The following article excerpt by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Well the debate is over and, if the Trump spectacle were not so dangerous, watching the Republicans devour each other in the shark tank would be fun. But America is more than a reality show, and the stakes are too high for pure enjoyment.
…In the “children’s table” warm up debate, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal joined the anti-immigrant fray with the memorable statement that “immigration without assimilation is an invasion.”
In fact, of course, the immigrant rights community has been organizing to make legal immigrants citizens for a long time.
…Citizenship Day in the U.S…was commemorated by a White House announcement that it was launching a national, multilingual public awareness campaign to promote the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of citizenship among eligible lawful permanent residents, and to build a volunteer corps that will support them throughout the naturalization process. It’s called the “Stand Stronger” Citizenship Awareness Campaign.
You’d think the “immigration without assimilation is an invasion” crowd would just love the push for legal permanent residents to become full fledged American citizens, but don’t bet on it.
That’s because citizens can vote.
And there is a growing movement brewing out there that is worth watching, enjoying, and actively supporting. That is the work being done in the immigrant communities through naturalization and voter registration that may teach the Republicans a lesson.
I have been working in the progressive movement a long time and I have many close friends in the immigrant rights movement. They are smart, tough, and they are street fighters. Usually their communities work hard and try to quietly raise their families. But if there is anything that gets them mad and moves them into action, it is seeing their hard working communities being bullied.
They are quite bi-partisan about it — and have gone after Democrats on occasion.
But usually the bullies are on the Republican side of the fence. In 1994 California Governor Pete Wilson pushed for the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. The Mexican immigrant community first responded with marches, and then they proceeded to naturalize in massive numbers and turn out to vote. California, that had been Ronald Reagan Red for eight straight elections has been true-blue Democratic ever since.
When Rep. James Sensenbrenner passed the harshly anti-immigrant H.R. 187 late in 2005, he triggered the mega-marches in the spring of 2006, and a massive surge in naturalization and voter registration. Latino immigrants, who had voted 49 percent for George W. Bush in 2004, voted 75 percent for Barack Obama.
The Latino, Asian, and immigrant vote carried many swing states, such as Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, and Colorado for Obama, and helped to sweep in Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate as well. We enjoy ObamaCare as a result.
When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lurched to the Right on immigration issues in the primaries leading up to the 2012 elections he was lured into talking about the need for undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”. That sound bite played in almost a continuous loop on Spanish language television, and Mitt Romney “self-deported” from the White House. Over 70 percent of the 15 million Asian and Latino voters sent a strong message by voting for President Obama.
For a while it looked like Republicans had learned their lesson, and were going to engage in constructive bi-partisan solutions. But the lure of rancid, right-wing populism was too great, and now the Republicans are tripping over themselves talking about invasions, fences on the border to both Mexico and Canada, and changing our U.S. Constitution to prevent babies born in the U.S. from ever being voters. Not to mention the racist bloviating by Donald Trump, calling Mexicans “rapists” and drug dealers.
These provocations have resulted in large immigrant demonstrations calling out Trump. Latinos protesting Trump were outside his speech in Dallas…next to the USS Iowa battleship…in San Pedro, CA, and…outside the Simi Valley, CA Ronald Reagan Library.
Just as interesting and perhaps more important, there were over 40 naturalization workshops being organized around the nation…by the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA). NPNA is an umbrella organization of well-known immigrant rights coalitions operating in 34 States.
Over the last three years they have assisted over 66,000 immigrants to naturalize or get the president’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protection from deportation. And they have plans to greatly increase the pace of naturalization during the coming months and to begin promoting a “New American Dreams” platform for sensible immigrant integration.
The Latino and Asian vote was some 15 million in the 2012 elections, and under normal circumstances that number grows with each election. These are not normal circumstances. There are right now 9 million legal permanent residents (green card holders) who are eligible to apply to naturalize today. There are over 13 million unregistered Latinos and Asians who are eligible to vote.
If even 20 percent of the Green Card holders or unregistered voters are motivated by the Trump hate to get up, become citizens, and vote, then that changes the political demographics of this next election by adding an additional 4.4 million voters to the voting pool. In addition, we should not forget that close to 900,000 U.S. citizens immigrant families turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote. Nothing like insulting their parents to get them motivated.
The anger generated by the nativist rants coming from Donald Trump and the Republican party look like they are fueling a growing political revolution in immigrant communities. This is one reality show that will be fun to watch, and I am going to do my very best to help my friends to make it happen.

