John Nichols post at The Nation, “The Post-Wisconsin Game Plan” provides a nuanced ‘where-do-we-go-from-here’ consideration of progressive strategy to mobilize middle class voters for the 2012 elections. Nichols sees the still-strong outrage against the effort to eradicate collective bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin, Indiana, Maine and Ohio as a powerful force, which can be leveraged to strengthen the Democratic party and its prospects:

Post-Wisconsin, there is a tentative but emerging consensus that mass movements at the state level might matter just as much to the broader goals of labor and the left as traditional election-oriented campaigning. As Steve Cobble, former political director of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s, argues, “The energy that’s developed in Wisconsin and Ohio, and that could develop in a lot of other states, is what’s needed to renew the coalitions that can re-elect Obama in 2012 and elect a lot of Democrats. But it should go further than that. With the right organizing push, unions can build a base that forces Obama and the Democrats to take more progressive stands and to govern accordingly.”
The size of the demonstrations in the states, and the agility with which protest movements have pivoted to political fights that could shift control of governorships and legislatures, has prompted this reassessment of strategy by labor and its allies. Rather than a single-minded focus on electing Democrats–or the rare friendly Republican–the idea is that more might be accomplished by directing cash and organizing hours to (as one SEIU draft document suggests) “mobilizing underpaid, underemployed, and unemployed workers” and “channeling anger about jobs into action for positive change.”

Nichols acknowledges that some progressives are skeptical about this approach:

…Henry has conceded that the decision to focus more on nonunion workers is risky. The talk is of a major expenditure of resources, with some 1,500 SEIU staffers fanning out in seventeen cities to knock on more than 3 million doors–including those of millions of non-SEIU members. Some worry that this is not the most strategic use of resources. Veteran organizer Jane McAlevey argues that intensive engagement with union members should take precedence over a diffuse attempt to mobilize nonunion workers for mass rallies with an uncertain purpose. “The go-big, go-wide and go-shallow model may generate 2012 voter IDs outside their base, but it’s not going to mobilize a real fight for a fair economy,” says McAlevey. “To do it right requires deep work with their members and their members’ organic connections in their communities.”

There is an emerging consensus, explains Nichols, that “the greatest threats to unions as forces in the workplace and in political life are posed at the state level–where GOP governors and legislators are attacking collective bargaining rights while proposing brutal cuts in spending on education and services…” But he notes the overwhelming complexity of meeting this challenge:

States have unique political cultures, quirky voting patterns, divides between heavily union and nonunion regions that can be finessed only by those who understand the territory. “I’ve heard from people in other states who want to know how they can do what’s been done in Wisconsin, and I tell them it’s not that easy,” says Ben Manski, an organizer of the Wisconsin Wave protest coalition. “They have to focus in on their own strengths, their own history and their own challenges.”

Nichols provides a succinct summation of current initiatives, post-Wisconsin:

Whereas Wisconsin activists are focused on recall elections this summer that could remove Republican state senators who have backed Walker’s antilabor agenda, Mainers are lobbying moderate Republican legislators to break with right-wing Governor Paul LePage. While there is talk in Michigan of trying to recall Governor Rick Snyder, in Ohio there is no recall option. But Ohio has a veto referendum provision that unions are using to try to overturn Governor John Kasich’s attacks on collective bargaining.
Every one of these state battles turns a labor struggle that initially played out in the streets into an edgy political fight. Instead of waiting for the next election, labor and progressive campaigners are forcing votes on their schedules to address unprecedented assaults on union rights and public services.

