Juan Cole has an interesting post on the complicated geopolitics behind President Obama’s request for authorization of military strikes against the Assad regime. Cole, who believes the administration’s strategy considerations “rest on doubtful premises,” writes at his blog:

The increasing importance of al-Qaeda-linked radical Sunni fundamentalist groups to the civil war in the north of Syria has posed a dilemma for the Obama administration, which began calling for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in late spring of 2011.
The US now doesn’t want the regime to fall relatively quickly as in Libya, because the al-Qaeda affiliates have become too powerful and could well take over Damascus. Highly undesirable. The US does not want that outcome, and neither do Israel or Saudi Arabia, the two pillars of US policy in the region.
So US policy is to join with Saudi Arabia and Jordan to encourage a second front at Deraa with anti-al-Qaeda fighters a la sons of Iraq and limiting access for heavy weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra at the northern front by intercepting them in Turkey. Turkey and Qatar are upset with this policy and both try to subvert it, undisturbed by the al-Qaeda tendencies of their allies.

Cole adds that “this strategy is likely a multi-year effort” which “has the potential for provoking a Syria-Jordan War, since Jordan is clearly the base.” He believes that the Assad regime sees chemical weapons as an essential part of it’s ability to “level the playing field” against the rebels, while Obama is hoping that the threat of a rapid, Libya-like overthrow will persuade Assad to refrain from any further use of chemical weapons.
Cole sees three major problems with the strategy:

1. There is enormous space for mission creep
2. The premise that the regime can be forced to fight the southern rebels fairly is not entirely plausible
3. The US-Jordan-Saudi rebel forces are Sunni and could well be radicalized by their fight with the Alawite army; the idea that people keep the ideology you pay them to have is simplistic.

Cole also cites the danger of a “failed gambit,” which are usually followed by escalations, rather than a prudent scaling back. Cole does see an alternative, however, difficult:

One way the incipient Washington strategy could succeed is if Russia and Iran can be enlisted in forcing the regime to stop using chemical weapons. It would not shorten the civil war, but it might avoid a US quagmire. The signs that President Obama will go back to the UN Security Council are positive, and might be a step toward this outcome.

That’s a big “if,” though one that merits consideration as an alternative to U.S. military involvement and risking a quagmire. It’s difficult to assess how much of the administration’s policy is based on such geopolitical concerns vs. the moral imperative of taking a strong stand against allowing use of chemical weapons to go unchallenged. What is likely is that a majority of American voters will want to know that all diplomatic paths are fully-explored before military action is taken, which should be clearly delineated in the President’s speech on Tuesday.
UPDATE: Via Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, “The Game-Changer?“:

There’s no way to know at this point if John Kerry’s “offhand” suggestion that U.S. military strikes on Syria might be avoided if Assad gives up his chemical weapon stockpiles was actually “offhand” or part of the administration’s plan. But now that Russia, the United Kingdom and Syria itself are greeting the idea positively, and the administration is said to be “reviewing” the Russian government’s proposal for how it might happen, this could be a game-changer, at least temporarily. It comes, moreover, in the wake of a report from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Russia and Iran were already preparing a peace proposal that involved surrender of chemical weapons and perhaps even a path to free elections in Syria…this new development could represent a 180-degree change in a positive direction for the Obama administration, and a plausible way out of a military conflict no one but neocons seemed to relish.

TDS founding editor William Galston writes in the Wall St Journal in support of a “measured” military response to the Assad Regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians:

Only now is America reckoning the full cost of the disaster in Iraq–friends in the Middle East doubting our competence, our closest ally unwilling to stand with us in Syria, our people weary and fearful of entanglements that could prove open-ended. Little more than a decade after the Vietnam syndrome was laid to rest, an Iraq syndrome has replaced it.The question is whether this new sentiment will dominate policy–whether acting for the wrong reasons in Iraq will prevent us from acting for the right reasons in Syria.
On Friday, in what was surely Secretary of State John Kerry’s finest hour, he stated the challenge clearly to the nation: “Now, we know that after a decade of conflict, the American people are tired of war. Believe me, I am too. But fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility.”
“Our responsibility.” What is it? What does it require of us?…Whatever the truth of the interminable debate over the limits of executive power, Mr. Obama was right to ask the members of Congress, as representatives of the American people, to join him in a firm but measured response to Bashar Assad’s crime against his own people.
But why is it this country’s responsibility? The stark fact is that the U.S. is the only country in the world with the capacity to respond to Assad’s outrageous use of chemical weapons in a way that might deter him from repeating it.
It would be good to have friends and allies standing with the U.S. But from a military standpoint, it is not strictly necessary. If America acts, others may follow–or at least offer support. If we don’t, no one else will.

