Rob Stein, Founder of the Democracy Alliance, has a sobering, must-read for Democrats in his HuffPo article “The Grand New Alliance.” Stein skillfully dissects the component elements of the right wing coalition of his post’s title (‘GNA’ in shorthand), provides a thoughtful assessment of their cumulative power and makes a compelling argument that it promises serious trouble for Democrats and Progressives in 2012 — and beyond.

A profoundly significant new political alignment within the right flank of the Republican Party is becoming entrenched in American politics.
For the modern, somewhat more mainstream economic and neo-conservative Reagan-Bush-Bush-Cheney Republican Establishment, it is a threat far more dangerous to its control of the Conservative-Right than, in their time, were the rambunctious John Birch Society, the youthful Goldwater Rebellion, or the Lee Atwater upstarts who orchestrated the Reagan Revolution.
For Independents, moderate Republicans and Democrats this new alignment should be a wake-up call that the foundations of Democracy are always fragile and the promises of America must never be taken for granted…An harmonic convergence — a “grand new alliance” — is occurring among Libertarians, the Christian Right and the disparate legions of Tea Party activists that is transforming politics as we have known it.

Stein acknowledges significant “tensions and fissures” in this multi-tentacled right-wing coalition, “around the environment, the legitimacy of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, and gay marriage.” He adds, however, that,

Today, the Libertarian-Religious-Tea Party Alliance is a consciously strategic federation of separate, but inter-connected, wings of a potent right-wing political machine that is energized by the frightening uncertainties of the economic downturn, mobilized in rigid opposition to a President they cannot abide, emboldened by confrontation with some of their historic allies within the broader Republican conservative movement, and fueled by a new avalanche of post-Citizen’s United-inspired financial resources.
Its political power has risen rapidly and dramatically. In just the past twelve months, the GNAs’ successes have affected virtually every nook and cranny of American politics – sweeping victories in the 2010 Congressional and state elections, grid-locked legislative stand-off with Congressional Democrats and President Obama, scorched earth political wars in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey and other states with overwhelming Republican elected majorities, and a dramatic hijacking of the current Republican Presidential Primary process through the candidacies of Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

Stein goes on to describe the three key elements of the GNA — libertarians, the religious right, and the tea party — their numerical strength, what they believe, how they get funded, work together and resolve their differences. He notes that the dominant element, the tea party, successfully projects a “powerfully resonant right-wing populist economic (anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government, anti-Obama) message that is drowning out reasoned debate, causing legislative gridlock, and strengthening reactionary forces.” Worse,

