Ron Brownstein has a couple of recent posts tracking white working class political attitudes that should be of interest to presidential campaign strategists. In “Working Class Whites Still Wary of Obamacare,” he explains:

The problem, as on almost all issues relating to government’s role, is centered on whites, particularly those in the working class. According to figures provided by Kaiser, in their latest survey, 35 percent of non-white respondents believe that the law will benefit their family. That compares to just 14 percent who believe they will be worse off (the remaining 39 percent don’t think it will make much difference). Whites offer nearly a mirror image: just 18 percent believe the law will leave their family better off, compared to 38 percent who believe they will be worse off as a result.
The skepticism among whites is most concentrated among whites without a college degree. Just one-in-seven of them believe health care reform will personally benefit them or their family. Among college whites about one-in-four expect to personally benefit from the reform.
Gallup Polling in March 2010 found that while few whites expected to personally benefit from the law, a majority of them believed it would benefit low-income families and those without health insurance. That suggested they viewed health care reform primarily as a welfare program that would help the needy but not their own families. Kaiser didn’t replicate that question in their latest survey, but it may have detected an echo of that sentiment in the finding that twice as many whites believed the law would benefit children than thought it would help their own family.

Ironically, adds Brownstein, “…non-college whites are uninsured at much higher rates than those with degrees; for that reason, the law would personally benefit far more of them than the college-educated whites who are somewhat more open to it.” Yet, “the targets of that effort remain entirely unconvinced that the law will benefit them. Rather than ameliorating their skepticism that government will defend their interests, it appears to have only intensified it.”
Brownstein warns that the skepticism about the ACA is “another brick on the load Obama is carrying with white working class voters, who appear poised in polls to reject him at levels no Democratic presidential nominee has experienced since 1984.”
In another post, “How Diversity Divides White America,” Brownstein addresses white working class attitudes towards immigrants revealed in the just released Pew Research 2012 Values Survey:

Among college-educated whites who identify as Democrats-an increasingly central pillar of the party’s coalition-over four-in-five say that the immigrants do not threaten American values. But nearly two-thirds of Republicans without a college degree-an increasingly central pillar of the GOP coalition-do consider immigrants a threat to American traditions…That overwhelming unease among the blue-collar (and older) white voters central to GOP electoral prospects today represents a huge hurdle for the Republican strategists who want the party to expand its Hispanic outreach.

One conclusion to be drawn from both of Brownstein’s articles is that the Obama campaign should upgrade it’s outreach to white workers as a large constituency which benefits from Obama’s reforms, yet remains unpersuaded — doubt which the Republicans are eagerly prepared to reinforce in their ad campaigns.

John Sides has some revealing graphics up at The Washington Monthly which demolish the myth of “Independent” voters as a large, politically moderate third force.
From John Nichols’ wrap-up “Recall Campaign Against Scott Walker Fails” at The Nation: “The failure of the campaign against Walker, while heartbreaking for Wisconsin union families and the great activist movement that developed to counter the governor and his policies, offers profound lessons not just for Wisconsin but for a nation that is wrestling with fundamental questions of how to counter corporate and conservative power in a Citizens United moment…The “money power” populists and progressives of another era identified as the greatest threat to democracy has now organized itself as a force that cannot be easily thwarted even by determined “people power…The right has developed a far more sophisticated money-in-politics template than it has ever before employed. That template worked in Wisconsin, on behalf of a deeply divisive and scandal-plagued governor…There was, as well, a huge problem with messaging as regards the recall itself. Walker’s theme for the better part of year–reinforced in paid advertising and constant appearances on his favored news network, Fox–was that the recall election was a costly partisan temper tantrum. The criticism was never really countered.”
The Progressive editor Matthew Rothschild has harsh words for the white house and DNC for avoiding Wisconsin, but gives Walker some credit: “As much as I can’t stand the man, Walker proved to be a formidable candidate. He stayed on message. He was a pesky debater. He was unflappable. He cultivated a down-to-earth image with his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up and his aw-shucks demeanor. And he said two plus two equals five with a straight face and basset eyes. Even as he had the worst jobs record of any governor in the country, he talked about how great he was creating jobs, and when the numbers weren’t in his favor, he wheeled out different numbers. Brazen, yes, but it worked…He flipped these numbers around by running ads on the airwaves all winter long, from Thanksgiving through the Super Bowl and right up to the Democratic primaries. Even on the night of those primaries, he was on the air bashing Tom Barrett.”
But Walker’s rising star may yet flame out in a swamp of criminal accusations, reports Matthew DeLuca at the Daily Beast.
Former Bush speechwriter/WaPo columnist Michael Gerson argues that the Wisconsin vote also reflects a legitimate concern about excessive pension commitments to public workers. He offers no Wisconsin data to support his point, but it would be interesting to find out if the pro-Walker ad campaign leveraged the meme.
Looking for an antidote to progressive demoralization in the wake if Wisconsin? Check out this program for the 7th Annual Netroots Nation, beginning today in Providence, RI.
Looking toward the next possible blow to Democratic prospects, Greg Stohr’s “Voting-Rights Surprise at High Court May Foreshadow Health Care” at Bloomberg Businessweek offers this chilling note: “The secret to successful advocacy is simply to get the court to ask your opponent more questions,” Roberts wrote in a law review article adapted from a speech he gave on Supreme Court arguments. More comprehensive studies have reached similar conclusions…The chief justice himself was one-sided in the health-care case, interjecting 23 times during [U.S. Solicitor General} Verrilli’s hour on the insurance requirement and only seven times as opponents of the law made their arguments. Kennedy interrupted Verrilli six times, compared with four times during the other side’s time.”
Mike Hall reports at AFL-CIO Now that “ALEC Resignations Grow, Pressure on Others Mounts“: “For those of us keeping score, 19 major corporations and 54 state legislators have cut their ties with the extremist American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Now pressure is mounting for other major corporations to join the exodus from ALEC and its agenda of voter suppression, union-busting and immigrant bashing.”
L.A. Times reporters Jean Merl and Richard Simon say “California’s new setup a hurdle for Democrats’ bid to retake House.”

