There is simply no end to Republicans screwing around with election laws to gain political advantage at every opportunity. The latest GOP scam, well-reported in Mother Jones by Nick Baumann, has Pennsylvania Republicans planning to do away with the state’s winner-take-all electoral vote allocation, and replace it with a congressional district-based allocation system. The goal, of course, is to dilute the electoral power of a pivotal state that awarded its 21 electoral votes to Senator Obama in 2008. As Baumann explains:

The problem for Obama, and the opportunity for Republicans, is the electoral college. Every political junkie knows that the presidential election isn’t a truly national contest; it’s a state-by-state fight, and each state is worth a number of electoral votes equal to the size of the state’s congressional delegation. (The District of Columbia also gets three votes.) There are 538 electoral votes up for grabs; win 270, and you’re the president.
Here’s the rub, though: Each state gets to determine how its electoral votes are allocated. Currently, 48 states and DC use a winner-take-all system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Under the Republican plan–which has been endorsed by top GOPers in both houses of the state Legislature, as well as the governor, Tom Corbett–Pennsylvania would change from this system to one where each congressional district gets its own electoral vote. (Two electoral votes–one for each of the state’s two senators–would go to the statewide winner.)
This could cost Obama dearly. The GOP controls both houses of the state Legislature plus the governor’s mansion–the so-called “redistricting trifecta”–in Pennsylvania. Congressional district maps are adjusted after every census, and the last one just finished up. That means Pennsylvania Republicans get to draw the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts without any input from Democrats. Some of the early maps have leaked to the press, and Democrats expect that the Pennsylvania congressional map for the 2012 elections will have 12 safe GOP seats compared to just 6 safe Democratic seats.

Cute, huh? Baumann fleshes out the scam:

Under the Republican plan, if the GOP presidential nominee carries the GOP-leaning districts but Obama carries the state, the GOP nominee would get 12 electoral votes out of Pennsylvania, but Obama would only get eight–six for winning the blue districts, and two (representing the state’s two senators) for winning the state. Since Obama would lose 12 electoral votes relative to the winner-take-all baseline, this would have an effect equivalent to flipping a medium-size winner-take-all state–say, Washington, which has 12 electoral votes–from blue to red.* And Republicans wouldn’t even have to do any extra campaigning or spend any extra advertising dollars to do it.
If the president wins the states John Kerry won in 2004 plus Ohio–otherwise enough to give him a narrow win–changing the electoral vote rules in Pennsylvania alone would swing the election to the Republican nominee.

Former PA Governor Ed Rendell says Dems should file a lawsuit against the measure, if it is enacted. But The GOP plan may be legit within the parameters of the Constitution, according to law professor Karl Manheim, quoted in Baumann’s article. “The Constitution is pretty silent on how the electors are chosen in each state,” says Manheim, adding that the Republican plan “would certainly increase the political advantage of politically gerrymandering your districts.”
Worse, the time seems ripe for Republican electoral vote manipulation to spread, as Baumann reports:

…After their epic sweep of state legislative and gubernatorial races in 2010, Republicans also have total political control of Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, three other big states that traditionally go Democratic and went for Obama in 2008.* Implementing a Pennsylvania-style system in those three places–in Ohio, for example, Democrats anticipate controlling just 4 or 5 of the state’s 16 congressional districts–could offset Obama wins in states where he has expanded the electoral map, like Colorado, New Mexico, North Carolina, or Virginia. “If all these Rust Belt folks get together and make this happen, that could be really dramatic,” says Carolyn Fiddler, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which coordinates state political races for the Dems.

Chris Bowers reports at Daily Kos that Republicans are taking the opposite tack in Nebraska — changing to a winner-take-all electoral vote system to benefit their party’s candidate. (In 2008, Obama picked off one of Nebraska’s five electoral votes).
Fiddler adds: “This would effectively extend the effect of gerrymandering beyond Congress and to the Electoral College. State legislatures could gerrymander the Electoral College.” John Fortier, an electoral college expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Reuters, “It would be harder for Democrats to win in a close election if this goes through.”
Baumann doesn’t discuss what could happen in the event of an anti-incumbent sweep next November. If fed-up voters give Republicans control of the Senate and Democrats control of the House, it’s possible the GOP manipulations could backfire, as Democrats take back districts now held by the GOP. But Republican gerrymandering in place would offset the effects of an anti-incumbent sweep to some extent.
Another backfire scenario would occur if Republicans win a majority of PA votes, and Dems hold some districts and get a chunk of PA’s electoral votes. “Despite Obama’s easy win in Pennsylvania three years ago, he is now broadly unpopular there, with 52 percent of Pennsylvanians saying he doesn’t deserve reelection in a recent Franklin and Marshall College poll.,” reports Aaron Blake in WaPo’s The Fix.
It’s a gamble, but it looks like one the PA Republicans like, since they haven’t won any of the state’s electoral votes since 1988. The National Popular Vote Compact probably won’t be in place in time to offset the electoral vote shenanigans for 2012. But the GOP’s manipulation of election laws certainly underscores the importance of the compact as a potential remedy leading to direct popular election of the president down the road.
After the 2000 fiasco, many called for direct popular election of the President of the United States, but the calls for reform faded out. It’s even more clear today, however, that it is the only way to permanently put an end to the GOP’s campaign to undercut the will of the people in electing our President. It should be a top priority the next time Dems get the votes to make it happen.

