Katrina vanden Heuval’s recent WaPo op-ed sketches a disturbing picture of Republican voter suppression in a number of state legislatures, an important story that has been bounced to the back pages of the MSM by the debt ceiling controversy. From her op-ed:

In states across the country, Republican legislatures are pushing through laws that make it more difficult for Americans to vote. The most popular include new laws requiring voters to bring official identification to the polls. Estimates suggest that more than 1 in 10 Americans lack an eligible form of ID, and thus would be turned away at their polling location. Most are minorities and young people, the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party.

The i.d. campaigns are based on a particularly flimsy excuse, the myth of “voter fraud” as a significant problem in the U.S. As vanden Heuval explains,

…Voter fraud, in truth, is essentially nonexistent. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found the incidence of voter fraud at rates such as 0.0003 percent in Missouri and 0.000009 percent in New York. “Voter impersonation is an illusion,” said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center. “It almost never happens, and when it does, it is in numbers far too small to effect the outcome of even a close election.”
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) disagrees. He argues that voter fraud is a serious problem that requires serious action. But as proof, Kobach cites just “221 incidents of voter fraud” in Kansas since 1997, for an average of just 17 a year. As a Bloomberg editorial points out, “During that same period, Kansans cast more than 10 million votes in 16 statewide elections. Even if the fraud allegation were legitimate . . . the rate of fraud would be miniscule.”

The suppression initiatives appear tweaked to fit demographics of different states. As vanden Heuval notes,

In Ohio, for example, a recently signed law to curb early voting won’t prevent voter impersonation; it will only make it more difficult for citizens to cast their ballot. Or take Florida’s new voter registration law, which is so burdensome that the non-partisan League of Women Voters is pulling out of Florida entirely, convinced that it cannot possibly register voters without facing legal liability. Volunteers would need to have “a secretary on one hand and a lawyer on the other hand as they registered voters,” said Deirdre MacNabb, president of the Florida League of Women Voters…This year Texas passed a voter ID law, but wrote in a provision that explicitly exempts the elderly from complying with the law. The law also considers a concealed handgun license as an acceptable form of ID, but a university ID as insufficient.

At the annual NAACP convention in Los Angeles, President Benjamin Jealous underscored concerns about the deliberate disenfranchisement of people of color leading up to the 2012 elections, reports Alexandra Zavis in the Los Angeles Times:

He cited new laws in 30 states that require voters to present approved photo identification at the polls. “Simply put, people who are too poor to own a car tend not to have a driver’s license,” he said…In Wisconsin alone, he said, half of black adults and half of Latino adults are now ineligible to vote because of this requirement.
Jealous also took issue with laws in Georgia and Arizona that require voters to attach a copy of their driver’s license, birth certificate or passport to their registration forms. And in Florida, he said, the establishment of a five-to-seven-year waiting period before felons can vote would disqualify more than 500,000 voters, including 250,000 blacks.

In addition to the i.d. requirements, shrinking of early voting periods and felon disenfranchisement expansion, the GOP is also suppressing voting power of people of color through redistricting. In North Carolina, for example, the Republicans are twisting the intent of the Voting Rights Act to dilute minority voting, as WRAL’s Laura Leslie explains:

According to Republicans, the VRA and resulting case law require lawmakers to create districts with majority populations of minority voters that can elect the candidate of their choice. They argue the creation of such districts will protect the state from potentially costly civil-rights lawsuits.
But Democrats disagree. They say the VRA does not require lawmakers to create such districts, except in truly exceptional cases. They’re accusing the GOP of using the VRA to justify “packing” minority voters into a handful of districts to reduce their influence elsewhere.
In the Senate, where the Senate and congressional map votes were strictly partisan, Democrats accused Republican mapmakers of drilling down to precinct-level caucus data to separate black voters from white ones…Senator Josh Stein, D-Wake, asked why the GOP Senate map splits 40 voting precincts in Wake County alone. “The only possible explanation is that you want to reach out and grab every black person you can find and put them in Dan Blue’s district. And for what purpose?”