There are two items of good news in the Wisconsin Recall Bummer. First, Democrats won back control of the state senate, with former Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine) defeating incumbent Van Wanggaard in a squeaker. As Lee Bergquist, reports in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

Results posted early Wednesday showed Lehman with 36,255 votes to 35,476 for Wanggaard with 100% of precincts reporting. The margin of 779 could bring a recount.
…If Lehman’s win holds, Democrats assume a 17-16 majority, at least until next November’s elections. It’s unknown whether the Senate will convene in a special session before then…In November, 16 of the 33 Senate seats are up for election.
Wanggaard’s district – closely matched between Republicans and Democrats – covers much of Racine County. It’s been one of the most volatile in recent Wisconsin history, flipping back and forth five times between the two parties in the last 22 years.

Even if Lehman’s win sticks, Dems won’t be able to move any legislation past the state senate. But they should be able to check Walker and the Republicans to some extent.
The other piece of good news is that exit polls indicate that President Obama had a 9-point lead over Gov. Romney in the Wisconsin exit polls. However, as Chris Cillizza noted at The Fix;

…Exit polls show Walker winning 17 percent of Obama supporters — much higher than Democrat Tom Barrett’s 6 percent of Mitt Romney supporters. Overall, the electorate that turned out today is backing Obama by a significant margin: 52 percent to 43 percent.
Now, all of this comes with a giant caveat; the exit polls initially were pretty far off, showing a close race between Walker and Barrett. Thus, Republicans are casting doubt that they mean much of anything at all.

As for the painful lessons for Dems, you will find plenty of opinions across the blogosphere and MSM. Boiled down, one lesson is that recall elections are generally a tough sell. As Scott Clement, Peyton M. Craighill and Jon Cohen report in in another post at The Fix,

…About three in 10 said recall elections are appropriate for any reason, according to preliminary exit poll results. But the answer depends heavily on whether your party’s candidate is being dragged to the ballot box before their term is up. Republicans said by a near unanimous margin that recall elections are never appropriate or only appropriate in the case of official misconduct. But slight majority of Democratic voters said recall elections are appropriate “for any reason.”

Another lesson is that organized labor needs to do a better job of educating the public about their contributions and role in protecting the middle class. Too many voters seem to have bought into negative stereotypes about “big labor,” as a result of labor-bashing propaganda, which now seems to be an even bigger element of the GOP agenda. Unions need more assertive mass media/public education outreach.
A third painful lesson is that even great GOTV doesn’t necessarily trump money. Barrett was outspent 7-1, which can’t be unrelated to his defeat. An interesting question here is whether Walker also had energetic street-level GOTV or just an ad war edge.
If lessons are learned and strategy is tweaked accordingly, Democrats should be able to hone their edge for future campaigns.

