The following article is by Erica Seifert of Democracy Corps:
We do not expect House Republicans to take up an increase in the minimum wage during this Congress. But if they did, they would find themselves on the right side of history and public opinion.
A survey of American adults released last week by Quinnipiac University found that 71 percent — including majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans — support raising the minimum wage; 51 percent believe it should be raised to $10.10 an hour or higher.
Our own research has found that raising the minimum wage is consistently and increasingly one of the most powerful policies that we test on our national surveys. As we hear in focus groups across the country, “The minimum wage is way below the cost of living.” These people are not policy experts, but they know the price of gas and groceries.
In a few weeks, Democracy Corps will be traveling to Denver to conduct live dial-meter groups during President Obama’s State of the Union address. Last year, the president’s call to raise the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour received strong approval from the Democrats and Independents in our group.

And yet congressional Republicans cannot find the will to even allow this issue to come to a vote.
Meanwhile, in unrelated news, the Center for Responsive Politics announced on Monday that — for the first time in history – more than half of all members of Congress are millionaires.

The following is cross-posted from a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner e-blast:
On Monday, Maria Shriver, the Center for American Progress and AARP released the results of a comprehensive new poll of 3,500 Americans. The bipartisan poll–conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and TargetPoint Consulting and sponsored by AARP–reveals a public that understands the changing nature of American families, the economic stress these changes impose on women and the failure of policymakers to adapt to these changes. In a country divided politically, the public comes together to support bold policy changes–from paid leave, to protections for pregnant workers, to pay equity–that support women and families. This survey focuses specifically on “women on the brink:” Groups of women including those with a lower income, women of color, single mothers and others who are one misstep or one calamity away from poverty.
Among key findings of the survey:
An identical percentage of both men and women (71 percent) believe women are “essential” to the American economy.
Nearly two in three (64 percent) believe government should “adapt to the reality of single-parent households and use its resources to help children and mothers succeed regardless of their family status.” A much smaller 51 percent believe government should “reduce the number of children born to single-parents and use its resources to encourage marriage and two-parent households.”
The current economy does not work for many women in our country. Only 28 percent overall believe the phrase, “the harder I work, the more I fall behind,” applies to them. This rises to 54 percent among lower income women and 48 percent among single mothers.
Despite this, most of the women in the survey, including economically marginalized women, are optimistic about their future and their ability to improve their lives. An inspiring 92 percent of women of color, for example, believe, “I have the ability to make significant changes to make my life better.”
In policy terms, these women focus first and foremost on steps businesses and governments can take to accommodate family obligations. For example, paid leave is just as important to these women as increased pay and benefits.
Democrats and Republicans alike come together to support policies that adapt to new American families. An impressive 95 percent of Democrats favor pay equity, for example, as do 88 percent of Republicans.
Additional details about this Shriver Report’s research, including details on this poll can be found here.
In addition, those who want to hear a recording of a poll presentation given on Monday can call this number 1.855.859.2056 and enter Conference ID 33.15.68.42.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has emerged as one of the more lucid policy journalists, with a knack for translating complex economic reforms into language that connects with everyday voters, as well as policy wonks. A recent short and simple entry from his blog, via Reader Supported News, “The Lousy Jobs Report and the Scourge of Inequality” rolls out an appealing menu of ten policy reforms in this excerpt:

Businesses won’t create new jobs without enough customers. But most Americans no longer have enough purchasing power to fuel that job growth.
That’s why it’s so important to (1) raise the minimum wage at least to its inflation-adjusted value 40 years ago – which would be well over $10 an hour, (2) extend unemployment benefits to the jobless, (3) launch a major jobs program to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, (4) expand Medicaid to the near-poor, (5) enable low-wage workers to unionize, (6) rehire all the teachers, social workers, police, and other public service employees who were laid off in the recession, (7) exempt the first $20,000 of income from Social Security payroll taxes and make up the difference by removing the cap on income subject to the tax.
And because the rich spend a far smaller proportion of their earnings than the middle class and poor, pay for much of this by (8) closing tax loopholes that benefit the rich such as the “carried interest” tax benefit for hedge-fund and private-equity managers, (9) raise the highest marginal tax rate, and (10) impose a small tax on all financial transactions.
One of the major political parties adamantly refuses to do any of this, and the other doesn’t have the strength or backbone to make them.
Make a ruckus.