Naturally some Democrats are very concerned about the deflection of needed labor resources from the Presidential contest next year. And there is concern, reports Nichols that the White House should be doing more to support unions, although the President’s approval ratings are still high in Wisconsin.
Nichols spotlights Sen Sherrod Brown (D-OH) for taking a gutsy, pro-union stance other Democratic politicians have avoided — a gamble that appears to have paid off in the latest opinion polls. He quotes Publi Policy President Dean Debham, “Sherrod Brown appears to be in a much stronger position now than he was just three months ago…There’s been a very significant shift in the Ohio political landscape toward the Democrats.”
As Nichols says “…the challenge is to build state-based movements that are muscular enough to win immediate fights (blocking bad legislation, preventing cuts, preserving embattled unions, organizing new workers) while pulling Democrats–including the president–away from the politics of caution and compromise.” He credits SEIU, CWA and National Nurses United, MoveOn and other progressive groups for innovative “neighborhood organizing, coalition building and demonstrations” against tax give-aways to the wealthy, home foreclosures and assaults on Medicare and Medicaid.
President Obama would do well, says Nichols, to heed the example of FDR in 1936, “after a wave of militant labor organizing and localized general strikes had swept cities across the country,” when he crafted “a populist appeal for unity…to battle the economic royalists who would turn the country back toward ‘the old law of the tooth and the claw.'”
Sad that 75 years later the “economic royalists” description still fits the modern Republican party so well. Hopefully, FDR’s example will not go unnoticed by President Obama, who has recently had his own lesson in how bold leadership can win public support.

Katrina vanden Heuval asks a hell of a good question in her Washington Post op-ed “Why aren’t the powers that be tackling the jobs crisis?” vanden Heuval gives the Republicans a sound and richly-deserved thrashing for their monumental hypocrisy on the subject, spotlighting GOP Sen. Rob Portman’s “Senate Republican Jobs Plan,” which hinges on “more top-end and corporate tax cuts, more deregulation, more corporate trade accords” and a catch-all Republican wish-list which has zero chance of being enacted.
The Dems also have a new jobs plan, which has some good features, though you can’t be blamed if you haven’t heard about it, so limp has been the leadership and media coverage behind it. Here’s vanden Heuval’s description of the package:

The next day, House Democrats unveiled their more ambitious “Make It in America” plan. This recognizes that the country can’t keep shipping jobs abroad while borrowing $2 billion a day from abroad to pay for what we import. The package contains its share of political malarkey — the Braley bill to ensure that all American flags are made in America, for example — but at its center is a serious strategy for revitalizing the country, one that deserves far more attention and debate than it’s getting. It tasks the president with creating a manufacturing strategy for the country. It would establish an infrastructure bank and invest in rebuilding America’s decrepit roads and bridges. A range of incentives are proposed for capturing a lead in the green industrial revolution that will sweep the world. The plan also would legislate buy-America procurement policies to help create markets at home while setting up a mechanism to challenge Chinese currency manipulation.

Not a bad start. I hope it doesn’t get too complicated as it develops. The legal challenges to the health care reform act indicate the trouble “big package” reforms risk in today’s polarized political climate– even after they are enacted. I’d rather see a series of separate jobs bills get floor votes in rapid succession than have congress vote on one big package proposal, which may have a dicey provision or two that give its opponents cover. Better to fault one’s electoral opponent for voting against a dozen different jobs bills, than one big one he/she can nitpick.
Poll after poll shows that jobs have been the central concern of the middle class for a couple of years now. It would be good to see any Democratic jobs bill get some media traction, even if it is late in the game. Let the House Republicans vote jobs bills down, and then make them defend their votes next year, as we remind them again and again of Boehner’s 2010 campaign slogan “Where are the jobs?”

Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA15) has a post up at HuffPo “Why Dick Lugar Wants Drawdown; Why Defense Industries Don’t,” which makes a strong case for accelerating withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Honda, chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Taskforce says:

A drawdown is what the majority of the American people want. They want us to end America’s longest war in history. They want us to stop spending $120 billion a year in Afghanistan, particularly when our heavy military footprint is not making Americans or Afghans safer. In the last year, we had the highest number of U.S. casualties, the biggest single-year spike in insurgent attacks, the most devastating of Afghan civilian deaths (an airstrike on nine youths gathering wood), an Afghan majority that says their basic security and basic services have worsened substantially, and majority populations in the U.S. and Afghanistan that want the troops to leave.