The blogosphere is laden with interesting articles about today’s recall election in Wisconsin. At the Madison-based Progressive magazine, Editor Mathew Rothschild and Political Editor Ruth Conniff explain “What’s at Stake in Wisconsin,” to help set the stage:

After a year and a half of historic protests and unprecedented citizen activism, the recall is a referendum on whether grassroots, democratic action can overcome the power of money in the Citizens United era…In February and March of 2011, Wisconsinites organized the largest sustained mass rallies for public sector workers in the history of the United States and the biggest outpouring of labor activism since the 1930s…The whole country is waiting to see whether or not citizens can overcome the corporate takeover of government in Madison.

The Recall coalition has a compelling case for getting rid of Walker, as Conniff and Rothschild explain:

Walker has made the largest cuts to public education in the history of the state, eviscerating our top-tier public schools as well as a model university and technical college system. In the birthplace of the public employees’ union, AFSCME, he overturned public employees’ right to bargain collectively. He has moved to disempower the state legislature, do away with open meetings, and shred the robust regulatory apparatus that has made Wisconsin a model of good government, environmental protection, and progressive ideals.
…Even as Republican attacks on women were making headlines around the country, Walker was quietly signing legislation to make it illegal for women to sue for compensatory or punitive damages when they’ve been discriminated against in the workplace. He rolled back accurate, age-appropriate sex education. He cut funding for preventive health care at Planned Parenthood clinics. He banned private health insurers from covering abortion in state health insurance exchanges starting in 2014 in almost all instances. And he required a woman who is seeking an abortion to have a one-on-one consultation with a doctor prior to the procedure. The doctor must ascertain whether she is being pressured to have an abortion, and any doctor who doesn’t do that can be prosecuted for a felony.
…Walker and the Republicans pushed through legislation endangering Wisconsin wetlands…[pushed for] massive cuts to public education and an across-the-board attack on everything from labor rights to tenant rights, from health care for the poor to nursing home care for the elderly…As for Walker’s “jobs” agenda, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Wisconsin had the single worst record in the nation for job losses from January 2011 to January 2012.
All of this in a legislative session that, the governor said, would be all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

It’s hard to name a major demographic group Walker hasn’t screwed in some way, other than wealthy Republican contributors. Also at The Progressive, Political Editor Ruth Conniff reports on Walker’s increasing legal problems and allegations that he is a target of a federal investigation into possibie criminal activity during his tenure as county executive and governor. Conniff says “Recent campaign finance filings show that Walker has transferred a total of $160,000 into a criminal defense fund–the only criminal defense fund maintained by a governor of any state in the nation.”
Since there is no indictment yet, Walker’s developing legal problems probably won’t be much of a factor in today’s vote. Regardless of the vote, however, Wisconsin voters could become increasingly sour on Walker and his party by November, especially if Walker’s legal problems multiply.
The most recent polls indicate a close election. John Nichols has a “A Wisconsin Recall FAQ” at The Nation, which sheds light on Barrett’s geographic strategy:

While the Democrat has to renew his party’s appeal statewide — after the disastrous 2010 election — his primary focus is on the Democratic heartlands of Dane County (Madison) and Milwaukee County, as well as industrial cities such as Sheboygan and Racine. Statewide, turnout fell from 69 percent in the very strong Democratic year of 2008 to 49 percent in the very Republican year of 2010.
Much of the falloff came within the city of Milwaukee, where 90,000 people who did vote in 2008 did not vote in 2010. Countywide, 134,000 people who voted in 2008 did not vote in 2010…Scott Walker’s winning margin in 2010 was 124,000 votes. A presidential-level turnout in Milwaukee County could reverse it with 10,000 votes to spare.
Will that happen? Probably not. Milwaukee turnout will need to be accentuated by a spike in turnout in Racine, a historical manufacturing city south of Milwaukee where voting in 2010 was way off from 2008.

