Not a big fan of Gov Christie of NJ. But it was good to see somebody nail former Ambassador Huntsman for his shameless backstabbing careerism in going after the job of the guy who gave him his biggest break. It resonates particularly well after Huntsman’s sanctimonious “I want to be very clear with the people here in New Hampshire and in this country. I will always put my country first.” Substitute “career” for “country” and you have the real key to Huntsman’s character.
Despite’s Huntsman’s zinger citing Romney as exhibit “A” showing why the country is so divided, I have to agree with Joe Klein’s assessment in Time Swampland that “No one really laid a glove on him, not even in the NBC debate on Sunday morning, which was far sharper and more substantive than the ABC debate last night. There was a reason for Romney’s success-and it pains me to disclose it: he was well-prepped by his consultants. His answers were clear, concise, declarative sentences. None of the other candidates seemed to have been prepped at all.”
Elizabeth Warren gets the Fenway thing a lot better than did Martha Coakley.
Mackenzie Weinger of Politico reports a new Pew poll which indicates that 51 percent of “Republican and GOP-leaning voters said the candidates are excellent or good,” compared to 68 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters said they had good Republican candidates four years ago.
Here’s an interesting wrinkle from The Hill: John McCain faults the Citizens United decision for having a “damaging” impact on the GOP presidential field. “…It’s also the result of the worst decision, I think, in at least the last 50 years or so, of the United States Supreme Court called Citizens United, where they basically unleashed without transparency, without accountability, huge amounts of money from these so-called independent campaigns, which you and I know are not independent.”
Nate Silver and Micah Cohen make the case that “Ground Game Determines Candidates’ Strength,” noting that Paul and Romney have the most stable numbers of the current GOP field and the most well-organized campaigns.
New Hampshire’s influence as the earliest primary state could be overshadowed by it’s importance as the state with the strongest pro-GOP trend since 2010, according to Chris Palko at Campaigns & Elections. In addition to the largest swing in the state legislature in 2010, “according to Gallup, only Rhode Island saw a greater decline in Democratic Party identification from 2008 to 2010.”
Quentin Fottrell of SmartMoney.com has some worthwhile insights in “10 Things Pollsters Won’t Tell You: Why you should think twice about those survey results this election season.” Among Fottrell’s insights: “People lie to say what they think is acceptable” (“social respectability bias”), “”The way we ask the questions can determine the answers” and “We’re being outclassed by social network sites.”
Robert Reich’s “How a Little Bit of Good Economic News Can Be Bad for the President” notes a political booby-trap which may lie ahead for President Obama — encouraged discouraged workers.
HuffPo Pollster Mark Blumenthal crunches the numbers and comes up with “…An average across all polls should produce the clearest picture of the outcome…As of this writing it shows Romney’s support declining slightly (to 36.8 percent) followed by Ron Paul (at 17.6 percent), with Huntsman just a point and a half behind (at 16.0 percent) and rising fast, followed by Rick Santorum (11.6 percent), Newt Gingrich (10.0 percent) and Rick Perry (0.9 percent). Huntsman’s momentum is on a track to catch Paul, though who will finish on top is one of those things about which polling simply cannot be certain.”

The latest polls show a Huntsman surge, and Santorum tanking in NH, so Santorum’s 15 minutes may be up sooner than later. But we shouldn’t let this political moment pass without a comment on the ‘Santorum as working-class hero’ snowjob.
Google Santorum +”working-class,” and you’ll pull up headlines like “Santorum fits working class bill,” “Like Rocky Balboa, Rick Santorum is a working class hero” and “Santorum: The Blue-collar Candidate – The former senator touts his working-class roots” etc. The conservative echo chamber is parroting the meme with impressive message discipline. Top conservative pundits, including Brooks, Will and Krauthammer have jumped on the Santorum as working-class hero bandwagon.
It’s not hard to understand why. One of the largest swing constituencies, the white working-class has trended toward the GOP in recent elections. According to Wall St. Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel

…Barack Obama did better than John Kerry or Al Gore with these voters, though even he earned just 43% of their vote…That was Mr. Obama’s high point. In 2010 a record 63% of this bloc voted for the GOP. And there are signs that, whether out of calculation or desperation, Team Obama may be abandoning them altogether–instead looking for 2012 victory in a progressive coalition of educated, socially liberal voters, combined with poorer ethnic voters, in particular Hispanics.
The white working class will make up as much as 55% of the vote in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Front-runner Mitt Romney knows it, as does Mr. Santorum. Their fight in New Hampshire and beyond will increasingly be over who can earn more points with this group. Their styles are very different, if equally damaging to the conservative growth message.