If a war on inequality is indeed the Democrats’ best strategy for 2014-16, then Reich’s agenda makes good sense.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of ‘Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,’ is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Yesterday’s revelation of the Governor’s Office was directly involved shutting down George Washington Bridge access lanes to Fort Lee, N.J., is not just another run-of-the-mill political problem for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
It could be fatal to Christie’s presidential ambitions. There are four reasons to believe that the ham-handed attempt to punish Ft Lee’s mayor by causing traffic gridlock in his city may make his presidential ambitions to sink faster than a rock in the Hudson River.
Reason #1: The episode turns his trademark no-nonsense forcefulness from a refreshing positive into self-serving bullying — a disgusting negative.
In politics, every positive trait has its evil twin. Voters want leaders who are on their side, but they don’t want demagogues that pander to their interests.
It’s a good thing in politics to be passionately committed to strongly-held beliefs. It’s not a good thing to be an uncompromising ideologue.
Voters want their leaders to be self confident and forceful. They don’t want leaders to be arrogant bullies.
That’s why in politics if you’re trying to convince persuadable voters that they shouldn’t support your opponent, it’s often best to take on their strongest positive traits and morph them into their negative first cousins. You attack their strength by turning their into their negative incarnations.
One of the reasons why this approach often works is that people are already predisposed to believe that the politician in question is prone to the qualities and behaviors in question that could have either a positive or a negative side.
Once Christie sold the public on the notion that he is a no-nonsense, straight-talking guy who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, tells it like it is and gets things done — it’s not hard to believe he is also the kind of a guy who will act like a bully to get what he wants.
And of course this episode conjures up all of the worst stereotypes about New Jersey politics that Christie already needed to overcome in places like Iowa and Wisconsin. “Bridgegate” and its colorful cast of characters could be a sequel to the current box office hit, American Hustle.
People in the Midwest and South like straight talk, but they also like “nice” and civil. Christie’s brash “straight-talk” was going to wear thin pretty quickly outside the Northeast even before the “bridgegate.” Now the negative side of his personal style will be the first thing they see.
Reason #2: “Bridgegate” will be the first impression that many ordinary voters get of Chris Christie.
Outside of New Jersey and the New York media market, most of the swing voters who will decide a general election — and many Republican primary voters — have only a vague knowledge of Christie. Normal people, after all, think about politics five minutes a week. The first priority of a political figure is to break through the clutter — to get on the radar scope — to get noticed.
But like your mother told you, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. This is a bad first impression.
Voters cast their ballots based on what they know. For example, if all you know is that you share the candidate’s ethnic name, you are often more likely to support him — since he’s “like you.” But if they learn more, the importance of the name begins to shrink.
“Bridgegate” is a big, interesting, symbolically powerful story that will break through with voters who know very little about Christie. For many voters, it will be their first real impression and he will come to be defined by it. Political communication is all about symbols. This will become a symbol for Christie — a story that describes him for voters who don’t know anything else about him.
“Oh yeah, he’s they guy who caused a three-day traffic jam to punish a mayor that wouldn’t support him, right? What a piece of work.”
Reason #3: So much for the guy who could, as the New York Times said, “transcend partisan rancor and petty politics in the service of the public good.”
You don’t get much more partisan or much more petty than inconveniencing and threatening the public safety of thousands of ordinary citizens in order to punish a Democratic mayor who failed to endorse your re-election for governor. When one unidentified aide said he felt sorry for the children on school buses who were late to school because of the intentional traffic jam, Christi’s friend and Port Authority official David Wildstein replied that they were the kids of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Buono’s supporters. Yuck.
Reason #4: The momentum and inevitability of Christie’s march to the GOP nomination has evaporated.
One of the big things Christie had going for him was the bandwagon. He seemed inevitable, so Republican donors, county chairmen and activists were signing on. No longer.
Of course part of that inevitability was built upon the premise that he could attract lots of persuadable voters and disaffected Democrats with his straight talking, non-partisan image. That is gone too. His attempts to revive that narrative will always be stalked by the specter of the bridge incident that proves it to be a work of fiction.
When he lost re-election many years ago, former Texas Agricultural Commissioner and now progressive radio talk show host and writer Jim Hightower said: “One day you’re a peacock and the next day you’re a feather duster.”
Christie may not be a feather duster quite yet, but the odds have increased that his oversized presence in American politics will appear in history books as little more than a small footnote.

The following article is by Erica Seifert of DCorps:
Earlier this week, the Senate passed a bill to extend long-term unemployment insurance, a measure that would restore assistance to the estimated 1.3 million workers whose benefits expired at the end of December. And while just six Republican senators joined the majority, the bill was pronounced “bipartisan.” Apparently this is what passes for Republican participation these days.
House Speaker John Boehner’s response to the Senate’s action was that the UI extension would need to be paid for with cuts elsewhere, and also include incentives for the unemployed to get back to work. Instead of trying to extend unemployment insurance, Boehner said, the House should “remain focused on growing the economy.” As the Speaker himself might put it: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Economists widely agree that unemployment insurance does not have a deleterious effect on the economy. On the contrary, it is quite beneficial. Our very smart friends at the Economic Policy Institute “find that continuing the extensions through 2014 would generate spending that would support 310,000 jobs. If this program is discontinued, the economy will lose these jobs.” The EPI further reports that “insurance benefit extensions through 2014 would generate a $37.8 billion increase in GDP.”
Given this, one would think that extending unemployment benefits must be politically controversial, because clearly it is not bad for the economy. But according to a December poll conducted by our colleagues at Hart Research Associates, the opposite is true — just a third of Americans oppose extending unemployment insurance. Additionally, maintaining these benefits has a 2-to-1 intensity advantage (those who say they strongly support or do not support extension).