Nichols notes that, not surprisingly, Mayor Barrett, former president Clinton and Jesse Jackson all three focused their campaigning in Milwaukee and Racine. Nichols adds “Both sides have put top recount lawyers on notice that their services might be needed. The Democrats have retained Mark Elias, who guided U.S. Senator Al Franken through his 2008-2009 recount fight in Minnesota,” adds Nichols. “Wisconsin law allows for a full recount — at no cost — if the margin in a contested election is less than 0.5 percent. The governor’s race could be that close, as could several of the state Senate contests.”
The New Republic explores possible counter-intuitive boomerang effects of today’s vote on the presidential outcome in November. Noam Scheiber worries that a Mayor Barrett victory over Governor Walker would encourage the Romney campaign to invest billions more in GOTV, but adds “…I do think a Barrett win would be better for Obama in Wisconsin, since it’s likely to deter Romney from going all-out in the state, while a Walker win would give Romney hope and probably demoralize Democrats there.”
Alec MacGillis’s TNR take is that a Walker win today could actually bode well for President Obama’s re-election:

…There are also going to be some swing voters who are going to be voting less on those big ideological questions than on the more general question of whether things are going okay. If these swing voters believe that things are gradually coming back in Wisconsin — no sure thing, given that the jobs expansion there has been less clear than in Ohio — they may decide to vote for Walker less out of ideological solidarity than because they figure it’s foolish to rock the boat with the rare act of a recall. And here’s the thing — to the extent that Wisconsin swing voters draw that conclusion about Walker, they may also be led to support Obama’s reelection, to stick with the guy in charge. Hard as it may be to believe, there is no question these Walker/Obama voters exist — after all, the same polls that have Walker ahead of Barrett in the polls tend to also have Obama ahead of Romney, albeit by a narrowing margin.

Walker may benefit from a belief that Recall elections should be used sparingly. As Citizen Dave Cieslewicz puts it in his post at The Progressive:

The most problematic issue for Barrett may wind up being voters who don’t like Walker’s policies but just don’t believe in recalls. Those voters probably believe that recalls should be reserved for criminal wrong-doing, and the John Doe probe of Walker’s county executive office aides might not be enough for them.

If Cieslewicz is right, much depends on how persuadable swing voters feel about recall elections in general, a good topic to probe in future polls.
The latest polls point to narrowing lead for Scott Walker, indications are it will be a close election. And regardless of the outcome, just making it a cliff-hanger would be a great victory for Wisconsin progressives. Perhaps even more importantly, it sets a solid organizational foundation for victory in the next progressive campaign.
In a way, the Wisconsin Recall has already won something important: showing how an energized, progressive coalition can inspire and educate millions of voters. As Katrina vanden Heuval puts the election in historical perspective in her WaPo op-ed:

…When the results come in, reflect on the vast organizing effort that brought Wisconsin to this moment — and imagine where it still has the potential to go. Elections are over in a matter of hours, but movements are made of weeks, months and years. The Declaration of Sentiments was issued at Seneca Falls in 1848, yet women did not gain the right to vote until seven decades later. The Civil War ended with a Union victory in 1865, yet the Voting Rights Act was not passed until a century later. Auto workers held the historic Flint sit-down strike in 1936-37, yet the fight for a fair, unionized workforce persists 75 years later.

Win or lose today, coming even close sustains hope and gives Dems leverage in the next election. That’s a victory worth celebrating.

