Tali Mendelberg’s and Bennett L. Butler’s NYT op-ed “Obama Cares. Look at the Numbers” gives the president and Dems a new meme to promote. The gist, from the authors:

…Mr. Obama has been more committed to communities like Ferguson than any Democratic president in the past half century.
…The Congressional Budget Office’s inflation-adjusted numbers show that Mr. Obama sought to spend far more on means-tested anti-poverty programs than other first-term Democratic presidents. The targeted needs include food, housing, education, health care and cash.
Mr. Obama earmarked 17 percent of his budget for these needs, versus Mr. Clinton’s 12 percent and Jimmy Carter’s 8 percent. These presidents all faced economic challenges, although of different degrees and strength. Each was committed to the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged. But Mr. Obama made good on that commitment far more concretely.
…Christopher Wimer of Columbia University found, for example, that tax and transfer policies lowered the poverty rate by only 1 percentage point in 1967, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, but by almost 13 points in 2012.
Did Mr. Obama plan to spend more simply because he had more mouths to feed? No. Even after accounting for the higher numbers of poor people caught in the Great Recession, Mr. Obama’s record outshines his predecessors’. His proposed first-term spending per poor individual was $13,731 to Mr. Clinton’s $8,310 and Mr. Carter’s $4,431, in 2014 dollars.

Mendelberg and Butler continue with more compelling statistical evidence of President Obama’s commitment to reducing poverty and conclude that the president’s critics “are wrong to say that he does not care about poor communities of color.” Add to their analysis that the Affordable Care Act has provided previously unavailable health care coverage to millions of impoverished people, and it becomes clear that few American presidents have done more to help low-income working people of all races.
And that is a message worth broadcasting far and wide as voter registration deadlines approach across the country.

It appears that our Republican brethren are getting a little twitchy about the political fallout emerging from the tragic slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. As Simon Maloy writes in his Salon post, “GOP’s insane Ferguson crusade: Now they’re denouncing voter registration drives“:

…With the situation spiraling out of control in the streets, activists and community leaders have set up voter registration drives in Ferguson. This act of civic engagement is drawing howls of outrage from conservatives and Republicans.
Before we get into the complaints from the right, let’s just take a moment to appreciate what is actually happening. Every night, the streets of Ferguson are filled with tear gas and less-than-lethal ordinance as cops decked out in military gear respond to protests over the killing of an unarmed black teenager. The situation is extremely tense and the threat of violence hangs over everything. In response to that, activists are saying to the community: “Yes, the system has failed you, so sign these forms and work within that same system to peacefully and proactively ameliorate the situation.”
And as ThinkProgress points out, low black voter turnout (combined with an unusual election calendar) has resulted in a local government that looks nothing like the population of Ferguson. The community is majority black, but the mayor is white, and five of the six City Council members are white. For members of the community who feel their interests aren’t being represented, the first step toward changing that is registering to vote.

Maloy relates that Missouri Republican Party executive director Matt Wills got all bent out of shape about the voter registration drive and responded “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate.” Maloy reminds his readers, “Again, this is in response to a voter registration drive in a majority black community.”
The GOP response to the voter registration effort continues on in like fashion, including some disparaging jabber about “politicizing” the death of Michael Brown. Sadly, it appears that the Republican Party is finally reduced to openly saying more voting by African Americans is a bad thing. As Maloy concludes, “They’re evangelizing faith in the political system and encouraging people to act within established political norms. I’m not sure how one can view that as “disgusting” and “completely inappropriate.”
In his Plum Line post, “By all means, we should ‘politicize’ Ferguson,” Paul Waldman writes, referring to the Republican expressions of disgust:

This argument isn’t just wrong, it’s precisely backward. “Politicizing” this crisis is exactly what we should be doing….”Let’s not politicize this” is something we hear whenever a dramatic (and especially tragic) event occurs, and talk inevitably turns to the larger issues and policy implications raised by the event in question. The guardians of the status quo always say that this isn’t the time to talk about those implications (this is particularly true of gun advocates, who inevitably argue that the latest mass shooting isn’t the time to talk about the fact that our nation is drowning in firearms).
But what’s a better time to talk about those larger issues than when the nation’s attention is focused on a particular crisis or tragedy? The events in Ferguson have highlighted a number of critical issues — the treatment of black people by police, the unequal distribution of power in so many communities, the militarization of law enforcement, and many others. Does anyone think that if we all agreed not to propose any steps to address any of those problems for a few months, that we’d actually restart the debate over these issues unless there was another tragedy that forced it into the news?
…Meanwhile, people in that community may be thinking more about their lack of political power, which might lead them to do things like register voters. I’m sure that all over the country, local activists are starting to ask questions about their own police departments and whether they suffer from some of the pathologies we’ve seen in Ferguson. That’s not exploitation, it’s the political process in action.

Or, if you prefer, Democracy.

From Pew Research Center’s “Stark Racial Divisions in Reactions to Ferguson Police Shooting” discussing an Aug. 14-17 national survey of 1000 adults:

Blacks and whites have sharply different reactions to the police shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Mo., and the protests and violence that followed. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say that the shooting of Michael Brown “raises important issues about race that need to be discussed.” Wide racial differences also are evident in opinions about of whether local police went too far in the aftermath of Brown’s death, and in confidence in the investigations into the shooting.
…Fully 65% of African Americans say the police have gone too far in responding to the shooting’s aftermath. Whites are divided: 33% say the police have gone too far, 32% say the police response has been about right, while 35% offer no response.
…One-in-five young adults (20%) closely followed news from Ferguson, less than the share of those 50-64 (34%) and 65 and older (33%).

It’s still too early to estimate the political fallout of the Michael Brown slaying and community protests in Ferguson. But Jonathan Cohn discusses possible outcomes in his post, “When Does the Ferguson Story End? At least two things probably need to happen first at The New Republic, while TNR’s Brian Beutler reports on the right-wing spin on the Ferguson events.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted fro HuffPo:
There is more and more evidence that Democrats and progressives are discovering the power of taking on big money in politics as a central issue in their campaign strategies. In the House, Nancy Pelosi has gotten most of her colleagues in the Democratic caucus (160 of them) to co-sponsor a major clean money campaign finance initiative, John Sarbanes’ Government By The People Act. In the Senate, Harry Reid is leading the charge against the Koch brothers, and for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Meanwhile Netroots icon Larry Lessig, with the help of a wide array of progressive movement organizations, was able to rapidly raise more than $5,000,000 in small donations for his new Mayday PAC to take on money in politics, proving the grassroots passion behind this issue. I think there will be more in the weeks to come as more news stories on political corruption break, and billionaires like the Koch brothers spend more and more money trying to buy this election.
In the meantime, two folksy prairie populists (full disclosure, both are old friends and I have been helping out their campaigns) have added new videos to the money-in-politics mix. Featuring music, humor, and down-home folksiness, they are both a lot of fun to watch.
The first is from Rick Weiland, who has been running for Tim Johnson’s open Senate seat in South Dakota. Rick has built his entire campaign around the message of taking on big money in politics, with his Take It Back slogan being a call to take back our country from the big money special interests that control it. While the Republican frontrunner in the race, Mike Rounds, runs around the country raising millions of dollars, Rick has been the first candidate to visit all 311 towns in the state, and is in the middle of doing it again right now. Rick likes to sing, and he came out with his second music video of the campaign a couple weeks back, having rewritten the words to Roger Miller’s classic “King Of The Road:”

And then there’s Chuck Hassebrook, who has spent his entire career fighting for family farmers and small businesses as head of the Center for Rural Affairs. He’s running a great populist campaign, this one for governor of Nebraska. He is running against Pete Ricketts, who is a far right crony of the Koch brothers and a brother of the owner of the Chicago Cubs (Ricketts is threatening to do to Nebraska what his brother has done to the Cubs, God save my home state). His new video thankfully doesn’t feature him singing, but it is really funny:

These kinds of grassroots videos are the latest sign that candidates all over the country, in red states as well as purple and blue, are taking up the fight against money in politics, to take the country back from the Koch brothers, Wall Street, and the big business interests that run things right now. It is exciting to see.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
One area where a lot of us populist progressives agree with at least the rhetoric of the Tea Party is the issue of subsidies to big business. Case in point: the Export-Import Bank. A recent Chicago Tribune piece touched on this topic. Reporter Gregory Karp asks this critical question: “Do high-end foreign airlines get unfair advantage in U.S.?” He goes on to describe the expanding services foreign airlines such as Emirates and Qatar are offering in the US. He writes that domestic airlines “…operate at a disadvantage because some foreign airlines receive government subsidies, have lower labor costs and don’t deal with U.S. regulations, some of which hamstring the growth of domestic airlines.”
This is absolutely true and has not received enough attention in the media. The US government’s Export-Import Bank has been providing financial subsidies to foreign companies, including Emirates and Qatar, giving them a leg up on domestic companies. These foreign companies often have terrible human rights track records — yet our government is still giving them a competitive advantage.
Emirates has a long and well-documented history of anti-LGBT behavior. News accounts of the company’s policies reveal several instances in which the airline has taken action against LGBT individuals — even while trying to market itself to gay travelers. The UAE, where Emirates is based, prohibits “homosexual acts,” which can lead to up to 10 years in jail. The airline reportedly circumvented anti-LGBT discrimination laws in California and banned a book featuring a gay character during its inaugural international literature festival.
Qatar has policies in place that harshly discriminate against women. The airline forbids any member of the cabin crew, the vast majority of whom are female, from marrying during the first five years of employment. In addition, Emirates has a policy whereby female cabin crew that become pregnant in the first three years have to leave. And last year, the airline was criticized for forcing women to ask permission from the company before getting married.
Thankfully, these actions would not be tolerated by the Obama administration here in the United States; yet, amazingly, that same administration happily allows Ex-Im to benefit Emirates and Qatar. It is time to look at the competitive edge we give foreign companies and ensure that they meet the same standard we ask of our own hometown companies and citizens.

David Catanese’s “The Democrats’ (White) Male Problem: The party’s problem with males may be even worse than the GOP’s troubles with women” at U.S. News is one of those articles that spotlights a significant problem, but offers no solutions. Nothing wrong with that, if the analysis of the problem is sound, it can be useful for the problem-solvers.
As for the nature of the problem in the short run, Catanese says it well: “In a campaign cycle set to see a handful of margin-of-error races that determine U.S. Senate control, it’s an often overlooked and undervalued element of the election.” Further,

An early August Wall Street Journal/NBC News national poll crystallized the canyon that exists between men and women’s views on the midterm elections. While women prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress by a 14-point gap, the difference is even larger among men. Males want a Republican-led Congress by a full 17 points.

As Catanese notes, however, there is some debate among Democrats about whether the problem is worth solving, given demographic realities and trends:

Above all, women are more coveted voters because of simple mathematics: There are more of them. In the 2012 presidential election, 53 percent of the voters were female while just 47 percent were male, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2010, the breakdown was slightly narrower, with women making up 4 percent more of the midterm electorate than men. Fewer younger women come out to vote in nonpresidential years, but women as a whole still outnumber men.
Republicans won men by 14 points in their banner 2010 midterm year, and this off-year Democrats could face a similar staggering deficit. But largely, their focus remains on increasing their margins with women rather than attempting to persuade men.
“You don’t need to,” says Benenson, dismissing the importance of carrying the male vote. “They won men in the presidential election and they lost. They win white voters in the presidential election and they lost. There’s no absolute rule that you have to win this group or that group.”

Catanese also argues, with only a generalized reference to data backing him up, that males are just more, well, stubborn:

…Men, in general, are just less likely to be persuaded, according to Democratic pollster John Anzalone…In some ways, men dig in. You see it in the numbers where generically they’re just much more Republican and they dig in,” he says. “It’s just much more difficult to move them. Women are more open-minded to the dialogue between Democrat and Republican candidates and I think men have shut themselves off to hearing a lot of messages.”

