A good place to begin your Tuesday reading would be John Nichols article in The Nation, “Occupy the Polls: Tuesday’s Critical Tests of Political Power” which spotlights a ten-pack of elections being held around the country today to watch for clues. Number one is the Ohio referendum to restore labor rights, which progressives are expected to win.
Dems should also keep an eye on swing state Virginia, where top Democrats are rallying to prevent Republicans from controlling the state senate, the last Democratic bulwark in the Old Dominion. The Washington Times’ David Sherfinski has a report here.
Seizing on a newly-released Florida poll indicating that a near-majority of respondents believe the Republicans are sabotaging the economy at the same time as the President’s approval rating is 41 percent in the sunshine state, Jonathan Chait makes the case that Obama’s low approval ratings are being overemphasized by the pundits. Chait notes that Bush’s mid-forties approval numbers improved significantly in ’04 as many voters decided they couldn’t cast ballots for Kerry. Says Chait: “…incumbent approval rating isn’t something that’s independent of the opposing candidate. Voters may shape their view of the incumbent by making a comparison…We have to be a little cautious about interpreting the importance of Obama’s mediocre approval ratings in the face of a polarized electorate and a still-discredited opposition party.”
Mounting opinion poll data indicates that the public believes the GOP is intentionally stalling the economy to hurt the President’s re-election prospects, according to Brian Beutler’s post “Three’s A Trend: Polls Show Voters Believe GOP Intentionally Stalling Economic Recovery” in Talking Points Memo. Salon’s Steve Kornacki has more to say about it here.
Ed Pilkington reports in The Guardian on “Koch brothers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind.” For those who were unaware of the extent of the brothers’ grandiose ambitions, Pilkington notes “The voter file was set up by the Kochs 18 months ago with $2.5m of their seed money…It has been given the name Themis, after the Greek goddess who imposes divine order on human affairs.”
Martha C. White has a Time Moneyland report “Bank Transfer Day, The Day After.” Although aggregate numerical data is not yet in, some anecdotal reports are impressive. Noting that the facebook-generated campaign had 86K supporters, White adds: “The Denver Post says more than 1,000 protesters marched from bank to bank and urged customers there to close their accounts, while the Colorado Independent says local credit unions have acquired $100 million in new deposits within the past month… In Sacramento, Golden1 Credit Union opened for extended hours, and Vice President of Marketing, Scott Ingram said “It’s a busy day for us. We were anticipating we’d see a lot of new members and that’s what’s happening at every branch,” reported
reported Leigh Paynter of News10 KXTV. Elsewhere, Suzanne Kapner of the Wall St. Journal reports “On Saturday, the Boeing Employees’ Credit Union in Seattle signed up a one-day record 659 new members. At the grand opening of a Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union branch in Pflugerville, Texas, the parking lot was so full that customers had to leave their cars across the street.” You want video? Anna Almendrala of HuffPo has some Youtube footage here.
Most of the action was in the west, but not all of it. Looking to the east, Rashid Mian of the Long Island Press reports in his “Bank Transfer Day: Hundreds Switch to LI Credit Unions” that “Bethpage Federal Credit Union reported that more than 1,200 new accounts were opened on Saturday alone, far more than the usual 300 accounts the credit union opens on average per week.” “We’ve been so busy I’ve been handling customers that are overflow,” says David Glaser, vice president of the National Capital Bank of Washington, in Washington, D.C. The two-branch bank has one location open on weekends, and Glaser says it added six new customers on Saturday. Ordinarily, he says a Saturday might yield just a single new customer or none at all,” according to White’s report in Time, cited above.
Dems need not be intimidated by GOP bluster and cherry-picked polls arguing for a return to “market-based” healthcare,’ because some polls show show quite the opposite, As Sarah Kliff of Ezra Klein’s wonkblog reveals in her “Unexpected chart of the day: Americans want more government in health care.”
Elizabeth DiNovella has a penetrating report in The Progressive on “The Group Behind the Republican Takeover,” the Republican State Leadership Committee, which “played a decisive role in the 2010 elections, and helped flip twenty state legislative chambers from Democrat to Republican. Republicans now control more state legislatures than at any time since 1928.” DiNovella notes that, “Able to raise unlimited funds, the Republican State Leadership Committee is a stalking horse for corporate America. Top contributors to the group include Altria (formerly Philip Morris), Anheuser-Busch, Citigroup, Comcast Cable, Exxon Mobil, Home Depot, Monsanto, PhRMA, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Verizon, and WellPoint.” Just thought you oughtta know.
Anyone who has any doubts that ‘felon disenfranchisement’ laws being strengthened by Republicans across the country are racially-motivated, should check out “Who Gets to Vote?,” a revealing NYT op-ed by New York law School professor Erika L. Wood.
Ronald Brownstein discusses “The Two Worlds of Whites” revealed in the Pew Research study last week in his National Journal column. Says Brownstein: “On the day after Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg described the modern Democratic coalition as diverse America and the whites who are comfortable with diverse America…That appears to be even more true today. The line between whites who are comfortable with the racial and ethnic change transforming America into a “world nation” and those uneasy about it increasingly looks like one of the most important boundaries of the 2012 campaign.”