Read more…

Arielle Kass has an instructive article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution “Banking customers switching over fees.” Kass reports on an awakening movement that Big Banks will find more than a little disturbing — depositors taking their money out of mega-banks and putting it into community credit unions that invest in, gasp, American jobs. This should be a central priority of the Occupy Wall St. protests.
In that same vein, check out Yves Smith’s post and accompanying video clip at Naked Capitalism “As Many As 24 people Arrested for Trying to Close Accounts at Citibank.” The overreaction of law enforcement to this protest in the video clip is stunning. It appears that the movement to transfer deposits from big banks to community credit unions is growing some legs.
Just in case you thought it has all been said on this topic, along comes Jonathan Chait in New York magazine with “Should Liberals Like Occupy Wall Street?,” with some fresh insights and linkages to what some of the interesting progressive writers are thinking.
Also, Eugene Robinson’s WaPo column “How Democrats can use Occupy protests to their advantage” offers a salient observation that “The Republican Party is trapped on the wrong side of this issue. Democrats should be moving boldly, not timidly, to claim the issue of economic justice as their own.”
Political map freaks alert: The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has a “Map of Shame” providing roll-over state-by-state updates on voter photo ID laws.
ProPublica.org has a “History of U.S. Government Bailouts,” put together by Jesse Nankin, Eric Umansky, Krista Kjellman and Scott Klein, and featuring a nifty color-coded chart so you can get a sense of the comparative size of the bailout for each corporate beneficiary. Most occurred during Republican administrations.
CNN’s Gustavo Valdez’s post, “Why Nevada’s Latino vote could make the difference in the 2012 election,” makes a strong case that NV’s electoral votes are Dems’ to lose, with Latinos now 26 percent of the population, accounting for 46 percent of the state’s population growth in the last decade.
I’ve always felt progressives could make more effective use of patriotic symbols — there’s a reason MLK always marched with the American flag behind him. In his American Prospect post, “The Constitution: A Love Story,” Garrett Epps argues that “It’s time for liberals to reclaim our founding document from fanatics who worship its name but not its meaning…too many progressives see only the imperfection and shame in the Constitution’s history and blind themselves to the promise of its text.”
Colin Woodard’s interesting geopolitical analysis, “A Geography Lesson for the Tea Party” at The Washington Monthly, divides the U.S. into more than a dozen cultural regions to conclude that the Tea Party’s “influence is melting away across vast swaths of America,” even though it still rules the GOP.
Mark Lander has a New York Times report on President Obama’s 3-day bus tour of North Carolina, a state the white house considers key to his 2012 prospects. Today the President begins day two of his tour. But if you really want to better understand the underlying political dynamics of the now pivotal tar heel state, you can’t do better than reading the articles by Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis at Facing South, particularly their reportage on the NC GOP’s Daddy Warbucks, Art Pope (see here and here, for example).
Greg Sargent addresses an important question in his Plum Line post, “What if working class Americans actually like Occupy Wall Street?” Unions are already on board and Sargent quotes Karen Nussbaum, executive director of Working America, which represents unorganized workers and is experiencing unprecedented growth in the wake of OWS: “if we keep the subject on jobs and democracy, we’ll keep those working class moderates in this fight…It’s crucial that we not let this moment evaporate, and we can do that if we tie the movement to a working class constituency.”

Nate Silver’s “The Geography of Occupation” should erase any doubt that the Occupy Wall St. protests are a nation-wide phenomenon which may yet surpass the tea party in size. Silver explains:

The nascent movement known as Occupy Wall Street had its largest single day of protests on Saturday. And a funny thing happened: most of the action was far from Wall Street itself.
No, I don’t mean at Zuccotti Park — which is not, technically, on Wall Street. Nor do I mean Times Square — all of 19 minutes away from Wall Street on the ‘C’ train — where large crowds of protesters gathered on Saturday.
Instead I mean Europe, where crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city (more, probably, than the protests in the United States combined). And I mean California and other parts of the western United States, where crowds were proportionately much larger than in the Northeast or elsewhere in the country.

Silver argues further that “…the distribution of protests throughout the United States may reveal something about the political orientation of the protesters.” He explains his methodology:

The way that I studied this was to search through hundreds of local news accounts for credible estimates of the crowd sizes for each gathering. Where possible, I used estimates provided by reporters or public safety officials rather than the protesters themselves as they are less subject to exaggeration. In some cases, there were multiple estimates of the size of the protest in a given city — they ranged, for instance, from about 5,000 to 15,000 for the New York protests — in which case I used the median estimate.
This exercise is meant, in part, to provide a comparison to the crowds that gathered for the first widespread Tea Party protests on April 15, 2009, for which I adopted a similar approach and came up with an estimate of at least 300,000 protesters across the country.

Silver concedes that “Saturday’s Occupy protests were probably smaller than that.” He found crowd size estimates for a total of at least 70K protestors, but he believes it could be as many as 100K in 150 cities across the U.S., which is impressive for a single day.
In terms of regional breakdown, Silver says most of the action was in the west, possibly because of the more liberal political attitudes in the region and abundance of tech-savvy youth mobilizing turnout. He presents a chart showing “protesters per 1 million population,” with the highest percentage turnout in the west, followed by the northeast, the midwest and the south. Notes Silver:

Over all, about 38,000 protesters — more than half of the documented total — turned out in the Western Census Bureau Region, which accounts for about 23 percent of the country’s population. On a per-capita basis, the West drew about two-and-a-half times more protesters than the Northeast, four times more than the Midwest, and five times more than the South. And it wasn’t necessarily in large cities — although places like Los Angeles and Seattle had large crowds, so did the wine-and-cheese town of Santa Rosa, Calif., and the college town of Eugene, Ore., among others.

