The following article is by Erica Seifert
As Congress returns from recess this week, we would like to believe that it will finally get down to the business of governing — but that would be too optimistic, even for us. Instead, the Republican Congress remains unprepared to address the real issues facing students, working women, and underemployed families. Most likely, the GOP’s top priority will be grinding government to a halt.
Republican leaders may believe that American voters don’t notice, or hope that their constituents will blame President Obama and the Democrats for the dysfunction in Washington. But if they do, the GOP will have severely underestimated the electorate.
Our recent battleground survey in the most vulnerable Republican districts and focus groups in two Republican-controlled states find that the GOP’s approach to “un-governing” has marginalized the party, even in red states.
Take these examples:

–In our recent battleground survey, 69 percent of voters in the most vulnerable Republican districts said that they wanted their representative to work with President Obama to address our problems. Just a quarter (26 percent) of voters in these districts would prefer that their representative try to stop the president from advancing his agenda.
–In the same survey, two of the top concerns among voters in the most vulnerable Republican-held districts were that the Republican Party is “so uncompromising that Washington is gridlocked,” and that the GOP is “only focused on blocking Obama’s agenda.”

In our focus groups, voters in Ohio and Florida were clear about their displeasure with the status quo. Here are some of the terms they used to describe the Republican Party and its leaders:

“Corrupted.”
“Con show.”
“Inflexibility.”
“Argumentative.”
“Too concerned about fighting with the Democrats.”

And when it comes to the Republican Party’s approach to the economy, they say:

“Not willing to work together.”
“Unwilling to compromise.”
“Being inflexible.”

Looking to the future, Republicans are going to have a very difficult time with young people. Here is what young voters in Florida think about the GOP:

“I think they’re just so far off the path that most Americans or people who generally identify themselves as Republicans look beyond.”
“They’re just so stuck.”
“I think it also goes back again to they’re just so… they have to do the opposite of what the Democrats are doing like it doesn’t matter like what it is, like they have to fight so they have to do the opposite. So if they want this then they’re going to want this.”
“This is a prime example of Republicans fighting just to fight, in my opinion.”

Clearly, the GOP is in need of a course correction. With even red-state voters expressing frustration at the nonstop obstruction, Republicans will continue their inflexible approach at their own peril.

At Daily Kos Meteor Blades flags an interesting Alternet post by Robert Becker. The title and subtitle alone merits a “hell, yeah!”: “Whatever Happened to Using Boycotts and Constant Protests in the People’s Fight Against Govt. and Corporate Power?: Never before have so many activists commanded so many technological tools to corral like-minded millions into cohesive action.” As Becker explains,

Where are the momentous, consciousness-raising boycotts of yesteryear that rose up against injustice, bigotry, or plain stupidity, to advance legal, civil and workers’ rights? Once upon a time high-profile uproars, some lasting years, brought down presidents, ended major wars, and remade national American priorities and values. Is such spirited activism, vs. the more legalistic modes now notching gains for marriage equality, as obsolete as quill pens?
With few exceptions, say Monsanto, the paucity here of policy-changing anti-corporate uprisings is all the more astonishing considering the moneyed octopus swells. And this dominance seems undeterred by challengers having, at our very fingertips, a limitless, low-cost communication network. Never before have so many activists commanded so many technological tools to corral like-minded millions into cohesive action. And yet, while trivial, celebrity inanities go viral, serious class and economic “viruses” endure uncontested.
What calamities remain that could trigger direct protests, by American consumers or street insurgents alike? Did tactical repression of Occupy scare off activists? Is corporate media ownership a reform death knell? Are we held captive, isolated, equating online petitions with defiant action?

