Regarding that Gallup Poll J.P. Green cited just below, The Fix’s Chris Cillizza adds some perspective on it worth noting:

That more than one in four Republicans think their own side is too inflexible speaks not only to the divide between the conservative and establishment wings of the party — nothing shocking there — but also, and this is somewhat new, to the size of the group who thinks the GOP is simply too hard line.
The second, and more important data point, is that the second most-mentioned critique of the party — 14 percent named it — by self-identified GOPers is that they “don’t stand up for their positions” and “give in too easily.” And, when asked the things they like about their party, the three most-mentioned traits are “better fiscal management/budget cuts/less debt”, “conservative views” and “favor smaller government.”
Rock, meet hard place.

Cillizza adds that “giving way on the budget and size of government strikes at the party’s raison d’etre. Compromising on those sorts of things — like the party did in the fiscal cliff deal with President Obama in late 2012 — is likely to lose the party more of its adherents than it gains it in converts.”
He speculates that the GOP will make a big deal about their compromising on immigration, “to change the perception that they are allergic to deal-making,” since only 2 percent of Republican respondents in the poll cited it as a problem. Expect much bloviating from the Republicans in the year ahead about such “nothingburger” compromises.

From Peter Baker’s New York Times report on the President’s statement today:

Standing in front of mothers of gun victims invited to the White House, Mr. Obama scolded lawmakers for not embracing the most sweeping of his ideas and objected to the notion that the country has moved on three months after 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“Less than 100 days ago that happened, and the entire country was shocked and the entire country pledged we would do something about it and this time would be different,” Mr. Obama said, his voice rising with indignation. “Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”
The president’s remarks came as his proposal to reinstate an assault weapon ban has faltered in the Senate and another proposal to expand criminal background checks appears in trouble as well…The Senate is preparing to begin a floor debate on gun laws when lawmakers return the week of April 8.

The broad coverage the president is receiving with this video clip provides good example of how to use the bully pulpit to generate public pressure on congress to act.

Republicans leaders have been stumbling all over themselves lately, desperately trying to put a kinder mask on their immigration policies in order to woo more Hispanic voters. When it comes to voting rights for Latinos, however, it’s clear that the GOP is more committed to suppression than ever, as Zachary Roth explains it in his MSNBC post “Wave of voter suppression measures target Latinos.” Says Roth:

…While the national GOP has said it will focus on reaching out to Latinos, Republicans on the ground have taken a very different tack: In recent years, a host of voter suppression measures across the country–from purges of voter rolls, to citizenship requirements to ID laws like the one Riddle backed in Texas–have appeared to target Latinos.
“Voter suppression laws and policies threaten to relegate Latino voters to second-class citizenship and impeded their ability to participate fully in American democracy,” warned a 2012 report on Latino voter disenfranchisement by the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group.
Since the civil-rights movement, the public face of voter disenfranchisement has generally been black. African-Americans have been more systematically victimized by efforts to restrict voting than any other group. But while blacks last year appeared to recognize that they were the targets of restrictions on voting, and responded by turning out at a rate few pollsters expected, advocates for Latinos say many don’t yet understand that their rights are at risk.
“There is a lot more work to do in the Hispanic community to get them to connect the dots between the voter suppression movement and their emerging political power,” Juan Cartagena, the president of Latino Justice, told MSNBC.
It’s no coincidence that these threats to Latino voter participation come at a time when the group’s political power is growing rapidly. Latinos now make up 10% of all eligible voters in the U.S., and with 60% of all new citizens in the coming years projected to be Latino, it’ll soon be much more. And because Latinos still punch far below their numerical weight–in 2010, just 31% of eligible Latinos voted, compared to 49% of non-Latino whites and 44% of African-Americans–they’ve got plenty of room to grow.