At HuffPo, George Lakoff’s “Obama Reframes Syria: Metaphor and War Revisited” analyses President Obama’s strategy from a wonky, but interesting linguistic perspective, noting:

President Obama has reframed his position on Syria, adjusting the Red Line metaphor: It wasn’t his Red Line, not his responsibility for drawing it. It was the Red Line drawn by the world, by the international community — both legally by international treaty, and morally by universal revulsion against the use of poison gas by Assad. It was also America’s Red Line, imposed by America’s commitment to live up to such treaties.
The reframing fit his previous rationale for the Red Line: to uphold international treaties on weapons of mass destruction, both gas and nuclear weapons. By this logic, the Red Line therefore applies not just to Assad’s use of sarin, but potentially to Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
The new version of the metaphorical policy has broad consequences, what I have called systemic causation (that goes beyond the immediate local situation) as opposed to direct causation (in this case applying just to the immediate case of Assad’s use of sarin).
Some will call the reframing cynical, a way to avoid responsibility for his first use of the Red Line metaphor. But President Obama’s reframing makes excellent sense from the perspective of his consistent policy of treaties and international norms, which he has said was the basis for the Red Line metaphor in the first place.

Lakoff has much more of interest to say about the uses of metaphor in selling both military action and opposing it, and his post is highly recommended for those who want to better understand this particular battle for hearts and minds.
In terms of seeking alternatives to military action, political commentator Fareed Zakaria has opined that it is still possible for the U.S. and Russia to negotiate a deal to de-escalate the crisis, and CNN reports that “U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, held “constructive” talks Friday on Syria on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Russia.”
Rep. Alan Grayson has called for more multilateral diplomacy, focusing on helping Syrian refugees and taking a complaint about the use of chemical weapons to the International Court of the Hague.
For those who don’t want to rush into military action, but also don’t want to take it off the table just yet, a proposal being floated by Sens. Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp, the U.S. offers Assad’s government 45 days to sign an international chemical weapons ban “or face the wrath of American military might,” reports Jonathan Allen at Politico. If Assad refuses, however, it could lock the U.S. into military intervention.
At present no one is reporting anything close to majority support in congress for military action against Assad. But President Obama will soon take his case to the American people on Tuesday. It’s conceivable the Administration could pick up some support for military intervention if Assad refuses to sign on, but it’s unclear how much.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There has been a lot said in the last week comparing the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force to punish Bashar al Assad’s government for using chemical weapons to the resolution authorizing the Iraq War. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As an ardent opponent of the Iraq War resolution, I am proud to say that 60% of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against authorizing the Iraq War. Today, I support the resolution authorizing force to sanction the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
There are five major differences between the current resolution and the one that authorized the Iraq War:
1). The President is asking for a narrow authorization that the U.S. exact a near-term military price for Assad’s use of chemical weapons. He is not asking for a declaration of War – which is exactly what George Bush asked from Congress in Iraq.
George Bush sent thousands of U.S. troops to overthrow the government and then occupy Iraq. He spent what will ultimately be trillions of dollars to overthrow the Iraqi regime and then conduct a 10-year campaign to pacify the country.
The President’s proposal to Congress is not intended to overthrow the government of Syria. And it certainly does not involve conducting an American war against Syria. This is not an action that the President would have contemplated absent the use of chemical weapons. This resolution is intended entirely to make the Assad regime pay a price for their violation of a 100-year international consensus that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable in the civilized world.
Some have argued that killing people with chemical weapons is no worse than killing them with a gun or a bomb. Both are horrible. But the difference that created a worldwide consensus against their use is that they are weapons of mass destruction. Like biological and nuclear weapons they are distinguished by two characteristics that would make their regular use much more dangerous for the future of humanity than guns and bombs:

They can kill massive numbers of people very quickly.