Silver speculates that, “perhaps the protesters are more ideologically minded than they are interested in partisan politics,” which could be problematic for Democratic hopes of benefitting form OWS. If the protests keep growing at the current fast clip, they could easily approach and perhaps surpass the number of individuals who participated in tea party demos. It will be interesting to see if OWS does as well in terms of media coverage and influence on the political agendas of either party.

Ah, some new data rendering the myth of the ‘liberal media’ into a pile of rubble. As Politico’s Keach Hagey reports on a new Pew Research study of “11,500 news outlets — including news websites and transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, at both the local and national levels — as well as hundreds of thousands of blogs”:

Sarah Palin put an end to her possible presidential candidacy this month with a familiar parting critique: President Barack Obama has an unfair advantage as a candidate because he’s got “about 90 percent of the media still there in his back pocket.”
…But a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, in the past five months, the reverse has actually been true: Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.
Pew found that just 9 percent of the president’s coverage was positive, while 34 percent was negative — a stark contrast to the 32 percent positive coverage and 20 percent negative that it found Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the most covered Republican, received.
“His coverage has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months — even the week that Bin Laden was killed,” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president’s treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.

The wingnuttiest Republicans got plenty of positive coverage, as Pew reports:

The top four most favorably covered candidates, the study found, were all tea party favorites: Perry was followed by Palin, with 31 percent positive coverage and 22 percent negative; Michele Bachmann, with 31 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative; and Herman Cain, with 28 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative…Mitt Romney’s positive and negative coverage were almost in a dead heat at 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

Of course there is always a cautionary note with this kind of data. Some publications carry a lot more weight than others, as do some stories. Associated Press stories, for example, tend to appear in hundreds of newspapers. Hagey quotes one AP story that put a negative spin even on the killing of bin Laden:

A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the street to wildly cheer President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decadelong manhunt. The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his reelection campaign.

Hagey goes on to show that, despite negative stories in the “liberal” media, Perry and Palin have gotten pretty positive coverage, according to the Pew data (Gingrich not so good). Ron Paul has done well on the blogosphere, but not as well in the MSM, while Herman Cain’s coverage has perked up considerably. Hagen quotes Newsweek analyst Jonathan Alter:

…Over the last 2½ years, Obama never got a honeymoon, if you actually look back into the early days of his presidency. He got very positive press on the first day, and he’s been in the scrum ever since…The truth about the American media is that we have gone, over the last 15 years, from something that could accurately be called a dominant liberal media — through the period of American liberalism, from the end of World War II to the founding of Fox News in 1996 — to a dominant conservative media in this country.

Moreover, President Obama is taking plenty of heat from the left flank inside his party, so the cumulative criticism is cited by both the left and right as proof of his growing unpopularity. Yet he still does much better in opinion polls than the Republican Party and surprisingly well in head-to-head horse race polls, considering the current economic situation.
Hagen closes with an inconclusive discussion about whether it is good strategy to attack the media for bias. But what remains clear is that conservative whining about ‘liberal media bias’ won’t find any verification in the best data out there.