The Republican voter suppression initiatives are not unconnected in purpose or timing, as vanden Heuval points out:

What’s worse is that these aren’t a series of independent actions being coincidentally taken throughout the country. This is very much a coordinated effort. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a corporate-funded organization that works with state legislators to draft model legislation. According to The Nation’s John Nichols, “Enacting burdensome photo ID or proof of citizenship requirements has long been an ALEC priority.” It’s not surprise then, that the Wisconsin state legislator who pushed for one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation is also ALEC’s Wisconsin chair.

Vanden Heuval quotes Alexander Keyssar, a top voting rights scholar and author of “The Right to Vote”:

…”What is so striking about the wave of legislation for ID laws is that we are witnessing for the first time in more than a century, a concerted, multi-state effort to make it more difficult for people to exercise their democratic rights…It is very reminiscent of what occurred in the North between 1875 and 1910 — the era of Jim Crow in the South — when a host of procedural obstacles were put in the way of immigrants trying to vote.”

This is the first part of what will almost certainly be a three-stage voter suppression program. Call it the pre-election suppression campaign, likely to be followed by election-day shenanigans at the polls and then ballot-counting “irregularities” in Florida and Ohio, among other states.
It’s tough to challenge voter suppression campaigns in Republican-controlled state legislatures and state and federal courts. But Democrats should keep demanding that the Justice Department review these laws for compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and have legal teams in place to monitor election-day suppression and ballot counting.

If there was a contest to identify the most influential political buzzword, phrase or term of the last year, I would have to give the nod to “job-killer.” I don’t have a ‘word cloud’ or content analysis to back me up, but it’s so ubiquitous that you rarely hear a GOP speech that doesn’t parrot it to describe some progressive proposal.
OK, you want numbers? I just did a quick Google, which pulled up 53,300,000 hits for ‘job-killer’ on the web and 230 hits for the term in today’s news.
The really bad news is that the vast, overwhelming number of those hits is for citations using the term to support some conservative distortion or other. Engage a Republican in dialogue about the need for revenues and the rich paying their fair share of taxes, for example, and his knee will immediately jerk, accompanied by the term ‘job-killer’ in description of all taxes, or any progressive reforms, for that matter. It’s more than a little ironic, considering that Republicans do more job-killing than anyone.
Some of the page one usages of the term in my Google search described the minimum wage, climate control regulations and HCR. The California Chamber of Commerce fronts an annual list of “job-killer” legislative proposals, also on page one.
The reason there are so many hits is because the lapdog MSM dutifully reports nearly every usage of the term, although 53 million hits suggests it’s getting a little, well, shop-worn. Apparently they like vivid descriptive terms, even when used in a totally bogus context.
There’s no denying it’s a powerful, resonant term. Common sense tells us that something is killing jobs. The Republicans favor one simplistic explanation in particular — taxes, and they are not afraid to use ‘job-killer’, again and again in that context. Liberal eyes roll with every usage, but GOP wordsmiths (see Luntz, Frank) tell them that it still does the job. Repetition is a cardinal principle of Republican propaganda, and they have the message discipline and echo chamber to back it up.
The good news is that the term can be used with more credibility by progressives. But the sole progressive use of ‘job-killer’ among the page one hits in my Google search was for David M. Cutler’s article, “Repealing Health Care Is a Job Killer: It Would Slow Job Growth by 250,000 to 400,000 Annually” at the Center for American Progress website.
Joshua Holland has a more recent example of a progressive take on the term in his Alternet post “Why the Wealthiest Americans Are the Real ‘Job-Killers’.” It would be good to see ‘job-killer’ being used in a progressive context in the MSM, as well as the blogosphere, which could be encouraged if Democratic politicians would take the term out for a little spin once in a while.
But there will come a point when the term loses its power from overuse and becomes just another cliche. Meanwhile the Republicans are milking it dry. They are more clever at creating resonant catch-phrases and buzzwords for sound-bites, probably because of their more pervasive connections in the advertising industry. At this point it would be a welcome development for Democrats to begin thinking more about how to catch up.