They are completely indiscriminant. They kill everything in their path. They do not discriminate between combatant and non-combatants – between children and adults.

Those two characteristics make weapons of mass destruction different from other weapons. In the interest of our survival as a species we must make the use of all weapons of mass destruction unthinkable. That must be one of humanity’s chief goals if it is to survive into the next century.
There has been talk about “other options” to punish Assad and deter him from using chemical weapons in the future. But the fact is that the only price that matters to Assad – or to anyone who is in the midst of a military struggle – is a military price.
There is a worldwide consensus that no matter how desperate someone’s military situation, the use of chemical weapons in specific – and weapons of mass destruction in general — is never justified.

Read more…

The following article is by Erica Seifert of DCorps:
When Congress returns from summer recess next week, legislators will face big choices on military intervention in Syria, raising the debt ceiling, funding the government, and broadening Americans’ access to health care.
These are big issues, but we also believe that Congress shouldn’t forget the women’s economic agenda – “When Women Succeed, America Succeeds” — which was announced by House Democratic women in July. This agenda contains a package of policies to address pay, work and family balance, and childcare. The proposed policies include paycheck fairness, raising the minimum wage, support for job training and education, paid family and medical leave, and affordable childcare, among other initiatives. These policies would address the most fundamental economic challenges for middle-class and working women.
While we find that the economy no longer works for working people regardless of gender, we also know that women face unique challenges. The ways in which American families earn income have changed dramatically over the last 30 years, but the laws, assumptions, institutions, and structures that govern the economy have not. This has left many women on the edge–or struggling to keep up with demands at work and costs at home.
In late July, Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund tested these policies and found that not only are the individual policies incredibly popular, they are even stronger as a whole package. This agenda has the power to move the vote and to motivate unmarried women to turn out next November.
Why? In our March survey, 60 percent of unmarried women said the national political debate was not addressing the issues most important to them. It’s no wonder — two thirds (65 percent) of unmarried women said they had to make major changes at the grocery store to make ends meet, 40 percent said they had received reduced wages, hours, or benefits at work, and 40 percent said they had been forced to move in with family or had family move in with them. But women rarely hear about policies to address these pocketbook realities. This agenda will do just that.
The women’s economic agenda has broad and intense support – and set out new areas for winning broad engagement. Among all voters and among unmarried women, 3 of the top 4 most popular Democratic policies offered were part of the women’s economic agenda (the fourth was Medicare, which is also central to women’s economic stability). It is incredible to note that Democrats have not put these policies together as a package until now, given how strong they are among all voters and among the voters whose support they most need in 2014.
In short, a Democratic agenda focused on pay, opportunity, and support for working moms outperforms a Democratic agenda that does not include these policies — and far outperforms the dominant Republican agenda. It can powerfully move voters’ perceptions of which party is better on the economy, better for the middle class and working people, and better for women. This is true among all voters, all women, unmarried women, and the Rising American Electorate. It is not only the right thing to do for women, children, and families — it is the right thing to do politically.

The Republicans have had a delightful summer, despite their miserable approval numbers, doing very little, other than wallowing in fantasy scenarios, well-described by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson:

As the August recess unfolded, Republicans — including a number of prospective presidential candidates — contemplated whether to shut down the government as a protest of Obamacare and whether to refuse to honor the nation’s debt as a cri de coeur against Obamacare or the deficit or Obama himself or perhaps modernity in general. These issues were debated at length, if never quite in depth, on right-wing talk radio and Web sites. That nobody but the hard-core Republican right seemed stirred by shuttering the government and defaulting on the debt mattered not at all.
If the American right increasingly seems to occupy an alternative planet, that’s largely because its media outlets — we can throw Fox News into the mix — dwell on stories so exquisitely calibrated to excite the right that they may not be stories at all. The New Black Panther Party? The Epidemic of Voter Fraud? The calculated perfidy of Benghazi? The impeachable crime of Obamacare (a socialist scam actually modeled on a proposal from a conservative think tank 20 years ago)? It’s not the editorials and opinionating of right-wing broadcasters and journalists that are driving the right into fantasyland. It’s the tales they spin into stories and the time and space they devote to events that never actually happened or that they surreally misconstrue.