There’s no denying the GOP crowing rights for their twin victories in NY-9 and NV-2 yesterday. Stat wizard Nate Silver reviews the vote and rolls out a grim (for Dems) assessment in today’s edition of his Five Thirty Eight blog. First, he acknowledges the special circumstances in New York :

There are good reasons to think that local issues may have loomed especially large in New York’s 9th Congressional District, where the Republican Bob Turner won on Tuesday. President Obama had significantly underperformed his Democratic predecessors in the district in 2008, and the large split in voting between the Brooklyn and Queens portions of the district — the Brooklyn parts are more heavily Jewish — implies that Israel-related issues may have played a role.
There were other local factors as well: influential endorsements for Mr. Turner by Democratic leaders like former Mayor Ed Koch and the Assemblyman Dov Hikind, and local rabbis; the close timing of the election with the Sept. 11 anniversary; the fact that the district had been vacated by a Democrat, Anthony Weiner, in a scandal; and perhaps gay marriage in a district that is economically liberal but fairly religious, with pockets of social conservatism.
Still, even if those issues played a role, even if they swung the result, the Democrat David Weprin would likely have performed better had the national environment been stronger for his party.

Silver crunches the numbers and then analyzes the NY election in light of the “partisan voting index” (“a measure of how the district voted relative to others in the past two presidential elections.”). Silver concludes that the Republican victor, Bob Turner, pulled off a net swing of +18 percent from the p.v.i.
Silver runs the Nevada results through the p.v.i. analysis:

The Nevada Second, for instance, has a P.V.I. of Republican plus-5, meaning that the Republican candidate would be expected to perform 5 points better there than a Republican might nationally. Since a vote for the Republican is (usually) a vote against the Democrat, you need to double that number to project the margin of victory. In this case, that would imply a Republican win by 10 points given average candidates and a neutral overall political environment.
The Republican Mark Amodei, however, leads by 22 points as of this writing, an easy victory, meaning that he overperformed the P.V.I. by 12 points.

Ouch. No matter how you spin it, there’s no avoiding the conclusion that Republicans did substantially better than expected in Tuesday’s elections.
Silver acknowledges the big Democratic win in NY-26 in May, a +17 swing from the p.v.i., noting that Obama’s approvals were much higher then, along with the less impressive Democratic July win in CA-36, where Dems underperformed in p.v.i. terms. He averages the four special congressional elections of 2011 and finds a score of R+7 and concludes that “Democrats may still be locked in a 2010-type political environment.”
Worse, Silver adds that special elections have a “statistically significant correlation to the outcome of the next general election,” although “…the relationship is weak and frequently runs in the wrong direction, as it did in 2010.” He points out that special elections are weak measures of anti-incumbent sentiment, since there are no incumbents on the ballot. He also notes that polls indicate Dems are “roughly tied” with the GOP in therms of the generic ballot polls for House races.
Silver concludes “Nevertheless, these are waves that portend trouble…At the very minimum, they imply a reduction in the odds that after three consecutive “wave” elections, 2012 will show a tidal shift back toward Democrats.”
A more optimistic analysis for Dems would point out that Dems are 2 and 2 in 2011 special elections. There are 13+ months left and, if the economy begins to turn around faster than expected, all bets are off. Nonetheless, as Silver makes clear, the possibility of a broad rout of Democratic candidates is a very real concern, and President Obama will have to campaign harder and smarter to prevent it.

Feeling a little queasy about the partnering of Cable News Network with the Tea Party Express in presenting the GOP prez candidate debate last night? You’re not alone. Here’s Adele M. Stan, writing about it in her Alternet post, “When Did CNN Become a Shill for GOP Extremism and the Tea Party?“:

CNN, once known for its unflinching coverage of actual news events, last night decided to become a maker, not a chronicler, of news. When the cable news network decided to partner with the Tea Party Express for a debate among the Republican presidential candidates, it cast aside any ethical concerns a news organization might have about direct involvement in elections and active engagement in altering the dynamics of a political party.
You could say there was a bit of a payoff, after a fashion, for the American people in the bargain, though: an unvarnished look at who the rank-and-file of the Tea Party really are, and what they believe. The audience in Tampa was said to comprise members of 150 Tea Party groups from across the nation. True to form, they applauded at the notion of an uninsured person in a coma being left to die (as suggested by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas), and booed Texas Gov. Rick Perry for saying that undocumented citizens who were brought to this country as children, through no fault of their own, should be allowed to pursue a higher education here. And CNN surely could have put together an audience of Tea Partiers without partnering with an organization that makes direct payments to the campaign coffers of right-wing candidates.
If the Tea Party Express was nothing more than a political constituency of the Republican Party, that would be bad enough. But it’s not: it’s a political action committee, directly involved in electioneering, and the CNN event promises to aid the fundraising efforts of the Tea Party Express PAC. CNN’s co-sponsorship of the Tea Party Express debate amounts to an incalculable in-kind contribution to a far-right political PAC, elevating its brand name, providing free air time and event-staging, and conferring an aura of legitimacy on an organization that is essentially a fundraising operation for anti-government candidates. If this isn’t illegal, it’s time to scream from the rafters, why not?
In the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party Express raised a total of $7.7 million, which it spent on the U.S. Senate campaigns of Christine (“I’m not a witch”) O’Donnell, Del.; Sharron Angle, Nev.; Joe Miller, Alaska; and Marco Rubio, Fla., among others. In fact, Tea Party Express donated the maximum allowable amount to the congressional campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann, something that none of the other contenders at last night’s debate can claim.