Senator Lugar (R-IN) had made news with this sobering observation about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan:

“Our geostrategic interests are threatened in numerous locations, not just by terrorism, but by debt, economic competition, energy and food prices, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and numerous other forces,” he said in a statement. “Solving these problems will be much more difficult if we devote too many resources toward one country that, historically, has frustrated nation building experiments.”

Honda’s claim about public opinion is affirmed to some extent in the latest Pew Research Center poll, conducted May 5-8, which found that 49 percent of respondents want to “remove troops as soon as possible,” while 43 percent want to “keep troops in until situation has stabilized.” In an NBC News-Hart/McInturff poll conducted 5/5-7, 46 percent of respondents “somewhat disapprove” or “strongly disapprove” of “leaving some American troops in Afghanistan until 2014,” while 42 percent said they “strongly approve” or “somewhat approve.”
Honda advocates transferring U.S. funding for our large occupation force to support “policing, intelligence and negotiations…at a fraction of the cost of the heavy military, air and navy operations that currently characterize our security strategy.” He admits it won’t be easy, but he argues persuasively that it is the right way to go:

Such a shift requires courage, especially for members of Congress, given all the industries that benefit from our footprint-heavy warfare. But now is the time to take that necessary step. Our country has been emboldened, and we must now leverage this unity into a new direction for our defense apparatus — one that will keep us safer in every possible way, from our forces to our finances.

Writing in The American Prospect, Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, believes that that bin Laden’s death may provide an opportunity to open political dialogue:

By dealing a blow to al-Qaeda — and by implication, to its allies in the Taliban and its protectors in Pakistan’s intelligence establishment — bin Laden’s death may have created new opportunities for a political settlement in Afghanistan. While experts across the political spectrum have been calling for talks with elements of the Taliban, opponents have argued that because the U.S. had not turned the tide militarily, now was not the time. It’s hard to imagine a bigger military momentum-changer than the bin Laden operation. Military and regional experts from Gen. David Petraeus on down have said for years that a political solution — one that gives Afghans a stake in their government — as opposed to military intervention is the key to scaling back the administration’s 2009 surge and ultimately ending U.S. combat operations there. But given that the war in Afghanistan was about more than just finding bin Laden, our withdrawal will likely occur independently of his death.

President Obama showed bold leadership in ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound at considerable risk. His challenge now is to provide equally-strong leadership in dramatically scaling back our military involvement in Afghanistan, while advancing the incentives for a political settlement. In so doing he will strengthen Democratic prospects, as well as our national security.

Mike Elk, a third-generation union organizer who writes for the Campaign for America’s Future has a post up at Alternet, which should be of considerable interest to both the labor movement and the Democratic Party. Elk’s post, “Major Union Victory for Rite Aid Workers Offers Roadmap for Labor Movement,” is important to the Democratic Party because labor unions function as a pivotal source of funding and volunteers for Democratic candidates. When unions grow, the Party’s resources will expand.
Elk’s insights about the highly successful campaign of the International Longshoremen Workers Union to organize Rite Aid workers at the company’s southwest distribution center should prove instructive for future campaigns. First, a little history:

The victory is a testament to the resolve of the workers and organizers — it’s a success five years in the making. It reveals how tough the environment for rehabilitating the labor movement is, but also how it is still possible to win through creative, direct action.
“We’re excited about winning this victory, even if it took longer than it should have” said Carlos “Chico” Rubio, a 10-year warehouse worker who was on the union bargaining committee. Unlike many unions that do win a good contract, the union was quick not to praise the boss for agreeing to a contract, but to point out instead that the process was a long and costly one. Workers decided to first start organizing a union in March of 2006 and hoped to have a new contract within several months, not five years.
Rite Aid management responded with the typical toolbox of anti-union tactics. They hired a team of expensive union busters to hold anti-union intimidation sessions and captive audience meetings. They threatened to fire workers if they supported the union and even fired two workers for wanting to a join a union. They asked a delay of over 18 months from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on scheduling a vote so that they could have more time to run intimidation sessions to make workers wary of joining a union. Finally after two years of organizing and despite massive anti-union attacks, workers voted to join a union 283 to 261 in an NLRB supervised election in June of 2008.