It’s been quite a frolic for the fantasy party, earning Speaker Boehner the crowning achievement of his career as least-productive speaker in U.S. history, while his GOP brethren in the Senate did almost as little. If you had to pick a famous painting that would depict the essence of their languid, hazy days of summer, Bruegel the Elder’s “Land of Cokaigne” would do.
But alas, reality eventually intrudes, as Meyerson writes:

By seeking congressional approval for military action against the Syrian government, President Obama has accomplished something that the nation hasn’t seen in some time: He’s compelled Republicans to divert their attention from their concocted crises to an issue of actual substance…By throwing the Syrian conundrum to Congress, Obama has at least confronted Republicans with a real-world choice. Since Saturday, the drumbeat for closing down the government has been muted in its usual haunts.
That’s why the coming collision of libertarian fantasies with reality will be instructive. Can a congressman vote to defund the government and approve a military action in the same month? Or vote to authorize cruise missile attacks while insisting the government default on its debts? All these issues will soon come before Congress in rapid succession.

Never mind, as Meyerson notes that “the U.S. government has obligations to the American people even more fundamental than seeking to stop the use of chemical weapons that are killing innocents in a foreign land. It provides pensions to the elderly, health coverage to the old and the poor, and, in a few months, it will help Americans without health insurance buy private coverage. It has obligations that conservative opposition has kept it from meeting — among them, repairing and modernizing the nation’s infrastructure and creating the jobs (say, by repairing the infrastructure) that the nation’s private-sector employers are unable or unwilling to create.”
As Meyerson concludes,

…Now Syria has popped the balloon of their insular summer. Right-wing Republicans may decide not to authorize a strike because they want to embarrass the president, but even they must know that there’s more at stake than their war on Obama: life and death; the future of a crumbling country and a volatile region; our own security as well as U.S. credibility. There may even be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in what passes for their philosophy.

As the Republicans’ summer of sloth comes to a close, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the GOP has devolved into a party which finds it easier to address conflicts in distant nations than the health, welfare and security of Americans.

From Khalil Abdullah’s post, “How to fight the ‘biggest wave of voter suppression’ since 1965” at The Louisiana Weekly:

Voting rights advocates are responding in four main ways. Litigation continues to be the critical bulwark against the implementation unfair voting practices, but, …litigation is expensive and is sure to test of the resources for the organizations like…the ACLU, Brennan Center for Justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Leadership Conference, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and others that champion voting rights.
Secondly, public demonstrations and civil disobedience could raise public awareness about the unjust or disparate impact of newly proposed or enacted laws. The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the North Carolina chapter of NAACP, had some success in rallying protesters against HB 589 and other legislative actions through Moral Monday demonstrations each Monday in Raleigh….The Rev. Joseph Lowery, 91, a former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, used the bully pulpit at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last week to promote the Voting Rights Project, a new 50-state initiative…
A third front of organizational activity focuses on pressuring Congress to take up the issue of devising a new Section 4 formula so that Section 5 can be fully restored…Section 5, the strongest oversight measure of the Voting Rights Act, allows the Department of Justice to challenge proposed changes in election laws before they could be implemented, if those changes could be shown to have discriminatory impact on minority voters. But it was the findings under Section 4’s formula that triggered the DOJ action… “By invalidating Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the court has effectively eliminated Section 5 federal oversight,” wrote David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “The current U.S. House of Representatives will almost certainly NOT provide a new definition for Section 4 coverage, and so Section 5 is out for the foreseeable future.”
…While all three prongs of a voting rights offensive may be in play, ultimately, the endgame in voters’ rights may be the passage of a Constitutional amendment explicitly guaranteeing the right to vote. Currently, that right is only implicit under federal law. Resources, again, may be the determinant of whether such a movement can be sustained.