Stan goes on to further document the rabid partisanship of the Tea Party Express, well to the right of even the tea party, and concludes of CNN, “So, in its partnership with Tea Party Express, CNN is essentially (however inadvertently) deploying Wolf Blitzer, who moderated last night’s debate, to alter the political dynamic of the Republican Party to move it even further to the right than it already is.”
Stan suggests that CNN was trying to upgrade its wingnut cred to take a bite out of Fox News’ viewership, noting the network’s recent hiring of wingnut commentators. She concludes:

Each time a news organization partners with a constituency group in a presidential debate, it accords that group a greater impact than competing constituencies — and that’s troubling enough. But when a news organization partners with a group that gives money directly to candidates and that makes attack ads against candidates it doesn’t fancy, that news organization has crossed the line into electioneering. And that’s just plain wrong.

Not to demonize the entire network, because CNN does some good work, both on the little screen and on line. But I’d have to agree with Stan that this “partnership” is more than a little on the cheesy side. I doubt we will see CNN partnering with an equally-ardent progressive PAC to present a presidential debate anytime soon.

It’s not fun, but it is time to wrap your head around the fact that the presidential nomination front-runner of one of America’s leading political parties is also its most rabid climate-change denier. As the lead editorial in today’s New York Times reflects:

The Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance. The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”
Never mind that nearly all the world’s scientists regard global warming as a serious threat to the planet, with human activities like the burning of fossil fuels a major cause. Never mind that multiple investigations have found no evidence of scientific manipulation. Never mind that America needs a national policy. Mr. Perry has a big soapbox, and what he says, however fallacious, reaches a bigger audience than any scientist can command.

The editorial goes on to point out that the rest of the GOP presidential aspirants, save the Hapless Huntsman, have also voiced considerable skepticism about climate change as a major problem. When pressed, Romney goes all mush-mouth, suggesting that he probably knows better. Newt has done a 180 towards denial, but integrity was never his thing.
I know Republicans who are neither climate-change skeptics nor evolution-deniers, but they don’t have much to say about it. I guess they are either intimidated by the tea party fanatics, or maybe they believe, wink wink, that their candidate is just making appropriate noises to get through the primaries and will heed the top scientists once elected. It’s a risky proposition with candidates like Perry and Paul, who would have an awful lot to repudiate.
Conservatives like Huntsman won’t find much support for their concerns about global warming from the intellectual right. Organs like the National Review address pollution-related issues with bland paeans to ‘market-based’ solutions as the panacea or articles ridiculing bizarre examples of environmentalism, such as “Gaia vs. the Big Death” in the current on-line issue.
If the GOP deniers win the presidency and congress, breathing organisms could be screwed for generations. But cheer up, at least it will provide a promising premise for a sci-fi flick: What would happen if a cult of science-denying ignoramuses achieve global domination? Dawn of the Deniers, maybe.
Cynicism aside, Democrats do have an opportunity here. Asked “Do you think the federal government should or should not regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to reduce global warming?,” 71 percent of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC News poll taken in June last year supported regulation. The same percentage responded affirmatively to a question about supporting funding to continue enforcing greenhouse gas regulation in a CNN/Opinion Research Poll taken in April of this year.
Thus far, however, no Democratic presidential candidate has taken full advantage of the Republicans’ bull-headed stupidity on this issue. President Obama’s strategists should prepare a debate module, punctuated with a memorable one-liner to expose the dangerous idiocy of the climate-change deniers. The Democratic echo-chamber, such as it is, should parrot the one-liner ad nauseum until most reasonable voters are embarrassed to vote for the Republican.
Progressive writers have been very good on exposing Republicans pandering to ignorance about global warming and climate change. For our political leaders, however, it’s been limited to occasional jabs in speeches. But the time is now ripe to do more. We can’t give the Republicans another pass on this one. Too much is at stake.

Drawing from his Wisconsin roots, Tom Hayden has written a highly insightful guide to the Madison uprising and it’s relevance to the politics of 2012. Hayden’s article in The Nation, “Cheese, Brats, Beer, Polka, Unions! The Homegrown Revolution in Wisconsin,” serves as an informative companion piece to the excellent work of The Nation’s Madison-based correspondent John Nichols.
Hayden explains the damage done to Wisconsin’s public workers by Governor Scott Walker and Republicans in the state legislature, reviews the inspiring response of working people and then describes the current political moment and its opportunities:

Last week when I visited, the movement was showing no signs of abating, with several thousand demonstrating at the Capitol. The legislature will reconvene in mid-September.
The next target of voter recall is likely to be Governor Walker himself, assuming the movement sustains the energy to collect 700,000 valid signatures this winter. Already Walker is making nervous but thus-far empty gestures about sitting down for talks with his adversaries. Opinion surveys across the Rust Belt show majority opposition to repeal of collective bargaining. In Ohio, an even harsher version of the Wisconsin law is likely to lose when put to a voter referendum in November. The Wisconsin uprising has broken the momentum of the Tea Party in critical Midwest states.