The following article excerpt from democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
In Wednesday night’s GOP debate, Jeb Bush made the outrageous statement that his brother George W. Bush “Kept us safe”.
Here is a news flash for Jeb: George W. Bush did not begin his term on September 12, 2001. The worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor occurred on his watch. And it occurred after he had systematically ignored intelligence warnings – before 9/11 – that Osama Bin Laden “was determined to strike the U.S.” and that his terrorist network might try to hijack planes to do it.
In fact terrorism was a low priority for the Bush Administration before 9/11. And just six months after 9/11, when asked about apprehending the mastermind of those attack, Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him.”
Instead his administration was busy cherry picking intelligence to justify an attack on Iraq that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
The Iraq War did anything but “keep us safe.” It was based on false “intelligence” that Saddam Hussein had non-existent weapons of mass destruction. It cost over 4,000 American lives and maimed or injured tens of thousands more. It cost America trillions of dollars. Worst of all it served as a recruitment tool for Al Qaida and other terrorist networks around the world.
In fact, rather than “keep us safe,” a 2006 intelligence report concluded that the War in Iraq “made the overall terrorism problem worse”. It also kicked over the sectarian hornet’s nest in the Middle East and created the conditions that spawned Al Qaida in Iraq that ultimately turned into ISIL (there was no Al Qaida in Iraq before the invasion).
Of course you can understand why Jeb Bush insists that his brother “kept us safe”. He has surrounded himself with many of the very same foreign policy advisors that presided over the worst foreign policy record in half a century.
They are the same crowd that most recently tried and failed to sink the six-nation agreement to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon without a war.
After a while it gets sickening to listen to their attempts to rewrite history and posture as tough foreign policy geniuses when in fact they conducted a foreign policy that put America and our interests at more risk and sent thousands of young men and women to their deaths in an unnecessary elective war.
But the thing that is most galling is their refusal to take any responsibility for allowing the nation to be subjected to the worst attack on the homeland in 70 years.
It is simply outrageous that the Bush crowd would have the audacity to say they “kept us safe” after presiding over the 9/11 debacle – and the inept, ineffective, ideologically driven response that followed.
The Republicans have been fixated for years on the tragic death of one American Ambassador and his aides in Benghazi – even though he was knowingly taking risks to advance America’s foreign policy goals in Libya and there is not one shred of evidence of official wrong doing.
Can you imagine the investigations and vicious smears of Democrats that would have ensued had Al Gore been President at the time of the 9/11 attacks?
Democrats did not use those horrible attacks to their political advantage.
But the chutzpa required for Jeb Bush to argue that George Bush actually kept America safe is simply beyond the pale – and can’t be ignored.
Of course it wasn’t just Bush’s failed defense and foreign policies that left everyday Americans less secure. His trickle down economics lead to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression; cost 8 million Americans their jobs; and did economic damage that, years later, has just begun to heal.
George Bush left President Obama an economy that was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month when he took office in 2009. And the collapse of the financial markets on Bush’s watch whipped out $2 trillion in retirement savings.
Is that what he means by “keeping us safe”.
George Bush sped up climate change with an energy policy written in secret by Dick Cheney and representatives of the Oil companies.
And who can forget how he kept the people of the New Orleans and the Gulf Coast “safe” when they were struck by Hurricane Katrina. Over a thousand Americans died because the levies failed in New Orleans and the Bush Administration’s response was infamously inept.
“Keeping us safe?”

…The evidence is clear. The best ways to keep America truly safe are never to forget just what George W. Bush did to America — and to keep Jeb Bush and the entire Bush gang a “safe” distance away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the levers of American political power.

