Greg Sargent’s “Is GOP hyping of scandals prompting a media backlash?” credits Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee with “a moment of fine concern-trolling” in his statement that,

…You know, when you look at the IRS and you look at the Benghazi issue and you look at the AP issue, I think the trouble here isn’t even the individual specific scandals, it’s this broader notion that there’s a pattern of this activity. I think that’s what concerns people because what you don’t want to have happened is Americans lose faith and trust in their institutions…

Sargent responds that Roger’s dicey meme represents “a critical moment of candor. The most important thing here is not the individual scandals; it’s the sense of a “pattern” of activity that creates the risk.” Sargent adds that “The goal is to create an overarching atmosphere of scandal, because this intensifies pressure on news orgs and reporters to hype individual revelations within that framework with little regard to the actual importance or significance of each new piece of information.”
But Sargent sees “stirrings of a media backlash to the GOP overhyping of all of these scandals.” He notes that both the Post and the Times have not taken the GOP Koolaid and have instead responded with nuanced reporting taking a more sober perspective, debunking exaggerations and putting the incidents in historical perspective. He notes that even moderate/conservative journalists, like Howard Kurtz and Ron Fournier are refusing to take the GOP bait and blasting the Republicans for their flimsy, overhyped evidence.
Sargent reiterates that “The goal of Issa and others here is to create an atmosphere of scandal, with the deliberate aim of obscuring the importance of the details of the actual scandals themselves.” When all of the “scandals” have run their course, voters may decide, along with a growing chorus of the media, that Republicans have squandered their taxes on bogus investigations with no results, rather than legislating needed reforms.

We dig Igor Volsky’s Think Progress post, “GOP Survey Of Young People Reveals They Support Progressive Policies,” which notes:

The College Republican National Committee released a report on Monday outlining the major challenges facing the GOP as it seeks to rebrand and redefine itself in the aftermath of the 2012 election…But a close reading of the 90-page report finds that young people have strong disagreements with Republican policies — including large parts of former candidate’s Mitt Romney’s platform — and are far more likely to support progressive positions.

Among the 11 examples cited by Volsky:

1. GOP economic polices are to blame for the recession. “Although ‘Republican economic policies’ is the factor least likely to be viewed as playing a major role in causing the crisis, this is mostly due to young Republicans in the sample hesitating to pin blame directly on their own party, and an outright majority of young people still think those Republican policies are to blame – hardly an encouraging finding.”
3. Increase taxes on the wealthy. “Perhaps most troubling for Republicans is the finding from the March 2013 CRNC survey that showed 54% of young voters saying ‘taxes should go up on the wealthy,’ versus 31% who say “taxes should be cut for everyone.”
5. Expand universal health care coverage. “Many of the young people in our focus groups noted that they thought everyone in America should have access to health coverage. In the Spring 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics survey of young voters, 44% said that “basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it.” … As one participant in our focus group of young men in Columbus put it, “at least Obama was making strides to start the process of reforming health care.”
8. Democrats are more responsive on student loans. “Many focus group members did think that Democrats were responding to the student loan crisis. “I think they’re more in tune to what we need right now with student loans, getting a job, fixing the housing market and the environment,” observed one participant from Orlando, with another adding that he had “heard Obama once say, oh, he has student loans, he went to school, he knows what we’re going through.”
10. Bush’s wars blew up the deficit. “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan themselves, however, were largely viewed as having been a net negative for the U.S. In fact, during focus group discussions about the recession, one respondent said she felt that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had contributed in part to the economic crisis.”

