From the new Bureau off Labor Statistics new “Employment Situation Summary“:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 288,000, and the unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 6.3 percent in April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported today. Employment gains were widespread, led by job growth
in professional and business services, retail trade, food services and drinking
places, and construction.

While these numbers are encouraging, Dems should be wary about making optimistic pubic comments. The April report may be a one-time downward bump, and the usual statistical concerns apply. In addition, recent message-testing by DCorps indicates that crowing about “recovery” may be unwise

Democrats have to be hard-hitting and focused on the economy. As a start, Democrats should bury any mention of “the recovery.” That message was tested in the bipartisan poll we conducted for NPR, and it lost to the Republican message championed by Karl Rove. The Democratic message missed how much trouble people are in, and doesn’t convince them that policymakers really understand or are even focusing on the problems they continue to face. That framework gets in the way of a direct economic message.

At The National Journal, Charlie Cook adds:

From a political perspective, what a cross section of American voters think of the economy matters more than a panel of the top economists. Last month’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 57 percent of Americans believe we are still in a recession; just 41 percent say we are not, with pessimism just gradually diminishing over the last few years. It is what average people think that’s important, not what economists say…To this day, Americans don’t think the economy has been effectively dealt with. Thus, maybe Democrats should avoid the “R” word.

There is another “R” word Democrats should not hesitate to use in a specific way — asking voters to think about the role of Republicans in preventing the unemployment rate from falling even further.

Alec MacGillis’s “Democrats Can Overcome Their Midterm Fatalism–If They Get Over Themselves” at The New Republic restates a key message point of Sasha Issenberg’s recent article in the same magazine. MacGillis says it a little differently, but his emphasis should help bring the midterm challenge into focus:

…Before Democrats swoon into another round of pearl-clutching, they would be well-advised to absorb the message in Sasha Issenberg’s striking cover story in the new issue of this magazine. The piece is, on the surface, a helpful explainer of the new political science findings on how midterm elections work, and in particular why Republicans have come to have such a built-in advantage in them.
Embedded in the piece, though, is a powerful exhortation for Democrats to overcome their natural tendency toward midterm fatalism. Put simply, even when things aren’t looking so great for the party, the mundane work of fundraising and campaign volunteering can still make a real difference in winning key races. But if Democrats allow their fatalism to keep their butts on the couch and checkbooks in the drawer, forget about it.

Dems shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about changing minds at this stage. Showing up is actually a good bit more than half the battle, or rather, getting the so-called “unreliables” to show up:

…The irregular voters–“unreliables,” in Issenberg’s lingo–do not need to be won over to the Democrats with some magically persuasive message. They are, for the most part, already inclined to support the party. They just need to be gotten to the polls in midterm years. And there is an increasingly strong grasp of how this can be done: not through brilliant ads seeking to fire up base voters, but through the more targeted and unflashy outreach of shrewdly-phrased direct mail and, best of all, door-to-door contact by campaign canvassers.

In a way, voter apathy is less of a solvable problem than donor/volunteer motivation, echoes MacGillis:

The real challenge is that the efforts that have been proven to get Democratic voters to the polls even when the climate seems against the party–as in Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s 2010 reelection and Terry McAuliffe’s election as Virginia governor last fall–is that they take manpower and cost money, and that the people who supply both of those in presidential years need to get over their fatalism and do the same in midterm years. That is, the fatalism that is so damaging to Democrats resides less in the disillusioned voter who stays home on election day than it does in the donor or volunteer whose support could have gotten 10 or 100 or 1000 unreliable voters to the polls.

Energizing volunteers and donors, then offers Dems their best chance to bust the midterm doldrums, argues MacGillis, agreeing with Issenberg. “Whether or not Democrats hold the Senate this year and win back some of the ground they lost in state capitals like Columbus will depend, in great part, on whether the party’s volunteers and donors can rouse themselves to get people back on those sidewalks–to get past their mood of the moment and the drumbeat of pessimism from the pundits to do the necessary work. It really is as simple as that.”
Simple or not, it’s hard to see how Democrats can go wrong energizing these two relatively small, but hugely influential pro-Democratic constituencies.