After the doomsayers and Pollyanna’s of both parties have all had their say, Ron Brownstein can be counted on for a sound analysis of the political moment in presidential politics. His current National Journal post, “Back to Basics: Can Barack Obama’s amplified populism galvanize the modern Democratic coalition?” provides a carefully-calibrated weighing of the challenges facing the Obama campaign. Brownstein explains:

Regardless of the Republican nominee, those on the Obama team recognize that their biggest obstacle is voter disappointment with his performance, particularly on the economy. They believe one of their biggest opportunities is that voters generally prefer the president’s ideas for dealing with jobs and the deficit over Republican alternatives. They understand that their biggest challenge is to improve the retrospective judgment about his performance while simultaneously encouraging voters to focus more on the prospective comparison with the GOP.
In most national surveys, Obama’s approval rating is running around 45 percent. (Some top Democrats worry that the actual number among likely voters is lower.) Even more ominous, more than two-thirds of Americans surveyed routinely say the country is on the wrong track, the highest level in decades. On both fronts, those numbers more resemble the profile of presidential losers than of winners.

As long as there is an electoral college, U.S. presidents will be elected by 50 different elections, which makes for a complicated calculus. As Brownstein says, “…Even senior Obama strategists acknowledge that they feel more confident about states where his approval rating reaches 47 percent or above.” Brownstein adds that the 47 percent approval figure is “the same number transfixing many Republicans.”
It’s always possible that the economy will pick up during the next year, but Brownstein notes that “…The glum conclusion inside the White House is that the economy isn’t likely to provide him much of a tailwind before Election Day.” Brownstein believes “The smaller-scale administrative initiatives he’s now consistently announcing may help only at the margin.”
But Brownstein does not dismiss the Obama campaign strategy, which he describes:

…Obama’s team is most optimistic about improving his ratings through the comparison with the eventual Republican nominee. That debate, they hope, will remind people of first-term accomplishments like the auto-industry rescue and shift attention toward ideas such as reducing the deficit through a mix of spending cuts and upper-income tax increases, which consistently outpolls the GOP’s cuts-only approach. Put another way, they hope that clarifying the choice will help them win the referendum…Obama strategists say that no matter whom the GOP nominates, the president will deliver the same core message: A Republican president would rubber-stamp the agenda of the GOP Congress and return to policies that caused the crash, favor the wealthy, and squeeze the middle class….