How you can help GOTV in Wisconsin: The AFL-CIO has a widget you can use for making 15 GOTV phone calls.
Greg Sargent flags “The Wisconsin debate moment everyone’s talking about” as a powerful energizer for the movement to recall Scott Walker and elect Tom Barrett. “Barrett attempted to use the moment to turn the tables on one of Walker’s main closing arguments — about crime stats in Milwaukee — and pivot back to allegations of Walker corruption. The exchange is heartening to labor and Dems because it’s the kind of charged debate moment that has at least the possibility of breaking through a bit and having an impact in a campaign’s final days…Many have observed that the Walker attack ad featuring the two-year-old child is not the kind of spot a campaign runs if it’s extremely confident of winning.”
At The Daily Beast Peter Beinart says Obama is right to continue attacking Romney’s record at Bain : “…Obama can’t win reelection simply with the votes of young, single, and minority voters. He needs to hold down his losses among blue-collar whites, a group with which he has always struggled. Using Romney’s stewardship at Bain to drive a wedge between him and the culturally conservative working-class whites whose turnout he desperately needs made a lot of sense, especially if the Obama campaign had tied Romney’s record at Bain to his support for unpopular Republican budgetary proposals.”
The Century Foundation is presenting a panel today from 12:00 to 2:00p.m. on “The Future of Labor Organizing” at their DC HQ and via webcast.
Key swing states are doing better economically. The Economist mulls over the ramifications, skeptically: “How much any of this will matter on November 6th is unclear. John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, argues there is little or no empirical link between a state’s economic conditions and its presidential voting. National economic conditions are far more important, probably because voters base their opinions on the national media, or national indicators such as the stockmarket…Moreover, if Mr Obama tries to take credit for good news in swing states such as Ohio, Virginia and Florida, he will have to share it with incumbent Republican governors equally intent on reaping the political benefit.”
At the Wonkblog, Ezra Klein explains why, contrary to media overreaction, the May jobs snapshot should not provoke mass weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Alan I. Abramowitz argues at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “Buying a Presidential Election? It’s Not as Easy as You Think.” As Abramowitz says, “The airwaves in the eight or 10 states that will decide the outcome of the 2012 presidential election will soon be saturated with ads supporting and opposing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, all aimed at persuading a small group of undecided voters — less than 10%, according to most recent polls…These undecided voters are much less interested in the presidential election than those who have already chosen sides…The net impact of all of this advertising is likely to be minimal…Research by political scientists and evidence from 2012 polls in the battleground states suggests that the parties and candidates would do better to focus their efforts in these states on mobilizing their supporters rather than trying to persuade uncommitted voters.”
Also at Crystal Ball, Larry J. Sabato has a zinger for Gallup’s June polls: “Over the past eight elections, Gallup — the most recognizable of polling organizations — has only identified the eventual popular vote winner twice in its early June horse race polling…”
Jill Harris, managing director of strategic initiatives for Drug Policy Action, the political arm of the Drug Policy Alliance, has a WaPo update on the public’s views on marijuana laws reform, noting: “A new Rasmussen poll showed that 56 percent of Americans support the legalization of marijuana and only 36 percent oppose it. A Mason-Dixon poll conducted in May found that 74 percent of Democrats, 79 percent of Independents and 67 percent of Republicans believe that the federal government should respect state medical marijuana laws and not prosecute individuals who are in compliance with these laws…In blue Oregon and California and red Texas, candidates have just succeeded with a pro-reform message. As the momentum builds for marijuana legalization across the country, politicians will have no choice but to get in step with the public. And then we’ll really start to see things change.”
Everyone agrees that the economy is the most pivotal factor. But at The Hill, Alexander Bolton has a riff that should make political junkies of all stripes a little nervous, “Ten game changers that could decide the race between Obama and Romney.”

Jeremy Leaming’s “Justice Stevens’ Reasoned Takedown of Citizens United” at the ACSBlog of the American Constitutional Society for Law and Policy reports on the retired Supreme Court Justice’s “methodical, thoughtful speech,” delivered at the University of Arkansas (full speech here). Noting that “Stevens’ former colleague Justice Samuel Alito mouthed “not true” during President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address when the president said Citizens United could “open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without fault in our elections,” Leaming quotes from Stevens’ speech:

…Justice Alito’s reaction does persuade me that in due course it will be necessary for the Court to issue an opinion explicitly crafting an exception that will create a crack in the foundation of the Citizens United majority opinion. For his statement that it is ‘not true’ that foreign entities will be among the beneficiaries of Citizens United offers good reason to predict there will not be five votes for such a result when a case arises that requires the Court to address the issue in a full opinion.
…Could the Court possibly conclude that expenditures by terrorist or foreign agents in support of a political campaign merit greater First Amendment protection than their actual speech on political issues? I think not. Indeed, I think it likely that when the Court begins to spell out which categories of non-voters should receive the same protections as the not-for-profit Citizens United advocacy group, it will not only exclude terrorist organizations and foreign agents, but also all corporations owned or controlled by non-citizens, and possibly even those in which non-citizens have a substantial ownership interest.

Even if Stevens is right, it’s not going to affect the 2012 presidential election. And regardless of how long it will take for new rulings to clean up the mess left in the wake of Citizens United, Justice Stevens’ address at Arkansas serves as a potent reminder of how important it is to restore balance and reason to a High Court that is now dominated by right-wing ideologues.
Election law scholar Richard L. Hasen adds in Politico that ‘Citizens United’ enables corporations to hide in the Super-PAC shadows and avoid consumer boycotts. But, the ruling actually threatens an important form of free speech, as Hasen explains,

Why are corporations reluctant to put their names on these campaign ads? They don’t want to lose customers. Target experienced a boycott a few years ago when the company gave money to a group supporting a candidate who opposed gay rights…But this is hardly a problem just for the right. The New York Times recently profiled a North Carolina company, Replacements Ltd., which is losing business because of its opposition to the state’s recent ballot measure banning same-sex marriage.
Both Target and Replacements Ltd. faced consequences for their political stands, but in neither case is it fair to call these boycotts “harassment” or “bullying.” Economic boycotts are protected political speech, and the potential of a boycott does not provide a basis to exempt anyone from required campaign disclosures.