We repeat: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

The Republican revisionist history machine is cranking up in a big way to address the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty. At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky’s “Marco Rubio Is Wrong: The War on Poverty Worked” provides a well-crafted takedown:

Our problem is when conservatives like Rubio talk gibberish: “Isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” No, it isn’t. It’s high time to say the war on poverty was a success. A wild success, indeed, by nearly every meaningful measure. But no one thinks so, and a big part of the reason is that most Democrats are afraid to say so. They’d damn well better start. If we’re really going to be raising the minimum wage and tackling inequality, someone needs to be willing to say to the American people that these kinds of approaches get results.
You may have seen the big Times piece Sunday that looked back over the half-century war on poverty, kicked off by Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union address. The article noted that in terms of health and nutrition and numerous other factors, the poor in the United States are immeasurably less immiserated today than they were then. But it did lead by saying the overall poverty rate in all that time has dropped only from 19 to 15 percent, suggesting to the casual reader that all these billions for five decades haven’t accomplished much.
What’s wrong with thinking is that we have not, of course, been fighting any kind of serious war on poverty for five decades. We fought it with truly adequate funding for about one decade. Less, even. Then the backlash started, and by 1981, Ronald Reagan’s government was fighting a war on the war on poverty. The fate of many anti-poverty programs has ebbed and flowed ever since.
But at the beginning, in the ’60s, those programs were fully funded, or close. And what happened? According to Joseph Califano, who worked in the Johnson White House, “the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century.” That’s a staggering 43 percent reduction. In six years.

Tomasky goes on the explain that the war in Southeast Asia and unrealistic expectations about abolishing poverty combined to unravel much of the progress. Yet, looking back with perspective,

But even for its shortcomings, the Great Society and the war on poverty did absolutely amazing things. I’d like my fellow West Virginia natives to imagine our capital-poor state without the billions the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent since 1965 on roads, local economic development, community health clinics, and numerous other projects. The Great Society brought federal billions to schools, made college possible for millions of kids from modest means, educated innumerable doctors, and so much more.

Yet, conservatives will continue “to point to the existence of poor people and therefore to make the claim that the whole thing has been a failure.” That’s been their time-honored practice of parroting lies until the MSM is suckered into repeating them as “on the other hand” false equivalence scale-balancing.
Democrats can’t give the Republicans and their MSM minions a free ride regarding their myth-mongering about the War on Poverty. As Tomasky concludes, “If we are entering a new phase of fighting a war on inequality, Americans need to know some facts about the last war that firmly support the view that the effort and resources have done far more good than harm. The Democrats just have to be willing–and proud–to say it and say it and say it.”

Here are my thoughts on the four most important strategic conclusions that can be drawn from the events of 2013:
1. Losing any one particular election does not and will not moderate Republican extremism or induce them to move back to the center. Democrats should not base their political strategy on the hope that this will occur.
2. Democratic firmness and unity in the face of Republican obstructionism was absolutely indispensable in 2013. It remains equally vital for the future
3. The state of the economy and the real-life consequences of policy decisions have far more influence on voters decisions than does the daily news cycle or the constant ups and downs of public opinion. Democrats should therefore not allow transient events and trends to overly influence their thinking.
4. Given the current partisan balance in Congress legislative gridlock cannot be overcome in the foreseeable future. Democrats therefore need to prioritize increasing Democratic voter turnout (especially in off-year elections) and expanding the Democratic coalition.
To read my entire memo reviewing these conclusions in more depth, click HERE.
Ed Kilgore: The Strategic lessons of 2013
Sincerely,
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor
The Democratic Strategist

Michael J. Mishak’s AP report “Democrats Breaking GOP’s Long Lock on Cuban Vote” spells serious trouble for the GOP in Florida. As Mishak sets the stage:

For more than two decades, running for Congress in this sun-soaked capital of Cuban exiles has required two things: a Republican registration card and a hard line toward the Castro regime.
So when Joe Garcia became the first Cuban-American Democrat from the state to win election to the House in 2012, it signaled a crack in a critical GOP constituency.
In a break with the exile community, Garcia campaigned in support of loosening restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to visit relatives on the island or send them money. Since taking office, he has pushed for U.S. trials of a Cuba-developed diabetes treatment and for easing travel rules for Cuban diplomats who visit the U.S.
And while Florida Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio, fumed when President Barack Obama shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro last month, Garcia dismissed it as a simple courtesy.
“Sometimes a handshake is just a handshake,” he said.

