The blogosphere is awash with references to Tim Pawlenty’s limp performance in the GOP opening debates, paired with positive spin about Michelle Bachmann’s comparatively strong presentation, prompting considerable snarkage about who really leads the MN GOP (Hint: It ain’t the ex-guv).
The punditariat is a tad mystified as to why Tim-Paw refused to elaborate on his pre-debate “Obamneycare” trial balloon, which many observers thought was a pretty clever zinger against the front-runner. Perhaps Pawlenty figured Romney had an equally-clever counter-punch at the ready, so why blunder into it. But the wide read on Pawlenty’s reluctance, especially after being pressed by CNN moderator John King, is that it did make him look evasive. Here’s how Josh Marshall described it in his post “Pawlenty’s Pitiful Moment” at Talking Points Memo, which also includes the video clip :

…The key moment where Gov. Pawlenty hemmed and hawed and ducked and weaved and wasn’t willing to repeat his criticisms to Romney’s face. Embarrassing. People get that. They have words for it.

Elsewhere at TPM, Marshall adds:

…The big story here was Pawlenty. He choked at a critical moment when he wouldn’t repeat the criticisms he’s made of Romney to his face. That makes him look weak. And more than weak I think it cuts against people’s sense of fair play and just being what we Jews call being a mensch. If you criticize someone when they’re not around. Be ready to stay it to their face. If you’re not, you’re just not for real. That’s elemental and I think people understand and remember that in a way they just don’t with the endless run of policy details candidates toss out.

Well, it wasn’t pretty. But I doubt it will prove fatal just yet, although another such choke would likely do him in as a viable candidate. Marshall is not alone in giving the night to Romney, and others give Bachmann a thumbs up as well, if only because she avoided making any characteristic blunders.
Newt and the others failed to make much of an impression, either way, although Ron Paul was gutsy, in GOP context, about bailing out of Afghanistan. I doubt he’ll get much cross-over support from anti-war moderates as a result, though, owing to his past association with some of the ugliest expressions of racial bigotry in recent times, even though the mainstream media has been too timid to call him on it.
No doubt the Romney camp is all smiles today. It won’t last. The GOP field, such as it is, will soon come after him with well-honed verbal pitchforks. I gather Romney’s nomination strategy includes letting the more conservative candidates divide the wingnut/tea party vote, so he can squeak by with the support of the saner Republicans. It’s not all that bad of a strategy, but the road ahead is increasingly pocked with political landmines bearing his name.

Nate Silver’s investigation of the relationship of the unemployment rate to presidential re-election prospects will probably become a staple of poly sci courses, with its rigorous analysis of the data and prudent conclusions. It might also be good for Journalism majors to chew on it, especially aspiring political writers, since it provides a good example of why the rag of record hired Silver — to give some data-driven heft to their reportage.
Credit Silver with doing a lot of good work and providing intelligent analysis, such as the following:

…Historically, the relationship between the unemployment rate and a president’s performance at the next election is complicated and tenuous…An article in today’s Times notes, for example, that “no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.” The 7.2 percent figure refers to Ronald Reagan, who resoundingly won a second term when the unemployment rate was at that number in November 1984.
This type of data may be of limited utility for predictive purposes, however. Reagan won re-election by 18 points in 1984, suggesting that he had quite a bit of slack. An unemployment rate of 7.5 percent would presumably have been good enough to win him another term, as might have one of 8.0 percent, 8.5 percent or even higher.

Silver then speculates that FDR’s experience may be relevant since he won re-election with serious double-digit unemployment (16.6 in ’36 and 14.6 in ’40), but it was headed downward.
Silver argues that “the rate of change over a president’s term — is probably the more worthwhile approach. But it too is not always reliable.” He cites the examples of Nixon, W and Ike, all of whom who got re-elected with rising joblessness, although Ford, Carter and Papa Bush got defeated. Silver crunches the numbers for the last century and demonstrates that there is no positive correlation between “the unemployment rate to the incumbent party’s performance in the popular vote” and only a “weak” correlation between “the change in the unemployment rate over the course of a presidential term” and incumbents’ reelection prospects.
Silver concedes that there may be a predictive formula relating joblessness and other economic statistics to reelection prospects that works, but he cites a host of complicating factors and notes,

Some political scientists prefer other economic indicators to the unemployment rate, and there is evidence that measures like growth in real disposable income do a better job of predicting election results. Here too, however, we ought to be cautious. There are literally thousands of plausible models that one might build, using different economic indicators measured in different ways and over different time periods, taken alone or in combination with one another, and applied to different subsets of elections that are deemed to be relevant.

In the comments following Silver’s post, various responders suggest factoring in underemployment, “the change in unemployment during the final 12 to 24 months of a presidency,” gas prices, The CPI etc. It’s possible that there may be some formula that does a credible job of predicting electoral outcomes. Perhaps another stat wizard, like Alan I. Abramowitz could ferret it out.
As Silver acknowledges, however, the common sense argument for reducing unemployment is strong enough, even without statistical verification. For Dems, job-creation must remain a critical priority, the daunting difficulties of doing so cited by Andrew Levison in his recent TDS Strategy Memo notwithstanding. As Levison shows, Keynesian job-creation remains a tough sell with a significant segment of the public. Same goes for encouraging the private sector to invest in jobs when consumer demand is limp. Fresh ideas to break these two logjams are urgently needed.