Elk reports that Rite Aid stalled with bad faith or “surface bargaining” for a full year after the vote. Then the union and workers got creative:

…Workers started by attending yearly stockholder meetings and opening lines of communications with stockholders and board members. They released detailed reports about how much money the union busting efforts of Rite Aid was costing the company. Workers were able to persuade some stockholders to put pressure on Rite Aid to negotiate a fair and equitable contract.
Likewise, they used their leverage against Rite Aid by expanding the fight across various unions and the country. They formed a coalition of nationwide Rite Aid workers from various unions including UFCW, SEIU, and Teamsters who coordinated their strategy. Workers reached out to powerful community allies with groups like United Students against Sweatshops and Jobs with Justice. They held protests in nearly 50 cities across the country against Rite Aid and promised to apply more heat if Rite Aid didn’t settle the contract dispute in California.

After creative coalition-building comes economic withdrawal, a.k.a. ‘hardball’:

Most importantly, the workers union had a strong presence within the distribution center in Lancaster, California. Workers even engaged in “work to rule,” where they purposely slowed down movement in the distribution center in order to put pressure on the company to settle a contract. Even last year, 75 workers walked off the job for a day in Lancaster, California to protest Rite Aid’s lack of good faith bargaining.
Finally, when negotiations seemed to be breaking down at the last second, they launched a “pinpoint” boycott campaign at two Rite Aid workers at two Rite Aid Stores in San Pedro, California on April 1, 2011. They persuaded hundreds of seniors to switch their prescriptions to other pharmacies. The threat of a larger boycott spreading forced Rite Aid to finally settle the contract a month later.

To put the Rite Aid campaign’s success in perspective, Elk points out that “fewer than 1 in 6 organizing drives ever results in a union contract for workers in the workplace.”
It looks like the ILWU and Rite Aid workers have developed a promising organizing template for the 21st century union movement. It’s an especially welcome development, coming soon after the Wisconsin protests and the awakening of many workers to the unexpected consequences of voting Republican.
An invigorated labor movement is also critically-important for insuring the integrity of the Democratic party. As Joan Walsh notes in her Salon.com post today, data provided to her by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka indicates,

…Democrats have become almost as reliant as Republicans on corporate money (Republicans get 79 percent of campaign contributions from business; Democrats get 72 percent, and the share from unions has dropped in half in just the last decade.)

Restoring a larger share of contributions from unions to Democratic candidates will help make the Party less beholden to their corporate contributors — and more responsive to the priorities of working families. But the challenge is made more difficult, as Walsh reports, by the AFL-CIO’s recent decision to invest more of current resources in shoring up the Federation’s structure and programs, and less on federal candidates for office. In her interview with Trumka, he explains how the allocation of the Federation’s resources will be different going forward:

…We’re going to do a full-time, around the calendar political program that’s going to be mobilizing and educating people 12 months a year, 24 months a cycle, as opposed to doing it till Election Day and dismantling it. We’re going to keep people in place, and actually make people pay a price [if they don’t keep promises]. We’ll start running some of our own, in state races.

Democrats face a tough challenge in the short run in raising funds for candidates to make up for the expected shortfall resulting from the AFL-CIO’s new priorities. If they can raise the needed funds through other means, a stronger union movement could result in a more mutually beneficial relationship down the road. In the longer run, what it comes down to is that Democrats must do a better job of supporting unions and their priorities, so unions can grow and return the favor.

