood the airwaves with nearly $400 million worth of right-wing propaganda. The election outcome may depend on people “seeing through” the GOP ad blitz.
Can Florida’s shameless Governor Rick Scott stoop any lower than this?

Silly me, thinking Todd Akin probably had just enough sense to get out of the Missouri Senate race yesterday. And despite Akin’s walkback of his twisted remarks about rape, the birds & bees, which smells an awful lot like a ‘jailhouse conversion,’ the draft GOP platform indicates that his unchanged policy prescriptions aren’t all that far out of the Republican party’s ‘mainstream.’ As an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, puts it:

In passages on abortion, the draft platform puts the party on the most extreme fringes of American opinion. It calls for a “human life amendment” and for legislation “to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” That would erase any right women have to make decisions about their health and their bodies. There are no exceptions for victims of rape or incest, and such laws could threaten even birth control.
The draft demands that the government “not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage,” which could bar abortion coverage on federally subsidized health-insurance exchanges, for example.
The platform praises states with “informed consent” laws that require women to undergo medically unnecessary tests before having abortions, and “mandatory waiting periods.” Those are among the most patronizing forms of anti-abortion legislation. They presume that a woman is not capable of making a considered decision about abortion before she goes to a doctor…

Since Akin will be around for a little while, at least, he will serve as the poster-boy for the GOP’s medieval notions about female biology and women’s health rights. And no, the term ‘medieval’ is not that much of a stretch, as Vanessa Heggie writes in her article in the Guardian, “‘Legitimate rape’ – a medieval medical concept: The idea that rape victims cannot get pregnant is a very old medical theory“:

The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape appears to have been instituted in the UK sometime in the 13th century. One of the earliest British legal texts, Fleta, has a clause in the first book of the second volume stating that: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman’s consent she could not conceive.”

Heggie cites other examples in more recent centuries. Junk science dies hard — especially in today’s Republican party.
The media is loving having Akin as poster-boy for the worst instincts of the GOP. And Democrats, not just Sen. McCaskill, are gratified that he keeps Republican lunacy on the front pages. But there may be a downside for Dems. Ed Kilgore notes in his Washington Monthly post on “Todd Akin, Superstar,”

…Thanks to the scorn and mockery he has now attracted, this relatively obscure congressman whom I’d bet half the pundits discussing his fate today had barely heard of before his primary win, is a National Superstar, the very embodiment of the Christian Right’s all-too-often abandoned determination to stand up to GOP pols who forever pay them lip service but rarely deliver the goods.

The media loves a buffoon, and it’s possible that Akin will hang in there long enough to serve as a distraction, deflecting media attention from Romney and Ryan, who espouse essentially the same policies as Akin. Much depends on the MSM, as well as the progressive press, making the connection between the views of the GOP ticket and the party’s loon du jour.

I will be surprised if GOP MO Senate nominee Todd Akin doesn’t take a glorious swan dive under the bus today ‘for the good of the party,’ since he stands to lose $10 mill in NRSC and Rove bucks if he stays. Even if he survives the day, it’s only a matter of time before he quits.
In terms of the Senate race, credit Senator Claire McCaskill with brilliant strategy for pushing for Akin as her opponent. Boy, was she right. Unfortunately, she also had bad luck, with Akin delivering the mega-gaffe before he was out of the gate. We Dems always seem to get these breaks too early, and the Republican disasters are forgotten by the time election day rolls around. Just once, could we have a monumental GOP gaffe during the week before a general election?
Many Dems are no doubt disappointed, since Akin is a near perfect stalking horse for outing, not only the idiocy of the wingnuts, but also the ever-waffling views of Ryan and Romney about just which women should be allowed to control their own bodies without fear of criminal prosecution. One day it’s only those whose lives are endangered by pregnancy complications. On other days it’s nobody or only those who can prove “forcible” rape.
In terms of national politics, however, the good news is that Dems have lots of new footage for ads portraying the GOP as the party of prevarication and equivocation, as well as for winning support of remaining women swing voters. It’s a little harder today for thoughtful voters of either gender to see the Republican party as a sober alternative up and down-ballot. As Ed Kilgore ably puts it at the Washington Monthly,

What’s basically happened thanks to Akin is that the messy logic and morality of anti-choice GOPers and their rationalizations for positions that don’t sound politically toxic is under the microscope. From that point of view, even if Paul Ryan’s managed to reposition himself as more “moderate,” the whole ticket and the political party supporting it may find its troubles have just begun.

If there is good news for McCaskill in Akin’s too-early flop, it’s that it’s possible that just enough wingnuts will be disgusted by sacrificing the primary winner on the altar of the Romney campaign that they will stay home or lodge a protest vote on election day. It’s also possible that some moderate Missouri Republican voters will look at the Akin mess as symptomatic of their party’s confusion and decide that McCaskill is the more prudent choice. Hey Missourians, what would Harry Truman think?
It was fun this morning to watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe‘s host, Joe Scarborough straining to put lipstick on this particular pig. Something about how swell it is that the national Republicans are united in wanting to throw their MO Senate candidate under the bus, train, plane and any cars that may be milling about — in the senate race that was supposed to be their best chance for a pick-up. Yes, Republicans, let’s do have more of this.