Georgia is often classified with the reddest of states, not without some reason, even though a third of the voters are people of color. But the new Republican Governor Nathan Deal has just signed into law a bill which could push some white rural voters, thoughtful farmers in particular, into the Democratic column.
The reason is nicely encapsulated in the title of Jeremy Redmon’s Atlanta Constitution article “Farmers Tie Labor Shortage to State’s New Immigration Law, Ask for Help,” which explains:

This month, Gov. Nathan Deal signed House Bill 87 into law. Among other things, the law punishes people who transport or harbor illegal immigrants here. It also authorizes police to investigate the immigration status of suspects they believe have committed state or federal crimes and who cannot produce identification, such as a driver’s license, or provide other information that could help police identify them.
Georgia’s agricultural industry — the largest in the state — vigorously opposed HB 87 in the Legislature, arguing it could scare away migrant workers and damage the state’s economy

The consequences thus far, are less than impressive, according to Redmon:

Migrant farmworkers are bypassing Georgia because of the state’s tough new immigration enforcement law, creating a severe labor shortage among fruit and vegetable growers here and potentially putting hundreds of millions of dollars in crops in jeopardy, agricultural industry leaders said this week.
…Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, said he has been in close contact with Labor Commissioner Mark Butler and Agricultural Commissioner Gary Black about the shortage, calling it the most severe he has seen. Hall said it’s possible state officials could hold job fairs to steer some of Georgia’s unemployed workers to these farm jobs, which pay $12.50 an hour on average. The state’s unemployment rate is now at 9.9 percent.
Farmers, however, say they often have little luck recruiting Georgia residents to work in their fields because it is temporary, hot and physically demanding. To recruit more workers, some farmers are offering signing bonuses, Hall said.
The law doesn’t take effect until July 1 but is already making migrant Hispanic farmworkers skittish, said Dick Minor, a partner with Minor Brothers Farm in Leslie in southwest Georgia who says he is missing about 50 of his workers now, threatening as much as a third of his crops.
Some farmers who work in Georgia’s $1.1 billion fruit and vegetable industry are now reporting they have only two-thirds or half the workers they need now and for the weeks of harvesting to come, Hall said. Farmers said the full extent of the shortages won’t be known until the coming weeks as they harvest their remaining crops, including watermelons and sweet corn. Hall estimated such shortages could put as much as $300 million in crops at risk this year.

Georgia’s pain may translate into Florida’s gain, reports Redmon:

Manuel De La Rosa, who recruits workers for Minor’s farm, confirmed many migrant workers are skipping Georgia for other states, including Florida. He said these workers became afraid after they heard Hispanic television news programs comparing Georgia’s new law to a stringent one Arizona enacted last year.
“Some of the people who were coming over here to [pick] cucumbers said: ‘No. They are going to catch us. They are going to put us in jail,’ ” said De La Rosa, a U.S. citizen. “Some of them were going to try another state where they have not passed this law yet.”

While white southern voters have often displayed a singular genius for voting against their own economic interests, the sheer idiocy of Republican immigration “reform” in Georgia and other states should give rural Georgians pause the next time some Republican leader prattles on about GOP pro-business creds. Redmon adds:

Meanwhile, the state’s Republican labor and agricultural commissioners are discussing issuing a joint statement in the coming days about what they intend to do about the labor shortage, a Labor Department spokesman confirmed Thursday.

No doubt Georgians await the next edition of GOP business acumen with baited breath, while state consumers may not be too thrilled with expected price hikes at the supermarket, courtesy of the Republican Governor and legislators. Here’s hoping Georgia Dems call them out.

Pollster Mark Mellman has a brilliant piece of opinion data analysis, “Winning the Medicare Fight,” up at The Hill. Mellman’s post is of interest, not only for those concerned with political strategy and Medicare policy, but also for anyone interested in how to analyze a poll. Here’s some of Mellman’s nuanced analysis of a recent Gallup poll regarding deficit-reduction through Medicare reform, which was hailed by conservatives:

Gallup’s findings seemingly suggested Republican fears were exaggerated. The pollsters’ analysis noted that “Ryan’s plan includes a complete restructuring of Medicare for people younger than 55.” Nevertheless, to Republicans’ evident glee, Gallup reported, “Pluralities of middle-aged Americans as well as those 65 and older prefer Ryan’s plan to Obama’s.”
Republicans took heart from these findings too quickly. Nowhere does the question explain, or even reference, Ryan’s Medicare plan. Respondents were simply asked which was “the better long-term plan for dealing with the federal budget deficit — the Republican plan put forth by Congressman Paul Ryan or the Democratic plan put forward by President Barack Obama?” Voters dividing evenly on which party is better at dealing with the deficit should surprise no one. Indeed, if these numbers contain any surprise, it is that Democrats perform as well as they do on this traditionally pro-GOP issue.