From William Galston’s Wall St. Journal column: “What It Will Take to Win in 2016
Democrats have some advantages, but history favors the Republicans“:

Some basics favor the Democrats. Relative to 2012, the share of the electorate commanded by minority voters–principally Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians–will continue to increase. This shift will be especially pronounced in states such as Florida and Nevada, where large numbers of Hispanics are reaching voting age. Millennial voters (young adults of all hues) will also increase as a share of the electorate, and they tend to favor Democrats as well.
In these highly polarized times, party identification does more to shape voting behavior than it did decades ago, and recent studies show that the Democrats have retained their advantage. To be sure, as the share of the electorate that regards itself as independent surges, both parties continue to decline. But most self-professed independents lean toward one party or the other and vote accordingly, and true independents constitute at most 15% of the electorate. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey gave the Democrats a six-point edge (42% to 36%) once leaners are taken into account.

But Galston also notes that “the Democrats’ advantage in the vital Midwest–home to six of the 11 states decided by single digits in 2012–has disappeared.” Further, “Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz has shown that candidates vying to succeed incumbent two-term presidents of their own party face an uphill climb–all else being equal, a penalty of between four and five percentage points relative to the incumbent’s second-term share of the vote.”
Galston also warns that President Obama’s ‘approval drag’ effect is a significant problem: “On average, a five-point increase in public approval will increase his would-be successor’s share of the popular vote by 0.9%. Mr. Obama’s rating, which topped 50% in the concluding days of his re-election campaign, is now hovering around 45%–a modest but potentially significant drag on the Democratic nominee’s prospects if not reversed.
But Democrats have reason to hope that the economy will break their way in the months ahead, according to CBO growth projections of 3 percent for 2016, especially if it produces an employment uptick. A woman nominee and disgust with Republican voter suppression and immigrant-bashing could give Democrats the edge they need with key constituencies, adds Galston.
“…If heads ultimately dominate hearts in both parties,” concludes Galston, “the 2016 election will be closely contested. However, “if the GOP selects a nominee who can appeal to Midwestern voters, the Democrats’ “lock” on the Electoral College could go the way of its Republican predecessor in 1992.”
Galston’s cautiously optimistic assessment for Democrats makes sense. But it is tempered by a significant concern about growing Democratic weakness in the midwestern states with respect to the electoral college. An extra effort on the part of the national and state Democratic parties in those states, along with well-targeted contributions to GOTV in the midwest, just might make a pivotal difference in 2016.

Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has an article at HuffPo, “Grandmaster of the Great Game: Obama’s Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China,” which should elevate debate about America’s foreign and trade policy.
Republicans will dismiss McCoy’s post as liberal propaganda, and his analysis will be completely lost on the more rabid Obama-haters among them. But McCoy, an author of several ground-breaking books on international politics, has revealing insights which merit a fair hearing, including:

…Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence…Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security — all in search of a new version of American supremacy.
…Moving from repair to revival, from past to future, President Obama has been using America’s status as the planet’s number one consumer nation to create a new version of dollar diplomacy. His strategy is aimed at drawing China’s Eurasian trading partners back into Washington’s orbit. While Beijing has been moving to bring parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified “world island” with China at its epicenter, Obama has countered with a bold geopolitics that would trisect that vast land mass by redirecting its trade towards the United States.
…Obama has unleashed a countervailing strategy, seeking to split the world island economically along its continental divide at the Ural Mountains through two trade agreements that aim to capture nothing less than “the central global pole position” for “almost two-thirds of world GDP [gross domestic product] and nearly three-quarters of world trade.” With the impending approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Washington hopes to redirect much of the vast trade in the Asian half of Eurasia toward North America.

McCoy has much more to say about the particulars of Obama’s global political and economic strategy in his HuffPo post. Further, he adds, “In his determined pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama has revealed himself as one of the few U.S. leaders since America’s rise to world power in 1898 who can play this particular great game of imperial domination with the requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness.”
McCoy argues that there are “just three grandmasters of geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of America’s rise to global power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, who shattered the Soviet Empire, making the U.S. the world’s sole superpower; and Barack Obama, who is defending that status and offering a striking imperial blueprint for how to check China’s rise. In each case, their maneuvers have been supple and subtle enough that they have eluded both contemporary observers and later historians.”
It will likely take many years before President Obama’s remarkable expertise in ‘The Great Game’ is fully-appreciated. If “grandmaster” seems a little grandiose for describing Obama’s statecraft, consider McCoy’s contextual overview:

To the consternation of his critics, in the waning months of his presidency, from Iran to Cuba, from Burma to the Pacific Ocean, Obama has revealed himself as an American strategist potentially capable of laying the groundwork for the continued planetary dominion of the United States deep into the twenty-first century. In the last 16 months of his presidency, with a bit of grit and luck and a final diplomatic surge — concluding the nuclear treaty with Iran to prevent another debilitating Middle Eastern conflict, winning congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and completing negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — Obama just might secure the U.S. a significant extension of its waning global hegemony.

Looking forward, Democrats are in excellent position to continue building on this impressive legacy, because President Obama has included two top Democratic leaders, Vice President Biden and former Secretary of State Clinton in the development of the Administration’s foreign and trade policies. Republicans will continue to howl and parrot their memes that the Administration is projecting “weakness” on this and that. In reality, however, few of their leaders are equipped to understand what Obama has accomplished, despite their all-out opposition to everything he has done.

Dear Readers:
The relationship between Democrats and the Black Lives Matter movement has become a critical issue, not only for the presidential candidates but for all Democrats as well.
Because Black Lives Matter is a loose umbrella coalition of many groups and individuals, it has not been clearly reported in the press that there are actually two very distinct — and basically incompatible — political perspectives that exist within the broad alliance. It is absolutely vital that Democrats and liberal-progressives make a major effort to clearly understand and sharply distinguish between them.
The reason is simple. While the first perspectives sees liberals and the Democratic Party as lacking in genuine understanding and adequate commitment to addressing the urgent needs of Black America, it nonetheless views them as potentially useful actors in the national political process. The other perspective views liberals and the Democratic Party as utterly and hopelessly tainted by racism and therefore as active, fully culpable collaborators in “the system” that oppresses Black America.
Liberals and Democrats cannot avoid forming an opinion about these two perspectives and then deciding how to respond to them, particularly in regard to the second view.
We are therefore pleased to offer the following Strategy Memo that examines this critical issue.
There are two profoundly different political perspectives within the Black Lives Matter coalition. It’s extremely important for Democrats to understand the difference between them in order to successfully relate to this important social movement.
To read the memo, click HERE
We believe you will find the memo both useful and important.
Sincerely
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor
The Democratic Strategist

From WaPo columnist Dana Milbank’s “Dick Cheney tries to fool the public again,” commenting on his address to the American Enterprise Institute:

Cheney hyperbolized, hyperventilated and gave rein to hyperactive imagination — “desperation . . . cave . . . neutered” — and the audience at the normally sedate American Enterprise Institute was riled…Applauding Cheney from the front row were Paul D. Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq war, and Sen. Tom Cotton, (Ark.), author of the Senate Republicans’ letter to the ayatollahs attempting to kill the deal during negotiations. In the second row were former congresswoman Michele Bachmann and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Cheney aide whose tenure led to a prison sentence.
Surely, those who would like to see Congress undo the nuclear agreement can’t expect that rolling out Cheney is going to save the cause. When it comes to dire predictions based on scary intelligence, the former vice president wouldn’t seem to have the best track record.

Clearly the GOP’s neocons have learned nothing from the Bush administration’s catastrophe. More disturbing is that few of the current Republican presidential aspirants are willing to say so.

The New York Times has not one, but two K.O. punches for the Republican presidential campaign and the Summer of Donald. First Krugman:

…Go back to the politics of 2009, when the new Obama administration was trying to cope with the most terrifying crisis since the 1930s. The outgoing Bush administration had already engineered a bank bailout, but the Obama team reinforced this effort with a temporary program of deficit spending, while the Federal Reserve sought to bolster the economy by buying lots of assets.
And Republicans, across the board, predicted disaster. Deficit spending, they insisted, would cause soaring interest rates and bankruptcy; the Fed’s efforts would “debase the dollar” and produce runaway inflation.
None of it happened. Interest rates stayed very low, as did inflation. But the G.O.P. never acknowledged, after six full years of being wrong about everything, that the bad things it predicted failed to take place, or showed any willingness to rethink the doctrines that led to those bad predictions. Instead, the party’s leading figures kept talking, year after year, as if the disasters they had predicted were actually happening.
…How would the men and women who would be president respond if crisis struck on their watch?
And the answer, on the Republican side at least, seems to be: with bluster and China-bashing. Nowhere is there a hint that any of the G.O.P. candidates understand the problem, or the steps that might be needed if the world economy hits another pothole.