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about how most voters cast their ballots based more on their emotional responses to candidates than candidates’ positions on the issues. But I have to believe that there are a significant number of swing voters out there who care about issues, including what a strengthened conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court resulting from Romney’s election might mean in terms of expanding corporate power over workers and consumers.
I realize it’s hard to make the future of the Supreme Court a leading concern among voters who are worried about losing their jobs, houses and pensions. Yet the Supreme Court has powerful leverage to adversely affect every aspect of economic security, and the Roberts majority offers scant hope that the interests of anyone except the wealthy will be protected — especially if Romney wins and appoints more arch-conservatives.
There is only so much that Democrats could do with this concern in their messaging, but it ought to be worth developing in an ad or two. What might help even more is if progressive media made it more of a a priority issue for public discussion.

USA Today’s Richard Wolf and Tim Mullaney report that “Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News say the economy is expected to have added 150,000 jobs in May, with unemployment holding at 8.1%. That’s up from 115,000 new jobs last month, but below the 200,000-plus monthly gains this winter.” and “midyear job growth is a solid election predictor. Employment grew strongly in the spring and summer of 1972, 1984, 1996 and to a lesser degree 2004 — and presidents won re-election. The opposite was true in 1976, 1980 and 1992, when incumbents lost.”
Hrafnkell Haraldsson has a pretty good wrap up at PolitcusUSA of the many reasons why Obama deserves support from progressives, as well as moderates.
Noam M. Levy reports in the L.A. Times that a new Kaiser Family Foundation finds “Little interest in women’s issues on the campaign trail.” I don’t know how much value there is in polls ranking issue priorities — of course respondents will say the economy is the big issue. But Levey’s note that “the Kaiser poll found just 31% of women believe there is currently a “wide-scale effort to limit women’s reproductive health choices and services.” Just 31 percent?…Sounds like bad news for the GOP to me.
Good to hear Attorney-General Eric Holder speak out about the threat to voting rights. The Democratic response to the GOP war on voting could use a louder trumpet.
Re: the war on voting, this report should make Derms a dilly of an ad.
At PoliticusUSA, Jason Easley reports that “CNN Moves To The Right and Loses 52% of Its Viewers.” Easley observes, “CNN’s problems started when the network bosses got the bright idea that they should try to copy Fox News, and move to the right. After climbing into bed with the Tea Party Express and hiring far right wingers Erick Erickson and Dana Loesch led to the current ratings disaster, what would you expect CNN to do?…If you said hire more right wingers and conservatives, congratulations, you are qualified for an upper management position at CNN.”
Bloomberg.com’s Heidi Przybyla’s “Senate Democrats Outspent 3 to 1 on Ads by Super-Pacs” provides a sobering look at the GOP’s financial edge, noting “The disparity could take a greater toll on House and Senate Democrats than on Obama…”There’s so much oxygen being sucked up by the Obama campaign,” said Ken Goldstein, president of New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising. “Democrats are also not going to have the same kind of money that Republican outside groups are going to have.”
I doubt President Obama’s “Polish death camp” gaffe will hurt much with Polish-American voters. In a way, it underscores the fact that an Obama gaffe is a very rare occurrence, the exception that proves the rule.
At The Plum Line, WaPo’s Jonathan Bernstein concludes that no swing voters will care one way or the other about Obama’s attacks on Bain capital or Cory Bookers take on it. Bernstein also observes, “Mostly, people vote on two things: their party leanings, and a general sense of how the incumbent has been doing (that is, how the nation is going, not whether his ads and TV surrogate appearances are well co-ordinated). Other things may, on the margins, push voters a little: specific issues, evaluation of the candidates’ personalities and abilities and ideology, group affiliation beyond partisanship…Most true independents are low-information voters who pay only minimal attention to any of this stuff.”