The other examples are equally-encouraging for Dems. It appears the GOP youth outreach department has an exceptionally daunting task ahead.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I have been bemused for many years by the peculiar mindset represented by D.C.-centrism. I have written about it a number of times over the years, in my book “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be” and in many of my blog posts. D.C. Centrism embraces what the political establishment, especially including the big special interests who tend to control this town, thinks is right, even when the vast majority of Americans are opposed to it. For example, cutting Social Security, something 80 percent of Americans oppose, is a classic example of D.C. centrism. Another example is focusing obsessively about the deficit while ignoring new measures to create jobs, which is the reverse of what voters want the government to focus on. Bailing out, and now subsidizing, the Too Big To Fail banks is yet another example. And these three examples really just scratch the surface — there are so many ways that D.C. Centrism is different from what the centrist position of real voters is.
I was thinking about all this again over the last week while I was out in my home state of Nebraska, where the Senate and governor races are wide open. While traveling around the state talking politics with folks, I was also doing email conversations with friends about the South Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Minnesota, and Oregon Senate races. In all of these cases, the political situation goes against D.C. conventional wisdom, as candidates and potential candidates scramble the usual political labels and dynamics. Let’s look at the situation in all of these races.
Six years ago, in both Minnesota and Oregon, openly progressive/populist challengers Al Franken and Jeff Merkley took on well-funded Republicans with reputations in D.C. as centrists in classic swing states (both of them have been on target list for both parties in most of the presidential campaigns over the last 30+ years). D.C. conventional wisdom rated them both very long shots — after all, how could a centrist in a swing state lose to lefties like Franken and Merkley? But both Democrats ran aggressively populist campaigns, attacking the incumbents as beholden to big-money special interests. Both won, and both have served in the Senate just as they ran, as bold and unapologetic populist progressives. And you know what? Both enter this election cycle as very well-positioned for their re-election battle in 2014.
Iowa is another classic swing state, one of the closest states in each of the last four presidential elections. With Tom Harkin retiring, Democratic Congressman Bruce Braley is running to replace him. Braley is so populist that he founded the Populist Caucus in the House, and if wins he will carry on Harkin’s progressive politics in the Senate. You would think that such a candidate would be in a tough race, and one may yet develop, but so far every leading Republican that party leaders have tried to recruit into the race have turned them down, and Braley is likely to win.

Read more…

David Nir of Daily Kos flags Joshua Green’s Bloomberg Businessweek post, “Obama’s Data team Totally Schooled Gallup,” which observes:

As David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser, explained in my story, the data team’s models proved to be much steadier and more accurate than even the traditional tracking polls the campaign was also conducting. A number of Obama vets repeated this claim to me, so I asked them to provide some evidence to back it up, and they did. Here, for the first time, is a chart based on internal data that shows how the Obama campaign’s swing state model performed against the much maligned Gallup poll over the last several months of the race. This was the campaign’s daily “horserace” projection of the outcome, based on a nightly survey of 10,000 people.
To me, a few thing jump out: Gallup indicates that the selection of Paul Ryan as running mate hurt Mitt Romney, but Obama’s model really doesn’t; Gallup suggests, incredibly, that the “47 Percent” flap hurt Obama and moved the race back in Romney’s direction; and, biggest of all, Gallup shows a huge drop for Obama–really, an outright collapse–after the debacle of the first debate. At the time, Obama’s staffers were claiming to the press that, yes, their internal numbers showed the president’s weak showing had hurt his support, but that the fall was brief and quickly stabilized right about where his level of support had been all along. As a reporter, you never know if you’re just being spun when campaigns tell you this, because even if they really were collapsing the way Gallup suggests, they’d probably lie about it and say everything was fine, so as not to feed the panic. Based on this data, though, the Obama campaign looks to have been telling the truth.

Green goes on to tell how David Axelrod was so confident of three key states (MI, MN and PA) going Obama’s way as a result of their internal polling and analysis, that he bet his mustache –and won.

(Sound kicks in at about 1:18 – well worth the wait)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks on the importance of Voting in Kingstree, SC in 1966.

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:
There were big demonstrations at the Department of Justice a couple of weeks ago starting on May 20, including civil disobedience and arrests, and I wrote about these important demonstrations at the time. But after two days of protests at DOJ, the demonstrators switched targets and went over to the law firm of Covington and Burling, where seven brave grandmothers from all over the country were arrested. Here is a video of Cammy Depew, one of these grandmothers, talking about what led her to be willing to be arrested, a video that is powerful in its simplicity:

I think everyone understood the reasons for taking on the DOJ — they seem to have been a lot more interested in wiretapping journalists than in holding bank CEOs accountable. But why would demonstrators focus on Covington and Burling? Because these grandmothers understand that to get at the root of our problems, we’re going to have hold K Street accountable, not just government. And the line between the problems at DOJ and Covington and Burling couldn’t be any more direct. C&B was Eric Holder’s law firm; they were Lanny Breuer’s law firm, and just as I predicted when he left his perch at DOJ after not prosecuting any of the top execs at the big banks on Wall Street, he went straight back there after his DOJ stint; and they are Wall Street’s leading law firm here in the nation’s capital. Quite a track record, and quite a revolving door. When Holder finally leaves DOJ, and whenever it is that day won’t come a moment too soon, my strong guess is that he will head straight back to Covington as well.
The Covington-DOJ connection is at the heart of the problem. Holder and Breuer enjoyed their work on behalf of Wall Street at Covington, and made a lot of friends (and money) doing it. The idea of going back is understandably appealing. But it’s hard to go back to representing bankers when you have just been prosecuting them. It is time for Obama to break the connection, and appoint an Attorney General who will prosecute bankers, not grandmothers who have been abused by bankers. Or, say, reporters.
Covington and Burling was the perfect target for this kind of demonstration, because they are such a ripe symbol for the kind of K Street influence that is corrupting our government. But this goes far beyond C&B. K Street’s tentacles are everywhere — in his book The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, Jeff Connaughton calls this phenomenon “the blob,” that constantly migrating group of lobbyists, PR people, regulators, Capitol Hill staffers, and think tank staffers who stay close to Wall Street for all kinds of reasons (although most of them involve money). Jeff was focused on Wall Street, but it’s not just Wall Street that has K Street’s minions blobbing all over our government — big monopolist industries control too much of our government. And it’s a thoroughly bi-partisan problem. I am a Democrat because Democrats are far better on social issues, and because there are some Democrats that still fight the economic powers that be. The reason more and more people, like those seven gutsy grandmas, feel like they have to take to the streets, though, is because neither party is listening to them and fighting for them nearly enough.
We have to take our country and our government back. We have to beat back the blob. And we should use every non-violent tool in the citizen tool box that we have available to us, from electing good people to engaging in civil disobedience.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from Think Progress:
In 2012, the GOP got 49 percent of the (two party) popular vote for the House but managed to snag 54 percent of the seats. That no doubt had something to do with clever boundary drawing (otherwise known as gerrymandering) in states where Republicans controlled the redistricting process.
But it would be a mistake to assume that’s all there is to it. Republicans also benefit from how their votes are distributed spatially, as a very useful post by Kyle Kondik on the Crystal Ball reminds us. His analysis shows that Democratic House districts tend to be small and densely populated, while Republican House districts tend to much bigger and sparsely populated. According to Kondik, Democrats currently hold 87 of the 100 smallest Congressional districts, while the GOP holds 73 of the 100 largest districts. Overall, the GOP holds districts covering 80 percent of the US land mass (!), compared to the Democrats’ measly 20 percent.
Moreover, those small Democratic districts tend to be very Democratic, which wastes a considerable proportion of Democratic votes where they’re not, in a political sense, needed. Kondik notes that Obama won 70 percent of the vote in 61 House districts, while Romney won 70 percent in just 19. The term of art for this is that Republican votes are more “efficiently” distributed to produce Republican victories. That means that, even if there were no gerrymandering to speak of, a Democratic share of the vote that is just over 50 percent would still likely translate into less than 50 percent of House seats.
That’s the dark side of a pattern I commented on in a post a couple of months ago. The Democrats benefit on the Presidential level and in many states from dominating large dynamic metropolitan areas, particularly the most densely populated parts of those areas:
The flip side is an inefficient distribution of Democratic votes in House districts. The only effective way for Democrats to nullify this disadvantage is to push farther out into less densely populated suburbs and metro areas, trying to create or find more Democrats and thereby put more seats in play. Blaming all their problems on gerrymandering or, worse, waiting for 2020 and another redrawing of the map, will simply ensure that current Republican advantages remain intact.

Matt Miller has a WaPo opinion post, “A Money Bomb for 2016,” suggesting a simple idea for ending the corruption that has paralyzed our political system. First, Miller does and excellent job of describing the core problem:

New legislators are told by party leaders to spend no less than four hours a day “dialing for dollars” for reelection. That’s twice the time they’re expected to spend on committee work, floor votes or meeting with constituents. And it doesn’t count the fundraisers they attend in their “free time.”
“Members routinely duck out of the House office buildings, where they are prohibited by law from campaigning,” the Boston Globe recently reported, “and walk across the street to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee offices…. There, on the second floor, 30 to 40 legislators and their staffers squeeze into the ‘bullpen’ … a makeshift call center of about two dozen cubicles, each 2½ feet wide and equipped with two land lines.”
The two parties function “basically like telemarketing firms,” Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat who lost in 2010 after serving one term in the House, told the Globe. “‘You go down on any given evening and you’ve got 30 members with headsets on dialing and dialing and dialing, trying to close the deal.'”
…Our leaders are groveling half a day every day to just 150,000 out of the 311 million of us. Forget “the 1 percent.” This is the one-twentieth of 1 percent who can afford to give a couple of thousand dollars to campaigns.
This is your democracy at work.