You don’t see much in the MSM or political blogosphere about the political priorities and impact of one large political demographic in particular, people with disabilities. Perhaps it’s because the category cuts across many other demographics, race, age, gender, class, sexual orientation etc. with all of the political concerns that come with overlapping identity facets.
With one exception, however, Democrats have demonstrated an edge with this constituency in presidential elections.
In 1992, for example, President George H. W. Bush was that rarest of Republican birds — an actual champion of rights for a group of disadvantaged citizens, in that he strongly supported Americans with Disabilities Act. Yet, here’s what happened in the election, according to Humphrey Taylor, writing for The Harris Poll as its president/ceo:

In the election, Clinton enjoyed a 24 percent lead among disabled voters, which was 19 percentage points better than his 5 point margin of victory. In 1988, George Bush lost the disabled vote by 5 percentage points to Michael Dukakis, which was only 13 points worse than Bush’s 8 point margin of victory.

Taylor goes on to note that people with disabilities were then about 13 percent of the population, roughly the same percentage as African Americans. Other estimates are much higher, including a broader universe of disabilities and “impairments” of varying severity — currently as many as 51 million Americans. Their political impact may be even greater, considering family members who are also affected by their disabilities.
In 1992, however, only about 10 percent of total votes were cast by people with disabilities, notes Taylor. According to Taylor’s analysis of the pro-Democratic tilt in that year:

In 1992, it seems likely that disabled voters — who are much poorer and are much more likely to be unemployed than other voters — were particularly badly hit by the nation’s economic problems for which George Bush was generally blamed.
Furthermore, they were more concerned about health care reform, an issue where Clinton enjoyed a clear advantage. For these and possibly other reasons, disabled voters did not vote to support a president who has pushed very hard for their rights, harder than many Conservatives and Republicans would have liked.

Taylor tracked the presidential preferences of voters with disabilities at several points over the 1992 campaign, noting that Bush got a very significant bump with these voters after the Republican convention — he referenced the constituency and strong support for the Americans with Disabilities Act in his acceptance speech. But his bump quickly tanked over the following weeks as Clinton gained ground.
In 2004 available data indicates that voters with disabilities changed course. “People with disabilities have historically been much more likely to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate with the exception of 2004 when they appeared to be more likely to vote for the Republican candidate, President George W. Bush,” according to the Kessler Foundation/National Organization on Disability 2010 report, “The ADA: 20 Years Later.”
In 2008, however, they cast 50 percent of their votes for Sen. Obama, vs. 44 percent for Sen. McCain, according to the final pre-election Harris Poll survey. The 2012 election should be an interesting test of this constituency’s preferences, considering the impact of HCR’s protection of people with disabilities from discrimination based on ‘prior condition’ by health insurance companies. They are also disproportionately impacted by budget cuts for health and social services, as well as unemployment.
Recent Harris Poll data indicates an impressive increase in turnout for voters with disabilities in presidential elections, with participation rates of 33 percent in 1996; 41 percent in 2000; 52 percent in 2004; and 59 percent in 2008, about the same as the general population for the first time. If this rising turnout trend continues among voters with disabilities — and their family members — it could provide an edge for President Obama and Dems in 2012.

I disagree with the crux of the conclusion of Dana Milbank’s Washington Post column, “The New Party of Reagan,” in which he says,

…While Reagan nostalgia endures, a number of Republicans have begun to admit the obvious: The Gipper would no longer be welcome on the GOP team. Most recently, Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (Calif.) called Reagan a “moderate former liberal . . . who would never be elected today in my opinion.” This spring, Mike Huckabee judged that “Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible time being nominated in this atmosphere,” pointing out that Reagan “raises taxes as governor, he made deals with Democrats, he compromised on things in order to move the ball down the field.”