Brownstein recounts the weaknesses of the GOP presidential candidates, most notably Romney, whose “boardroom background” could alienate the largest swing constituency — blue collar whites — which is how Ted Kennedy whipped Romney in the ’94 Bay State Senate race. But Brownstein also cites political strategist Mark Penn’s argument that an over-emphasized “class warrior” message might alienate white collar workers who have been trending Democratic in recent elections.
Brownstein acknowledges that Republicans will “remind voters about the aspects of Obama’s term they like least–such as his stimulus failing to dent high unemployment.” But he leaves the door open for a possible Obama victory, concluding “Obama’s sharpening populism reaches back to his party’s traditions. Whether it can galvanize his party’s modern electoral coalition remains to be proven.”
I would only underscore that, despite historic precedents concerning approval ratings and unemployment rates, there are some major unprecedented factors bearing on the 2012 presidential election, which could be game-changers.
First, The entire GOP field is riddled with well-publicized vulnerabilities, personal and political. Secondly, we have never before seen a Republican party so hell-bent on legislative obstruction at all costs, and there are indications that this is not playing well with the middle class. Third, today’s GOP is more shamelessly devoted to protecting the wealth of multimillionaires from even modest tax increases than ever, contrary to overwhelming public support. Lastly, the public is well-aware that the Republican party is focused on destroying a sitting president as its openly-stated raison d’etre — even if it means voting against putting hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans to work fixing our dangerously decaying infrastructure.
it will take some skillful politicking to exploit these new factors effectively. But if Dems listen to the right strategists, these assets ought to be worth a few points in a close election.

Matthew D. Lassiter, author of “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.” has a New York Times op-ed, “Who Speaks for the Silent Majority” arguing that “Mr. Obama’s challenge in 2012 is not the ideological fervor of Tea Party conservatives, but rather the recognition by many working-class and middle-class voters that both parties favor Wall Street over Main Street. While activist groups on the right and left compete to portray big government or big business as the enemy, the silent majority is still out there in the volatile political center, up for grabs.” Since not all Dems “favor Wall St over Main St.,” Lassiter’s point would be more credible if he said “perception” instead of “recognition.”
Peter Beinhart’s “The GOP’s War Hypocrisy” at The Daily Beast puts to rest any worries anti-war Dems may have entertained about the GOP presidential candidates coming up with a coherent alternative to the Administration’s Afghanistan policy.
The fate of same-day voter registration in Maine is on the line next Tuesday, when voters will cast ballots affirming or rejecting the restoration of the measure. Chris Bowers reports that it’s a close call, with 48 percent rejecting a measure to require voters to register at least two days in advance, and 44 percent supporting it, according to a recent Public Policy Poll. As you might guess, supporters of same-day registration are being outspent by the voter obstruction crowd. Those who want to help correct the imbalance can contribute here.
Marco Rubio (R-FL) is down, but not out, as a possible GOP veep candidate, according to George Bennett’s Palm Beach Post report on a new Suffolk University/WSVN-TV poll.
But Rubio’s “anti-Latino record” is far too problematic for him to do the GOP ticket any good, according to Democratic strategist Maria Cardona’s well reasoned post at CNN politics.
There are encouraging numbers for President Obama in the new Quinnipiac Poll, reports Kyle Leighton at Talking Points Memo, with “big gains among the groups with whom he has had the most problems – whites and men. Women also shift from a five-point negative to a four-point positive,” according to Quinnipiac Institute spokesman Peter Brown…The President leads all his possible GOP challengers outside the poll’s margin of error…Romney is the only GOP candidate that pulls more support from independent voters than Obama, although Cain comes within one point. The key against Romney is female voters — Obama gets 50 percent against Romney’s 38, while they evenly split males.”
Apparently not all rich guys are financial wizards. Mayor Bloomberg popped off on Tuesday, loudly parroting the conservative meme that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act caused the financial meltdown. Krugman shreds the meme, noting that Fannie and Freddie accounted for “very little subprime lending” and adding “this is cheap, politically motivated stuff, motivated by a deliberate desire to mislead. And if Bloomberg actually believes this stuff, he has very bad judgement, not just about the facts, but about who he should trust.”
Dems who want to get a better understanding of the living standards and concerns of young voters should check out a new report posted by Demos, “The State of Young America: the Databook,” especially its splashy Charts and Graphs.
Chris Isidore reports at CNN Money that Harvard student supporters of Occupy Wall St. walked out of an Intro Econ class being taught by Bush economic advisor Greg Mankiw. A student statement said that the protest was being conducted “to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course.” Perhaps it’s time for OWS to hold teach-ins on income inequality on America’s campuses — with strong Democratic support.
Redistricting is serious biz for political junkies, but ProPublica gooses a little levity out of the topic in their catchy ditty “The Redistricting Song.”
Kim Geiger of the L.A. Times Washington Bureau reports that a third party advocacy group funded by secret donors, ‘Americans Elect,’ has just announced that it has secured 1.9 million signatures needed for a spot on the Ohio presidential ballot for 2012. The group has already qualified in Florida, Michigan and Nevada, Arizona, Alaska and Kansas — “and is awaiting certification in California, Utah, Hawaii and Arkansas.”