Becker has a lot more to say and he may have hit on the missing ingredient in progressive politics, the long-neglected strategy and tactics that have become limp from disuse, but which are still powerful levers for compelling political change. Becker flags a nifty website, “Boycott Owl,” which lists dozens of boycotts, and adds,

Why not boycott obnoxious zealots who worship at the Citizens United altar, like rightwing casino magnet Sheldon Adelson (Las Vegas Sands or Venetian Macau Ltd.)? Why not singe the villainous Koch Bros. by not consuming Brawny towels or Angel Soft paper goods, Lycra clothing or Stainmaster rugs? When does Chick-Fil-A CEO Dan Cathy get stung for condemning gay rights as unnatural and immoral, inviting fire and brimstone from an angry God? How long would BP’s Arco stations thrive (or its Castrol, Aral, am/pm, Amoco, or Wild Bean Café brands) were enough consumers to drive, bike, or walk another block – and just say no?

Good questions all. Becker also notes an excellent how-to post at Community Tool Box on “Organizing a Boycott.” Of course, boycotts should always be coordinated with the appropriate labor unions to insure that workers’ concerns are properly addressed. But Becker is clearly right that, in this post-Citizens United era, the Koch brothers and other powerful corporate interests which are lavishing money on right-wing causes and candidates need to pay a price — and organized progressive consumers are in a position to make it happen.

The following article is by Erica Siefert, Senior Associate, GQRR and Democracy Corps
On Monday, federally subsidized student loan rates doubled because Congress failed to pass a permanent solution to relieve our debt-stricken students (or even to extend the current rates until they could agree on a plan). There are very few policy issues more deserving of our representatives’ attention.
As we hear in our Democracy Corps focus groups and surveys, middle-class and working people desperately want Congress to address the cost of higher education. Students who can afford the high and rising costs of board, tuition, and fees — which now average $22,261 at public schools and $43,289 at private schools — do not need to worry about student loan interest rates doubling. This is only about those families who cannot afford to pay for the rising cost of higher education.
At one point or another in our careers, James, Stan, and I have all taught at colleges or universities, so this is a topic about which we feel strongly. As James recalled in It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, he was able to pay his law school tuition out of pocket in the 1970s, even though he was not wealthy. The result, James noted, was that state colleges and universities “functioned as a kind of equalizer.”
That is no longer true. The average all-in cost of private colleges in the U.S. is almost equal to the median household income (which hovers around $50,000). But as James noted, it was not always this way. Our very smart friends at the Economic Policy Institute note that while median household income increased 10.9 percent from 1983 to 2013, the average cost of public school tuition rose 130 percent — leaving many families in the dust, and very much reliant on student loans.
Add to this the ongoing economic stagnation for middle class and working Americans, and we are looking at a crisis that could be crippling. We all know that young people face diminished job prospects out of school. But this crisis is not limited to 20-somethings. It also hits those in their 30s and 40s — who pay their student loans from stagnant or diminishing incomes — and those in their 50s and 60s who struggle to pay mortgages, save for retirement, and put their children through school.
Next week, Democracy Corps will release a serious report on recent focus groups we conducted in Orlando and Columbus for the Economic Media Project. One of the things that struck us in these groups was how much we heard about the student loan crisis — and participants did call it a crisis:

“People coming out of college are getting off on the wrong foot. My husband has $58,000 worth of student loans and isn’t making even close to what he needs to be making to pay it off. They’re saying that you need all this education to get these jobs to make more money but yet you come out of college with all this debt and you can’t ever catch up.”
“I have plenty of student loans that I’m paying. I have a degree. I’m working as a bartender not by choice; not saying I love it but I make more money doing that than any position I could get with my degree so I pay my student loans as a bartender.”
“I can’t go to school because my credit is bad because of my previous school loans but I can’t afford to pay them. There’s not really anything I can do to better my education because I can’t afford it and I can’t get a loan.”
“It’s important to have an education but the cost …I wonder is it worth it?”
“When you come out of school you’re $50,000 or $100,000 in debt. You’re lucky if you’re making, you know, $30,000 or $40,000 a year. That’s paying your bills. That’s paying your rent. You’re not paying off your debt so you’re never getting ahead.”
“It’s more for the financial reasons where, you know, we have a student loan crisis basically where you’re getting into so much debt to get that degree, to get that better job, that that is becoming cyclical where you are working just to pay off your student loans so it’s almost, it’s a double-edged sword.”