At Five Thirty Eight, John Sides has the second installment of “The Moneyball of Campaign Advertising” (part one here) taking a skeptical view of the value of political ads, according to available data — except when a candidate is not well-known.
Dems, know thy adversary. Democrats involved in political analysis, strategy and messaging should check out GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz’s web page. Start here and keep reading and clicking.
Is the upper south trending blue? Kyle Trygstad’s “Latest Quinnipiac Poll Continues to Show Virginia Is Top Battleground” at Roll Call Politics taps a new Quinnipiac University Polling Institute survey to offer some encouragement to both the Obama and Kaine for Senate campaigns.
GOP bullying tactics don’t work so well in the granite state, reports the AFL-CIO blog’s Nora Frederickson. The Republican speaker Bill O’Brien got five of the GOP presidential candidates to pop off in favor of overriding Democratic Governor John Lynch’s veto of the so-called “right-to-work” bill. But after hearing from workers, the override effort flunked, and Bachmann got booed.
John Cassidy’s New Yorker article “Can Obama Win? Not This Way” makes a persuasive case that Obama campaign strategists’ belief that he can win without a strong showing in the industrial states is dangerously wrong.
Curious about top corporate/PAC contributors to Democrats and Republicans? OpenSecrets.org has the percentage breakdowns for the 2012 election cycle thus far.
Need a good soundbite on GOP Senators killing the one jobs bill that has popular support? “There are 14 million people out of work, wages are falling, poverty is rising, and a second recession may be blowing in, but not a single Republican would even allow debate on a sound plan to cut middle-class taxes and increase public-works spending.” So sayeth this New York Times editorial.
But the bill is about to be resurrected — in more palatable bites. Lisa Mascaro and Christi Parsons report from the L.A. Times D.C. bureau on the strategic considerations in their article “Democrats plan next step for Obama’s jobs package“.
Time Magazine Swampland reports that the latest Time/ABT SRBI poll has some good news for Dems. Asked “Regardless of how you usually vote, overall, which party…do you trust to do a better job in dealing with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?”, 42 percent chose Democrats and 31 percent picked Republicans, with 18 percent saying “neither.” In addition, a total of 54 percent of respondents said they had a “somewhat favorable” or “very favorable” opinion of the Wall St. protests and 68 percent said “the rich should pay more taxes,” while 73 percent favored tax hikes on millionaires.
Jamison Foser at Media Matters has a provocative post “The Symbiotic Relationship Between “Moderate” Republicans And The Tea Party,” which faults ‘moderate’ GOP Senators, who “deserve far more blame than they get for Washington gridlock and the continued failure to fix urgent problems…” He calls out Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, along with Mass. Sen. Scott Brown as particularly blame-worthy for political gridlock because they know better. Ditto, says Foser, for GOP House members in swing districts.

Kevin Drum’s “Rich People Create Jobs,” at Mother Jones provides a handy guide to five must-shred myths Dems will have to address to do their best in 2012.
Eric Lichtblau’s New York Times article “Protests Offer Help, and Risk, for Democrats” reviews the complexities of the relationship between Democrats and the Occupy Wall St. Protesters. Robert Reich has some insights on the topic as well.
Naomi Klein delivered an inspiring speech to the OWS demonstration, urging the protesters to remain nonviolent and “…this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.”
If you haven’t yet seen Alan Grayson’s KO of P.J. O’Rourke’s limp attempt to trivialize the Wall St. protests, Digby’s got the transcript and video.
In his WaPo column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. takes America’s most widely-read columnist, George F. Will, to task for setting up a “straw colossus” in his poorly-supported attack on Elizabeth Warren. “My colleague has brought out his full rhetorical arsenal to beat back a statement that he grants upfront is so obviously true that it cannot be gainsaid. Will knows danger when he sees it.”
And Warren’s fund-raising prowess is proving to be as impressive as her ability to rally progressives, as Sean Sullivan reports at Hotline on Call.
John Nichols has an update in The Nation, reporting on the drive to recall Wisconsin’s union-busting Governor Scott Walker — and his efforts to get control of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, which oversees “the pettioning, the voter registration, the voter-identification rules, the vote counting, the recounting, everything…”
The Occupy Wall St. Protest is rapidly approaching tea party levels of news hits, owing in part to clashes with the police, and Nate Silver has the numbers and charts to prove it in his Five Thirty Eight NYT blog.
According to Mark Blumenthal, “…President Obama large-sample national tracking surveys show that the level and intensity of Obama’s overall approval rating among blacks remains largely undiminished.”