While the point about Reagan’s willingness to compromise is historically accurate, my take is that Reagan was more the party hack than the man of principle Milbank’s conclusion suggests. If Reagan were alive and alert today, I would be very surprised if he didn’t issue statements supporting McConnell, Cantor and Boehner as they do their worst.
Perhaps Reagan would side more with McConnell than Cantor in the debt ceiling negotiations. But I doubt he would make a big deal about it. “No longer welcome on the GOP team” is a stretch. As Milbank shows, they trot out his speeches every chance they get.
What Milbank got right is Reagan’s track record of supporting economic policies today’s GOP no longer tolerates:

Tea Party Republicans call a vote to raise the debt ceiling a threat to their very existence; Reagan presided over 18 increases in the debt ceiling during his presidency.
Tea Party Republicans say they would sooner default on the national debt than raise taxes; Reagan agreed to raise taxes 11 times.
Tea Party Republicans, in “cut, cap and balance” legislation on the House floor Tuesday, voted to cut government spending permanently to 18 percent of gross domestic product; under Reagan, spending was as high as 23.5 percent and never below 21.3 percent of GDP.
That same legislation would take federal spending down to a level last seen in 1966, before Medicare was fully up and running; Reagan in 1988 signed a major expansion of Medicare.

All of which shows that Reagan once supported economic polices that are no longer acceptable to GOP leaders. But none of that proves he wouldn’t adjust to the GOP party line today. Were he alive today, it’s hard to imagine him steering the tea party and GOP leaders toward sweet reason and compromise, especially since he used his majorities in congress to steam-roll Dems every chance he could.
Some Democrats believe that referencing Reagan’s legacy to suggest he would be agreeing with Democratic economic policy today is a good idea. I think it distorts history and confuses Reagan’s real legacy, which is an all-out assault on America’s labor movement, de-regulation and carte blanche for corporate abuses. It’s a mistake to whitewash all that to score a few points about his willingness to compromise when his puppet masters told him it was OK.
Reagan didn’t get a free ride from the mainstream media during his presidency. But he got off easy much of the time. Let’s not compound the error by holding him up today as Mr. Moderate, when his presidency was overwhelmingly directed toward screwing working people to give the fattest of cats as much as possible.
Yes, it’s fun to use Reagan’s quotes and policies against today’s Republican leaders. But It would be wrong to forget Reagan’s central contribution to the GOP-driven gridlock we are now experiencing. His statement that “Government is the problem” is still the ideological mantra of the Republicans ideologues who are devoted to obstructing any reforms that benefit the middle class. That, regrettably, remains his most enduring legacy.

A couple of paragraphs from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s blog jump out to underscore a huge gap in public awareness that must be addressed:

A recent paper by Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler surveyed how many recipients of government benefits don’t really believe they have received any benefits. She found that over 44 percent of Social Security recipients say they “have not used a government social program.” More than half of families receiving government-backed student loans said the same thing, as did 60 percent of those who get the home mortgage interest deduction, 43 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries, and almost 30 percent of recipients of Social Security Disability.
…One would have thought the last few years of mine disasters, exploding oil rigs, nuclear meltdowns, malfeasance on Wall Street, wildly-escalating costs of health insurance, rip-roaring CEO pay, and mass layoffs would have offered a singular opportunity to explain why the nation’s collective well-being requires a strong and effective government representing the interests of average people.

Andrew Levison and others have advocated government reform and getting people more involved in decision-making to challenge the GOP’s “government is the problem” meme. No doubt this is correct. But I think the federal government has an additional problem — lousy public relations. It’s as if even Democratic administrations have been hustled to believe that promoting the effectiveness of government programs is somehow an unacceptably partisan activity.
The selection above from Reich’s blog indicates that it’s not safe to assume that citizens have an adequate awareness of what government does for them. Citizens do need to be expressly reminded from time to time about what they get for their taxes. It’s not a panacea for government-bashing. Government certainly needs reforms to improve public attitudes toward it. But not educating the public about what government does for them makes the Republicans’ anti-government propaganda a lot easier.
I think there should be a permanent public education campaign, using every facet of the mass media to remind people of the important things that government does for them. It should be creative, use humorous skits — whatever it takes to get the public’s attention.
When corporate America wants to sell a product, they promote the hell out of it. Government should do the same, if it wants people to know that they are getting value for their money.
Government funding of such a campaign could certainly be justified. In fact not doing it is more of an indefensible failure, something that is understandable only when it happens during Republican administrations. Progressive groups should also participate in a major public education campaign. Doing no p.r. is a gift to the Republicans.
The website, governmentisgood.com, one of the best internet-based antidotes to government-bashing, has an interesting post “Publicizing What Government Does for Us,” which argues,