Santorum is making a hard-sell pitch for the blue collar vote, as Strassel reports:

Mr. Santorum surged in Iowa as the “I’m One of You” candidate. On the stump, and in his victory speech in Iowa, he’s highlighted his working-class roots. He kicked off his campaign near the Pennsylvania coal mines where his grandfather worked, and he talks frequently of struggling steel towns…He’s the frugal guy, the man of faith, the person who understands the financial worries of average Americans. He’s directly contrasting his own blue-collar bona fides with those of the more privileged Mr. Romney.

In reality, however, Santorum’s working-class creds are awfully thin. His father was a clinical psychologist and his mother was an administrative nurse — clearly more of an upper middle-class upbringing than a blue collar culture. Yeah, he had a grandfather who was a miner, but it’s not like he grew up in a mining family as the GOP meme-propagators would have us believe.
Worse, much of his career in public office has been dedicated to serving as an eager bell-hop for the wealthy. More recently, as the Washington Post reported,

Santorum earned $1.3 million in 2010 and the first half of 2011, according to his most recent financial disclosure form. The largest chunk of his employment earnings — $332,000 — came from his work as a consultant for groups advocating and lobbying for industry interests. That included $142,500 to help advise a Pennsylvania natural gas firm, Consol Energy, and $65,000 to consult with lobby firm American Continental Group, and its insurance services client.

And, as Marcus Stern and Kristina Cooke recently reported for Reuters,

As a senator, Santorum went further, playing a key role in an effort by Republicans in Congress to dictate the hiring practices, and hence the political loyalties, of Washington’s deep-pocketed lobbying firms and trade associations, which had previously been bipartisan.
Dubbed “the K Street Project” for the Washington street that houses most of these groups, the initiative was launched in 1989 by lobbyist Grover Norquist, whose sole aim, he said, was to encourage lobbying firms to “hire people who agree with your worldview, not hire for access.”
…Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal government watchdog group, named Santorum among three “most corrupt” senators in 2005 and 2006, accusing him of “using his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit those who have made contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee.”

Santorum has won some blue collar support by promoting his message of “industrial renewal,” and supporting protectionist measures, as John Nichols reports in The Nation. But, as Nichols, says, “There is no reason to overplay Santorum’s commitments. He is an economic conservative who would side more often with Wall Street than Main Street.”
In 2002, for example, Senator Santorum received a 15 percent rating from the AFL-CIO. Not many Senators had a lower score.
Republican strategists are so desperate for a candidate who can relate to the blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” that casting an arch conservative, silk-stocking lawyer like Santorum as a working class hero seems a reasonable stretch. If Santorum does recover from his latest poll dive, it shouldn’t be too hard for Dems to expose his policy agenda as more anti-worker than not.
Note from James Vega:
Using exactly the same, utterly and shamelessly idiotic “grandfather’s history plus general geographical area” theory of social class, Mitt Romney can claim to be “the authentic descendent and representative of Mexican-American autoworkers” – his grandfather lived in Chihuahua, Mexico most of his life and Romney himself grew up “in the shadows of the automobile factories of Detroit”
Newt, on the other hand, can polish his credentials in the African-American community by claiming to be “a scholar of African society whose congressional district was a short distance from Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement”