The following article is cross posted from a DCorps E-blast:
Best Democratic strategy for base turnout and vote in 2014 includes ACA but overwhelmingly focuses on economic choice
This poll in the House battleground shows all of the major indicators largely unchanged since our last battleground poll in December when the country was pretty unhappy with the state of things. The anti-incumbent mood, Republican brand problems, President’s approval rating, and the congressional vote are all largely unchanged.
But one big thing has changed – and that is the views of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. Across all of the battleground districts, support has increased on all three tracking measures–and this is particularly true in the Republican-held seats. There have been big shifts on wanting to implement and fix the law and big drops in intensity for those who want to repeal and replace the law. This is one of the most significant changes we have seen in tracking in the battleground — and Republicans already have a lot of explaining to do.
What is really striking is that this change is overwhelmingly driven by Independents. In our last battleground survey in December, independents favored repeal by a 12-point margin; they now support implementation by 7 points.

This support has grown in both size and intensity among college-educated women and unmarried women.
The drop in intensity on the opposition/repeal side risks the GOP’s off-year turnout strategy – and indeed, in the Republican seats, the continued focus on ACA produces a somewhat lower turnout of base Republicans. In any case, by continuing to focus on the ACA, Republicans are emphasizing their weakest message according to this battleground poll.
The shift against repeal and opposition has just kicked in, but could begin to erode the Republican vote in the months ahead.
This fourth battleground poll of the election cycle is based on interviews with 1,200 respondents in 35 incumbent Democratic seats and 50 Republican seats; these are interviews with actual off-year voters, reflecting off-year demographics, using a named ballot in each district. But this survey included a unique experiment to see the impact when Democratic incumbents emphasized or de-emphasized the Affordable Care Act in their positive and negative campaigns. We assess the impact on both the vote and base turnout.
Unmarried women are the key target because they could be 20 to 25 percent of the electorate – and this poll reveals their limited interested in voting, as well as diminished levels of support for Democrats.
The survey, the experiment, and the regression models remind us that this economy remains tough, and that is the strongest framework for attacking Republicans and the strongest motivator for Democratic base voters to vote. Health care messages are important to Democrats’ success, but messages with an economic agenda at the center are strongest. .
The strongest framework for Democrats in challenging the Republican incumbents and in fending off Republican challengers is their support for “Speaker John Boehner and his policies that have hurt the economy and done nothing about jobs.” Half (50 percent) say that their incumbent “may be okay” but they would not vote to reelect because he or she supports the Speaker and the policies that produced gridlock and damaged the economy, and his priorities do not include getting to work on jobs.
That framework takes advantage of the terrible brand position of John Boehner and the Republicans in the House. What is so striking is how much more powerful is this framework than a parallel test with Medicare and taxes. Democrats need to be focused on the Speaker and the economy.

The strongest Democratic messages in the simulated campaign and the regression modeling begin with the economic agenda tested here:
Everyone in Washington is fighting instead of focusing on jobs and jobs that pay enough to live on. We should raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, make sure women get equal pay for equal work, make job training and college more affordable, stop tax breaks for companies that export jobs…
The strongest messages also include education and fixing the health care law, while keeping the insurance companies out, as well as support for specific health care reforms. Nevertheless, it is critical for voters to understand first that Democrats are focused on jobs that pay enough to live on, while Speaker Boehner and Republicans in Congress have hurt the economy and done nothing about jobs.
The experiment will show that base voter turnout is higher with an economic focus, though health care messages and attacks remain critically important to the our message strategy. They also play a targeted role with college educated and unmarried women.
Read on the website

Accustomed though you may be to great Paul Krugman columns, do not miss his Sunday op-ed on “High Plains Moochers.” There’s been a lot of good writing lately about the Cliven Bundy fiasco, but Krugman nails it squarely:

It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken.