We also need to become more aware of what government is doing for us. Many of us rarely think about what we get for our tax dollars – the kinds of services that our local, state and federal governments are providing for us every day. Remarkably, when asked if government has had a positive effect on their lives, 45% of Americans insisted that it has not. But it is revealing that when these same people were asked about specific government programs, a majority said that they had benefited from programs on food and drug safety, consumer protection, workplace regulations, public universities, public schools, roads and highways, parks and recreation, environmental laws, medical research, police and the courts, and social security. So when people stop thinking about government in the abstract, and are made to think of particular government programs, they are more apt to recognize their beneficial effects on their own lives.
Pollsters have found that if they first remind people of the various government programs and services provided for them, and then ask them to rate government, the results improve. “After people consider different government activities and programs, they are more likely to report that government has a positive effect on their lives.” Hardly surprising.
…Governments could also learn from non-profit organizations and charities, which send out annual letters to their donors explaining all the good works that have come from their donations. Our state and local governments should be sending out “annual reports” that inform citizens of all the good their tax dollars are doing. For example, our local government should tell us how many criminals it has arrested, how many supermarket scanners and gas pumps it has checked, how many fires it has put out, how many parks it has been maintaining, how many construction sites it has inspected, how many miles of roads it has cleaned and plowed, how many gallons of clean water it has provided, how many drunk drivers it has gotten off the roads, how many restaurants it has inspected, how many people have used the public libraries, how many children it has educated, and so on. As the old saying goes, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it” – and government is “doing it” for citizens every day.

Nothing is going to stop the Republicans from wholesale government-bashing. But a strong, well-crafted response from Democrats and progressives can help limit their effectiveness.

Political correspondent Bill Boyarsky makes a good point in his Truthdig post “Entitlement Is a Republican Word.”

At his news conference this week, President Barack Obama seized on a misleading Washington word–“entitlements”–to describe the badly needed aid programs that are likely to be cut because of his compromises with the Republicans.
“Entitlement” is a misleading word because it masks the ugly reality of reducing medical aid for the poor, the disabled and anyone over 65 as well as cutting Social Security. Calling such programs entitlements is much more comfortable than describing them as what they are–Medicare, Social Security and money for good schools, unemployment insurance, medical research and public works construction that would put many thousands to work.
It’s also a Republican word. It implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing. And now it’s an Obama word as he moves toward the center and away from the progressives who powered his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination over centrist Hillary Clinton.
“There is, frankly, resistance on my side to do anything on entitlements,” he said before heading into another negotiating session over raising the debt limit and cutting the budget. “There is strong resistance on the Republican side to do anything on revenues. But if each side takes a maximalist position, if each side wants 100 percent of what its ideological predispositions are, then we can’t get anything done.”

Having been guilty of using ‘entitlements’ on many occasions, I now realize Boyarsky is right. It is a convenient catch-all term, but it is freighted with negative overtones and plays right into the Republican scam of making programs working people have paid for sound a little like privileges provided to slackers.
Boyarksky goes on to fault the President for caving on social program cuts and adds “To stop them, Obama has to be honest, forthright and progressive–and stop using “entitlements” to refer to worthwhile government programs. He’s a writer. He must know what negative nuances the word carries.”
I’m not so sure as Boyarksy that President Obama used the term with full awareness of its more nuanced implications. The term has creeped into mainstream reportage and common parlance, even among liberals. But Boyarksy is dead right that the President and all progressives need to stop using it, because every time we use it, we reinforce the GOP meme that needed — and hard-earned — social programs are extravagant give-aways.