There should also be a fifth ‘front’ in the war against voter suppression — the most energetic voter registration campaign ever launched in key states, which would add leverage to progressive movements for voter protection and reform. Clearly, the outcome on all fronts will be more favorable if Democrats can mobilize a substantially better-than-expected turnout in 2014 and unseat Republicans in congress and state legislatures and governorships.

In his Labor Day column in the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr. noted a very disturbing milestone, which cries out for action:

…New York Times labor writer Steve Greenhouse has noted, until 1975, “wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of our nation’s GDP.” But in 2012 they fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Those who make the economic engine run are receiving less of what they produce. And it’s not because employees aren’t working harder, or smarter. From 1973 to 2011, according to the Economic Policy Institute, employee productivity grew by 80.4 percent while median hourly compensation after inflation grew by just 10.7 percent.

Dionne goes on to cite an encouraging protest, which addresses the issue and may open up a new path of action for the labor movement:

Thursday’s one-day strike of fast-food workers in dozens of cities was one of the new forms of labor creativity aimed at doing something about this. The folks who serve your burgers are demanding that instead of an average fast-food wage of $8.94 an hour, they ought to be paid $15. Assuming two weeks of unpaid vacation, this works out to $30,000 a year, hardly a Ronald McDonald’s ransom.
The protests have the benefit of putting low-wage workers in the media spotlight, a place they’re almost never found in a world more interested in the antics of Miley Cyrus and Donald Trump. “They want a raise with those fries,” the New York Daily News cheekily led its story on the strike.
Key unions are helping to organize these efforts, but they don’t necessarily expect formal union recognition. They want to raise wages, which is what could happen if the public responds. Companies have been frantically painting themselves green to attract environmentally conscious customers. Employers might discover, to paraphrase the old McDonald’s slogan, that their workers deserve a break today if consumers (who are also workers themselves) started pressuring them to be more employee-friendly.

Dionne explains that the protest is linked to the growing movement for a higher minimum wage and “a living wage” for all American workers. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask in this era of soaring corporate profits and growing economic inequality. Dinonne continues,

This is part of a larger strategy to insist that tax dollars not be used in ways that hold down wages. Thus did the group Good Jobs Nation file a complaint this summer alleging that food franchises at federal buildings in the nation’s capital have ignored minimum-wage and overtime laws. The overall objective, as the National Employment Law Project has suggested, should be to use federal contracts, concessions and subsidies as leverage toward a higher-wage economy.
There’s a new idea that brings these approaches together: “Pre-distribution.” The term was coined by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker as an alternative to “redistribution” that involves “government taxes and transfers that take from some and give to others.”
Redistribution is necessary, but Hacker thinks that a more promising long-term solution is to begin changing “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” We need a fairer distribution “even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits.

It’s a simple idea, much in keeping with American principles of economic fairness. As Dionne concludes, “The genius of the labor movement has always been its insistence that if the law genuinely empowered workers to defend their own interests, the result would be a more just society requiring fewer direct interventions by government.”

So far, President Obama is playing alert political chess with respect to Syria, much to the disappointment of his adversaries. Earl Ofari Hutchison has a perceptive post up at HuffPo crediting President Obama’s deft strategy in seeking congressional approval for air strikes against Syrian president Assad’s regime. As Hutchinson explains:

If Obama had bowed to the initial GOP demands to take military action before getting congressional approval, GOP leaders would have jumped all over him and blamed him for not getting that approval — and they wouldn’t have stopped there. They would have also blamed him for any real or perceived failure to remove the Assad regime, or failure to sufficiently degrade his military to enable the rebels to defeat it, or for igniting a blowback that would further strengthen the hand of al-Qaeda linked radical Islamist factions fighting to topple Assad.
They would have sanctimoniously waved the provision in the Constitution that strictly forbids a president from engaging in any military action in the absence of an actual or imminent danger of an attack against the United States. The president does have authority under the 1973 War Powers Act in some situations to wage limited war with a strict time constraint on it without congressional approval but even here at least on paper the president must report to Congress on the action. The GOP rendered this a largely moot point when it switched gears and hoisted the demand that Obama take no action without congressional approval.
Obama recognized the damned if I do, damned if I don’t trap that the GOP had laid when he tossed any decision to strike Syria back to Congress. But even this didn’t silence Obama’s GOP critics. They quickly trotted out the line that Obama wasted time by not consulting Congress in the first place, and that this further contributed to the muddle in Syria. The GOP’s shallow, and self-serving gyrations to hammer Obama notwithstanding, the truth is that the type of unspecified intervention that the GOP demanded Obama take would have had potentially disastrous unintended consequences from killing innocent civilians to further stirring anti- American hatreds in the Middle East while doing nothing to rid Syria of Assad. The Obama administration would have had to answer for those consequences.