And then there is this, from Timothy Egan:

In a few weeks, Pope Francis will visit our fair land, a fitting pivot from the Summer of Trump, closing out a gluttonous episode of narcissism, rudeness, frivolity and xenophobia. For all that the orangutan-haired vulgarian has done to elevate the worst human traits a public figure can have, Francis is the anti-Trump. He has more power, media magnetism and authenticity in his lone functioning lung than Donald Trump has in his entire empire of ego.
…But for saying things that the darker elements of the Republican Party believe, but rarely voice, Trump is their clear front-runner — a dangerous moment for a troubled party. He’s drawn praise from ex-Klansmen like David Duke. The Daily Storm, a neo-Nazi website, urged its followers “to vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents us.”

Egan is no doubt correct that the Pope’s visit will certainly set a stark contrast to the Summer of Donald, reminding the American public of the dignity that is now sorely lacking among Republican leaders. That’s what it has come to — a once great political party reduced to groveling for any kind of media coverage while their ring-master hogs the limelight with increasingly lame pronouncements. The Democratic Party has its problems, but it can’t be denied that the modern GOP sets a matchless standard for well-earned ridicule.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
A message to the out-of-touch Washington pundit class: get a grip. What was or was not on Hillary Clinton’s email server when she was Secretary of State is not a game-changing news story.
In fact, no one outside the chattering class — and right-wing true believers — could give a rat’s rear about this story — and there is a good reason: there is no “there” there. If someone really thinks the great “email” story — or the Benghazi investigation — are going to sink her candidacy, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.
Of course, this is not the first time that the media — with an assist from right-wing political operatives — have laid into Hillary Clinton in an attempt to create a “scandal” where there was none.
Over the weekend, syndicated columnist Gene Lyons quoted a New York Times editorial as saying:
“These clumsy efforts at suppression are feckless and self-defeating.” It argued that these actions are “swiftly draining away public trust in (her) integrity.”
That editorial actually appeared in January 1994. The Times was expressing outrage at Hillary Clinton’s turning over Whitewater documents to federal instigators rather than the press, which, as Lyons pointed out, ” had conjured a make-believe scandal out of bogus reporting of a kind that’s since become all too familiar in American journalism.”
Speaking on NPR’s Diane Rehm show, the Atlantic’s Molly Ball sounded the same notes 21 years later. The email issue “continued to contribute to the perception that she has something to hide.”
The Times’ Sheryl Gay Solberg added that the email issue “creates and feeds into this narrative about the Clintons and Mrs. Clinton that the rules are different for them, and she’s not one of us.” Really?
What might really feed a negative narrative would be the New York Times’ own story several weeks ago that falsely accused Ms. Clinton of being under criminal investigation. Which she is not and never was. The Times public editor acknowledged that the story was false and that it feed another narrative: that the New York Times had an ax to grind against the Clintons.
Of course the bottom lines of this story are simple:
At the time Ms. Clinton was Secretary of State there was no prohibition against the Secretary of State having a private email server. In fact, no Secretary of State before Ms. Clinton had a government email account.