One of the more disturbing and under-reported stories these days is the Republican campaign to obstruct voting by pro-Democratic groups. It’s happening in many states, and it’s a more serious threat than usual, as a result of GOP gains in November, which give them additional leverage in state legislatures.
The Miami Herald is doing a pretty good job of covering this campaign in Florida, and I would urge progressives to monitor the GOP’s voter suppression efforts at the state level more closely. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a report by the Herald’s Steve Bousquet on Democratic Senator Bill Nelson’s critique of Florida’s recent efforts at election law “reform”:

Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson blasted state Republican lawmakers Monday for an election law overhaul that he says will block college students and military personnel from having their votes counted next year when he and President Barack Obama both seek re-election.
Then Nelson waded into a controversy of his own when he suggested the U.S. special forces that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden could be blocked from voting if the Legislature passes the bill.
“Should we deny those very military that carried out this very successful decapitating of the al-Qaida snake?” Nelson asked at a Capitol news conference. “Should we deny them because they have signed their voter registration card in a different way than they signed their absentee ballot overseas?”

Senator Nelson’s point is well-put and well-timed. Naturally, Florida Republicans went ballistic and accused Nelson of, gasp, political opportunism. Bousquet explains what the ‘reform’ proposals would do:

The target of Nelson’s wrath are bills awaiting floor votes in the last few days of the session. Under the proposed changes, voters could not update addresses at the polls unless they moved within their county, and third-party groups that don’t turn in voter registration forms within 48 hours would face $50-a-day fines.

The Herald’s Joy-Ann Reid elaborates in her Sunday article, “In Florida, GOP Squeezes Obama-friendly Voters“:

In Florida, the GOP-dominated legislature will soon pass laws squeezing the voting methods favored by minorities, college students and the working class.
Between them, the House and Senate bills would cut early voting from two weeks to one; force people who need to update their name or address on Election Day (say, due to marriage or divorce or a move by a military family) to vote on provisional ballots; and impose onerous restrictions on groups registering people to vote.
In the most extreme case, Republicans hope to pack the Supreme Court to undermine the anti-gerrymandering Fair Districts Amendments voted through by a public who actually thought the authoritarians in Tallahassee would let a little thing like the Constitution come between them and their stranglehold on power.
And in an especially creative flourish, Rick Scott and his Cabinet have revived the spirit of Jim Crow by re-imposing restrictions on voting rights restoration that had been brought into the 21st Century by former Gov. Charlie Crist.

As for the motivation behind the FL GOP reforms, Reid explains:

Florida’s two-week early voting period was among the reforms meant to prevent embarrassments like the 2000 election. It was a hard-won victory for working people who sometimes can’t get to the polls if they work odd hours, or run out of time to resolve a problem at the polls.
Arguably, it also contributed to Obama’s Florida win in 2008, as black churches and college students took full advantage of the extra time (and the history-making opportunity)…Karen Andre, who ran the Liberty City/Little Haiti office for the Obama campaign, called the impact of early voting in those neighborhoods “amazing…It was raining constantly during early voting and people would not leave the polls,” she said.
Held harmless by the “reformers” will be absentee voting, which happens to be the method used most effectively by Republicans.

Early voting and same day registration “have been critical in getting sizable numbers of black, Hispanic and young voters to the polls, particularly in presidential elections,” according to the Reid Report’s “Florida Republicans’ War on Voting Continues.”
Lawsuits to stop the Florida GOP’s disenfranchisement campaign are expected, but prospects for a favorable decision are unclear at best. In any case, Democrats in Florida and other states facing similar shenanigans now have an extra incentive to break records in registering new voters and turning them out in ’12.