When Congress returns after the holiday week, I hope they commit themselves to the students who would like to return to school next fall, but are having a hard time budgeting for it.

(CNN) – A bill currently awaiting Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s signature could radically change the way in-state public university students pay their way through college.
Passed unanimously by the Democrat-controlled state Senate Monday after it had already cleared the also Democrat-controlled House, the bill would create a program called “Pay Forward, Pay Back” by which students wouldn’t pay a dime at the time of study at any public institution for higher education in Oregon. Instead, students who qualify as Oregon residents would sign a binding contract that would require they pay a percentage of their post-college income back to the state every year for up to 24 years…
The percentage of income paid back would vary based on the type of institution attended but would be in the neighborhood of three percent.

Editor’s note: We are pleased to present this memo from Third Way.
An earlier post in TDS criticized the characterization of The Center for American Progress in a Washington Post op-ed that was written by the authors of this memo. In response, Third Way requested that we publish the full memo on which the op-ed was based and which they feel presents their argument in a more substantive and nuanced way. We are happy to comply.
Memo from Third Way: The Four Fiscal Fantasies
TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Jon Cowan, President; and
Jim Kessler, Senior Vice President for Policy
RE: The Four Fiscal Fantasies
Democrats are at a crossroads. There is growing pressure on the party from many
liberal advocates to curtail further efforts at long-term U.S. fiscal reform. They argue that any real entitlement changes should be shelved for at least the remainder of Obama’s presidency, thus relegating a grand bargain to the J.C. Penney sales bin.
They note correctly that our short-term fiscal situation has improved, that there
has been a welcome pause in health care cost inflation, and that our economy still has far too many un- or under-employed. Thus, their alternative: a return to the agenda of Obama’s early first term when the economy was in free-fall–another round of massive spending on job-creating investments, new and expanded entitlements, continued high deficits, and a substantial tax increase.
A portion of this argument is now moot: a large-scale grand bargain died with the
fiscal cliff deal, which eliminated the main forcing mechanism–we won’t soon again
see trillions of dollars of tax breaks expire and automatic spending cuts to
discretionary defense and domestic programs occur on the same day. Without these hammers, a grand bargain has about as much life as the Monty Python parrot.
But just because we aren’t likely to see one large fiscal deal does not mean that
Democrats should stop pursuing fixes to our safety net programs. In fact, the liberal case is built on four fiscal fantasies that we describe below. If Democrats heed this policy advice and walk away from fixing entitlements, it will be a catastrophic policy and political mistake–for the party, the middle class, and the country’s future.
Read the full memo HERE:
Below are two interesting critical responses to the Third Way memo:
Dean Baker
Jon Chait

Those of us who want to build a more progressive America would be well-advised to pay relatively less attention to presidential races and more attention to politics at the state and local level. Here are a few reasons why:
1. Because state and local races tend to have lower turnout, you get more bang for your activist buck. A relatively small but well-organized and committed group of activists can make a big difference in a low-turnout election. And because local campaigns are cheaper than national ones, your donations can be more powerful. Think about it: to whom was your marginal political dollar worth more in 2012, Barack Obama in his campaign for president, or Wendy Davis in her campaign for the Texas state senate?
2. Mass political movements with the most staying power and popular support often are enacted first at the grassroots level. Only later do they work their way up the political food chain. Case in point: the modern American conservative movement. In the 50s and 60s, conservative activists tended to focus on local issues, such as school board elections, as this and other histories of that movement document. Only after over 20 years of intense activism did the conservatives finally get their dream president, Ronald Reagan.
3. One way to ensure you’ll have strong progressive candidates for national office (the presidency and the U.S. House and Senate) is by electing strong progressive candidates at the state and local level. That’s where those national candidates are recruited from, after all.
4. Lots of really bad stuff is happening at the state level these days, and progressives should be doing everything they can to prevent it
5. Believe it or not, there are some good things happening in the states, too! The Obamacare state exchanges, for example — when Democrats control the statehouse, these exchanges can potentially work out very well indeed (in California, for example, insurance premiums are surprisngly affordable).
6. Building a strong progressive movement on the state and local level is particularly important during times like the present, when we have divided government and GOP obstructionism runs amok….One reason for the gridlock is that partisan gerrymandering has caused the GOP to punch above its weight in the House. In many states, the state legislatures are responsible for drawing up the Congressional map….
If you’re a progressive and you aren’t doing so already, I strongly urge you to start reading local political blogs and to get involved in issues you care about at the local level. You may be able to make far more of a difference than you realize.