Romney’s tax return could be a game-changer, and not in a good way for Republicans. Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler explains why Mitt is extremely reluctant to release it.
Liz Novak sounds the call at In These Times: “Occupy the Electoral Process.” Yes, it’s important to have a non-electoral protest track to push forward a progressive agenda. But now the tea party is mobilizing its resources to elect right-wingers from the white house to the court house, and the Occupy Movement can make the difference that prevents a reactionary takeover.
The Occupy Movement will find lots of useful data for the campaign against inequality in a study, flagged by Jim Hightower, of social justice records of all 31 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The survey ranks “each nation in such categories as health care, income inequality, pre-school education, and child poverty rate. The overall performance by the U.S. – which boasts of being an egalitarian society – outranks only Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey. Actually, even three of those countries performed better than ours in the education of pre-schoolers, and Greece did better than the U.S. on the prevention of poverty.”
Dems interested in upgrading their campaign blogs should have a gander at Andrew Clark’s “The five best campaign blogs of 2011” at Campaigns & Elections.
The Forum has a special issue out on “Governing through the Senate,” which ought to be of interest to U.S. Senate candidates and campaign workers. Abstracts and guest passes are free. “…Charles O. Jones considers its inherent peculiarities as the institution meant to ‘go second’ in a separated system; Sarah Binder argues that the modern Senate is moving away from its constitutional role; Frances Lee considers the role of party competition in shaping senatorial behavior; Barry Burden asks about the influence of senatorial polarization and party balance within the bicameral context; and Daniel DiSalvo contrasts partisan polarization with divided government as influences on senatorial behavior. Randall Strahan observes one particular senator negotiating this complicated framework; Wendy Schiller and Jennifer Cassidy consider the dynamics of cooperation (or not) among same-state senators; and Andrea Hatcher contrasts a majority leader who lost re-election with another who won. Ryan Black, Anthony Madonna, and Ryan Owens examine a very private form of senatorial obstruction, ‘blue slip behavior’; Gregory Koger examines what is surely the best-known form of obstruction, the filibuster; Eric Schickler and Gregory Wawro argue that, whatever its collective impact, senators have multiple reasons to protect this filibuster; and James Wallner closes with a substantive realm, budgeting, where the absence of policy action by the Senate is critical. In book reviews, Joseph Cooper uses Matthew N. Green, The Speaker of the House: A Study in Leadership, to think about the study of Congress more generally, and Matthew Green responds; Amnon Cavari reviews B. Dan Wood, The Myth of Presidential Representation; and Philip Brenner reviews Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.”
The Monkey Cage has a revealing chart that displays the racial demographics of New Hampshire in stark contrast to that of the United States.
Get up to speed on “Racial Profiling, Republican Candidates, and Rights Violations: the Immigration Debate at Year’s End” by Kari Lydersen, from In These Times via Alternet.
Nick R. Martin has a post at TPM Muckraker on “Report Says ALEC Wields Disturbing Level of Influence’ In Virginia.” Martin explains “The Virginia General Assembly introduced at least 50 bills since 2007 that appear to be near carbon copies of legislation first imagined by the American Legislative Exchange Council, more widely known as ALEC, the report found…The report also said taxpayers spent more than $230,000 to send state lawmakers to ALEC conferences, where they then met with corporate lobbyists behind closed doors. Of the bills apparently drafted by ALEC, three became law, the report said.”
Brad Reed has a good Alternet post, “8 GOP Primary Moments That Would Make Jesus Weep” that Christian voters should find of considerable interest.
Please sign The Democratic Governor’s Association petition to stop voter suppression in the state of Florida. “Now that they control a majority of statehouses across the nation, Republicans are attempting a bold power grab to disenfranchise voters and repeat the Florida election debacle of 2000…Right now, states with Republican governors or new GOP majorities are ramming through bills designed to make it harder for people to vote. They’ll stop at nothing to steal the Presidency. We have to act now to stop these bills from becoming law. The Democratic Governors Association is the only organization devoted solely to electing Democratic governors who will veto any and all attempts to limit voter rights…Stand with the DGA and demand that Republicans stop their politically-motivated attempts to suppress votes.”
In a saner nation, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s post on “Saviorism” at The Atlantic would be the last word anyone would need to read about the warped credo of Rep. Ron Paul.