Excellent point. Bundy’s racist drivel lets Hannity and other wingnut sycophants back away in faux disappointment, without having to be held to account for their support of government moochers masquerading as government-bashers. As Krugman elaborates:

For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others.
Start with the narrow issue of land use. For historical reasons, the federal government owns a lot of land in the West; some of that land is open to ranching, mining and so on. Like any landowner, the Bureau of Land Management charges fees for the use of its property. The only difference from private ownership is that by all accounts the government charges too little — that is, it doesn’t collect as much money as it could, and in many cases doesn’t even charge enough to cover the costs that these private activities impose. In effect, the government is using its ownership of land to subsidize ranchers and mining companies at taxpayers’ expense.
It’s true that some of the people profiting from implicit taxpayer subsidies manage, all the same, to convince themselves and others that they are rugged individualists. But they’re actually welfare queens of the purple sage.

It’s OK, say the wingnut pundits, for the likes of Bundy to steal from taxpayers, while all of them would agree grazing on land owned by just one tax-payer, or more likely in their case a tax-dodger, would be an outrage to them. Private property is sacrosanct; Government property is for looting. Not an argument that would stand up under much scrutiny.
Krugman adds that “the Bundy fiasco was a byproduct of the dumbing down that seems ever more central to the way America’s right operates,” not so unlike the once studious adolescent who stops reading books, so he can spend more time with comic books. As Krugman laments:

American conservatism used to have room for fairly sophisticated views about the role of government. Its economic patron saint used to be Milton Friedman, who advocated aggressive money-printing, if necessary, to avoid depressions. It used to include environmentalists who took pollution seriously but advocated market-based solutions like cap-and-trade or emissions taxes rather than rigid rules.
But today’s conservative leaders were raised on Ayn Rand’s novels and Ronald Reagan’s speeches (as opposed to his actual governance, which was a lot more flexible than the legend). They insist that the rights of private property are absolute, and that government is always the problem, never the solution.

“…Along with this anti-intellectualism,” continues Krugman, “goes a general dumbing-down, an exaltation of supposedly ordinary folks who don’t hold with this kind of stuff. Think of it as the right’s duck-dynastic moment.” Perhaps we can spare a rare kind word for conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who at least called out Bundy’s phony patriotism.
Other than that, don’t hold your breath waiting for more honest conservative reflection on the Bundy fiasco. As Krugman concludes, “I don’t expect it to happen.”

In Chris Cillizza’s “Bob Dole says the GOP is way more conservative than it was even 20 years ago. He’s right.” at The Fix, he analyses a VoteView study of roll call votes in the U.S. House and Senate to show that the Republican Party has indeed become more ideologically-extreme.

…What VoteView did is analyze every roll call vote in the House and Senate and then use that data to map how liberal or conservative the average Republican and Democrat was over time…If you start in the early 1990s, you begin to see the Republican and Democratic lines heading in opposite directions — with Republicans growing more conservative and Democrats more liberal. (This is true in both houses of Congress although more stark in the House.) But, the charts also show that Republicans have moved closer to the 1.0 pure conservative score than Democrats have to the -1.0 pure liberal score. That movement has been even more pronounced in the last decade in the House.

He quotes from the landmark Brookings study by Norm Orntstein and Thomas Mann, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism“:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party…The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise;unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal

Speaker Boehner, who bosts top ratings from conservative organization groups is often dissed by his GOP colleagues as inadequately conservative. Further, adds Cillizza:

Republican politicians who were once considered solid conservatives two decades ago are now routinely dismissed as Republicans In Name Only (RINOS). The defeat of Bob Bennett in Utah in 2010 and the primary challenges to the likes of Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are evidence of this trend. Conservatism tinged with pragmatism is no longer considered conservatism by many within the party’s base. Sen. Ted Cruz, the most visible figure of the ‘pure’ conservative movement, typified the change within the Republican party in Congress when he recently dismissed Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney as evidence that when Republicans don’t stand on principle, they lose. (Dole’s response? “I was one of the top supporters of President Reagan and had a pretty conservative record when I was in the Senate. But he [Cruz] didn’t know any of that.”)