It’s a depressing image, enough to make many a potentially-promising candidate say “no thanks” to party recruiters. But Miller has a potential solution, which originates from a proposal by Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig:

Enter Lessig’s idea. He’s working to launch “a super PAC to end all super PACs.” He wants 50 patriotic billionaires to pony up $20 million to $40 million dollars each (provided their fellow tycoons do the same). Toss in contributions from less well-heeled folks who believe in the cause. Presto: You have a $1 billion to $2 billion dollar war chest devoted to making grass-roots public funding of campaigns a viable path to office.
The super PAC would champion a short slate of reforms centered around publicly supported small-dollar campaign funding. It would intervene in campaigns to help elect congressional candidates who sign on to this agenda and to defeat candidates who oppose it. Building on recent reforms in Connecticut and New York, the bedrock fix might involve a system of matching grants or tax credits or vouchers that enable average citizens (via public dollars) to be the main source of finance for competitive campaigns.
Politicos are helping Lessig develop a more precise, district-by-district estimate of how much money it would take to win a congressional majority pledged to these reforms, but his guesstimate feels like it is in the ballpark.

Say what you will about the likelihood of finding “50 patriotic billionaires” who also happen to be generous enough to contribute 20-40 million to such a cause. Lessig himself says “You have to embrace the irony.”
Miller points out that a mini-version of the idea has had some success in defeating 8 candidates who caved to well-funded special interests. And he reports that a new group called Fund for the Republic, is considering the idea. It may be possible to get such a fund started, and over time, who knows? Sometimes we have to put skepticism aside and make room for grace.

From a new Politifact study, flagged by Politico’s Dylan Byers:

Fifty-two percent of Republican claims reviewed by the Tampa Bay Times fact-checking operation were rated “mostly false,” “false” or “pants on fire,” versus just 24 percent of Democratic statements, according to George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs. By the same token, 54 percent of Democratic statements were rated as “mostly true” or “true,” compared to just 18 percent of Republican statements.
The CMPA looked at 100 statements — 46 by Democrats, 54 by Republicans — that were fact-checked by PolitiFact between January 20 and May 22. The study’s findings are similar to a previous CMPA study, which found that PolitiFact gave more negative ratings to the Romney campaign than the Obama campaign in 2012.

You can check out the data right here.

At HuffPo, Jonathan Weiler, Director of Undergraduate Studies in Global Studies, UNC Chapel Hill, has a well-written blistering of a largely one-sided WaPo report on extremism in North Carolina. As Weller explains:

The all-too-frequent failure of political media to report accurately and with appropriate context is an ongoing disaster for our country. Among the adverse consequences of this failure is that political media aid and abet Republican extremism by softening its razor sharp edges and by bending over backwards to lend it respectability and legitimacy even when doing so requires distorting basic facts, apparently driven by the conviction that providing context and independent analysis might smack of liberal bias. The Washington Post this weekend offered a particularly dismaying entry in this regard in an article on the extraordinary developments in North Carolina. The article does note that since Pat McCrory took over the governor’s mansion in January, the state GOP has pushed North Carolina “hard to the right.” The ongoing legislative session in Raleigh has been a master class in venality, spite and contempt, resulting in, among many other things, the rejection of Medicaid expansion — thus denying half a million North Carolinians health insurance; extreme attacks on voting rights; proposals that would result in an historic shift in the tax burden away from the wealthy and toward the middle class and the poor; massive cuts in education to the university system, K-12 education and pre-K; and efforts to gut environmental regulations.
Author Michael Fletcher noted some of these proposed cuts, but repeatedly gave Republicans a platform to justify their proposals, while providing none for their Democratic opponents in state government nor offering any independent scrutiny of their claims…Fletcher offers not a single factual rebuttal to Republican claims in the article, despite the ample evidence that the premises behind key policy proposals are false or contradictory or both. Nor does he quote a single state Democratic lawmaker in the article opposing the Republican agenda. Surely a Washington Post reporter would have the access necessary to find one Democrat in the legislature who would go on the record. And surely he or a research assistant could spend a few minutes examining whether the claims he does quote stand up to scrutiny — in other words, to be something other than a stenographer. North Carolina Republicans have launched an all out attack on the less well off, apparently concerned only with the welfare of the already well-to-do. Their job is made easier by work like Fletcher’s on Saturday. This is shoddy journalism, as likely to obscure as to inform people about the true state of affairs in North Carolina, serving among other things to paper over the excesses of a broadly unpopular agenda — from taxes, to guns, to environmental protection to cuts in education and more…

As Weller concludes, “When, for the love of all that is decent and fair, are we going to drop the canard about a liberal media?” Indeed.