Nate Silver gives Romney a 42 percent chance of winning the Iowa caucuses, followed by Ron Paul at 34 percent and Rick Santorum at 20 per cent. The final Des Moines Register poll, which has an impressive track record, indicates a 2 point lead for Romney over Paul. Ezra Klein also sees a Romney win. Howard Dean and Ed Schultz predict a Santorum upset nonetheless.
Mark Blumenthal has an instructive post at HuffPo Pollster, “Newt Gingrich Under Attack: How Much Did Negative Ads Matter?” As Blumenthal explains, “Assuming that 45 percent of the ads run in two markets were anti-Gingrich, and using the statistics we provided from the IowaPolitics records, Hutchins estimated that the average television viewer in those two markets would have seen anti-Gingrich ads roughly 60 to 80 times in December.” But John G. Geer argues at Politico that it isn’t the attack ads that have tanked Newt; it’s the frontrunner scrutiny of his lengthy baggage.
Give it up for John Nichols, whose Nation post headline “Iowa’s $200-Per-Vote Caucuses Reward Negatives, Nastiness, Narrow Thinking” pretty much nails the dark side of the caucuses.
For those who take the Iowa Caucuses more seriously, Kyle Leighton’s “Just Who Votes In The Iowa Republican Caucuses?” at Talking Points Memo has the skinny: “A recent national Public Policy Polling (D) survey of Republican primary voters showed that 42 percent considered themselves “very conservative,” while the latest numbers from the Des Moines Register released Saturday night show that only 34 percent of likely GOP caucus-goers define themselves that way. There are the same amount of moderates in both sample sets, so data shows the Iowa group is tilted a little more to the center on the ideological scale. There is confirming data in other PPP numbers specific to Iowa…NBC News and Marist College recently partnered to run a survey with a huge sample size of Iowans: they polled nearly 3,000 registered voters in the state and then whittled down to who would be voting in the Republican caucuses…Nearly a quarter of respondents described themselves as moderates or liberals, and only 46 percent said they were evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. A majority, 54 percent, said they were definitely not. The cross-party voting affects the numbers strongly on other labels: nationally, the PPP numbers show that 57 percent of Republican primary voters view themselves a supporter of the Tea Party. But NBC/Marist data from Iowa shows a 46 – 47 split against support of the conservative movement..”
Lest anyone be tempted to read too much into the Iowa Caucus results, however, Juan Cole has a couple of pie charts in his “Conservative White People’s Primary” that put the demographics into clear perspective.
The Nation’s editor Katrina vanden Heuval has an interesting WaPo op-ed “Voting rights, super PACs and the media cloud the election” urging readers not to get too distracted by the horse race aspect of the primaries. Instead “pay attention to three issues that could affect the outcome of the election, even though they have nothing to do with the campaigns themselves” — the impact of voter suppression, big money from the super PACs and MSM “false equivalence” reportage.
Ronald Brownstein reports at National Journal on Santorum’s success in winning support of working-class Republicans.
Mark Lander of the New York Times ponders the ramifications of the Obama campaign’s strategy targeting the “do-nothing congress.” Joshua R. Earnest, the president’s deputy press secretary, describes the meme thusly: “the image of a gridlocked, dysfunctional Congress and a president who is leaving no stone unturned to try to find solutions to the difficult financial challenges and economic challenges facing the country.” Not bad, but “do-nothing Republicans” would be a more accurate term, since more congressional Dems have negotiated and compromised in good faith, than have Republican House members.
Sasha Issenberg’s Slate.com post “The 12 Kinds of Undecided Voters,”
 is more intuitive than data-driven.” But it nonetheless sheds some light on a large constituency.
John Huntsman may be toast. But he should get a consolation prize for the most creative attack ad thus far, “The Ron Paul Twilight Zone.”
Iowa does get one thing very right, however, according to “GOP windbags have little to say about a huge Iowa success story” by Daily Kos’s Meteor Blades. “In all the hot air that has been expended in what one person rightly called a glorified straw poll, hardly anything has been said about one of the state’s major accomplishments, getting roughly 20 percent of its electricity from 2800 wind turbines across the state…Many Republicans seem to view wind power, and fossil-fuel alternatives in general, as a socialist plot…While the Republican candidates pretend to care about jobs and pretend that Democratic efforts to create more of them have been utter failures instead of just not enough, wind power has generated more than $5 billion in private investment in Iowa, some 4000 jobs with a payroll of $70 million.”

In his The Plum Line column, Greg Sargent reports on “The GOP’s game plan to end Obama’s presidency,” based on “the book,” a 500-page memo the GOP has compiled, featuring the President’s quotes and videos the Republican plan to use against him. Sagent explains:

National Republicans who are putting together the battle plan to defeat Obama face a dilemma. How do they attack Obama’s presidency as a failure, given that voters understand just how catastrophic a situation he inherited, continue to like Obama personally, and see him as a historical figure they want to succeed?…The answer is simple: Republicans will make the argument that Obama fell short of expectations as he himself defined them.
…The game plan is to remind Americans of the sense they had of Obama as a transformative figure in order to claim that he fell short of the promise his election seemed to embody:

One reason for the strategy, notes Sargent, is President Obama’s likability. The GOP apparently is concerned that personalized attacks against the President could backfire, because polls indicate that many who disapprove of his record like him nonetheless.
The “Obama vs. Obama” strategy is rooted in a double-barreled assault: “Republicans will now attack him for failing to transcend partisanship and achieve transformative change.” Sargent elaborates on the strategy’s built-in weakness :

…Obama had barely been sworn into office before the national Republican leadership mounted a concerted and determined effort to prevent any of Obama’s solutions to our severe national problems from passing, even as they openly declared they were doing so only to destroy him politically. Republicans have admitted on the record that deliberately denying Obama any bipartisan support for, well, anything at all was absolutely crucial to prevent voters from concluding that Obama had successfully forged ideological common ground over the way out of the myriad disasters Obama inherited from them.