The GOP can no longer be defined solely by the acronymn terms “Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis.” The “sabotage” meme is also begining to stick, as Political Animal Steve Benen observes in the Washington Monthly: “…the “sabotage” question — concerns that Republicans are deliberately hurting the country, holding back the economy on purpose, for the express purpose of undermining the Obama presidency — is gaining mainstream traction.”
Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert have a DCorps report on a new GQR survey exploring attitudes toward the Occupy Wall St. Movement and revealing “an intensely anti-establishment, anti-Washington, anti-Wall Street moment.” The report also indicates “On our thermometer scale, voters give chilly ratings all around. Everyone has dropped substantially, but support for the Republican Congress has completely disintegrated. More than half of all voters give these Republicans a negative rating, with a mean rating under 40 degrees. With House Republicans getting a remarkable 65 percent disapproval, the race for Congress is now dead even, after Republicans won by 8 points in 2010.”
Julian Brookes has a Rolling Stone post, “People are Ditching Their Banks and Shredding Their Cards,” noting: “Efforts like the Facebook-based Bank Transfer Day,, which is urging depositors to switch to a (low-or no-fee) credit union before Nov. 5, and Move Your Money, are having an effect, and local news outlets are reporting an uptick in fund shifts from big banks and into nonprofit institutions. Understandably, credit unions are piling on with ad campaigns urging potential customers to “ditch their banks” and “shred their cards.” Some credit unions have seen a 30 percent bump; others have doubled their membership.”
David G. Savage of the L.A.Times D.C. Bureau has an update on the GOP’s nation-wide voter suppression campaign, “Election laws tightening in GOP-run states”
Ron Brownstein’s National Journal post, “The Stained Glass Divide,” shows Dems doing a little better among the faithful than I expected: “Looking then at all adults, Republicans lead Democrats in identification among the very religious by 49 percent to 36 percent; Democrats lead Republicans among the non-religious by 52 percent to 30 percent; and Democrats narrowly lead among the moderately religious by 44 percent to 38 percent.”
In his CNN opinion post, James Carville makes a pretty tight argument “Why Rick Perry’s presidential bid is toast.”
Daniel Stone has a clip ‘n share for Dems at The Daily beast, “The Tea Party Pork Binge,” hammering conservative politicians for the disonnect between their pious government-bashing on the one hand and their eagerness to grab all the pork they can for their constituents, Eric Cantor being exhibit ‘A.’: “But away from the cameras, Cantor sometimes pulls right up to the spending trough, including the very stimulus law he panned in public. Letters obtained by Newsweek show him pressing the Transportation Department to spend nearly $3 billion in stimulus money on a high-speed-rail project–not the one he derided in Nevada, but another in his home state.” More juicy revelations here.
Jessica Brady has an interesting post at Roll Call Politics, discussing how conservative challengers in GOP primaries are a potentially-powerful asset for Democrats in their quest to retake majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Chris Bowers reports how “One part of Republican plan to derail Wisconsin recalls collapses,” when Republican state Senator Dale Schultz took a stand against a bill requiring the recall effort to be conducted under new, redistricted state maps. Bowers notes, however, that the state GOP has another bill in the hopper, which could obstruct the recall by requiring that recall petititions be notarized.