I was hoping it wasn’t true. But Brendan Nyhan, always with the “it’s the economy stupid” arguments, now has me convinced he is probably right about the limitations of the “do nothing congress” meme as a Democratic battle axe. Here’s Nyhan, writing as a guest columnist for Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, on Dems’ embrace of the meme:

Can President Obama overcome a weak economy and win in 2012 by campaigning against the Republican Congress? The historical evidence for this claim is weaker than his allies would like to admit.
Obama’s strategy seems to be Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign against a “Do-Nothing” Republican Congress. Last week, for instance, David Goldstein of McClatchy Newspapers asked, “Has President Barack Obama been channeling Harry Truman?”
Like most journalists who have written on the subject, Goldstein repeated the conventional wisdom that Truman’s campaign against the “do-nothing Congress” was responsible for his victory: “Facing long odds in the 1948 election, Truman put Republicans in his campaign bull’s-eye and unloaded on the “do-nothing Congress.” He won, and conventional wisdom took a beating.”
This idea, which has been echoed by opinion makers ranging from former New York Times columnist Frank Rich to Washington Post reporter Dan Balz, has given hope to Obama supporters demoralized by the current state of the economy.
Obama himself has paid homage to Truman’s strategy. During a Sept. 15 speech, for instance, he said: “[T]his Congress, they are accustomed to doing nothing, and they’re comfortable with doing nothing, and they keep on doing nothing.”

Nyhan then quotes from an academic article by University at Buffalo, SUNY political scientist James Campbell:

Until recently, for instance, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) figured that GDP in the first half of 1948 (leading into the Truman-Dewey contest) was growing at a healthy 4.1% rate. The BEA’s latest series indicates that this greatly understated growth at the outset of the 1948 campaign. The BEA now figures that the economy was growing at a sizzling 6.8%, a revision that helps explain Truman’s miraculous comeback…

Not content to leave it at that, Nyhan adds,

This well-timed surge in economic growth is likely to have played an important role in the success of Truman’s campaign. By contrast, the International Monetary Fund just downgraded its forecast for US economic growth in 2011 and 2012 to 1.5% and 1.8%, respectively.

Killjoy.
Nyhan then presents some depressing charts comparing the very different economic situations facing Truman and Obama to make his point. He concedes that the predictions could be wrong and an unexpected upsurge could help Obama and Dems.
But there’s really no denying Nyhan’s larger point — that it would be folly for Dems to think they can reheat Truman’s “Do Nothing Congress” strategy without the favorable economic trends that gave HST the needed cred.
That doesn’t mean Obama can’t get some leverage from the meme, because, after all, the Republicans really are all about gridlock, and it needs to be said. But let’s not bet the ranch on it.
I do have one admittedly less substantial quibble with Nyhan’s excellent post — the title “Obama 2012: Not Exactly the Truman Show.” Having just returned from a couple of days r&r not far from Seaside, FL, the otherworldly village where “The Truman Show” was filmed, I can report that the town feels much more like a Republican creation, with it’s pricey neo-victorian houses, manicured landscaping and upscale boutiques, by all appearances a not entirely welcome colony of hedge fund prosperity that developers have superimposed on the Redneck Riviera.