Further, polls indicate that the public is not likely to be hustled by the GOP faulting Obama for inadequate bipartisanship, especially since the president has taken so much heat from inside his party about excessive bipartisanship. Most voters now know that Republicans have no intention of extending anything resembling a bipartisan spirit toward the President. Blaming the President for the failure of bipartisanship is a very tough sell.
The second prong of the GOP strategy, blaming the President for the failure to achieve transformative change, is also made problematic by the public’s awareness of Republicans’ refusal to negotiate in good faith on anything. Also, whether you like the Affordable Care Act or not, Dems can make a compelling case that the legislation is, in fact, transformative. Dems, however, have failed thus far to vigorously defend the legislation and ‘sell’ the extraordinary benefits of the act for millions of citizens. It’s about turning the ACA into a political asset, instead of a source of concern.
In terms of the economy, Sargent notes another major flaw in the GOP strategy:

While it’s true that disapproval of Obama on the economy is running high over government’s failure to fix the economy, the independents and moderates who will decide the presidential election agree with Obama’s overall fiscal vision — his jobs creation proposals and insistence on taxing the wealthy to pay for them. They also recognize that Republicans are more to blame than Dems for government’s failure to implement those proposals…

If the Republicans stick with the flawed strategy of ‘the Book,’ Democrats shouldn’t have much trouble crafting a persuasive response. In a way, GOP complaints about the failure of bipartisanship and the inability to create transformative change call attention to their responsibility for both failures. Instead of ‘Obama vs. Obama,’ their strategy could end up looking like ‘Republicans vs. the GOP.’

Laura Meckler has a sobering article at The Wall St. Journal, “Democrats Lag in Voter Registration.” According to Catalist, a group with Democratic ties that studies voting, “In North Carolina, half of all people who registered to vote in 2008 were oriented toward the Democrats, and about 20% were oriented toward Republicans, a 30-percentage-point advantage for Democrats…Since then, that advantage has been erased. Republican-oriented voters have run slightly ahead of presumed Democratic voters in new registrations in North Carolina throughout 2010 and 2011…The picture is similar among new registrations nationally. Democrats had a 2-to-1 advantage in 2008, but in the most recent quarter, Republicans were slightly ahead, Catalist found.”

Many progressives applaud the retirement of Dem Sen. Ben Nelson. Others worry that the GOP may have just clinched a Senate takeover.

Salon’s Jefferson Morley interviews Thomas Frank about his new book, “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.” Frank addresses the failure of liberalism and Democratic messaging, the rise of the tea party, “a cognitive withdrawal from the shared world” and ‘utopian market populism’ as chasing “the dream more vivid than life itself.”

It’s still a little gimmicky, but here’s the first thing I’ve read that makes an Obama-Clinton ticket sound interesting.

Recent polling in Iowa suggests Paul has not been damaged by reports about his racist newsletters, according to Slate.com’s Dave Weigel. My guess is Paul’s largely low-information constituency doesn’t read, know or care much about racial injustice and many simply have a high tolerance for bigotry in general. Newt and Bachmann, to their credit, have denounced Paul’s newsletters, while Mitt, as usual, cowers in the shadows.

Am I alone in thinking this endorsement smells a little like a set-up?

David Lauter of the L. A. Times Politics Now reports that “Latinos by a 2-to-1 margin disapprove of how President Obama is handing deportations of illegal residents, but by an even larger margin, Latino voters favor him over Mitt Romney, according to a new survey by the Pew Hispanic Center..Among the registered voters in the survey, Obama led Romney in a hypothetical matchup by 68%-23% — about the same margin by which Obama defeated John McCain among Latino voters in 2008, according to exit polls.”

Emily’s List has just published a “GOP Presidential Scorecard,” rating the Republican candidates according to their positions on five major issues of concern to women. Hint: Newt flunked worst.

It isn’t all about electoral politics. Dara O’Rourke writes at The Boston Review about another track for progressives activists, the awakening of the “Citizen Consumer.”

Jeffrey Toobin’s “Holder’s Legacy” at The New Yorker urges the A.G. to accept a worthy challenge: “…To define his legacy as Attorney General–as something more than the guy who tried, and failed, to have Guantánamo Bay detainees tried in federal court in New York. There is a purity, a simplicity, about the voting-rights fight that is sadly absent from many modern civil-rights battles. This is not about special privileges, or quotas, or even complex mathematical formulae. It’s about a basic right of American citizenship, which is being taken from large numbers of people for the most cynical of reasons. The laws are, quite literally, indefensible–so Holder ought to make the states that have them try to defend them. That would be a legacy that would make any Attorney General, and any American, proud.”