Feeling frustrated with your bank or disgusted with megabanks in general? Danielle Douglas has an alternative to consider in her WaPo article “Credit Unions Pounce After Banks Raise Fees.”
Douglas quotes from an ad placed by a Kensington, MD credit union: “There’s no reason to pay your bank, when we’re here to pay you, with: no-fee checking and debit card, no minimum balance requirements . . . dividends paid quarterly.”
Douglas explains further,

In the past month, the National Association of Federal Credit Unions recorded a 350 percent increase in Web traffic to its online credit union locator, CUlookup.com. The portal matches visitors with institutions they might be eligible to join based on affiliations, such as school, employer or church.
A Facebook group has designated Nov. 5 “Bank Transfer Day,” calling on customers to move their money into credit unions to avoid soaring fees. The event has gained momentum in the blogosphere and spilled into the mainstream media, drawing attention to an often-ignored sector of the financial industry.

Douglas may have overstated the case in saying that credit unions lack extensive ATMs. Many credit unions, for example, are part of the no-fee CO-OP ATM network, which has more than 28,000 CO-OP ATMs nation-wide, more than any major bank. Bank of America, for example, reportedly has an estimated 18,000 ATMs.
Rank and file Dems may be interested to know how banks spend their depositors’ money on politics. According to Opensecrets.org’s most recent analysis of FEC data for the 2012 election cycle, so far Bank of America has given 69 percent of its political donations to Republicans and Wells Fargo has doled out 65 percent of its political contributions to GOP candidates. The American Bankers Association has distributed 73 percent of its political donations to Republicans this cycle, while The Credit Union National Association has so far given 55 percent of its political contributions for this cycle to Republicans (but gave more to Dems in ’08 and ’10).
Good stats for Dems to keep in mind, leading up to Nov. 5, “Bank Transfer Day.”

Brian Beutler’s data-driven analysis at Talking Points Memo guts libertarian ideologue Rep. Paul Ryan’s claims about upward mobility in the U.S., compared to other industrialized nations.
Good news for Dems in Ohio: “October 25, 2011 – Opposition To Ohio’s SB 5 Grows, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; Women, Union Members Push Kasich Deeper In Hole.”
Ronald Brownstein has “Eight Takeaways From Early-State Presidential Primary Polls” at National Journal’s Hotline on Call. Brownstein’s nuanced analysis should provoke high fives in the Romney campaign.
Ditto for Steven Shepard’s “New Polls Show Romney Ahead in First Four States,” also at Hotline. “Taken collectively, the polls show that — despite Cain’s slight lead over Romney in some recent national polling — Romney has the advantage in the four states that will most determine the direction of the GOP nominating process:”
But Cain isn’t over quite yet, according to Charles Franklin’s wonky charts at his new website Pollsandvotes.com.
Dems can hope that past isn’t necessarily prologue, especially in this unprecedented political climate. But Harry Enten’s “History of Presidential Coattails Points to Republicans Keeping the House” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball is worrisome nonetheless.
DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-NY) is more optimistic, as Joshua Miller reports in Roll Call: “Under what he said was his most pessimistic take on the race for the House, Israel did the math to get to 25 Democratic victories in districts across the country. He saw 10 pickups in GOP-held seats won by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004 and by Obama in 2008, along with 15 pickups in GOP-held Obama districts that President George W. Bush won in 2004. But, in what he called his pessimistic scenario, he said most Democratic Members would have to hold on to their seats. “It means we don’t have a margin of error with our incumbents,” Israel said.”
“Black Voters’ Support for Obama Is Steady and Strong,” reports Helene Cooper in the New York Times. “In a recent Pew Research Center poll, black voters preferred Mr. Obama 95 percent to 3 percent over Mitt Romney, “which is at least the margin he got in 2008,” said Michael Dimock, associate director for research at Pew.” The challenge is all about turnout.
Gene Lyons has a Salon.com post, “The Real Reason OWS Terrifies Conservatives,” exploring the possibility that Occupy Wall St. could draw some support from the tea party.
Sarah Kliff’s “How many Americans will gain insurance under health reform? Good question” at Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog has some pertinent insights for Dems charged with defending health care reform during the next year.
Democratic upper of the day has to be Jed Lewison’s “AZ-Pres: President Obama leads Mitt Romney by 5 points” at Daily Kos. Says Lewison, “Taking Arizona would be a big deal: Not only does it represent one of the very few states that could flip to Obama (John McCain won it in 2008), it has a sizable 11 electoral votes, up from 10 in 2008. Including D.C., the average state has 10.5 electoral votes, but because there are a lot of of smaller states, Arizona ranks in the top 20 by electoral vote.”