…even if you could explain GOP extremism through gerrymandering, there’s nothing about a highly ideological approach to politics that requires intransigence. You can have a strong attachment to your beliefs and show a willingness to compromise for the sake of advancing them.
What’s missing in the Republican Party is that willingness to compromise for anything, even if it benefits the particular interests of individual lawmakers or the interests of the party writ large. And this seems to stem from an attitude that emerged during the 1994 elections and has only grown since–the idea that conservatives aren’t just opposed to liberals but that they’re at war with liberalism. It’s why Republicans have dismantled key norms governing Congress and other institutions (see: the filibuster and the 60-vote Senate), and have taken to opposing everything associated with the Democratic White House. If immigration has a chance, it’s because it isn’t identified with President Obama. And insofar that individual Republicans see it as such, they tend to be opposed.
Changing the method of election won’t fix this problem. Indeed, it’s hard to say what will. The losses in 2008 and 2012 have only strengthened conservatives and deepened the conviction that compromise is verboten. The real question is whether the GOP is sustainable in this form. If it isn’t, then something will have to give. If it is, then we’ll be waiting on reform for a long time.

Just look at what’s already happened since the [Voting Rights Act] decision was announced–the GOP is launching voter-suppression drives in six of the nine freshly liberated states. All the states, of course, are down South. These drives might “work.” But they will attract an enormous amount of negative publicity, and they’ll probably induce massive backlashes and counter-movements. This effort will lead to even greater distrust of the GOP by people of color, and it will reinforce the captive Southern-ness of the party, making it even more Southern than it already is. And Republicans won’t stop, because they can’t stop. Race baiting is their crack pipe.
And here’s the worst part of this story. If the House Republicans kill immigration reform, and Republican parties across the South double down to keep blacks from voting, then they really will need to jack up the white vote–and especially the old white vote–in a huge way to be competitive in 2016 and beyond. Well, they’re not going to do that by mailing out Lawrence Welk CDs. They’re going to run heavily divisive and racialized campaigns, worse than we’ve ever seen out of Nixon or anyone. Their only hope of victory will be to make a prophet of Trende–that is, reduce the Democrats’ share of the white vote to something in the mid- to low-30 percent range. That probably can’t happen, but there’s only one way it might. Run the most racially inflamed campaign imaginable.
That’s the near-term future we’re staring at. We can take satisfaction in the fact that it’s bad for them, but unfortunately, it’s not so good for the country.

The broad assumption for next year’s congressional elections is that Republicans hold the advantage. Not only are Democrats defending more seats in the Senate, but Republicans have an entrenched House majority and benefit from the skewed demographics of midterm elections, where traditionally Democratic voters — young people, women and nonwhites — are underrepresented at the voting booth.
With that said, a new poll from Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling group, suggests that the landscape for Democrats is better than it looks. In its survey of the 24 most competitive Republican congressional districts, the GOP holds just a one-point advantage over a generic Democrat, 43 percent to 42 percent. What’s more, a large number of voters in these districts (54 percent) want Republicans to do more to work with President Obama. Overall, the Republican brand has taken a serious hit over the last six months — GOP opposition to universal background checks and the Violence Against Women Act, among other things, has raised “serious doubts” about the performance of Republican incumbents in competitive areas.
Indeed, this fits with other polling, in particular, generic ballot surveys, that show Democrats with a small but persistent advantage. In the Real Clear Politics average, for example, Democrats hold a three-point lead in the generic ballot, 42 percent to 39 percent.
None of this is to say that the GOP is set to lose in 2014, but that the current behavior of congressional Republicans has not endeared the public. Another 12 months of this, and the GOP could find itself in a worrisome position next November.