That alone would be an impressive accomplishment. But there is more to be encouraged about, as Hayden reports:

This is a homegrown revolution, not one led or fed by outside forces or agitators in the grip of ideology. International unions and Democratic Party strategists based in Washington, DC, didn’t start the fight, but were drawn into it by their rank and file and thousands of independent citizens across the state (including players from the Packers). Politically active observers noticed the freshness from the beginning. Dawson Barrett, a graduate student active at the University in Wisconsin-Milwaukee, e-mailed me on the first day, saying “crazy shit going on in Wisconsin…this is escalating quickly…high school and university students are having walkouts ALL over the state to support their teachers and family members…. The governor announced the national guard is ready!” The historian Paul Buhle e-mailed from Madison on February 16 that “it seems (for a moment anyway) as if a new era has opened.”
This was a qualitative shift of forces exceeding anyone’s imagination. Only months before, the conservative elements of Wisconsin populism reared up to defeat Senator Russ Feingold, the very embodiment of the La Follette tradition. Tea Party-led Republicans were frothing against Barack Obama and the Democrats for seeming betrayals of their 2008 promises, and Feingold was among the fallen Democrats. No one predicted the governor’s overreach nor the cycle of progressive revolt that soon followed.

Hayden goes on to illuminate the unique cultural roots of Wisconsin’s protest heritage, exemplified in the title of his post:

These examples suggest an important clue to social movements: that cultural or identity factors play a critical role alongside those of class, race and gender. Wisconsin was a homeland for populist, labor and socialist politics among European immigrants a century ago. “Sewer socialism” was a description of the success of Socialist Party mayors, especially German ones, in my parents’ youth. On February 17, Buhle wrote: “As I moved along with the tight-packed crowd, late in the afternoon, coming out of the demonstrator-filled Wisconsin capitol building and passed the statue of Hans Christian Heg [[Norwegian immigrant, Union Army officer] toward the street, I touched the engraved lettering. ‘Fell at Chickamauga.’ It occurred to me that my great-great-grandfather, farmer-abolitionist Ezra Fuller, did not fall at Chickamauga, and that makes me a lucky survivor of another civil war.” (Readers’ guide: Hans Christian Heg joined a Wisconsin militia called “The Wide Awakes,” which tracked down slave-catchers before the Civil War. He joined the abolitionist Republican Party and fought in the Civil War, dying under Confederate fire in 1863. There are at least eight memorials to Heg scattered around Wisconsin towns.)
Not only was immigrant memory a unique factor, but can anyone remember the last time when the forces of law and order have sided with the trespassers in taking over government buildings for weeks at a time? The very legitimacy of Walker’s authority and legislation fell under siege after he threatened to lock the Capitol and deploy the National Guard, a unique moment in modern political history. The daily, months-long cooperation between the Madison and state police, firefighters, teachers, construction workers, students and homeless people far surpasses the momentary links between “Teamsters and Turtles” at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999.

Hayden chronicles a marathon sing-along of innovative protest songs inside the state capitol and connects the continuing protest to the 2012 election, urging President Obama to play a more substantial role in encouraging the protests:

The Wisconsin drama is central to the 2012 election, as is the Tea Party Republicans’ broad assault on the base of the Democratic Party, and the state’s place in the Rust Belt electoral vote. Barack Obama won here in 2008 with a healthy 56.22 percent. But having beaten the respected Russ Feingold in 2010, Republicans hope to make it competitive in 2012. Wisconsin is also critical for maintaining Democratic control of the US Senate in 2012. Democratic representative Tammy Baldwin, a strong progressive, would become the first openly gay or lesbian member of the Senate.
Obama had been a regular visitor to Wisconsin until the fight over collective bargaining broke out in February. In a national television interview, he criticized the attack on labor rights, but he has been mostly silent while the drama unfolded. Many speculate that Obama and his advisers are concerned that too close an association with militant labor demonstrations will lose middle-class votes in several swing states. In addition, the president’s team may have believed that class war in Wisconsin was inconsistent with his negotiations to avoid default by achieving a budget deal with the likes of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. For Democrats in Wisconsin, however, the sense of abandonment by the White House has been real, and could erode Obama’s public support in 2012. Even on his Midwest listening tour in August, Obama’s bus rolled right past the Wisconsin border.
“If Obama had come here in February,” says Paul Soglin, “there would have been 150,000 people in ten-degree weather.” Among many labor leaders, John Matthews, the longtime director of the Wisconsin teachers’ union who pushed the original February walkouts, agrees with the need for Obama to step into the battle.
As long as Obama appears to be disengaged, his support is waning in Wisconsin. He must resume his frequent appearances in Wisconsin, or send Vice President Joe Biden or Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Walker’s challenge to Wisconsin Democrats is at the forefront of the Republican challenge to Obama. In addition, Wisconsin will be the center of a hotly contested US Senate race that may determine control of the upper chamber in Washington. “If Elizabeth Warren can beat Scott Brown in Massachusetts and someone like Representative Mazie Hirono wins the open Hawaii seat, Wisconsin will be the key to holding fifty-one seats,” Nichols argues.
Democrats in Wisconsin also need Obama, according to Nichols, to help mobilize the African-American vote in places like Milwaukee to supplement the white liberal forces opposed to Walker’s draconian budget cuts…

As Hayden concludes, “The Tea Party has thrown down the challenge in Wisconsin. Time will tell how well the president can polka.”