We can be sure that Republican leaders are watching the arrests and evictions of Occupy Wall St. protesters in several cities, hopeful that things will turn ugly, and law-abiding citizens will turn against the protesters, then progressives and eventually, Democrats.
For now, polls indicate that a healthy plurality of the public approves of the protests, which have been highly successful in focusing media coverage and public attention on the injustices perpetrated by the banking and financial sector. It’s not such an unbridgeable leap from there to awakening growing working-class solidarity among all races, which is a nightmare scenario shared by Rove, Rollins, Luntz, Norquist and all GOP political strategists.
The GOP dream scenario, on the other hand, would be for the heretofore nonviolent protests morph into police-demonstrator violence. Call me paranoid, but no one should be shocked if it is later revealed that agents-provocateur are already engaged in planning disruptions toward that end. Dems should never forget “the Brooks Brothers Riot” nor the covert ops shenanigans of James O’Keefe and his ilk.
No one asked me, but I’m thinking that OWS should now consider a new tactical emphasis, or at least mix tactics. Armies of occupation have limited utility and significant vulnerability in protracted nonviolent conflict, as well as in war. After a certain point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, winning fewer hearts and minds until a point is reached when adverse effects take root. There may be a little more favorable leverage to be gained in the OWS protests. But it can’t last forever.
OWS has served a great purpose in refocusing public attention on corporate/banking abuses. Organizers should now begin planning nation-wide campaigns of economic withdrawal and voter registration, as well. That’s the hardball the banking/financial sector fears far more than occupations with no mass economic action.
Imagine, for example, what could happen if thousands of depositors began taking their cash out of megabanks and put it into credit unions every week. As I noted on October 13, this is beginning to happen here and there. Perhaps target a different city each week, with a goal of ten thousand depositor transfers to community credit unions, and 10 thousand newly registered voters. After losing a few hundred thousand depositors, Big Banks just might begin to show more concern for investing in American jobs and other reforms. If they won’t meet the challenge, community credit unions are already programmed to do so.
The night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. urged his supporters “Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal,” and he compelled historic reforms with that commitment. It’s just possible that King’s challenge has even more resonance for our times.