Hutchinson then reviews the history of the U.S.’s multi-trillion dollar military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting “The sobering reality was that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the most expensive wars in US history with the returns on both problematic” and adds that “Obama recognized that the Iraq war was an ugly and shameful page in U.S. history and that millions of Americans were furious and frustrated by it.”
These realizations, concludes Hutchinson, enabled President Obama to avoid “the GOP’s politically cynical demand that Obama intervene in Syria” which “would be foolhardy at best and utterly disastrous at worst.” Now, observes Hutchinson, the President “won’t have to make a one man stand on Syria with all the perils and pitfalls that that would have engendered. Not the least being the trap that the GOP had hoped to set for him.”
Obama may yet take emergency military action against Syria, with or without congressional approval. But, if he does, at least he can say he sought approval beforehand. Score the Republican’s cynical gambit foiled by Obama’s adroit strategy.

The following article by TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeia, is cross-posted from Think Progress:
Don’t look now, but the Republican Party may be vanishing before our very eyes.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it is the case that the number of Americans willing to directly identify with the Republican Party is reaching historic lows. The Pollster.com rolling average of GOP party identification now stands at 22 percent and has been declining fairly steadily for the last several years. The latest poll from Pew Research Center — perhaps the most reliable of all pollsters — has the GOP down to only 19 percent identification:
[see chart here] What’s going on? President Obama’s approval rating has been declining and is now “underwater” (higher disapproval than approval). The GOP, of course, has been single-mindedly dedicated to opposing him. They are particularly committed to opposing Obamacare, which on the surface seems like an even juicier target, averaging just 40 percent approval in recent polls. Indeed, they are so dedicated they have voted 40 times to repeal it and now are threatening to shut down the government unless the program is defunded. You’d think that beating up on these not-so-popular targets would yield more, not less, identification with the GOP. Where’s the love?
Maybe they’re placing their bets on the wrong horse, especially when it comes to Obamacare. Start with the fact that roughly a third of the opposition to Obamacare stems from the view that the program isn’t liberal enough rather than too liberal. That doesn’t fit with the GOP’s blow-it-up paradigm. Nor do recent polls that show an average of only 35 percent saying they want to repeal Obamacare as opposed to keeping it as is or with changes.
A recent Hart Research/SEIU poll on voter attitudes toward the ACA makes the point even more clearly. As Hart Research puts in in their memo on the poll:

Voters feel intensely negative toward Republican candidates who have worked to repeal or undermine the law, especially those who are unwilling to help their constituents take advantage of the benefits and protections available to them under the ACA….Seventy-one percent of voters express unfavorable feelings toward “a Republican who, as an elected official, refuses to help individuals and small businesses understand how best to deal with Obamacare and take advantage of its benefits.”….Two-thirds of all voters (including 60% of undecided voters) have an unfavorable impression of “a Republican who repeatedly voted to cut the funding needed to effectively implement the law, and refuses to provide information to employers and individuals about it.”

No wonder the GOP’s anti-Obamacare shenanigans aren’t helping their brand with the public. The point is underscored by another finding from the Hart survey:

Our generic congressional trial heat shows a relatively narrow, three-point advantage for Democratic candidates (44%) over Republicans (41%) nationwide. However, when the choice in the 2014 election is presented as “a Democrat who favors fixing and improving Obamacare rather than repealing it altogether” versus “a Republican who wants to totally repeal Obamacare,” voters favor the Democratic candidate (51%) over the Republican candidate (36%) by 15 percentage points.