No one is ever going to put it any better than conservative scribe George Will, who called Donald Trump “a bloviating ignoramous.” But credit fellow conservative Russ Douthat with a more thorough skewering of GOP candidate Mitt Romney for hitching his star to the birther gasbag. As Douthat puts it in his New York Times column:

…Throughout the presidential selection process, the Romney camp has repeatedly pulled back the curtain of highmindedness to acknowledge more cynical realities.
…Think of Romney’s famous debate explanation for why he fired a landscaping company after learning they were employing illegal immigrants (“I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake, I can’t have illegals!”), or his attempts later in the primary season to defend delaying the release of his tax forms, which emphasized the hay that Democrats might make with them rather than any principled reason for non-disclosure…The description of the general election’s arrival by Eric Fehrnstrom, a key Romney adviser, as an “etch-a-sketch” moment, in which the slate of base-pandering primary season positions could be shaken clean, was unusually dunderheaded precisely because it was so unusually honest, saying out loud what most campaign operatives would only say behind closed doors.
The same thing happened Tuesday, after Donald Trump used the occasion of a joint fundraiser with the Republican nominee to embarrass Romney with a burst of “birther” nonsense…Responding to the inevitable questions about Trump’s paranoid pose, Romney issued an anodyne bit of evasive politician-speak — “You know I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in” – but then followed it up with a characteristic Romney-ism: “But I need to get 50.1 percent or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people”…But “I’m running for president, and I need Donald Trump in my corner” manages to be at once cynical and stupid.”

Like Will, Douthat seems perplexed that Romney’s political calculus is so warped as to see any kind of benefit accruing from their joint public appearances. Douthat speculates that whichever GOP strategists see merit in Romney hooking up with The Donald “confuse the existence of a fan base (which Trump certainly has) with the existence of a meaningful constituency (which he almost certainly does not).” Douthat adds:

Indeed, precisely because Trump’s highest goal is so transparently the perpetuation of his own celebrity, his latest attention-seeking stunt offers Romney an almost cost-free chance to repudiate a figure who’s notionally to his “right” (though in reality lacks any ideological commitment whatsoever) without risking any kind of sustained conservative revolt…
Given the bad publicity he’s obviously capable of generating for Romney’s campaign, then, giving Trump the stiff-arm would not only be the right thing to do but the crafty thing as well. The fact that Romney thinks otherwise suggests that underneath his public cynicism lurks something more troubling: A deep miscalculation about which votes he needs to win and how.

You’d think that a Republican presidential candidate who has weathered the primaries would have enough sense to heed the advice of two of America’s smartest conservative journalists. But that would presuppose assumptions about the adequacy of Romney’s character and judgement that he evidently can’t meet.

When it comes to comparing job-creation track records as elected officials, Mitt Romney gets crushed, as The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky explains: “…Romney–when working in the public sector, not the private, as he obviously would be as president–had a downright embarrassing jobs record, especially for a state with higher-than-average education levels…This, as has been often noted, put Massachusetts at 47th in the nation, only ahead of of Michigan, Ohio, and Katrina-ravaged Louisiana…In his seminal book Unequal Democracy, political scientist Larry Bartels measured the effect of each president’s policies on the economy since Harry Truman by giving them all one year for their policies to start to kick in…by Bartels’s rules, Obama has created a net 3.635 million jobs. Applying the same rules to Romney’s numbers through the same time period–that is, through April of his fourth year in office, 2006–we credit Romney with 64,500 jobs. So he grew jobs by 1.9 percent. Obama’s job-growth rate is 2.35 percent.”
In The New Republic, Walter Shapiro takes a skeptical look that the opening salvo of TV ads for the presidential campaign and finds, despite “an estimated $1-billion-plus orgy spent trying to define the Obama-Romney race” that “all too often, the ads themselves are simply mediocre…Never in political history has so much money been spent to convince so few voters of so little. Take, as a case in point, the dreary dozen of TV spots and web videos put out by the Obama and Romney camps in the last two weeks. These ads offer either visual wallpaper or run-from-the-room negativism. There is not a dollop of surprise or aesthetic flair. These are headache ads transported to politics.” Ouch.
Speaking of excessive negativity in political ads, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar has a Bloomberg Businessweek post up comparing two “throw granny of a cliff” ads from both parties — they literally throw granny off a cliff –, arguing that neither one will help much.
The AP’s Todd Richmond reports that the real story in the Wisconsin recall election may come down to: “a handful of undercard recall races could transform Wisconsin politics just as dramatically in the long run…Pockets of voters in southeastern, northwestern and central Wisconsin will decide recall elections that could hand Democrats control of the state Senate.”
Despite media pessimism about Dems’ hopes in the June 5 Wisconsin Recall vote, Abby Rapoport offers an alternative strategy in The American Prospect, where she explains “How Walker Loses in Wisconsin.”
AP’s David Crary discusses the disconnect between opinion polls showing substantial growth in approval of same-sex marriage on the one hand and continued disapproval in the voting booth in 32 states. “It’s a paradox with multiple explanations, from political geography to the likelihood that some conflicted voters tell pollsters one thing and then vote differently.”
Karl Rove writes in the Wall St. Journal about “Romney’s Roads to the White House” and the “3-2-1” strategy that can get him there. Lotsa “ifs” here.
Rove’s rationale looks like even more of a stretch in light of Donna Cassata’s AP report “Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida — GOP highlights in 2010 now marked by bitter Senate primaries.”
Meg Handley reports at U.S. News on “Homeowners in Battleground States Dogged By Underwater Mortgages.” Says Handley:”…Florida and Ohio are the only swing states that have negative equity levels above the national average…Although nearly one in three homeowners with a mortgage is under water, fully 90 percent of them are still current on their payments, and stresses that negative equity doesn’t necessarily equate to foreclosures.”
Paul Begala does a solid job of blistering two hypocritical fat cat Republicans, Joe Ricketts and former major league star Curt Schilling, who rail against government spending, but use plenty of it in their dubious business ventures. Re Schilling: “The state of Rhode Island has pumped $75 million of taxpayers’ money into Schilling’s unsuccessful 38 Studios, and could flush millions more down Schilling’s commode. Schilling, who earned $114 million in his baseball career, loves to lecture us bleacher bums about government spending. Then Begala throws in Romney for good measure: “…Classic crony capitalism: privatize the gain, socialize the risk. When Romney drove GST Steel into bankruptcy, he and his partners made $12 million in profit and another $4.5 million in consulting fees. But Romney stuck the taxpayers with a $44 million tab for the company’s underfunded pensions.”
After all of the shouting of campaign 2012 is done, look at two sets of stats to predict who will win the presidential election, explains Alan I. Abramowitz in his post “What Does President Obama’s May Approval Rating Tell Us About His Reelection Chances?” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “…The final outcome will depend on the actual performance of the economy and the public’s evaluation of the president’s job performance in the months ahead. Those interested in assessing where the presidential race stands should focus on these two indicators rather than the day-to-day events of the campaign, which tend to dominate media coverage of the election.”