But maybe Dems can get back some white male voters with specific reforms in cherry-picked races, notes Catanese. “Anzalone believes hammering home a message on protecting entitlements like Medicare and Social Security can snag the attention of a sliver of silver-haired males.”
Catanese doesn’t address the role of class in the GOP’s edge with white males. Yet, the GOP has little to offer working class whites in terms of economic policy, while Democrats offer a range of reforms. Catanese leaves it to others to decide whether or not there is a broader strategy that can win more male support for Democrats. With so many races narrowing as we near the midterm elections, it’s a challenge that demands more attention.
It may be that Dems can hold the senate without assigning more resources to winning white male support. But if Democrats can figure out a way to cut into the GOP’s edge with white males across the nation, even by just a few percentage points, the GOP will have to start worrying about it’s House majority as well.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand up Straight: : How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The Republican Leadership may be doing just fine with the Wall Street crowd and extremists who oppose birth control, but for the majority of ordinary Americans its actions over the last several weeks have rapidly begun to seal its fate as a minority party.
First, let’s start with the fact that the Republican Party is — at this very moment — a distinctly minority party in American politics.
The Gallup poll reports that the number of Americans identifying as Republicans has fallen to its lowest level in the quarter century it has been tracking the number: 25 percent.
Republicans lost the last presidential popular election by almost five million votes.
The FEC reports that combining the total number of votes cast by Americans for president, House and Senate in 2012, Americans voted for the GOP 158,605,000 times and for the Democrats 176,167,000 times. In other words they cast over 17 million more Democratic votes than Republican votes in 2012.
And even though Republican gerrymandering allowed the party to maintain control of the House by a slim margin, 1.17 million more votes were cast for Democratic House candidates than for Republicans.
Right now, GOP hopes for victories do not rest on their ability to appeal democratically to the majority of voters. They hinge entirely on successful gerrymandering and voter suppression policies that reduce the turnout of ordinary Americans. That means their hopes for political success in the future rest on very, very thin ice. And — amazingly — they seem to be doing everything they can to make the ice that separates them from complete political marginality thinner and thinner.
For instance, last week the House voted to authorize its leaders to sue President Obama for “exceeding his executive authority” — even though he has issued fewer executive orders than most recent Presidents from either party.
Polling shows that most Americans think the lawsuit is a political stunt that will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars — and many believe it is a first step toward attempts by House extremists to impeach the president.
Polling also shows that the issue of the lawsuit simultaneously convinces swing voters to support Democrats and fires up Democratic base voters. And it allows President Obama — who has leaned into the GOP lawsuit — to say, correctly, that the GOP is suing him for doing his job helping ordinary Americans, while the GOP leadership has prevented votes on scores of bills that would benefit ordinary people and would pass if they were allowed to come to the floor.
That includes the minimum wage bill that would immediately benefit 28 million ordinary Americans and would indirectly benefit millions more by putting money in people’s pockets to spend on goods and services sold and produced by other workers and businesses across the country. Polling shows that over 70 percent of Americans agree that America should increase the minimum wage and over 80 percent agree that no one who works full-time should live in poverty. No matter, the GOP leadership won’t bring the bill to the floor — because if it did the bill would pass.
Recently my wife, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, and I joined other Democrats taking the “Minimum Wage Challenge” to call attention to how difficult it is to live on today’s minimum wage. We worked very hard at trying to live on the $77 per week of discretionary income that the average minimum wage worker has to buy groceries, transportation, gas, pet food, entertainment, clothing, cleaning, etc. We still went over by about $5.
The “Minimum Wage Challenge” makes it really clear how little workers take home who work hard flipping burgers, cleaning hotel rooms, or bussing tables. Some small examples: One trip a day to Starbucks costing $3.25 per visit — that many people take for granted — would gobble up $22.75 or 30 percent of that $77. A five-dollar meal at Subway each day would consume $35 or almost half of the $77. The fare on the DC metro five times a week, eats up almost a third of the $77 just trying to get to and from work at the minimum wage job.
And to those in the Republican Party and corporate community who claim the minimum wage is adequate, I say: take the “Minimum Wage Challenge” yourself — see what you think after a week.
Of course the minimum wage is just one of a series of popular measures that the GOP leadership refuses to consider — including extending unemployment payments for the long-term unemployed — many of whom have worked all of their lives, paid their taxes, and now have been kicked by the GOP to the side of the road.
On the other hand the GOP was right there, passing extensions of tax breaks for Big Business.