Thus it would appear that the more the GOP pursues their anti-Obamacare crusade, the more damage they do to themselves. Indeed, when combined with their destructive opposition to immigration reform, popular gun regulations, and any expanded efforts to revive the economy, it’s hard to think of a group of voters they could alienate who they haven’t. That’s why we see their party identification hitting 20 percent or below. If Republicans ever want to see their party identification climb back up to respectable levels, instead of sinking slowly in the west, they’d be well-advised to re-think their current strategy, especially their obsession with repealing Obamacare.

This article by Jesse Jackson is cross posted from Campaign for America’s Future
Today, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “Dream” oration, President Barack Obama will speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, joined by former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
Much of the press is speculating about whether the president can reach the “King standard.” Can he deliver an address with the poetry and the vision that made Dr. King’s speech timeless?
But, I suggest to you that this is the wrong standard by which to measure the president. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He is the leader of the government. The March on Washington 50 years ago was a call by an oppressed people seeking justice. As the call to the march detailed, we marched to “help resolve an American crisis,” a crisis “born of the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation.”
The marchers carried ten demands to the nation’s capital, calling for comprehensive civil rights legislation, including the end to segregation and the right to vote, for immediate desegregation of the schools, for a “massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers – Negro and white — in meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages,” for an increase of the minimum wage, and for federal action against discrimination in employment, housing and federal programs. Dr. King’s speech called on the nation’s elected leaders to act.
The president’s task is to respond to this call. That was true 50 years ago, and it is equally true today. Last Saturday, tens of thousands gathered once more on the National Mall, calling for action. Once more, we gathered to “help resolve an American crisis.” Once more we carried an agenda — jobs, an increase in the minimum wage, defense of the right to vote, an end to discriminatory stop-and-frisk and stand-your-ground policies, an end to discriminatory sentencing, and comprehensive immigration reform. For President Obama, the question is the response — legislation, executive action, enforcement, and appropriations.
The president need not and cannot meet the King standard. He might best be measured against the Johnson standard. In response to the 1963 March, President Kennedy sought to move civil rights legislation. And when he was struck down, Lyndon Johnson took up the cause, expanded it and made things happen.
In 1965, President Johnson delivered a commencement address at Howard University titled “To Fulfill These Rights.” There, he laid out his response. He paid tribute to the protests that provided “the call to action.” He reported on the progress made. Passage of the 1964 civil rights legislation. Soon, passage of the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing the right to vote. The barriers to freedom, he reported, “are tumbling down.”
But President Johnson acknowledged, “freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others.'”
So Johnson argued that next and the “more profound stage of the battle for civil rights” is not just “equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Johnson then detailed the structural inequalities still facing African Americans — unequal unemployment, incomes, rates of poverty, infant mortality, and more. And he laid out the strategy of his war on poverty to address this crisis. He announced his intention to call a White House conference to address the theme of “To Fulfill These Rights.”
Johnson understood how difficult this was. He launched his war on poverty in Appalachia, choosing to “whiten” the face of poverty, to reflect the reality that more poor people were white than black. He drove hard to push legislation and appropriations and executive action. The minimum wage reached levels not seen in comparable dollars since. Infant mortality and poverty declined. Real progress was made.
But as Dr. King warned, the war on poverty was lost to the war in Vietnam that robbed resources, attention and political energy. When he was assassinated, Dr. King was planning another march on Washington — a Poor People’s Campaign, to bring the impoverished from across the races and the regions to camp in the nation’s capital and to call on our elected leaders once more to act.
So the question for President Obama isn’t whether he can match the poetry of Dr. King’s call. It is whether he can match the energy of President Johnson’s response. Will he revive the Civil Rights Commission? Will he announce steps to guard the right to vote now under assault from North Carolina to Texas? Will he call on Congress for appropriations to ensure every child has access to a high-quality public education? Will he move more aggressively to curb discriminatory sentences? Will he drive an increase in the minimum wage, a strengthening of our laws protecting workers and their right to organize, the move for comprehensive immigration reform?
We will listen to what he says. But as president, he will be measured by the hard prose of his actions, not the poetry of his words. We will be looking for what he does, not simply what he says.