So as not to offend the delicate sensitivities of the infantile right, we now begin the search for acceptable euphemisms for taxes. From Carrie Budoff Brown’s Politico post, “Bridging the no-new-taxes divide“:

Increasing airline fees, eliminating ethanol subsidies, boosting Medicare premiums for wealthier seniors — all of these take money from someone’s pocket and send it to the U.S. Treasury. But not all Republicans would call these tax increases. They haven’t been summarily dismissed. And just enough in the GOP might even be able to stomach them, and more.
“I know how many angels can sit on a pin, but I don’t know what a tax increase is,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum and former economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign. “There is a lot of language, and they will choose the language they need to get this done.”
But with so much at stake, Holtz-Eakin predicts that Republicans ultimately will agree to “$100 billion in fees and other stuff that aren’t labeled taxes but raise money for the federal government.”

Brown goes on to list other possible revenue sources, including cutting farm and maybe even – gasp – oil and gas subsidies, along with raising various user fees. There is talk of new billions in fees from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Another idea being bandied about, reports Brown, is tweaking the inflation calculation for federal benefits, including Social Security. Many Republicans like the idea of selling off “surplus” federal properties and auctioning the wireless spectrum. There’s even a proposal to jack up postage rates, which I imagine might prompt the tea partyers get out their tri-corners and go ballistic one more time.
Call these proposals “revenue enhancement,” or what you will, but these are not taxes, you understand.
I get it that face-saving is a necessary part of politics in a democracy. But looking ahead, Dems have some work to do in demystifying the “T” word to the point that the conservative party need not shrink in horror at the mere mention of it. It may be that demystifying the “G” word comes first, as Andrew Levison has argued — reforming government and figuring out new ways to get people involved in helping to make government policy as stakeholders, not just tax-payers.
So let a hundred euphemisms for ‘taxes” bloom in the short run. But as soon as the present crisis is resolved, it will be time to get serious about changing attitudes toward government and holding obstructionists accountable.

It took me a few minutes to get my head around the recent report that 35 percent of adults, not just 35 percent of cell phone users, now own smartphones, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. More than a third of American adults, not just kids, are using cell phones to check emails, surf the net and noodle with apps.
The app world boasts a few stunning statistics of its own, including the sheer number of available apps — 425K for Iphones and over 200K for Androids, figures soon to be ancient history.
There are a number of apps that provide a broad range of useful political data, such as Walking Edge, a database for canvassers that pinpoints homes of undecided voters and supporters, custom-designed, unfortunately, for Republican-friendly campaigns. Hopefully, a Democratic version is on the way, if not already up and running.
Plenty of political consultants are offering to provide fund-raising apps for individual campaigns. From what I can gather, however, the quantity of useful partisan advocacy apps for Democratic activists could be more impressive. Much abbreviated political dialogue takes place though mobile Twitter and Facebook applications. But apparently, major app providers are struggling with questions of content and taste in deciding which ones to provide. There are a few good pro-Democratic apps, including:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a mobile sign-up widget here.
‘The Democrats,’ the party’s official app, has some useful localized features, along with alerts, events, even some issue analysis
ActBlue Mobile makes cell bill add-on contributions to worthy Dems quick and simple
You can view screen samples for the “Obama 2012” app here.
Some others include ‘Democrat News,’ ‘Democrat Quotes,’ and ‘The Democrat News App‘

But, more are needed (readers please add good ones not noted above). Some possibilities include a series of daily apps, among them:

Message of the day – The DNC should craft a succinct message on a topic of current interest for rank and file Dems. It could be a rebuttal of the GOP message of the day, which has been part of their echo chamber for years
The Daily Stat – An interesting statistic for bolstering Democratic policy arguments
Political One-liner – sort of ‘snark du jour’ for the water cooler
Republican outrage of the day – A variation on Keith Olbermann’s ‘Worst Person of the Day.’ So much material here that it might be hard to pick just one.
‘The Read’ – Flagging a single must-read daily article or internet post for the time-challenged that explains a policy or issue of concern for Dems unusually well. App developer Handmark has a political digest called ‘Politicaster Left,’ (as well as Politicaster Right) but the offerings seem a little broad.
Candidate of the Day – Mini-bio of a featured Democratic candidate — local, state or federal — who needs some help in the form of contributions, similar to ActBlue, but spotlighting candidates of color and female candidates to improve Democratic candidate diversity. Press a button and your five measly dollars are automatically sent to them and added to your cell bill.

The apps world is expanding exponentially, and smart phone apps have huge potential for helping Dems, more than Republicans, to optimize small contributor fund-raising, educate voters, GOTV and lobby. A commitment to meet this challenge by the pro-Democratic technorati could be a game-changer.

MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews wondered aloud on Sunday if perhaps President Obama was starting to look like “the adult in the room” with respect to the struggle over raising the debt ceiling.
It’s a damn good question. The Republicans have been so rigidly infantile in their cut taxes and spending monomania that it seems likely an increasing proportion of swing voters have to be thinking “I don’t like all this talk about default and screwing up the world economy even more to make a point. Boehner, Bachmann and the Republicans seem more like angry children than grown-ups who are serious about compromise and governing sensibly.”
Speaker Boehner is still insisting on a $2.4 trillion deal, linked to a “dollar-to-dollar” ratio of spending cuts to debt ceiling increase. But President Obama wants a bigger, more flexible deal, and is holding out for $4 trillion package with a debt ceiling extension until at least Jan. 1, 2013. Negotiations resume today, with an 11:00 am press conference featuring the President’s update.
Ideologues, left and right want what they want. Middle of the road voters want to see policy compromises that guard against extremes and move the economy forward in a way that doesn’t penalize everyone but the rich. A common sense compromise might include a $3 trillion package with very modest, way-down-the-road entitlement cuts allowing the Republicans to save a little face, but significant tax hikes on the rich to give Dems some buy-in.
Progressive Dems fault President Obama for giving too much away up front. The frequently-heard meme is that he usually starts negotiating with the compromise position. There is merit in this critique. But the upside is that he is being seen as the only one who is willing to compromise with respect to just about all the debates over economic policy. This may help him get re-elected, argue progressives, but at what price?
Opinion data indicates that Dems may have an edge with voters in the debt ceiling debate. Asked in a Pew Research Center poll 6/16-19, “As you may know, unless Congress and the president can agree to raise the federal debt limit soon, the government will not be able to borrow more money to fund its operations and pay its debts. If the limit is not raised, who do you think would mainly be responsible for this: the Obama Administration or the Republicans in Congress?,” 33 percent said the Obama Administration would be responsible, compared with 42 percent who put it on “Republicans in congress.” (12 percent said both).
It’s hard to imagine how Republicans could have gained any advantage in the 3+ weeks since that poll. My guess is that the GOP’s zero-taxes-on-the-rich position has not served them well in recent weeks, and the Dem’s “shared sacrifice” sound-bite is beginning to resonate with crisis-weary voters as a sound principle of any reasonable compromise. A little amplification of it from the MSM, as well as Dems, could help — perhaps a lot.

Nate Silver’s well-reasoned analysis, “Why the Republicans Resist Compromise” at his Five Thirty Eight blog at The New York Times affirms the meme that the GOP is pretty much ensnared by its more conservative faction. While this conclusion is no big shocker to most political observers, Silver’s data-driven analysis, as presented in his chart “Ideological Distribution of People Voting Republican for U.S. House,” is impressive and instructive:

The Republican Party is dependent, to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, on a single ideological group. That group, of course, is conservatives. It isn’t a bad thing to be in favor with conservatives: by some definitions they make up about 40 percent of voters. But the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘conservative’ are growing closer and closer to being synonyms; fewer and fewer nonconservatives vote Republican, and fewer and fewer Republican voters are not conservative.
The chart, culled from exit poll data, shows the ideological disposition of those people who voted Republican for the House of Representatives in the elections of 1984 through 2010. Until fairly recently, about half of the people who voted Republican for Congress (not all of whom are registered Republicans) identified themselves as conservative, and the other half as moderate or, less commonly, liberal. But lately the ratio has been skewing: in last year’s elections, 67 percent of those who voted Republican said they were conservative, up from 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent ten years ago.