In his article “The Class War Has Begun” in New York Magazine, Frank Rich notes the similarities between the ‘Bonus Marchers’ of an earlier era and the Occupy Wall St. movement and surveys prospects for the protests awakening stronger class consciousness in the U.S.
Harold Meyerson’s WaPo column, “It’s hard to hate these occupiers,” distills the significance of the Occupy Wall St. protests into finding a worthy target: “It’s channeling ire — our ire — where ire should go: toward the banks that have fostered and profited from America’s decline.”
In the current issue of Dissent, Mark Engler writes about “The Future of the #Occupy Movement: Solidarity and Escalation.” Says Engler: “If the #Occupy movement is to remain in the media spotlight and continue gaining momentum, it must escalate. That could involve many steps, including occupying banks, continuing to use direct action against foreclosures, and embracing further international days of action.”
Joan McCarter reports at Daily Kos that “Lawmakers want to cut military benefits.” As McCarter says, “Putting defense contractor welfare above personnel, Congress and the Defense Department are doubling down on the Simpson-Bowles recommendations for catfood for veterans.” Republicans can often get away with screwing vets because of their upscale districts, but Dems who sign on are flirting with political suicide.
The Electoral College may be toast before long, if the latest Gallup Poll (conducted 10/6-9) numbers hold for a while. According to Politico, “Americans want to dump the Electoral College for a popular vote system by a margin of nearly 2-1…for the first time in a decade, a majority – 53 percent – of Republicans now favor the popular vote over the Electoral College. Democratic Party support for replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote system has been above 70 percent for the last decade.”
Tom Cohen of CNN Election Center discusses the possibility that President Obama’s foreign policy successes, including facilitating the dethroning if Gadhafi with no U.S, ground troops, killing bin Laden and ending the occupation of Iraq, will be a formidable campaign asset during the next year — particularly if he accelerates withdrawal from Afghanistan during 2012.
Although many people say they support the principle of ‘divided government,’ Ben W. Heineman, Jr.’s interesting post in The Atlantic, “The 4-Letter Word That Can Boost Obama’s 2012 Chances: V-E-T-O: Can the president win re-election by pledging to block Republicans?,” may be a little dicey in that it assumes a lot of “what if?” strategic voting. Still, in a close election…
Eric Alterman’s current post, “Think Again: The Continuing Curse of ‘On the One-Handism‘” at the Center for American Progress web pages explores a couple of the ways Republicans play the MSM for suckers. “What we have here is a prime example of what I have called “on the one-handism,” what Paul Krugman calls “the cult of balance” and what James Fallows calls the problem of “false equivalence.” The phenomenon derives from a multiplicity of causes but rests on two essential insights…”
“Republican House members have more than twice as many followers as their Democratic counterparts — about 1.3 million versus roughly 600,000 — and are far more active on Twitter with more than 157,000 individual Twitter messages, versus roughly 62,000 for Democrats,” reports Jennifer Steinhauer in her New York Times article, “The G.O.P.’s Very Rapid Response Team.”
In her WaPo The Fix post, “Race and redistricting: Unholy alliance starting to fray,” Rachel Weiner has some good news for Dems: The GOP redistricting practices of ‘cracking’ (diluting) African American votes and/or ‘packing’ it into districts to benefit Republicans in adjacent ‘whitewashed’ districts, which has long bedeviled Dems, particularly in the South, seems to be coming to an end for two major reasons….
If you want to see which GOP presidential candidates various Senators and members of congress have endorsed, The Hill has a round-up here.
Sam Stein’s “Presidential Campaigns Seek Fundraising’s Holy Grail: Mobile Donations” in HuffPo flags an important fund-raising trend: “Developing easy ways for people to donate to political campaigns using their cellphones has been the holy grail of campaign finance teams for several cycles now.” Apparently many people who don’t like giving their charge card numbers to political campaigns, are much more comfortable with just adding the contribution to their phone bills.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom being parroted by conservatives, Greg Sargent has obtained some interesting polling data indicating that most blue collar whites, perhaps the largest swing voter constituency, approve of the Occupy Wall St. protests. As Sargent explains:

It’s become an article of faith among some conservative and even neutral commentators: If Obama and Dems embrace Occupy Wall Street, they risk driving away droves of blue collar white voters in swing states who are crucial to Obama’s reelection. The argument: These voters tend to be culturally alienated by the theatrics of such protests, just as they were in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and won’t think Occupy Wall Street’s brand of populism is in their own interests — so Obama and Dems align themselves with the movement at their extreme peril.
But I’ve obtained some new polling that seriously complicates this argument: In two new national polls, the cross tabs show that majorities of blue collar whites do, in fact, back the protests.

Sargent asked for and got data from United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll, and Time magazine’s poll revealing the views of non-college-educated whites, “a reasonably good category for judging blue collar white sentiment.” The results showed:

In the National Journal poll, 56 percent of non-college-educated whites agree with the protesters; only 31 percent disagree.
In the Time poll, 54 percent of non-college-educated men, and 48 percent of non-college educated women, view the protests favorably. (That’s roughly 51 percent overall.) Meanwhile,only 29 percent of non-college-educated men, and only 19 percent of non-college-educated women, disagree. (That’s roughly 23 percent.)
The sample sizes were reasonable, too: In the National Journal poll, 384 non-college-educated respondents were polled; in the Time poll, 379 were surveyed.