According to the latest Gallup poll, unions also have some work to do in upgrading their image with the American public, As Steven Greenhouse reports in his New York Times article “A Challenge for Unions in Public Opinion,”

…A slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, approve of labor unions and that the difference in views between how Democrats and Republicans feel toward unions has reached record levels.
The Gallup poll, released on Thursday, found that the approval rate for unions was unchanged from 2010 and was up from 2009, when unions had the lowest approval rating, 48 percent, since Gallup began this survey in 1936.
Showing a huge partisan difference in views, the poll of 1,008 adults found that 78 percent of Democrats approve of unions, while just 26 percent of Republicans do, the lowest percentage ever for Republicans.

Greenhouse’s article also quotes Jeffrey M. Jones, managing editor for Gallup, “This could reflect a greater politicization of union issues given the fact that many state-level efforts to curb union influence were promoted by Republican governors often backed by a Republican-controlled legislature.” Jones also cites “…a draw in the court of public opinion, with labor unions neither gaining nor losing Americans’ support overall compared with last year.”
Well, sure. But it could also reflect lousy coverage of the leadership unions have provided in producing virtually all reforms benefiting workers. Greenhouse adds that union leaders note that “the approval rate was 65 percent less than a decade ago…conservative politicians and think tanks have been putting out a flood of negative information about organized labor.”
Nonetheless, there is some good news in the poll in terms of the trend line:

The Gallup poll found a strong rebound of Democrats’ and independents’ views toward unions over the last two years. Approval among Democrats rose to 78 percent from 66 percent in 2009, and to 52 percent from 44 percent among independents…

But Greenhouse reports that the good news is offset with an 8-point drop in approval among Republicans, to 26 percent from 34 percent last year — up from 29 percent in 2009. This may reflect the GOP’s superior echo chamber.
It’s not hard to see a case for unions doing more public education in this poll. What may be less obvious is the challenge facing the mainstream media on Labor Day 2011 — to do a better job of reporting on the gains won by unions, in modern times, as well as during the last century.
Strengthening the labor movement is essential for empowering the Democratic party. But it is also the key to reducing the growing gap in income and wealth between working families and the rich, and for restoring the economic vitality of America.

Lyman Morales has an article up at Gallup.com, “More U.S. Workers Unhappy With Health Benefits, Promotions,” which should be of interest to Democratic campaigns and candidates on Labor Day. As Morales reports:

U.S. workers are more dissatisfied today with their health insurance benefits and their chances for promotion than they were before the global economic collapse. These are the biggest movers since August 2008 on a list of 13 specific job aspects Gallup tracks.
The findings are from Gallup’s annual Work and Education poll, conducted Aug. 11-14, 2011. The majority of workers are at least somewhat satisfied with these job aspects, which Gallup asks about each year, but often fewer than half are completely satisfied. On-the-job stress remains the aspect workers’ are least positive about overall, as it was last year, with 28% of workers completely satisfied…

According to the survey, the top sources of worker dissatisfaction in percentages include: job-related stress (34); pay (30); health insurance benefits (30); employer retirement plan (28); chances for promotion (26); vacation time (20); recognition for work accomplishments (19); and job security (18).
If there is anything surprising here, it is that job security doesn’t rank higher among the list of concerns, although some of it could be included in the nebulous category ‘on-the-job-stress.’ And job security as a concern has increased only 5 percent since the ’08 (pre-Bush meltdown) survey, compared to an 11 percent hike for health insurance benefits.
It may be that many workers have a sense that their employers have cut about as many workers as they can. Perhaps the main perceived effect of high unemployment on employed workers is lower wages, more expensive health insurance and diminishing retirement assets. In light of this view, ‘it’s still the economy stupid’ for Dems, which is verified by the most recent priority-ranking polls by CNN/ORC, CBS News/New York Times and Bloomberg.
In terms of political impact, on-the-job concerns may not be a leading determinant of political attitudes. Everything can be fine at your job. But if a family member or good friend is having a tough time finding work it, it might affect your vote.
But the Gallup poll suggests it can’t hurt for Dems to do a better job of addressing sub-themes like stronger protection for retirement assets, clarification of health reform benefits and payroll tax cuts targeting the middle class. Dems have long supported all of these causes, albeit with unimpressive message discipline and low amplification.
On Labor Day 2011, Dems still have work to do in convincing swing voters that they are the party that best represents the interests of working people.

Ari Berman’s Rolling Stone article “The GOP War on Voting” should help alert a lot of young voters in particular about how they are being targeted for political disempowerment by the Republicans. But Berman’s piece is not only about young voters; it’s about the GOP effort to smother the electoral power of all pro-Democratic constituencies. Berman explains:

…Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.
Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP’s effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.
All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.
Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. “One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. “Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate” – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

Berman reviews the Republican’s bogus claims of voter fraud as a major electoral problem to justify burdensome identification requirements, encapsulated in Stephen Colbert’s warning that “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere.”
Berman rolls out the tally of voter obstruction in recent state-wide legislation in four areas:

Barriers to Registration Since January, six states have introduced legislation to impose new restrictions on voter registration drives run by groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters. In May, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution.
As a result, the law threatens to turn civic-minded volunteers into inadvertent criminals. Denouncing the legislation as “good old-fashioned voter suppression,” the League of Women Voters announced that it was ending its registration efforts in Florida, where it has been signing up new voters for the past 70 years. Rock the Vote, which helped 2.5 million voters to register in 2008, could soon follow suit. “We’re hoping not to shut down,” says Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, “but I can’t say with any certainty that we’ll be able to continue the work we’re doing.”
The registration law took effect one day after it passed, under an emergency statute designed for “an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare.” In reality, though, there’s no evidence that registering fake voters is a significant problem in the state. Over the past three years, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has received just 31 cases of suspected voter fraud, resulting in only three arrests statewide. “No one could give me an example of all this fraud they speak about,” said Mike Fasano, a Republican state senator who bucked his party and voted against the registration law. What’s more, the law serves no useful purpose: Under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002, all new voters must show identity before registering to vote.
Cuts to Early Voting After the recount debacle in Florida in 2000, allowing voters to cast their ballots early emerged as a popular bipartisan reform. Early voting not only meant shorter lines on Election Day, it has helped boost turnout in a number of states – the true measure of a successful democracy. “I think it’s great,” Jeb Bush said in 2004. “It’s another reform we added that has helped provide access to the polls and provide a convenience. And we’re going to have a high voter turnout here, and I think that’s wonderful.”
But Republican support for early voting vanished after Obama utilized it as a key part of his strategy in 2008. Nearly 30 percent of the electorate voted early that year, and they favored Obama over McCain by 10 points. The strategy proved especially effective in Florida, where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one among early voters, and in Ohio, where Obama received fewer votes than McCain on Election Day but ended up winning by 263,000 ballots, thanks to his advantage among early voters in urban areas like Cleveland and Columbus.
That may explain why both Florida and Ohio – which now have conservative Republican governors – have dramatically curtailed early voting for 2012. Next year, early voting will be cut from 14 to eight days in Florida and from 35 to 11 days in Ohio, with limited hours on weekends. In addition, both states banned voting on the Sunday before the election – a day when black churches historically mobilize their constituents. Once again, there appears to be nothing to justify the changes other than pure politics. “There is no evidence that any form of convenience voting has led to higher levels of fraud,” reports the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College.
Photo IDs By far the biggest change in election rules for 2012 is the number of states requiring a government-issued photo ID, the most important tactic in the Republican war on voting. In April 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a photo-ID law in Indiana, even though state GOP officials couldn’t provide a single instance of a voter committing the type of fraud the new ID law was supposed to stop. Emboldened by the ruling, Republicans launched a nationwide effort to implement similar barriers to voting in dozens of states.
The campaign was coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which provided GOP legislators with draft legislation based on Indiana’s ID requirement. In five states that passed such laws in the past year – Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – the measures were sponsored by legislators who are members of ALEC. “We’re seeing the same legislation being proposed state by state by state,” says Smith of Rock the Vote. “And they’re not being shy in any of these places about clearly and blatantly targeting specific demographic groups, including students.”
In Texas, under “emergency” legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date – requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year. “It’s like creating a second class of citizens in terms of who gets to vote,” says Analiese Eicher, a Dane County board supervisor.
The barriers erected in Texas and Wisconsin go beyond what the Supreme Court upheld in Indiana, where 99 percent of state voters possess the requisite IDs and can turn to full-time DMVs in every county to obtain the proper documentation. By contrast, roughly half of all black and Hispanic residents in Wisconsin do not have a driver’s license, and the state staffs barely half as many DMVs as Indiana – a quarter of which are open less than one day a month. To make matters worse, Gov. Scott Walker tried to shut down 16 more DMVs – many of them located in Democratic-leaning areas. In one case, Walker planned to close a DMV in Fort Atkinson, a liberal stronghold, while opening a new office 30 minutes away in the conservative district of Watertown.
Although new ID laws have been approved in seven states, the battle over such barriers to voting has been far more widespread. Since January, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina have all vetoed ID laws. Voters in Mississippi and Missouri are slated to consider ballot initiatives requiring voter IDs, and legislation is currently pending in Pennsylvania.
One of the most restrictive laws requiring voter IDs was passed in South Carolina. To obtain the free state ID now required to vote, the 178,000 South Carolinians who currently lack one must pay for a passport or a birth certificate. “It’s the stepsister of the poll tax,” says Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project. Under the new law, many elderly black residents – who were born at home in the segregated South and never had a birth certificate – must now go to family court to prove their identity. Given that obtaining fake birth certificates is one of the country’s biggest sources of fraud, the new law may actually prompt some voters to illegally procure a birth certificate in order to legally vote – all in the name of combating voter fraud.
For those voters who manage to get a legitimate birth certificate, obtaining a voter ID from the DMV is likely to be hellishly time-consuming. A reporter for the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee – another state now mandating voter IDs – recently waited for four hours on a sweltering July day just to see a DMV clerk. The paper found that the longest lines occur in urban precincts, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from erecting hurdles to voting in minority jurisdictions.
Disenfranchising Ex-Felons The most sweeping tactic in the GOP campaign against voting is simply to make it illegal for certain voters to cast ballots in any election. As the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist restored the voting rights of 154,000 former prisoners who had been convicted of nonviolent crimes. But in March, after only 30 minutes of public debate, Gov. Rick Scott overturned his predecessor’s decision, instantly disenfranchising 97,491 ex-felons and prohibiting another 1.1 million prisoners from being allowed to vote after serving their time.
“Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they’ve paid their price?” Bill Clinton asked during his speech in July. “Because most of them in Florida were African-Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats – that’s why.”
A similar reversal by a Republican governor recently took place in Iowa, where Gov. Terry Branstad overturned his predecessor’s decision to restore voting rights to 100,000 ex-felons. The move threatens to return Iowa to the recent past, when more than five percent of all residents were denied the right to vote – including a third of the state’s black residents. In addition, Florida and Iowa join Kentucky and Virginia as the only states that require all former felons to apply for the right to vote after finishing their prison sentences.