None of the emails on the Secretary’s personal account were classified at the time they were sent or received. That is not in dispute. There is an on-going controversy between various agencies of what ought to be classified in retrospect as the material is released to the public by the State Department, but that does not change the fact that none of it was classified at the time. In fact, one of the several emails at issue actually says the word “unclassified” in the upper left hand corner and can still be accessed by the general public on the State Department web site.
Finally, no one has ever pointed to an instance where the fact that something was on her server instead of a government server had any negative consequences whatsoever.
There is no issue here, period.
And as for the Benghazi “affair,” none of the many investigations that have already been completed concerning the events surrounding the death of the American Ambassador to Libya in the Benghazi attack has found a shred of evidence that that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong whatsoever leading up to or in response to that attack.
And frankly if you ask most people about the Benghazi affair they think you’re talking about something you rub on your muscles to reduce pain.
So now Congressman Trey Gowdy, who is the Chair of the Select Committee that was set up by the Republicans in the House to once again investigate this non-scandal, has decided to investigate the non-existent issue of the Clinton email server as well — even though he acknowledges that it has nothing to do with Benghazi.
Not withstanding the lack of substance to any of these issues, people like Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post proclaim that they could be a terrible weight on her candidacy.
Who exactly are these pundits talking to? Rarely have they been so out of touch with the real American electorate. The perceptions and narratives they are discussing are the perceptions and narratives of the insider pundit and political class — not normal voters.
And the same goes for often-unnamed Clinton backers that are wringing their hands that Clinton has not yet put the email issue behind her.
No one is handed the American presidency — and that is especially true of a candidates that are not incumbent Presidents.
Every candidate faces many challenges and hurdles to getting elected — and Hillary Clinton is no different. But the email-server issue is not one of them.
Clinton’s campaign completely recognizes that it must fight for every delegate in the primaries and every vote in the general election.
In the general election, she must motivate Democratic base voters to turn out in massive numbers. She must excite new voters — especially young people and women. And she must persuade undecided voters that she will fight effectively to actually change the rules of the political and economic game so that we have economic growth that benefits every American, not just Corporate CEO’s and Wall Street Banks.
These are her real challenges — and her campaign is focused like a laser on meeting those challenges.
It’s time for her supporters to focus on those challenges as well — and for the media to resist continuing to play its role as enabler of baseless right wing attacks like the great email and Benghazi “scandals” of 2015.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Many of the same people who rushed America to war with Iraq are now engaged in a no-holds-barred campaign to convince a small group of House and Senate Democrats that they should vote to kill President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement when Congress returns in September.
But the fact is that opposing the Iran nuclear deal is horrible politics for Democrats. If it were defeated, it would be even worse from America — and, by the way, for Israel.
The case is made succinctly in a new TV spot by Americans United for Change.
First, the politics.
Reason #1: Polls show that everyday Americans — and especially Democrats — overwhelmingly support the agreement, and they have been supportive of the process that led to the agreement for many months.
A Public Policy Polling nationwide poll taken July 23-24 found 54 percent of the public supported the nuclear agreement with Iran and only 38 percent opposed.
According to PPP:

Democratic voters (75/17) are far more united in their favor for the agreement than Republicans (36/54) were in their opposition to it. Voters within every gender, race, and age group are in support of it.
Similarly, 54% of voters want their members of Congress to vote to allow the agreement to move forward, compared to just 39% who would like to see it blocked.
It may surprise some pundits that an even greater number of Jewish voters support the deal. According to a poll by GBA Strategies for J Street, a progressive pro-Israel lobbying group, Jewish voters support the deal by a 20-point margin — 60 percent in favor and 40 percent against. Jewish voters strongly support action by Congress to approve the agreement.

And in New York City, where several Democrats are still undecided about their support for the agreement, a PPP poll taken last week found that 59 percent of the city’s voters want their Member of Congress to allow the deal to go forward, compared to only 33 percent who do not.
In New York City, of course, most key electoral races for Democrats are Democratic primaries. Far from experiencing a backlash if they support the Iran deal, Democratic Members of Congress will likely benefit. In fact, 54 percent of voters say they are more likely to vote for someone who supports the agreement, while only 25 percent say they’d be less likely to.
Reason #2: If the Iran deal goes into effect at the beginning of October as it is supposed to do, every indication is that it will be going very well by the time any Members of Congress face the voters in either a Primary or General Election.
The interim agreement that froze Iran’s nuclear program during the 18 months of negotiation that preceded the consummation of the final agreement was derided by Neo-Cons at the time it was signed. They argued that Iran would never adhere to its terms and it would collapse.
Not only did it not collapse, but many of those same voices thought it was working so well by early this year that they urged the U.S. to scrap the negotiations in favor of trying to maintain the interim deal that that they had earlier excoriated.
By next spring, there is every reason to believe that the same will be true with the permanent agreement.
There is no danger that a vote for the Iran agreement will create a nightmare scenario by the next election. But there is a very high likelihood that if Congress rejects the deal, America could be facing a major foreign policy disaster by next year that will be hung directly around the necks of those voting no. More on those consequences in a moment.
Reason #3: Many of the Democrats who oppose the Iran Deal, or are undecided about their support, fear a backlash from a very small group of influential Democratic donors and bundlers.
But many of them ignore the rise of a whole new group of progressive Democratic donors — and progressive Jewish donors — that are just as committed to supporting the agreement as opponents are to stopping it. J-Street — the progressive alternative to AIPAC — has exploded in size over the last five years. From the point of view of fundraising and political support, these donors represent the future for Democratic Members of Congress.
What’s more, many progressive Democratic donors have made it clear that they will refuse to support opponents of the deal in the next cycle.
Reason #4: Democrats who oppose the deal will be isolating themselves from the vast majority of Democratic voters (including Jewish Democratic voters), from the overwhelming majority of Democratic Members of Congress, from the House Democratic Leadership and from the Democratic President.
That isn’t good politics for anyone who wants to have influence within the Democratic caucuses of the House or Senate — or the White House.
Reason #5: The organized progressive community within the Democratic Party is every bit as intense in their support for this agreement as the small number of opponents.
Opponents of the deal are likely to alienate these organizations and their leadership for years to come and to bear the brunt of intense criticism from groups that have no compunction inflicting political costs onto Democrats who they believe have betrayed their principles.
Reason #6: Most importantly, Democrats who vote against the Iran Agreement will ultimately find themselves on the wrong side of history.
This vote is an “Iraq War” moment that will fundamentally define Members of Congress for the rest of their careers.
Thirteen years later, there are not many Democrats in Congress who voted in favor of the Iraq War and are glad they took that vote. Many of them have paid a steep political price for allowing themselves to be rushed into war by many of the same people who today are urging that the Iran Agreement be stopped.
There are simply no alternatives to this agreement other than a nuclear Iran or military conflict. If the U.S. Congress stops this agreement, our partners will end sanctions and we will get nothing in return from Iran. The hard-liners in Iran will be emboldened and will argue that the U.S. never really wanted a negotiated agreement and that the only way for Iran to protect itself is to actually build a nuclear bomb.

Read more…

From Samantha Page’s “Why Republicans Could Have Trouble Winning The Latino Vote, In One Poll”:

A new poll released Tuesday suggests Republicans could have a tough time winning over a key voting bloc next year if they don’t start taking environmental issues seriously….Nearly three-quarters of voting Latinos — one of the fastest-growing demographics in America — think it is “important” that the United States acts on climate change, according to the poll, released by Earthjustice and GreenLatinos.
More Latinos think it is important to reduce smog and to increase water conservation than to fix immigration policies, the poll of registered Latino voters found. The poll also found that 90 percent of Latinos want to strengthen the Clean Water Act, and 85 percent want to reduce smog and air pollution.

Latino concern about climate change is about being good, concerned citizens. But it’s also personal because “American Latinos are three times more likely to die from asthma than other racial or ethnic groups, and about half the country’s Latino population lives in regions that frequently violate clean air rules, according to the National Hispanic Medical Association…Almost a quarter of low-income Hispanic and Puerto Rican children in the United States have been diagnosed with asthma, in comparison to one in 13 middle-class or wealthy white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Most of the 16 declared GOP presidential candidates are still in denial about human-caused climate change and are clearly in poor position to offer remedies. Page adds: “A 2014 poll by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that nine out of 10 Latinos in the United States — including 68 percent of Republican Latinos — want the country to take action against climate change…This is bad news for prospective Republican candidates.”
Democratic candidates and their campaign staffers at the federal, state and local level, take note. Concern for the disparate impact of pollution on the health and well being of Latinos and indeed, all people of color and low-income whites, is a particularly good issue for your candidates — and a disaster for Republicans.