Time out for a little levity at Op-Ed News, where Rev. Dan Vojir’s “Driving The Clown Car: A (Serious) Look At GOP Campaign Managers With Nonetheless HILARIOUS UDATES!” reviews the latest Republican shenanigans.

Been wondering, just who are these mighty “job-creators” who Republicans keep referencing in their never-ending quest to fatten the incomes of millionaires? Rick Newman has a pretty good primer on the term — and its abuse, “What ‘Job Creators’ Really Want” at U.S. News Politics.

The Prez has +2 approval margin in the latest Gallup poll, an impressive improvement over -16 in October.

Newt compares his exclusion from the Virginia primary ballot to the attack on Pearl Harbor in which more than 2,400 Americans were killed and left another 1,200 wounded. “I’m not sure the analogy does justice to the grandness, the immensity of Newt,” conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer observes dryly. “I think the better analogy is 1066 — the Battle of Hastings. And I think King Harold is dead and William the Conqueror has landed. And Newt is going pick up the crown of the last king of the Saxons and lead a trusty band of Saxons fueled with money from Freddie Mac and will retake Britain from William and change the course of European history. I think that that kind of analogy captures the cosmic importance of the Newt campaign.”

This unsigned Economist article on “The faith (and doubts) of our fathers: What did the makers of America believe about God and religion?” should be of interest to Democratic candidates challenging GOP theocrats who jabber on about their oneness with the Founding Fathers.

Newt’s failure to get the requisite 10K signatures to get on the VA ballot — even with paid staffers gathering signatures — in his home state and an important swing state, indicates that there may be serious incompetence afoot in his campaign. It gets worse, as CNN’s Steve Brusk reports, quoting Newt’s campaign director Michael Krull: “We will work with the Republican Party of Virginia to pursue an aggressive write-in campaign to make sure that all the voters of Virginia are able to vote for the candidate of their choice.”…Problem is, notes Brusk, “Virginia state law specifically prohibits voters from writing in candidates not on the ballot in primary elections.”

WaPo’s Josh Hicks gives Ron Paul three Pinocchio’s for his evasive comments about who wrote the many racist comments in his newsletter. Too generous, imho. For a revealing look at the “white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists” who have embraced Paul, read the Times’s “Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views but Doesn’t Disavow the Support” by Jim Rutenberg and Serge F. Kovalesky.

Democratic activists have an article to read at Demos about a significant constituency, “From Citizenship to Voting: Improving Registration for New Americans” by Tova Andrea Wang and Youjin B. Kim. The authors explain: “The significant difference in turnout rates between native-born and naturalized Americans is due, to an enormous degree, to a parallel gap in voter registration rates. For naturalized citizens who surmount the barrier of voter registration, turnout rates are very similar to or even higher than among registered native born citizens. Thus, the key to increasing participation of naturalized citizens is to make voter registration more accessible.”

Robert Farley, Lori Robertson, D’Angelo Gore and Brooks Jackson have put together a fairly thorough USA Today report, “Fact Check: Many attacks on Gingrich are true,” which could be helpful to Dems in ’12.

John Nichols makes an important observation in The Nation about a recent Politico report on the Wisconsin movement to recall Governor Walker: “Politico errs when it sees the fight in narrowly partisan terms. What is happening in Wisconsin and, frankly, a lot of other states, goes beyond Democratic and Republican positioning. The overwhelming support for the recall drive in rural counties that backed Walker in 2010 offers a strong indication that of the more than 500,000 signatures already collected on petitions seeking to recall Walker and Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, tens of thousands have come from voters who have until recently identified themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, and who still think of themselves as conservatives…Walker did not merely pick a partisan fight when he attacked public-sector unions, public services and public education. Rather, he attacked the underpinnings of civil society.”

E. J. Dionne’s column “Obama: The conservative in 2012” makes an interesting argument that Dems should find helpful in appealing to moderates, the idea that the GOP field is pushing a radical right-wing agenda, positioning Obama squarely in the political center “For the first time since Barry Goldwater made the effort in 1964,” writes Dionne, “the Republican Party is taking a run at overturning the consensus that has governed U.S. political life since the Progressive era…Obama is defending a tradition that sees government as an essential actor in the nation’s economy, a guarantor of fair rules of competition, a countervailing force against excessive private power, a check on the inequalities that capitalism can produce, and an instrument that can open opportunity for those born without great advantages.”