Dems, especially, should read The New York Times editorial, “Where’s the Jobs Bill?,” urging Democrats, not Republicans, to work through their issues and get unified behind the jobs bill. “…The sharp contrast with the Republican plan to do nothing can only be made if Democrats are clearly united behind a plan to invigorate the economy.”
Lori Montgomery has a WaPo article on the politics of defining “rich” upward to “millionaires” as a new Democratic tax strategy.
Ryan J. Reilly of Talking Points Memo Muckraker posts on a topic that hasn’t gotten enough coverage, considering the scope of the problem: “What The Justice Department Can Actually Do About Voter ID Laws.” Reilly notes the legal limitations facing Dems in challenging the voter i.d. laws in states not covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: for all the other states that passed voter ID laws that aren’t subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, federal intervention is a long shot. The only other option for opposing a voter ID law is an argument under Section 2 of the VRA, where the burden of proof is pretty high.
We need revenues. We’re too fat. Why cant we do this?
In his Dissent article “Neither Revolution Nor Reform: A New Strategy for the Left“, Gar Alperovitaz has a challenge for progressives: “A non-statist, community-building, institution-changing, democratizing strategy might well capture their imagination and channel their desire to heal the world…Just possibly, it could open the way to an era of true progressive renewal, even one day perhaps step-by-step systemic change or the kind of unexpected, explosive, movement-building power evidenced in the “Arab Spring” and, historically, in our own civil rights, feminist, and other great movements.”
Ralph Nader shows Dems how to shred the GOP meme about “job-killing regulations” at Reader Supported News, and make the point that regulations which promote health and safety create jobs. “Wake up Democrats. Learn the political art of truthful repetition to counter the cruelest Republicans who ever crawled up Capitol Hill. You’ve got massive, documented materials to put the Lie to the Republicans.”
When do campaigns ads matter most? Nate Silver has some answers in the first installment of his two-parter on the topic. A nugget: “…the effects of television advertising appear to last no more than a week — a “rapid decay,” write the eggheads. A study of the 2000 presidential election finds the same decay. Campaigns may be wasting millions of dollars running ads weeks if not months before election day, only to have any effects of those ads dissipate. ”
There may be a good lesson for Dems in one anecdote in Sabrina Tavernise’s The Caucus post, “Democrat Wins West Virginia Governor’s Race” in the New York Times: “Kathy Jackson, a retired janitor, said she would cast her vote for the Democratic candidate because she did not trust Mr. Maloney…”I heard on TV that he wanted to take away Medicare,” she said, sitting in a wheelchair in a McDonald’s restaurant in Charleston.”
Obama campaign making hay vs. GOP early voting suppression in Ohio. TPM has the video ad here.
Jeremy Redmon and Daniel Malloy have an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the labor shortage and economic cost of the new Georgia immigration law. The authors explain: “Georgia’s economy is projected to take a $391 million hit and shed about 3,260 jobs this year because of farm labor shortages, according to a report released Tuesday by the state’s agricultural industry.” Many farmers believe the labor shortage and crop losses are a direct consequence of Georgia’s new immigrant-bashing law — House Bill 87 — passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by GOP Governor Nathan Deal. Latino farm workers fearing legalized harrassment have left the state in droves.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. sees a transformation of the race for 2012 in the events of the last week — to the benefit of President Obama and the Democratic Party. “Obama is a long way from being able to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” But for conservatives, the days of wine and roses are over.”

The image of congress has hit rock bottom. As Paul Kane and Scott Clement report in “Poll sees a new low in Americans’ approval of Congress” in the Washington Post:

After nine months of contentious battles on Capitol Hill, Americans have reached a new level of disgust toward Congress that has left nearly all voters angry at their leaders and doubtful that they can fix the problems facing the country.
Whether Republican, Democrat or independent, more Americans disapprove of Congress than at any point in more than two decades of Washington Post-ABC News polling.
Just 14 percent of the public approves of the job Congress is doing, according to the latest poll. That is lower than just before the 1994, 2006 and 2010 elections, when the majority party was on the verge of losing power in the House.
For most it’s not just a casual dislike of Congress: Sixty-two percent say they “strongly disapprove” of congressional job performance. An additional 20 percent “somewhat” disapprove.

Interestingly, among those who were dissatisfied with congress, 39 percent blamed the Republicans, while 25 percent blamed President Obama, with 27 percent blaming both and 9 percent having no opinion. Respondents were not asked if they blamed Democrats.
The last time approval dipped under 20 percent, Dems reaped the benefit. As Clement and Kane note, “Congressional approval has been cut in half since March and stands below 20 percent for the first time since October 1994, just before Republicans ended four decades of Democratic rule in the House.”
The data certainly indicates that the Republicans’ responsibility for congressional gridlock could be a potent meme for Democratic candidates in ’12. It appears that Dems have little to lose and much to gain by hammering the “do-nothing Republicans” meme in ads and throughout the Democratic echo chamber.
Apart from Republicans getting most of the blame for dysfunctional government, the really good news in the poll is that it looks like President Obama’s jobs initiative is getting a favorable response. The authors note that the President now “holds a 49 to 34 percent advantage over congressional Republicans when it comes to the public’s trust on creating jobs. That is a change from September, when they were evenly split at 40 percent each.” A majority, 52 percent, said they supported the President’s jobs plan, with 36 percent opposed.