I doubt anyone could script a better closer for the ‘birther’ idiocy than President Obama’s announcement that Navy Seals have killed Osama bin Laden as a result of a raid he personally green-lighted. No, the hard-core birthers aren’t going away, and the more paranoid among them will surely find fault with the President’s long-form birth certificate.
But what was behind birtherism from the get-go was a conscious attempt to raise questions about the President’s patriotism, and an effort to discredit him as somehow unamerican, actually alien. No doubt most birthers, like an absurdly high percentage of self identified conservative Republicans, also embrace the equally-ignorant/paranoid notion that the President is a Muslim, along with the bigoted subtext that all Muslims are anti-American. It’s a warped form of neo-McCarthyism, designed to discredit a progressive president’s patriotism and smear an entire faith.
That President Obama ordered the raid that finally ended the life of the top Islamic terrorist should put an end to most of this paranoid speculation. It should marginalize the adherents to the dark corners, where political lunatics dwell. No doubt, some will come up with conspiracy theories faulting Obama for not getting bin Laden sooner. But not many sensible voters will give them any credence.
From this point forward, few serious political candidates will continue to parrot the birther, Obama-as-secret-Muslim theories. GOP Presidential candidates will now pretend they always disdained such talk.
The most interesting question that now arises is will the President begin pulling our troops out of Afghanistan at a much faster rate? I certainly hope so, since he is not likely to have a better opportunity to do so with the cheering support of a grateful nation, putting him in even better position for reelection and strengthening Democratic candidates in 2012.

This being a serious political strategy e-rag, we try hard to avoid name-calling, since it never elevates dialogue about relevant issues. So, resisting that very difficult (in this case) temptation, I’ll try a little reverse psychology: Please Republicans don’t nominate that Donald Trump. We Dems are so scared of running against him. Trembling in our Birkenstocks, we are. As he said himself, “I’m the last person Obama wants to run against.”
OK, maybe you don’t buy that. How about a straight-up sincere appeal: Please Republicans, nominate Trump. We beg you. You know in your souls that his narcissistic personality captures the spirit of current GOP policies better than anyone. Go for the gusto! Let form follow function. We’ll even give you an edge, by telling you what video ad we will run against him. That’s right, you guessed it: His own “bragging birther” video clip, which is a tad nauseating to embed here, but you can see it at YouTube.
Yeah, we know. There’s no real chance he’s going to win the GOP nomination. It’s not only that he lacks the humility gene. His lightweight “policies” are all over the place and his narrative is too weird. On America’s worst day, I doubt there are enough ‘low information’ voters to affirm such sheer idiocy.
Speaking of humility, is there any chance fed and state Republican pols who wasted all those taxpayer dollars and time writing and huckstering ‘birther’ bills will now apologize to taxpayers?…Didn’t think so. But every one of them should be asked to do so, or explain why they won’t, on camera.

Joan C. Williams, author of “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter,” takes a sobering look at “The Democrats’ working-class problem” in the Washington Post. She makes some key points that merit consideration from Democratic strategists and candidates, including:

…When Democrats talk about the poor, they can wind up losing more votes than they win. A key constituency in any national election is white voters who are neither rich nor poor — the working-class families whose median income is $64,000. This group, overwhelmingly Democratic before 1970, has abandoned the Democrats in large numbers, creating a conservative center in American politics. Obama needs these voters in 2012. And his team needs to learn some basic messages about how this group sees the world, in particular about their attitudes toward the rich and the poor, and about certain phrases that may not resonate with them. The donkey’s tin ear should end here.
…White working-class voters see the world very differently; they are more likely to be true believers in equal opportunity than to link poverty with social injustice. These families are less inclined to think, “There but for the grace of God go I” and more inclined to attribute poverty to a life of impulse, chaos and a lack of discipline stemming from individual choices.
…when the Democrats focus on the poor, these Americans hear disrespect — disrespect for their lives of rigid self-discipline in jobs of deadening repetitiveness, disrespect for their struggles in which one false step can mean a fall into poverty. Every time Democrats focus their message on the poor, they enhance Republican power.