Sargent acknowledges the problems with interpretation: “These may be low information voters. They may be reacting to the target of the protests more than registering agreement with the protesters themselves. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t have a specific agenda, which makes it easier for people to back it, and things could change once it starts making specific demands.”
He notes also that President Obama’s approval rating with this demographic is still very low. But, as Sargent adds, the evidence he insightfully unearthed nonetheless suggests that “the protesters’ message may be resonating among voters who are supposedly certain to be alienated by the protests.”
Conservatives seem to be in denial, longing for the good old days when they could get away with the even then simplistic contention that social protesters and white workers were separated by a vast cultural divide into two very different political tribes. That’s not to say that the poll numbers will hold indefinitely, as Sargent notes. But it doesn’t look like the ‘hardhats vs. hippies’ meme is going to stick this time.

George Lakoff’s “A Framing Memo for Occupy Wall Street” at Reader Supported News contains some sound advice for the protesters. Lakoff, author of “The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain,” shares some good insights here, among them, “Occupy elections: voter registration drives, town hall meetings, talk radio airtime, party organizations, nomination campaigns, election campaigns, and voting booths…Above all: Frame yourselves before others frame you.”
One of the frequently-heard cynical utterances in Georgia is “Thank God for Mississippi,” because they almost always edge out the Peach State in the race to the bottom regarding various educational statistics. Well, today it’s “Thank God for Alabama,” which has topped even GA in the quest for bad press for having the most idiotic, destructive and racist immigration law. This New York Times editorial explains it well.
Speaking of vicious, self-destructive immigration policies, Trip Gabriel’s “Comments on Immigration Alienate Some Hispanics,” also in the NYT, discusses the boomerang potential of immigrant-bashing in the GOP Vegas debate.
At Daily Kos, Chris Bowers flags new and recent polls indicating strong public support for OWS. Bowers cautions “These are great numbers for Occupy Wall Street, but they should be digested with an important qualifier. By a four-to-one margin, those who agree with Occupy Wall Street “mostly agree” rather than “completely agree.” When polls are heavy with “somewhat” or “mostly” responses, that is often a sign that opinions are not well formed on that subject matter. As such, the challenge for Occupy Wall Street moving forward will be to solidify its broad, but soft, support.”
Gotta love Blue Texan’s comment at Firedoglake.com on Sarah Palin’s diss of Gov. Perry’s immigration policy: “Man, just when the Secessionist needed a life preserver — she throws him an anvil.”
Interesting read at Foreign Policy, where Jacob Heilbrunn has a lament “Twilight of the Wise Man,” concerning the demise of, well, sanity among the GOP’s international affairs gurus, in particular the once-influential but now besieged-by-the-tea-party Sen. Richard Lugar. “This kind of above-politics deal-making on matters of global importance was once the hallmark of a whole caste of Republican policymakers, the so-called “wise men”: avatars of the establishment who always maintained that foreign affairs is a lofty sphere to be left untainted by partisan bickering.”
AP’s article, “Ohio Union Fight Could Boost Dems’ 2012 Chances” by Ann Sanner and Sam Hananel quotes former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland on the importance of the November 8 referendum regarding whether to dump Ohio’s draconian restrictions on public employee unions: “If we were to win, I think it would be a major encouragement that will be hugely beneficial, not only to Democrats running for the state House and state Senate, but I think it would be a huge benefit to Senator (Sherrod) Brown and to President Obama.”
WaPo Fact-Checker Glenn Kessler doesn’t merely shred the job-creation claim made by Sens. McCain, Paul and Portman about their “ludicrous” alternative to the President’s jobs bill; he pulverizes it to smithereens.
Joe Slade White and Ben Nuckels discuss “The unconventional campaign that helped Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn secure an improbable win” in their Campaigns & Elections post, “Values, Timing and Breaking the ‘Rules.” The authors answer some interesting questions, including: “So how did the pundits and insiders have it so wrong? How did the Quinn campaign get outspent by over a million dollars on TV in the last eight weeks and still pull off a victory? And how did Quinn win, while the Democratic candidate to fill President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat lost?”
Aspiring authors take note of Herman Cain’s clever formula for getting your book on the best-seller list: Run for Prez, shell out $36K of campaign cash for copies of your own book, bought from your own company and..voila! Greg Howard fleshes out the scam at Slate.com.