Mishak backs up his contention with data:

In 2012, Obama captured nearly half of the Cuban-American vote in Florida, a record high for a Democrat. He has since pledged to “update” a U.S. policy that prohibits even the most basic business dealings with the island…
Polls show new immigrants and younger Cuban-Americans are more motivated by domestic concerns, including health care, education and the economy, than by anti-communist fervor. A study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that Cubans are the Hispanic group most likely to say they have “only a little” or “almost nothing” in common with those living in their family’s native country.

With respect to Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County:

Florida International University’s most recent poll of that group, done in 2011, found that 44 percent of them opposed continuing the embargo, and 53 percent said it had not worked at all. Two decades ago, 80 percent favored the economic sanctions.

Mishak goes on to report on Rep. Garcia’s role in promoting a thaw in U.S. relations with Cuba as emblematic of the new generation of Cuban-American leaders emerging in Florida, much to the dismay of the old guard Republican Cubans and their younger followers, like Sen. Rubio. He also quotes GOP leaders saying that recent trends favoring Dems are temporary expressions of Republicans fielding inept candidates of late.
Dems still have an uphill campaign to win over a majority of Cuban-American voters. But even getting a healthy minority of such an important demographic group in this swing state can make a big difference, since “Cubans now make up about a third of Florida’s fast-growing Hispanic population,” as Mishak reports.

TDS rarely cross-posts entire columns from the Washington Post, but we make an exception for this excellent op-ed by E. J. Dionne, Jr:
The reemergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don’t be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center.
For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.
Consider what this means in practice. Obamacare is not a left-wing program, no matter how often conservatives might say it is. Its structure is based on conservative ideas. The individual mandate was the conservatives’ alternative to a mandate on employers. The health-care exchanges are an alternative to government-provided medicine on the Medicare model.
Obamacare is complex because the government is trying to create a marketplace in which people shop for private insurance and receive government subsidies if they need them. It goes to a lot of trouble to preserve the private insurance market. The system does not even include a government plan as one option among many.
But once conservatives succeeded in pulling the health-care debate to where they had always wanted it, they abandoned the concepts they pioneered and denounced Obamacare as a socialist scheme. It’s a classic case of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose politics: Move toward me, and I’ll just keep moving farther away from you.
The right’s strong hand also prevented more aggressive action to ease joblessness. After the crash of 2008, the country desperately needed government to step in to bolster mass purchasing power, the point of stimulus efforts. With interest rates near zero, there was no better time to borrow in order to rebuild a decrepit national infrastructure and make other long-term public investments.
Instead, relentless pressure from the right made the initial stimulus smaller than it should have been — and then prevented any further expansion of government spending. In the blink of an eye, the public discussion was engulfed by an obsession with the deficit as millions languished without a job. Even Republicans are frustrated over how ideological fears about government’s size have stalled transportation bills that were once the stuff of bipartisan concord.
This pattern was repeated over and over on other issues, and the new militancy on the Democratic left is a consequence of a slowly building backlash against the skewed nature of our politics. A dramatic manifestation of this sentiment was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s unabashed attack on inequality in his inaugural address Wednesday.
You might summarize the revived left’s basic gripe with this question: Why was it so much easier to spend public money on rescuing financial institutions than on rescuing families caught in a cycle of unemployment, collapsing incomes and foreclosures?
Take the most recent flash point. Discussions about entitlements have revolved almost exclusively around the question of how much to cut them. By contrast, progressives such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) say we must begin dealing with a coming retirement crisis fostered by the near disappearance of traditional private pensions.
They argue that Social Security is not providing enough for low- and middle-income retirees and that making the program financially secure will necessarily involve lifting the cap on income taxed for Social Security. That cap requires middle-income Americans to pay a much larger share of their income than the highest earners do. Ask yourself: Are these unreasonable concerns?
More generally, the Democratic left is animated by the battle against growing inequality and declining social mobility — the idea, as Warren has said repeatedly, that “the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families.” She and her allies are not anti-capitalist. Their goal is to reform the system so it spreads its benefits more widely. Warren has argued that everything she’s done on behalf of financial reform has, in fact, been designed to make markets work better.
The resurgent progressives are battling a double standard. They are asking why it is that “populism” is a good thing when it’s invoked by the tea party against “liberal elites” but suddenly a bad thing when it describes efforts to raise the minimum wage and take other steps toward a fairer system of economic rewards.
And here’s why moderates should be cheering them on: When politicians can ignore the questions posed by the left and are pushed to focus almost exclusively on the right’s concerns about “big government” and its unquestioning faith in deregulated markets, the result is immoderate and ultimately impractical policy. To create a real center, you need a real left.