The Wall St. Journal Editorial “The GOP’s Payroll Tax Fiasco: How did Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?” is getting huge buzz. When the WSJ joins the Weekly Standard and National Review in piling on Boehner, a consensus that knee-jerk obstructionism is getting old is emerging across the political spectum. Even Newt is urging Boehner to cave, sayeth the WSJ.
At Daily Kos DemfromCT has a good round-up on the payroll tax banjax.
Peter Grier’s Monitor post “Are GOP voters fooling themselves about Newt Gingrich’s electability?” discusses what polls show about the disconnect between Republicans and the population at large on the topic of Newt’s chances against Obama.
George Will has a characteristically droll graph in his WaPo column on why Newt is not a real conservative: “Gingrich’s unsurprising descent into sinister radicalism — intimidation of courts — is redundant evidence that he is not merely the least conservative candidate, he is thoroughly anti-conservative. He disdains the central conservative virtue, prudence, and exemplifies progressivism’s defining attribute — impatience with impediments to the political branches’ wielding of untrammeled power. He exalts the will of the majority of the moment, at least as he, tribune of the vox populi, interprets it.”
Tomasky makes the case that it could be Santorum time.
Conor Friedersdorf, staff writer at The Atlantic has a long article on “Grappling With Ron Paul’s Racist Newsletters,” agonizing really, over how to deal with Paul’s publishing ugly racial diatribes. Friedersdorf glosses over the report in Ramesh Ponnuru’s Bloomberg post, which I flagged on Tuesday, noting that in 2004 Paul was the sole vote (414-1) in congress against a resolution celebrating the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Worse, he gave a speech defending his vote, arguing that “employers who wish to discriminate against blacks, in his view, should be free to do so,” according to Ponnuru. Judging by the tortured rationalizations, Libertarians seem to be having a tough time letting go of Paul.
CNN’s Gloria Borger does a good job trying to make Paul explain his newsletters on camera. Watch Paul respond here. Meanwhile Jackie Kucinich of USA Today reports in “Paul’s story changes on racial comments” that in an interview with the Dallas Morning News he “admitted writing at least some of the passages when first asked about them in an interview in 1996.”
Lauren Fox argues at US News that “Ron Paul Victory Could Hurt Legitimacy of Iowa Caucuses,” not for the aforementioned reasons, but because “If Paul wins and then fades really quickly afterward [in national campaigning]…then you have two caucuses in a row where the Iowa winner doesn’t go on to be the GOP nominee,” says Christopher Larimer, a professor at Northern Iowa University, quoted in Fox’s article.
Iowa, Schmiowa, I say. It’s past time for reforming the primary process so the states take turns going first or draw the privilege by lots. Other reform proposals here.
Alex Altman asks an important question at Time Swampland : “Americans Elect: Can a Well-Heeled Group of Insiders Create a Populist Third-Party Sensation?” Altman’s article provides an interesting look at an ostensibly moderate group, which may function more as a stealth GOP effort to drain moderate support from Dems. See also Michael Finnegan’s L.A. Times report on Americans Elect.

You know that widely-accepted meme that the public strongly opposes The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that nearly all Americans purchase health insurance, the one that has been used to help drive the effort to repeal or overturn the law? Turns out that it’s not true when polls put the question to the public with a critical missing piece of information. As Sarah Kiff reports at Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in “Messaging the Individual Mandate,” her post on the new Kaiser Family Foundation poll, conducted 12/8-13 and released today:

Kaiser found, as a baseline, 65 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the health reform law’s mandated purchase of health insurance. But among those, they found the majority would flip to a positive opinion when they were told that Americans with employer-sponsored insurance really wouldn’t have to deal with the mandate.

In other words, when the public is properly informed about how the “mandate” actually works, you get a strong majority, 61 percent supporting it, with only 34 percent still opposed. Other pieces of information also significantly reduced unfavorable attitudes toward the legislation. Reminding the public that without the mandate, people could “wait until they are seriously ill before buying health insurance, which will drive up costs for everyone” gets support for the law up to 47 percent, with 45 percent still opposed. Telling respondents that no one would be held to the mandate “if the cost of new coverage would consume too large a share of their income” gets the favorable support up to 49 percent, with 45 percent still opposed.
It may seem a little late to be thinking about re-messaging the individual mandate, with the Supreme Court set to rule on it mid-2012. But it is important for Dems to learn the lesson and pay more attention to different ways of messaging reforms, and specifically how to counter-punch when a reform is oversimplified in the opposition’s attacks.
Moreover, it seems to me that very little effort was put into explaining the law to the public after it was passed. The attitude seemed to be, “well, we got that one passed. Now let’s move on to the next fight.” Even though many people were weary of the whole debate, we didn’t really finish the job of explaining the new law in a way that would elicit strong majority support. A simple FAQs mailer to every home could have helped. Let’s not make that mistake again.