Williams is painting with a very broad brush here, without any opinion data to back it up. She credits Obama with scoring bulls’ eyes in his recent speeches when he talks about Social Security and Medicare, but not Medicaid. Her broad brush notwithstanding, I find it hard to disagree with her recommendation:

The Democrats need to stick to a central theme: that Republicans are proposing to eliminate the programs that allow Americans who have worked hard all their lives, doing everything responsible people are supposed to do, to pay for medical care and keep their homes as they age. Medicare and Social Security are the rewards for the settled life. Republicans propose to replace those programs with inadequate substitutes that will return seniors to where they were before government provided safety nets: the poorest group in the country.
The president does send this message, but he mixes it with a protect-the-vulnerable message that only strengthens Republicans’ hand in the coming budget negotiations. And, most important, by undermining the potential coalition between Democrats and working-class whites, the protect-the-poor message ultimately hurts the vulnerable Americans it is designed to help.

The white working class does not embrace a blanket “soak the rich” ideology, cautions Williams. But she does see an opening for Dems to frame the issue in terms of fair taxes:

In his deficit speech, Obama emphasized a theme he has drawn on before: that the very rich do not deserve tax relief. “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined,” he said. “The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. . . . They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs?”
Nice move on the president’s part, to ask whether he needs that level of tax relief while seniors face higher health-care costs. But this theme needs to be further developed and reframed.

She notes that Dems have a huge challenge ahead in educating the public about the concentration of wealth and its effects on the aspirations of working families:

Democrats also need to debunk the myth that the rich work “darned hard for every cent.” Class mobility in the United States is lower than in other industrialized countries, and only 18 percent of the income in America’s richest families comes from work — hard or otherwise. In America, most wealth does not come from hard work. It comes from wealth.
Democrats also need, over and over again, to contrast the decline of the middle class with the explosion of wealth at the top. Between the “Ozzie and Harriett” 1950s and the “All in the Family” 1970s, ordinary Americans’ standard of living doubled. Since then, it has fallen: Forty-two percent of new wealth created from 1983 to 2004 has gone to the richest 1 percent of Americans. The richer have become much richer at the expense of the middle class: The wages of high-school educated men have fallen 25 percent since 1973, during a period when the richest Americans’ share of income doubled. The top 20 percent now controls 85 percent of American wealth — something most Americans do not know.

Williams warns that Sarah Palin connects with this pivotal constituency better than any other politician (although I don’t see how Palin’s views on issues like Social Security and Medicare will survive seniors’ scrutiny or win working class support). Williams is dead right, however, in that the white working class remains the largest swing constituency, and Democrats need to speak to their core concerns more directly and effectively.

When it comes to messaging directly to the public, one strong protest song can sometimes do the work of ten good political speeches, which is why The Nation is asking readers to submit the name of “your all-time favorite protest song” on this form. (Nation writer Peter Rothberg has a pretty good list here to joggle the memory). It’s a tough call with so many great protest songs, but I don’t see how you can do much better in terms of relevance to the current political moment than this prescient little ditty, penned by a reluctantly prophetic songwriter, Iris Dement and first recorded by her in 1996:

When Tampa community radio station WMNF played the song back in 1997, Republican state Senator John Grant reportedly got so ticked off that he pulled $104,000 of the station’s public funding. Over the next day and a half Florida listeners raised $122,000 for the station in an emergency appeal.

Alan I. Abramowitz and Nate Silver agree that Dems have a good chance to win back a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year, which should be cause for some concern among smarter Republicans. Here’s Abramowitz, from his current column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