Silver notes the pivotal role of disproportionate conservative turnout in last year’s midterms, and the unfortunate consequences for Dems:

This was fortunate for Republicans, because they lost moderate voters to Democrats by 13 percentage points (and liberals by 82 percentage points). Had the ideological composition of the electorate been the same in 2010 as in 2008 or 2006, the Republicans and Democrats would have split the popular vote for the House about evenly — but as it was, Republicans won the popular vote for the House by about 7 percentage points and gained 63 seats.
Many of the G.O.P. victories last year were extremely close. I calculate that, had the national popular vote been divided evenly, Democrats would have lost just 27 seats instead of 63. Put differently, the majority of Republican gains last year were probably due to changes in relative turnout rather than people changing their minds about which party’s approach they preferred.

Addressing “the enthusiasm gap within the Republican party,” Silver cites a Pew Research poll conducted a few days before the election which indicated that,

Among conservatives who are either registered as Republicans or who lean toward the Republican party, about 3 out of 4 were likely to have voted in 2010, the Pew data indicated. The fraction of likely voters was even higher among those who called themselves “very conservative:” 79 percent.
By contrast, only about half of moderate or liberal Republicans were likely voters, according to Pew’s model. That is about the same as the figure for Democrats generally: — about half of them were likely voters, with little difference among conservative, moderate and liberal Democrats.
So the enthusiasm gap did not so much divide Republicans from Democrats; rather, it divided conservative Republicans from everyone else. According to the Pew data, while 64 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify as conservative, the figure rises to 73 percent for those who actually voted in 2010.

Silver cites data indicating that “Republicans are still fairly unpopular,” but adds,

…As long as conservative Republicans are much more likely to vote than anyone else, the party can fare well despite that unpopularity, as it obviously did in 2010. But it means that Republican members of Congress have a mandate to remain steadfast to the conservatives who are responsible for electing them.
Presidential elections are different: they tend to have a more equivocal turnout. The G.O.P. can turn out its base but it has not converted many other voters to its cause, and President Obama’s approval ratings remain passable although not good. The Republicans will need all their voters to turn out — including their moderates — to be an even-money bet to defeat him.

Silver believes that, if Romney is nominated, he would have a clear shot at turning out the GOP moderates, while Bachmann could alienate enough of them to give Obama victory.
At his TPM Editors blog, Josh Marshall applauds Silver’s analysis of conservative domination of the GOP, but adds that it shouldn’t let Democrats off the hook for their failure to take advantage of it:

When I castigate the Democrats for not having a clear message or President Obama for not having an “outside game” in the debt fight, readers will often write in to say that I’m ignoring the fact that the modern GOP is a coherent and highly ideological party while the Democrats simply are not. So Republicans are inherently more able to function as a unified force with a unified message than the Dems. In fact, these folks will argue, it’s not even right to talk about “the Dems” because that buys into the illusion that they’re a party like the GOP as opposed to a coalition of constituencies.
For my money, I don’t find this a sufficient explanation. I do think the Dems are consistently guilty of what amounts to a political failure — the failure to devise and push a consistent message and play on the weaknesses of their foes. I’ve made these points so often that there’s no need (and probably appetite) for me to restate them here. However, it is important to note these structural realities that create a genuine tilt in the playing field of our politics, one that makes it easier for 35% to 40% of the electorate to dominate the country by having virtually total control over one of the two parties.

“Still,” Marshall concludes, “…Politics matters. And on that count the Dems continue to be captive and captured by a weakness it is in their collective power — and for a president to a great degree individual power — to change.”