Cillizza quotes from the VotewView study:

Though Democrats have not moved nearly as much to the left as the Republicans have to the right, they have also contributed to polarization, in our opinion, by embracing identity politics as a strategic tool. In Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Democrats advocated redistribution and regulation of business. These issues remain active to some extent, but with time emphasis has shifted to issues centered on race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference. As this issue evolved, it mapped onto the existing liberal-conservative dimension. The mapping is marked by members of the Black Caucus anchoring the liberal end of the dimension. What our roll call analysis shows is that Democrats did not vote much further to the left on the new issues than on New Deal issues. The comparison works because some New Deal issues, such as minimum wages and regulation of the financial sector, continue to lead to roll call votes.

Well, it’s not so easy to avoid “identity politics” when your group is targeted for discrimination based on “identity.” Cillizza concludes with a shrug, acknowledging that the attack on 1-percenters’ worked pretty well in 2012, and we should expect more of that going forward.
Another way of saying it is that Democrats have reconnected with grass-roots populism, and it seems to be working well, while the Republicans have drifted even farther toward the hard, unbending right.

Norm Ornstein’s National Journal article “The Most Enduring Myth About the Presidency: The Green Lantern theory just won’t go away” provides a timely reminder about the folly of attributing unlimited powers to the President. Referencing the recent 50th anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at the LBJ Library, Ornstein writes in his set-up:

The meme is what Matthew Yglesias, writing in 2006, referred to as “the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics,” and has been refined by Greg Sargent and Brendan Nyhan into the Green Lantern Theory of the presidency. In a nutshell, it attributes heroic powers to a president–if only he would use them. And the holders of this theory have turned it into the meme that if only Obama used his power of persuasion, he could have the kind of success that LBJ enjoyed with the Great Society, that Bill Clinton enjoyed in his alliance with Newt Gingrich that gave us welfare reform and fiscal success, that Ronald Reagan had with Dan Rostenkowski and Bill Bradley to get tax reform, and so on.
If only Obama had dealt with Congress the way LBJ did–persuading, cajoling, threatening, and sweet-talking members to attain his goals–his presidency would not be on the ropes and he would be a hero. If only Obama would schmooze with lawmakers the way Bill Clinton did, he would have much greater success. If only Obama would work with Republicans and not try to steamroll them, he could be a hero and have a fiscal deal that would solve the long-term debt problem.

Ornstein acknowleges that “It is tempting to believe that a president could overcome the tribalism, polarization, and challenges of the permanent campaign, by doing what other presidents did to overcome their challenges.” Grownups, however, should give all of the cliches about the LBJ strong presidency a rest and look at the actual historical record. As Ornstein writes,

LBJ had a lot to do with the agenda, and the accomplishments. But his drive for civil rights was aided in 1964 by having the momentum following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the partnership of Republicans Everett Dirksen and Bill McCullough, detailed beautifully in new books by Clay Risen and Todd Purdum. And Johnson was aided substantially in 1965-66 by having swollen majorities of his own party in both chambers of Congress–68 of 100 senators, and 295 House members, more than 2-to-1 margins. While Johnson needed, and got, substantial Republican support on civil rights and voting rights to overcome Southern Democrats’ opposition, he did not get a lot of Republicans supporting the rest of his domestic agenda. He had enough Democrats supporting those policies to ensure passage, and he got enough GOP votes on final passage of key bills to ensure the legitimacy of the actions.
Johnson deserves credit for horse-trading (for example, finding concessions to give to Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to get his support for Medicare), but it was the numbers that made the difference. Consider what happened in the next two years, after the 1966 midterm elections depleted Democratic ranks and enlarged Republican ones. LBJ was still the great master of Congress–but without the votes, the record was anything but robust. All the cajoling and persuading and horse-trading in the world did not matter.

Ornstein goes on the document that even Reagan’s transformative accomplishments were made possible buy a spirit of cooperation in the opposition party. Polarization began to kick in during the Clinton Administration, when Newt Gingrich threw his tantrums, and only let up when Gingrich was disgraced and congressional Republicans tried a more pragmatic approach to the country’s benefit.
Contray to the current GOP meme, writes Ornstein, “When Obama had the numbers, not as robust as LBJ’s but robust enough, he had a terrific record of legislative accomplishments. The 111th Congress ranks just below the 89th in terms of significant and far-reaching enactments, from the components of the economic stimulus plan to the health care bill to Dodd/Frank and credit-card reform.” Further, “all were done with either no or minimal Republican support. LBJ and Reagan had willing partners from the opposite party; Obama has had none.”
Sure Obama could have done a little better here and there, concedes Ornstein. “But the brutal reality,” concludes Ornstein, is that “in today’s politics…LBJ, if he were here now, could not be the LBJ of the Great Society years in this environment. Nobody can, and to demand otherwise is both futile and foolish.”