At HuffPo Pollster, Mark Blumenthal’s post “Obama’s Approval Rating Is Underwater, But Don’t Try To Predict 2012 Yet,” notes that, despite lowered approval ratings, President Obama lead GOP frontrunners Romney and Perry. Although approval ratings are slightly better predictors of election results than trial heats, “none of these polling numbers can predict the winner of the presidency a year or more before the election,” as Blumenthal points out.
Jim Wallis, CEO of Sojourners has a HuffPo post, “Defining ‘Evangelicals’ in an Election Year” reminding progressives not to write off all evangelicals as conservative Republicans. As Wallis notes, “Now in 2011, the Right still gets it wrong when they claim that most evangelicals are firmly in their base; and the Left still doesn’t get it when they tacitly agree with the Right’s claim that all the evangelicals essentially belong to the most conservative candidates….it is precisely because we are Bible-believing and Jesus following evangelical Christians, that we have a fundamental commitment to social, economic, and racial justice, to be a good stewards of God’s creation, to be peacemakers in a world of conflict and war, and to be consistent advocates for human life and dignity wherever they are threatened.”
Lest you thought there was a limit to GOP electoral scams, Jane Mayer writes in The New Yorker on “State for Sale: A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012’s top battlegrounds,” a revealing look at Art Pope’s “REDMAP, a new project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state legislatures.”
The New York Times has an update on white house strategy, “Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election” by Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler. The authors believe the Obama campaign is focusing on securing states where demographic trends favorable to Dems have taken root — with rapidly increasing numbers of “educated and higher-income independents, young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans, many of them alienated by Republicans’ Tea Party agenda.”
Some political pundits were shocked when Virginia and North Carolina, as well as Florida cast their electoral votes for Senator Obama in 2008. But demographic trends favoring Democratic candidates are accelerating in the south, as Chris Kromm explains in his Facing South post “Black Belt Power: African-Americans come back South, change political landscape.”
One of the more interesting political history books of the year, “The ‘S’ Word” by John Nichols has a fascinating chapter on Abraham Lincoln’s significant socialist connections and beliefs. That would be Abraham Lincoln, the Republican President, who said “The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of family relations, should be one of uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.” and that “labor is the superior – greatly the superior – of capital.” There’s lots more here to annoy Republicans, when they trot out the sanitized, hagiographic Lincoln of high school history books.
Donna Jablonski has an update at the AFL-CIO Blog, “Working Families Stall Ohio Voter Suppression,” which should encourage citizens groups around the country to get organized and fight Republican schemes to disenfranchise pro-Democratic constituencies.
Lawrence Lessig, author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – – and a Plan to Stop It,” has a post making the case for small-donor reforms at Bloomberg.com. Says Lessig after reviewing several funding pathways: “There are comparisons to make and lessons to learn. But for now my aim is to talk strategy. If you believe that our Congress is corrupted; if you believe that corruption can be solved only by removing its source, if you believe special-interest funded elections are that source, then some version of small-dollar funded elections is the core to a strategy that could restore this republic..”
Michael Cooper reports at The New York Times on the expected impact of laws enacted in a dozen states “requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives.” Cooper cites a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law indicating that the laws “could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.”
Well, this is good news. Kyle Trygstad’s “Senate Math Not So Simple” at roll call.com reports that “The conventional wisdom is that odds favor Republicans winning control of the Senate next year. But an examination of the 2012 landscape at the end of the third quarter shows the chamber’s majority could go either way” owing mostly to uncertainty about the outcomes of a number of GOP primaries.