A crack in the obstructionist front? Felicia Sonmez’s “Payroll tax cut compromise further divides GOP” at the Post has a good report on the underlying politics behind the Reid-McConnell bipartisan compromise. Sonmez quotes House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD): “We are witnessing the concluding convulsion of confrontation and obstruction in the most unproductive, tea-party-dominated, partisan session of the Congresses in which I have participated.”
Brendan Nyhan takes some reporters to the woodshed in his Columbia Journalism Review post “When Newt Isn’t Newsworthy:The problems with news pegs in campaign coverage.” Says Nyhan: “Unfortunately, reporters’ dependence on news pegs means that they end up substituting opposing campaigns’ judgments about what issues are important for their own, particularly when it comes to a well-known political figure like Gingrich…Reporters: John H. Sununu should not be your assignment editor!”
Barbara A. Perry, Senior Fellow in Presidential Oral History at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, addresses the possible political fallout of major decision facing the High Court’s upcoming session, in “The Supremes v. Obamacare: Will the Court Decide the 2012 Presidential Election?” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “If the court upholds the entire act, Obama will emerge bruised but victorious from the judicial battle. On the campaign trail, he could then emphasize his efficacy in implementing a key pledge from 2008. The court’s complete invalidation of the law, on the other hand, would deal the president a severe blow…A loss on health care could also prompt Obama to make Supreme Court appointments a campaign issue…”
The polls are all over the place about Newt and Romney, but it’s good to see the President’s approval ratings have reached a high since summer, according to a new ABC/WaPo poll conducted 12/15-18 reported by By Peter Wallsten and Jon Cohen in the Washington Post. Speculation, some of it supported by data, credits his new populist message, a lackluster GOP presidential field, congressional Republicans’ obstructionism and a slight improvement in economic trends. It’s just a hunch, but I’m thinking general likability — in stark contrast to his adversaries — may be worth a few points.
Of the 11 Governorships up next year (not yet including the Wisconsin recall effort) “in a decidedly light gubernatorial year”, Crystal Ball wizards Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley rate 5 safe, likely or lean Republican, 2 as toss-ups and 4 as safe, likely or lean Democratic. The authors provide one-paragraph analyses for each race.
Paul Begala has a fun post up at the Daily Beast, “The GOP Candidates Read Wacky Books.” Mitch likes such enlightening tomes as Bush, Jr.’s “Decision Points” and L. Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth,’ while Newt cozies up with “military texts like Sun Tzu to Buzz Lightyear-style future-babble from Alvin Toffler.” Then there is Michelle Bachman who “cited J. Steven Wilkins’s Call of Duty: The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee…Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker tells us that “Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North.” Perry digs the Glenn Beck-recommended “The Five Thousand Year Leap: 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World” by W. Cleon Skousen, a John Bircher who has reportedly been called “an All-around nutjob” by Mark Hemingway of the National Review.
At last, a decent MSM report focusing on Ron Paul’s racist newsletter, “New Focus on Incendiary Words in Paul’s Newsletters” by Jim Rutenberg and Richard A. Oppel, Jr. in the New York Times. Still we wait for an interviewer to ask Paul point blank, “Mr. Paul, are you opposed to racial discrimination against African Americans?”
Looks like the GOP establishment is getting nervous about Ron Paul, as well as Newt. National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru reports at Bloomberg on another worrisome indicator of Paul’s racial views: “In 2004, the House voted 414-1 for a resolution celebrating the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paul not only voted no but gave a speech arguing that the act should never have been enacted. Employers who wish to discriminate against blacks, in his view, should be free to do so. A federal government that claims the power to override their decisions, he said, could also impose racial quotas. “Relations between the races have improved despite, not because of, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
We don’t expect our politicians to be saints. But Carl Gershman’s moving WaPo tribute, “Vaclav Havel’s legacy to humanity” raises a question: Why can’t we have politicians like this?
Charles Babington has an AP article focused on Romney’s considerable vulnerabilities on the issue of jobs, spotlighting his profiteering from mass layoffs when he was at Bain capital, as well as his weak jobs record as Mass Governor. “Romney’s record is a target-rich environment, since he threw people out of jobs to make a lot of money,” said Doug Hattaway, a Democratic strategist. “Gingrich is harder to paint as a job-destroyer.”…When Romney was endorsed by Delaware tea party activist Christine O’Donnell — she once declared “I’m not a witch” in a Senate race ad — Obama strategist David Axelrod jumped in. “If Christine O’Donnell really wants to help Mitt, maybe she can cast a spell and make his MA and Bain records disappear,” Axelrod said via Twitter.”