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:
Conventional wisdom is congealing. Too many Democrats are becoming locked in a defensive crouch, fearing that a 2010-style monsoon season is upon us because Obamacare is unpopular, Republicans will be fired up to vote and Democrats won’t. And they could be right, although if they are, it will mainly be because of their own fears. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
There is still plenty of time to change the dynamics in the 2014 race, to make this election exciting for Democratic base voters and to put the Republicans on the defensive. It’s been done before — in fact it was done the last time a Democratic president was in the sixth year of his presidency, and all the pundits said it was impossible then. We will have a number of chances to change the 2014 dynamics, and one of our very biggest is happening this week with the release of Elizabeth Warren’s new book, A Fighting Chance. This week, and in the next few weeks to come, progressives can help make Warren’s book a central part of the political and economic conversation in this country. The book’s populist progressive economic message — about how the economic game is rigged for most Americans, and how wealthy and powerful special interests have taken over our government and are squeezing the middle class and the working poor — is exactly the kind of message Democrats need to be pushing in the 2014 elections, and if her book’s narrative becomes a major part of the year’s political dialogue, that will help most Democrats.
But before I tell you more about this golden opportunity, let me take a trip down memory lane to that sixth year of the Clinton presidency. Although there are certainly some important differences (including the fact that 2014 is a far more populist moment politically because of how tough things have been for most people economically over the last decade), this cycle reminds me a great deal of 1998 in terms of the fearful way most Democrats are approaching the election. In 1998, the Lewinsky scandal was dominating the headlines, and Clinton’s personal popularity was dropping sharply. Most Democratic strategists for the fall Senate, House, and governors’ races were sure that the Republican base would be fired up to vote; that Democrats would not be motivated; and that swing voters would move the Republicans’ way because they didn’t like Clinton. Fearing another 1994-level disaster, many party leaders were advising Democratic candidates across the nation to distance themselves from the president; avoid mentioning him or how they would vote on impeachment; and run on local issues or modest-sized popular parts of the Democratic agenda. The pundits were predicting that the Democrats would lose at least 30 seats in the House, several in the Senate, and be swept in the competitive statehouse races.
But cautious, reactive strategies that avoid mentioning the elephant in the room, especially one that was featured in the paper every day and that Republicans were talking about every day — in other words, strategies that keep your candidates in a defensive crouch — are destined to lose. If the conventional wisdom had been followed, 1998 might well have been another 1994 sort of Republican landslide. But a coalition of people and groups willing to go against the conventional wisdom was willing to create a different, more aggressive strategy that was built around the idea of punching back on the impeachment issue and pivoting to the broader economic issues that really mattered to people. Our case was that, rather than obsessing about Clinton’s sex scandal and rehashing it over and over, the country needed to move on and talk about the economic issues that mattered to voters’ lives. Stan Greenberg and James Carville did polling to shape that message; People For the American Way (where I worked) did TV ads and grassroots organizing to push the idea; Wes Boyd and Joan Blades started an online petition for the country to move on that garnered 500,000 signatures in a matter of a couple of weeks (a stunning number in those early days of email), and got thousands of those people to volunteer to go to meetings with members of Congress and volunteer for candidates. By the fall it became clearer and clearer that where candidates and organizations were using our message, Democrats were doing better. More and more candidates started running ads focusing on the ‘let’s move on’ idea. We changed the political conversation, changed the dynamics in that election, and we shattered the conventional wisdom in the elections that year, picking up 5 Democratic seats in the House rather than losing the 30 that had been predicted by the pundits, and winning many of the competitive Governor and Senate races.

Read more…