Democrats would only need to pick up 25 seats in 2012 to get to the magic number of 218 that would give them control of the House-assuming that all of their members supported the Democratic candidate for Speaker. That’s hardly an insurmountable number. In fact, two of the last three elections, 2006 and 2010, have produced bigger swings, and 2008 came close.
Despite the recent volatility of House elections, some astute political observers are giving the Democrats little or no chance of regaining control of the House in 2012. For example, last December, Republican pollster Glen Bolger went so far as to “guarantee” that the GOP would maintain its House majority even if President Obama were to win a second term. And just last month, respected political handicapper Charlie Cook agreed that a Democratic pickup of 25 or more seats in the House was highly unlikely.
Both Bolger and Cook cited the relatively short coattails that winning presidential incumbents have had in recent years as a major obstacle to big Democratic gains in the 2012 House elections. In the past 40 years, the largest number of House seats gained by the winning incumbent’s party was 16 in 1984, a year in which Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide. You have to go all the way back to 1964 to find an election in which the winning incumbent’s party gained at least 25 seats in the House.
Notwithstanding these predictions and the historical record, however, there are three reasons to believe that Democrats have a decent chance of taking back control of the House in 2012. First, as a result of their big gains in 2010, Republicans will be defending a large number of seats in House districts that voted for Barack Obama in 2008; second, many of those districts are likely to vote for Obama again in 2012 because of the difference between the presidential and midterm electorate in the current era; and third, Republican incumbents in these Obama districts will be at high risk of losing their seats if Obama wins because straight-ticket voting is much more prevalent now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Further, adds Abramowitz,

…There are 60 Republicans in districts that were carried by Barack Obama in 2008 including 15 in districts that Obama carried by at least 10 points. In contrast, there are only 12 Democrats in districts that were carried by John McCain in 2008 and only six in districts that McCain carried by at least 10 points.

As for the GOP’s supposed edge in redistricting, Abramowitz notes:

Of course before the 2012 congressional elections take place, House districts will be redrawn based on the results of the 2010 Census. In states where Republicans control redistricting-and the number of such states grew considerably as a result of the 2010 midterm elections-GOP legislatures may be able to redraw the lines to protect potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents. However, the ability of Republican legislatures to protect their party’s House incumbents may be limited by the dramatic increase in the past decade in the nonwhite share of the population in many states. For example, while Republicans will control redistricting in Texas, which is gaining four House seats, more than any other state, most of the population growth in Texas has been because of the rapid increase in the Hispanic population. At least one, if not two, of the new Texas House districts are likely to go to Hispanics.

Abramowitz also cites the increased turnout, over the mid terms, of Obama-friendly constituencies in a presidential election, particularly Latino voters, who are growing even faster than expected, according to the latest census data. But he believes the Dems strongest card may be the rising trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years. Abramowitz stops short of predicting a Dem takeover of the House, but he calls it a “realistic” possibility, especially if Obama wins a “decisive victory” in ’12.
Nate Silver sees the budget fight and the vote on GOP Rep. Ryan’s draconian budget proposals as a potential net plus for Democratic congressional candidates. Silver explains in a recent five thirty eight post,

So far, no polls have been conducted on Mr. Ryan’s budget as a whole. But — although voters will like the deficit reduction it claims to achieve (several outside analysts have questioned the bill’s economic findings) — a couple of its individual elements figure to be quite unpopular. In particular, the bill includes substantial changes to Medicare and Medicaid — changes that many voters tell pollsters are unacceptable. And it would cut the top tax rates, when polls usually find that most Americans want taxes on upper-income Americans to be raised rather than lowered.

Silver also believes that the Republicans’ prospects for a senate takeover next year are overstated. Echoing Abramowitz’s point about the decline in split-ticket voting, he sees the vote on Ryan’s proposals as a potential game-changer for the House:

…One possible consequence of the vote is that it could tie the fate of Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress more closely together. In the past, presidents have rarely had substantial coattails when running for a second term; Bill Clinton’s Democrats won just 9 seats in the House in 1996, for instance, even though he beat Bob Dole overwhelmingly. In 2010, however, the share of the vote received by Democrats running for Congress was very strongly correlated with support for Mr. Obama, and today’s vote could deepen that connection, making it less likely that voters will return a divided government again.

When two of the sharpest political data analysts agree that the House may be up for grabs, the DNC and Dem contributors should take note and invest accordingly. Of course there is a difference between Dems having a decent chance to win back a House majority and the probability of it happening. For the moment, however, The President appears to be moving into solid position to leverage the trend toward straight-ticket voting for the benefit of the Party. With a favorable break or two on the economy, the possibility of a Dem takeover of the House could morph into a good bet.