Yesterday I flagged an AlterNet post by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers union about a coalition of shareholders, workers and public interest groups mobilizing to address outrageous executive pay, environmental and worker safety concerns. I expressed hope that this coalition would also address corporate contributions to political campaigns.
Having just read a New Republic article, “Reining In Corporate $$, The Back Door Approach,” I can report that such stockholder’s campaigns are already well underway. According to the author, Alec MacGillis, here quoting from a WaPo article by Tom Hamburger and Brady Dennis:

…Reformers have decided that their best hope for trying to rein in secret spending is to straight to corporations. As The Post reports: “One of the most polarizing fights over money in politics has been unfolding this spring at annual corporate meetings, where shareholders are mounting an intensifying effort to push companies to disclose the money they spend on lobbying and political campaigns. The transparency push, playing out at shareholders meetings from coast to coast this spring, has received cheers from campaign finance reformers and some corporate governance experts. It has drawn ridicule from critics such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who see the effort as an attempt by liberal groups to squelch the voice of the business world….

MacGillis adds:

…The Sustainable Investments Institute, a Washington nonprofit that tracks shareholder resolutions, found that 109 — nearly a third of those up for votes at annual meetings in 2012 — sought more disclosures about spending on politics and lobbying….To date, 101 major companies have agreed to disclosure and board oversight of some of their political spending, according to Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, which rates companies on the issue. Freed and others argue that disclosure can help executives and directors avoid reputational risk to their firms.

Naturally big business leaders and their journalistic apologists are in an uproar about the shareholder movements for disclosure of political donations, even though most of the resolutions have been defeated. But some companies, like Microsoft, are beginning to see the upside of transparency of their political donations.
As Dan Bross, Microsoft’s senior director of corporate citizenship, puts it, “As a company, we believe in openness, transparency and accountability…We are doing what we believe is right.”
As MacGillis notes, the shareholder movement does nothing to directly force more transparency among wealthy individuals or privately-held companies. However, he adds that “the momentum toward encouraging disclosure from corporations is as good as any place to start when the other avenues are blocked.” It seems to me that, by setting a higher standard of accountability, the shareholder movement may yet have a positive effect on individuals and privately-held companies.
The shareholder campaigns should not be considered a substitute for legislation and litigation to compel transparency in political donations. But they can contribute to public awareness that transparency of corporate political donations is both desirable and possible.