Read more…

Dear Readers:
The Democratic Strategist is pleased to offer a significant new Strategy Memo by James Vega that presents a provocative and important argument.
Here’s how it begins:

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is facing a fundamental choice about political strategy.
There is no question that, as a recent Politico article stated,
“An ascendant progressive and populist movement” is increasingly
dominant in the Democratic coalition today.
The single most dramatic evidence of this rapid rise of the progressive-populist wing is, of course, the emergence of Elizabeth Warren in a few short years as the most widely popular and generally respected progressive leader in the Democratic universe since Teddy Kennedy in his prime.
But progressive-populist Democrats have not yet grasped the critical fact that Elizabeth Warren is not only a compelling progressive champion. She is also presenting progressive and populist Democrats with a very new and distinct approach to progressive political strategy. It is a new approach that inevitably requires progressive Dems to make a profound and fundamental choice regarding how they will relate to the rest of the Democratic Party.
You can read the memo HERE.

We believe you will find this memo both useful and important.
Sincerely,
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor
The Democratic Strategist

E. J. Dionne, Jr. cuts through layers of fog in his Washington Post column, “Can the voters change the GOP?,” and clarifies Democratic strategy in the process. Dionne rolls out the choice that millions of voters face:

The central issue in this fall’s elections could turn out to be a sleeper: What kind of Republican Party does the country want?…It is, to be sure, a strange question to put to an electorate in which independents and Democrats constitute a majority. Yet there is no getting around this: The single biggest change in Washington over the last five years has been a GOP shift to a more radical form of conservatism. This, in turn, has led to a kind of rejectionism that views cooperation with President Obama as inherently unprincipled.

Dionne notes the Republicans’ most recent efforts to placate their nativist wing, while angering Latinos with increasingly mean-spirited immigration “reform” measures and rhetoric. Further, adds Dionne, “there is as yet no sense of the sort of tide that in 2010 gave a Republicanism inflected with tea party sensibilities dominance in the House. The core narrative of the campaign has yet to be established. Democrats seeking reelection are holding their own in Senate races in which they are seen as vulnerable.”
In addition,

Last week’s legislative commotion could change the political winds by putting the costs of the GOP’s flight from moderation into stark relief. House Republicans found themselves in the peculiar position of simultaneously suing Obama for executive overreach and then insisting that he could act unilaterally to solve the border crisis.

“On balance,” concludes Dionne, “Washington gridlock has hurt Democrats more than Republicans by dispiriting moderate and progressive constituencies that had hoped Obama could usher in an era of reform. The key to the election will be whether Democrats can persuade these voters that the radical right is the real culprit in their disappointment — and get them to act accordingly on Election Day.”

The following report is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps e-blast:
A new poll of the 12 states where control of the Senate is being contested, fielded by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Every Voice, a major new advocacy effort, shows that voters of all political persuasions are disgusted with the current campaign system and are ready for real reform – and they are ready to vote to get it.
Campaign reforms, from a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United to public matching funds for candidates that reject large donations, are widely popular ideas that actually move voters in these critical battleground states during a simulated-debate.
In the simulated debate (using the actual candidate names), Democrats supporting a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and a proposal to reduce the influence of big money in campaigns gain a net five points, with the gains concentrated among swing center-right groups. Clearly, the debate around these issues puts Republicans squarely on the wrong side of public opinion.
Key findings:
There is an intensely Anti-Washington mood in the Senate battleground.
Voters are strongly negative towards Super PACs and believe spending in politics this year is worse than in the past and is very corrupting.
There is overwhelming cross-partisan support of a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United that can translate into added support for Democratic candidates who support the amendment and damage Republicans who oppose it.
Importantly, there is more than two-to-one support for plans to give public matching funds for small donations to candidates who reject big donations. Support holds steady after balanced debate on the proposal that accuses the supporters of favoring “welfare for politicians” with taxpayer dollars.
Republican candidates supporting the RNC lawsuit to eliminate individual contribution limits put themselves in danger of losing support.
Engaging in a debate about money in politics, when it includes both a push to overturn Citizens United and the matching funds campaign finance proposal, moves the Senate Vote a net 5 points towards Democrats.
Read the full memo here.