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.

Michael Tomasky puts the Todd Akin gaffe on ‘legitimate rape’ into perspective at The Daily Beast (quoting also from Garance Franke-Ruta of the Atlantic), noting that it’s not just an isolated slip-of-the-tongue; the GOP has a disturbing history with the notion. Sarah Kliff of Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog has more on the GOP’s blundering on the issue.
More evidence that the GOP is running very scared on the Akin gaffe: Sen. Scott Brown has just called on Akin to resign from the GOP MO Senate nomination.
Bill Barrow’s Associated Press article, “Solid South’ no longer just all-red or all-blue” is a good starting point for re-opening the debate about how much money, time and energy Dems should put into trying to win southern states in November, and forward from there. Barrow really needs a ‘part II’ to explore the topic in a little more depth. It’s not just about VA and NC, which Obama won in ’08. Obama ads are now running in GA, where he received 47 percent of the vote in ’08, and which is being colored pink now, instead of red or even orange in this political map.
For a data-driven analysis of state-by-state voter turnout rates in 2008, you won’t find a better source than this web page, provided by The United States Election Project .
A Suffolk University poll finds that about 40 percent of America’s eligible voters say they probably will not vote in November, according to this Fox News report. Moreover, the report notes that “55 percent of unlikely voters in the Suffolk poll have a favorable view of the president, while just a quarter look favorably on Romney…If they did vote, roughly four in 10 of those registered to vote said they would back Obama, compared with 20 percent for Mr. Romney, according to the poll last week.”
Sometimes gaffes are the truth. A top GOP official in Ohio admits to racially-driven voter-suppression, as Ari Berman reports at The Nation.
WaPo’s Carter Askew meditates on “Mitt Romney’s Entitlement Problem,” and comes up with a revealing insight: ” Romney seems to believe that in certain ways he is better than others. How dare we question his tax rate; he has paid millions and millions of dollars in taxes. He pays more in one year at 13 percent than 99.9 percent of Americans pay in their lifetimes…Maybe Romney’s sense of entitlement is so vast that he thinks taxes and charity are one in the same: both his discretionary gifts to mankind, for which we should be thankful.”
Intrade’s political forecast map is a little different than the others, but still looking very good for the President.
“Robert Reich’s “Mitt’s 13% Tax Is Shameful” from his blog, via Reader Supported News, cuts to the chase in putting Romney’s taxes in perspective. Reich shares the one quote by Adam Smith the Republicans never repeat: “The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more in proportion.” Then Reich goes for the jugular: “At a time when poverty is increasing, when public parks and public libraries are being closed and when public schools are shrinking their offerings and their hours, when the nation’s debt is immense, and when the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together – Romney’s 13 percent is shameful.”
Here’s the skinny on all of the states’ voter registration deadlines, with widgets to register.

In the Philadelphia News, Will Bunch’s “Poll gives Obama the edge, but how would voter ID affect the lead?” offers an encouraging observation from veteran Philadelphia-based political analyst Larry Ceisler: “The reality is it [voter ID] will not have much effect – if anything it will boomerang” against the Republicans, wile noting that it might have more of an affect on some local races.
There have to be swing voters out there who are repulsed by Republican efforts to make voting harder. Google up “voter suppression” +”unamerican” and you get about 22K hits, one example being “F-L-A Governor Rick Scott’s Walk On The Wild Side: Voter Suppression Is UnAmerican” at Shred of Truth. Progressives have been reluctant to use the term, perhaps because it was used to destroy innocent people during the ‘Red Scare’ era. But if anything is a shameful betrayal of American democracy, it is voter suppression. There may not be much Dems can do to invalidate these laws between now and November, but we can certainly crank up the outrage among fair-minded voters. Maybe it’s time for high-profile Dems to start working the “U” word a little more aggressively and say it plain.
Regarding voter i.d. laws, Republicans are able to hide behind a phony concern about ‘voter fraud,’ even though all relevant data indicates that it is all but non-existent. But the rationalizations for repealing early voting laws are even more indefensible, and opponents of early voting should be compelled to explain their views at every opportunity. It would be fun, for example to hear Romney or Ryan try to boil this essay against early voting into credible soundbites — if the MSM had the gumption to call them out.
As for overcoming voter suppression in PA, at PolitcusUSA Adalia Woodbury’s “Keep Fighting: How to Beat Pennsylvania’s Attempt to Suppress Your Vote ” walks her readers through the steps needed to insure their voting rights in the Keystone State.
The hope is that the Republican campaign to suppress early voting will backfire by pissing off the highest-turnout constituency, seniors, especially those with mobility issues. But it’s a calculated risk Republicans are willing to make, since no constituency votes more Democratic than African Americans. Stephanie Siek explains, for example, at The Griot “How early voting changes in Ohio will hurt Democratic, black voters”.
Here’s an Ohio ACLU precis on the state’s balkanized, racially-motivated early voting system and the resistance to it.
In her HuffPo article, “GOP to Young Voters: Don’t Vote,” Christine Pelosi, executive director of Young Democrats of American, explains the techniques of — and remedies for — Republican youth voter suppression.
James Ridgeway’s “The Mother of All Vote-Suppression Tactics?” at Mother Jones provides an excellent overview of felon disenfranchisement laws. Ridgeway notes: “Florida leads the pack in the number of citizens excluded. But according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 48 states (exceptions: Maine and Vermont) prohibit current prisoners with felony convictions from voting and 29 of them also bar those on probation or parole…black men make up 36 percent of the nation’s disenfranchised population, but just 6 percent of the nation’s general population…According to Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, “Over 1 million people in Florida right now are disenfranchised,” he says. Nearly 1 in 3 of them are African American men. If these people were able to vote, Meade continues, “Florida would no longer be a swing state.”
Indications are Dems still have a lot of work to do to educate voters about the realities of voter ‘fraud’ and suppression, as this Washington Post poll reported by Michael Brandon and Jonathan Cohen suggests. The poll found that a healthy majority supports voter i.d. laws, and there may not be time to persuade a critical mass of these voters otherwise by November 6. Maybe Dems should put more muscle into fighting other forms of voter suppression, like felon disenfranchisement and restrictions on early voting.
The AFL-CIO has an impressive “Voter Suppression and Voter I.D. Laws: A Toolkit for Activists,” which should be of use to anyone who wants to get more involved in fighting to protect voting rights.

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.”