Berman notes that the ACLU and other groups are challenging the GOP-lead disenfranchisement campaign, calling on the Justice Department to be more assertive in fighting the racially-discriminatory ‘reforms.’ Berman cites a 2008 MIT study indicating that less than two-thirds of eligible citizens voted and “9 million voters were denied an opportunity to cast ballots…because of problems with their voter registration (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent).”
Berman believes “…Such problems will only be exacerbated by the flood of new laws implemented by Republicans. Instead of a single fiasco in Florida, experts warn, there could be chaos in a dozen states as voters find themselves barred from the polls.”
Clearly Democrats should not entertain any complacency regarding voter suppression the 2012 election, just because things went well enough in 2008. The 2000 election may have been the ugliest presidential election in U.S. history, with the ‘Brooks Bothers Riot,’ abuse of felon disenfranchisement laws and the shameless politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court. But the stage is now being set for massive disenfranchisement of targeted constituencies next year, and this time Dems should plan accordingly.

For many years the May Day celebrants of other nations have dissed America’s Labor Day, with its laid-back picnics and tame tributes to the laboring classes, as a flaccid imitation of a real workers’ celebration. Amid mounting anger about joblessness, however, some are now calling to transform America’s Labor Day celebration on September 5th into an energetic outpouring of worker solidarity and mass protest.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich makes a case for a day of protest in his recent blog (via Christian Science Monitor), “This Labor Day We Need Protest Marches Rather Than Parades.”:

Labor Day is traditionally a time for picnics and parades. But this year is no picnic for American workers, and a protest march would be more appropriate than a parade.
Not only are 25 million unemployed or underemployed, but American companies continue to cut wages and benefits. The median wage is still dropping, adjusted for inflation. High unemployment has given employers extra bargaining leverage to wring out wage concessions.
All told, it’s been the worst decade for American workers in a century. According to Commerce Department data, private-sector wage gains over the last decade have even lagged behind wage gains during the decade of the Great Depression (4 percent over the last ten years, adjusted for inflation, versus 5 percent from 1929 to 1939).
Big American corporations are making more money, and creating more jobs, outside the United States than in it. If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court’s twisted logic now insists, most of the big ones headquartered here are rapidly losing their American identity.
CEO pay, meanwhile, has soared. The median value of salaries, bonuses and long-term incentive awards for CEOs at 350 big American companies surged 11 percent last year to $9.3 million (according to a study of proxy statements conducted for The Wall Street Journal by the management consultancy Hay Group.). Bonuses have surged 19.7 percent.
This doesn’t even include all those stock options rewarded to CEOs at rock-bottom prices in 2008 and 2009. Stock prices have ballooned since then, the current downdraft notwithstanding. In March, 2009, for example, Ford CEO Alan Mulally received a grant of options and restricted shares worth an estimated $16 million at the time. But Ford is now showing large profits – in part because the UAW agreed to allow Ford to give its new hires roughly half the wages of older Ford workers – and its share prices have responded. Mulally’s 2009 grant is now worth over $200 million.
The ratio of corporate profits to wages is now higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, the American economy has all but stopped growing – in large part because consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of GDP) are also workers whose jobs and wages are under assault.
Perhaps there would still be something to celebrate on Labor Day if government was coming to the rescue. But Washington is paralyzed, the President seems unwilling or unable to take on labor-bashing Republicans, and several Republican governors are mounting direct assaults on organized labor (see Indiana, Ohio, Maine, and Wisconsin, for example).
So let’s bag the picnics and parades this Labor Day. American workers should march in protest. They’re getting the worst deal they’ve had since before Labor Day was invented – and the economy is suffering as a result.

United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard argues in his post at In These Times, that this Labor Day the emphasis should be on building hope. Parades are fine, Gerard argues contrary to Reich, but Labor Day 2011 should be an occasion to “Build esprit de corps among your fellow workers” and adds.

This is one day devoted to labor, to the middle class, to the majority. One day out of 365. On this holiday, everyone gives an obligatory nod to workers. So don’t fret this Labor Day. Don’t waste it away in apathetic doldrums. Don’t let the minority rich and their purchased politicians take this celebration away from us too…We must develop some self-confidence before we start protesting. Achieving the change we want requires an uprising of hope and anger…
…Frances Fox Piven counsels in her book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America that hope is crucial, that constructive change arises from the mix of hope and anger. In places like Libya and Egypt this Arab Spring, wealth proved insufficient to overpower the majority invigorated by hope and anger.

Gerard cites the “combination of anger and hopelessness” that “produces destruction and self-destruction” which exploded in London, clearly concerned that many American communities are ripe for similar unrest. He concludes, “So let’s put some effort into fostering optimism. Let’s strengthen each other this Labor Day. We must raise that hope before we organize Reich’s protests.”
Gerard may be right that some communities, where potentially explosive anger about joblessness and expanding income inequality is seething, are not prepared for disciplined nonviolent protests on such short notice. But recent protests in Madison and elsewhere indicate that other cities are well-prepared for Labor Day protest marches, and they can do some good. It’s up to responsible community leaders to make the call.
Both Reich and Gerard are calling for making Labor Day an occasion for building solidarity and hope among working people, and that should happen everywhere, whether we have marches or parades. And either way, Labor Day should also serve as a nation-wide teach-in on what state and local elected officials have or have not done to create jobs and provide help for the unemployed and underemployed.

Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. and Marjorie Cohn, immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild, have a post up at Op-Ed News, “Lost in the Debt Ceiling Debate: The Legal Duty to Create Jobs” addressing the federal government’s failure to comply with existing job-creation legislation.
Mirer and Cohn focuse primarily on The Employment Act of 1946 and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978, noting also mandates for job-creation in 1977 reforms requiring the Federal Reserve to leverage monetary policy to promote maximum employment. They add that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets a global standard of employment as an important right, which, not incidentally, some major industrialized nations have actually tried to honor.
The authors’ review of the two jobs acts provides a timely reminder of the moral imperative that faces every great democracy, the responsibility to take action to help insure that every family has at least one breadwinner who earns a living wage:

The first full employment law in the United States was passed in 1946. It required the country to make its goal one of full employment…With the Keynesian consensus that government spending was necessary to stimulate the economy and the depression still fresh in the nation’s mind, this legislation contained a firm statement that full employment was the policy of the country.
As originally written, the bill required the federal government do everything in its authority to achieve full employment, which was established as a right guaranteed to the American people. Pushback by conservative business interests, however, watered down the bill. While it created the Council of Economic Advisers to the President and the Joint Economic Committee as a Congressional standing committee to advise the government on economic policy, the guarantee of full employment was removed from the bill.
In the aftermath of the rise in unemployment which followed the “oil crisis” of 1975, Congress addressed the weaknesses of the 1946 act through the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978. The purpose of this bill as described in its title is:
“An Act to translate into practical reality the right of all Americans who are able, willing, and seeking to work to full opportunity for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation; to assert the responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable programs and policies to promote full employment, production, and real income, balanced growth, adequate productivity growth, proper attention to national priorities.”
The Act sets goals for the President. By 1983, unemployment rates should be not more than 3% for persons age 20 or over and not more than 4% for persons age 16 or over, and inflation rates should not be over 4%. By 1988, inflation rates should be 0%. The Act allows Congress to revise these goals over time.
If private enterprise appears not to be meeting these goals, the Act expressly calls for the government to create a “reservoir of public employment.” These jobs are required to be in the lower ranges of skill and pay to minimize competition with the private sector.
The Act directly prohibits discrimination on account of gender, religion, race, age or national origin in any program created under the Act. Humphey-Hawkins has not been repealed. Both the language and the spirit of this law require the government to bring unemployment down to 3% from over 9%…

This legislation only requires the federal government to take action. The private sector, which employs 85+ percent of the labor force, would be indirectly influenced by monetary policy, but would not be required to do any hiring. Still, full enforcement of existing legislation could substantially reduce unemployment by putting millions of jobless Americans to work in public service projects rebuilding our tattered infrastructure.
The ’46 and ’78 full employment laws have been winked at and shrugged off by elected officials for decades as merely symbolic statutes, despite the fact that they actually do require the President, Congress and the Fed to do specific things to create jobs.
Mirer and Cohn point out that Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced “The Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act” (HR 870), to fund job-training and job-creation programs, funded by taxes on financial transactions. But the bill has no chance as long as Republicans control the House.
The authors urge President Obama to demand that the Fed “…use all the tools relating to controlling the money supply…to create the funds called for by HR 870, and to start putting people back to work through direct funding of a reservoir of public jobs as Humphrey-Hawkins mandates.” Imagine the political donnybrook that would ensue following such action, legal though it apparently would be. It’s an interesting scenario that needs some fleshing out.
The best hope for full employment remains electing strong Democratic majorities to both houses of congress, while retaining the presidency. Under this scenario, full enforcement of the ’46 and ’78 employment acts is certainly doable. But it’s a very tough challenge, given the Republican edge in Senate races next year.
There are signs that the public is tiring of the tea party obstruction of government, and therefore hope that at least some Republicans may have to move toward the center to survive. It’s possible they could be influenced by energetic protest and lobbying campaigns by their constituents.
Like other groups across the political spectrum, we progressives are very good at blaming elected officials when they don’t follow through on their reform promises. But too many progressive Dems fail to realize that finger-pointing, while necessary, is only part of our responsibility. If we really want to see significant progressive change, especially full employment, we simply must escalate our protest activities to compel our elected and government officials to act.
At a white house meeting, FDR reportedly told the great African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph “Make me do it” in response to Randolph’s appeal for racial justice and economic reform. Roosevelt was not being a smart ass; He was underscoring an important law of politics, that elected officials need protest to galvanize them to act, and progressive politicians welcome it because it provides cover, as well as encouragement.
Regarding protest leadership, we have a great role model, whose 30+ foot stone image will be unveiled not far from the Lincoln, Jefferson and FDR Memorials on the National Mall in the capitol August 28th. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial will not only honor the historic contributions of a great African American leader; It will also inspire — and challenge — coming generations of all races to emulate his strategy of militant but dignified nonviolent protest to achieve social and economic justice.
Let’s not forget that the Great March on Washington MLK and Randolph lead in 1963 was not only about racial justice. The twin goals were “Jobs and Freedom,” a challenge that echoes with prophetic relevance for our times. It was FDR who said “make me do it,” and MLK showed us the way, not only with one demonstration, but with a sustained commitment to mass protest. Now let’s make them do it.