Mellman mines other polling data to test his argument:

According to a Kaiser poll, 57 percent oppose any reduction in Medicare spending to help reduce the federal deficit, and another 32 percent would countenance only “minor” spending reductions. An ABC/Washington Post poll found 78 percent opposed cuts in Medicare spending to “reduce the national debt.”

However, cautions Mellman,

While Republicans, who marched almost in lockstep in support of the Ryan plan, err grossly in taking solace from the Gallup poll, Democrats too have lessons to learn from this poll and other recent data.
First, shorthand rarely works — and certainly doesn’t work here. Vague references to the “Ryan plan” mean almost nothing to voters.
Similarly opaque references to “vouchers” likewise fail to galvanize public anger. According to the Kaiser poll, just 12 percent have any idea what “premium support” means, and an equally anemic 30 percent claim to know what vouchers are in the context of Medicare. In another test, use of the word “voucher” increased opposition to the Ryan plan by a single point. Even “privatization” fails the test. These terms may rally the informed base, but they carry little meaning to the wider electorate.
Second, some of the concepts Democrats find abhorrent are not quite so loathsome to voters. When Kaiser explained premium support — “people choose their insurance from a list of private health plans … and the government pays a fixed amount toward that cost” — voters divided about evenly between keeping Medicare as it is and adopting that alternative.

Mellman also cites an ABC/WaPo poll indicating that 65 percent of respondents opposed a plan in which people over 65 would get a government check to shop for health insurance in the private sector. He adds that the Kaiser poll found 68 percent of respondents opposed, even when informed of the GOP assertion that it would “reduce the deficit, save Medicare and encourage competition.”
As Mellman concludes,

While neither shorthand nor wonky explanation works, clear, crisp arguments do raise voters’ hackles about the GOP’s Medicare plan. The core message focuses on cutting Medicare benefits and putting insurance-company bureaucrats in charge of seniors’ healthcare…This is a debate Democrats can win decisively, but only with an oft-repeated and carefully honed message in place of shorthand and jargon.

Democratic candidates and campaign workers take note. Meeting this challenge in communications strategy could prove decisive in winning both support from seniors and close elections.

One of the staples of federal, state and local Democratic campaigns is the call for a major investment in upgrading the infrastructure. Dems have been great at making the call, less impressive in delivering the upgrades. Yet the need remains so compelling that it would be hard to identify an American city of significant size that doesn’t need major improvements in roads, bridges, transportation systems, harbors, airports, utilities or waste disposal facilities.
In his post, “Obama Should Call Chamber’s Infrastructure Bluff,” Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America’s Future works a slightly different angle to illuminate the problem and a strategy for addressing it more effectively:

The Chamber of Commerce claims it supports spending on infrastructure. President Obama should call them on it because a majority of the public supports rebuilding our infrastructure and millions of us need work. The President should tell the Chamber to take its rhetoric seriously and support spending what is needed. Imagine the jobs it would create and the boost it would give to our economy now and in the future. The President should make it the centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

Johnson does an excellent job of documenting the extent to which many other nations are taking infrastructure upgrades far more seriously to enhance their competitive advantage, while the U.S. muddles on, quibbling about budget cuts and deficit reduction. Republicans have dodged the infrastructure issue artfully, often parroting libertarian cliches about privatization as a solution to the problem.
Johnson notes the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $2.2 trillion investment is needed to get America up to current standards. According to the ASCE, “Years of delayed maintenance and lack of modernization have left Americans with an outdated and failing infrastructure that cannot meet our needs.”
Johnson notes that 80 percent of the public supports major infrastructure upgrades, according to a survey by Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies for the Rockefeller Foundation. Even the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce recognizes the need, as this excerpt from its web page indicates:

The U.S. Chamber is leading the charge to modernize and expand our nation’s transportation, telecommunications, energy, and water networks. Without proper investment and attention to our infrastructure systems, the nation’s economic stability, potential for job growth, and global competitiveness are at risk.

With all of the conservative whining about the need for budget cuts, it’s hard to imagine a multi-billion dollar infrastructure upgrade program, much less a two trillion dollar one get much traction. But, with 80 percent public support, maybe a little bully pulpit could help elevate infrastructure upgrades as a national priority. As Johnson suggests,

This is a tremendous opportunity for the President to lead with a plan for massive investment in infrastructure, employing millions and positioning the country to compete in the world’s economy again. The publiic is overwhelmingly behind this. The Chamber says they support updating our infrastructure, and the President should challenge them to really support it. This popular plan is good for the country and is the right thing to do, and that makes it the right thing to do politically as well.

FDR showed what a President could do with an iron clad, refuse-to-take-no-for-an-answer commitment to infrastructure improvement. To a lesser extent, President Eisenhower was ‘the infrastructure President’ of the post-war period, modernizing the nation’s interstate highways into the finest system ever created.
America will have to upgrade our infrastructure sooner than later. I’d hate to think that it’s going to take another Republican to meet this challenge (“Only a Nixon can go to China” sort of paradox) The need has never been more urgent, and President Obama should make the commitment to be ‘The Infrastructure President’ who takes America into the 21st century.

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.