Republicans know Latinos gave Obama 70 percent of their vote, so they are pulling out the stops to obstruct them at the polls. As Roth adds,

As the targets of these voting crackdowns has expanded to include Latinos, so too has the rationale used to justify them, which now often focuses on the need to prevent non-citizens from voting. But, as with other forms of alleged voter fraud, there’s little evidence to suggest that’s happening. A lengthy investigative report by the Carnegie-Knight initiative found just 56 accusations of non-citizens voting since 2000. Of those, just one ended in a conviction.
Still, broad efforts targeting non-citizens are the next big thing in the “election integrity” movement. Hans Von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who has done perhaps more than anyone else to push the case for photo ID and similar measures, told PBS last year that laws requiring people registering to vote to prove their citizenship are “the very next stage after photo ID.”

Roth explains that “Latinos are less likely than non-Latino whites to have a driver’s license in the first place, meaning they’d need a copy of their birth certificate or passport when registering. Those aren’t documents that most people carry around with them at the mall or other locations where voter registration drives tend to take place.” He adds that there is no system in place “to ensure that naturalized citizens–who are disproportionately Latino–aren’t wrongly targeted.” In addition,

…A 2006 study by the Brennan Center found that 16% of Latinos don’t have an acceptable ID, compared to just six percent of non-Hispanic whites. In Texas, where a 2011 voter ID law was blocked by the federal government, more than 400,000 Latinos–nearly 10% of the state’s massive Latino population–live in counties without an office that issues IDs, the Justice Department found.

Suppression of Latino voters continues unabated in key states, like Florida and especially Texas, notes Roth, where Republicans have pretty much declared all-out war against Latino voters:

Nowhere has the fight over Latino political power been as intense as in Texas, where even the redistricting process has been used as a weapon. A federal court found last year that Texas intentionally discriminated against Latinos in its 2011 plan, deliberately carving up districts held by minorities, while protecting those held by Anglos. Lawyers fighting the plan “have provided more evidence of discriminatory intent than we have space, or need, to address here,” a three-judge panel wrote.
Indeed, Lone Star State Democrats say that Republicans have made a decision to give up on Latinos and instead work to keep them from the polls, just as they have with African-Americans.
“They’ve come to the conclusion that they’re not going to win the Latino vote,” Texas Democratic party chair Gilberto Hinojosa told MSNBC. “That for them to develop policies that attract the Latino vote, they automatically alienate the biggest part of their base. So the only way they can avoid the inevitable is to delay Latino voter participation.”

It’s a cold calculation. Republicans know that suppressing Latino votes in Florida and Texas offers them their best chance of winning back the white house. But making kinder, gentler noises about immigration is not likely to fool many Latino voters, who know that the GOP remains wholly dedicated to disempowering their community at the polls.

In his Politico post, “Progressives must focus outside D.C.,” Jim Dean, chairman of Democracy for America, writes that DFA “is launching its Purple to Blue Project, a national, multi-year effort to win state House and Senate chambers across the country by making so-called “purple” state legislative seats decisively Democratic…”
Noting that “Republicans currently hold a lopsided 58 percent of all state legislative chambers in the country,” Dean adds that the DFA initiative kicks off in Virginia:

We’re launching the Purple to Blue project by focusing on this year’s elections in Virginia’s House of Delegates and, in particular, five key “purple” districts currently represented by Republicans. The first two of the five Purple to Blue candidates we’ll be in endorsing in Virginia this year are local activist and mom Jennifer Boysko in Delegate District 86 and retired Air Force Officer John Bell in Delegate District 87. These are races tailor made for progressives’ unique grassroots approach, happening in districts where you don’t need big media buys to win and knocks on the door from committed volunteers can make the difference.

Dean points out that winning all these seats won’t flip the Virginia House of Delegates to Democratic control won’t, but,

…It gives us a chance to figure out what works ahead of the critical state races happening in Michigan, Pennsylvania and elsewhere in 2014. It is also a critical step in preparing for the big fight in 2015 for the Virginia State Senate…The success of the Purple to Blue project in the Old Dominion would allow progressives to send a clear message across the Potomac to Republicans who think their legislative colleagues in the states have some “great” ideas: Namely, that waging a legislative war on women, working families, and voting is a sure path to defeat at the ballot box — in every state and at every level of office….

Dean explains further that, “Politically, the current state of affairs leaves us with a Republican party that has a deeper bench and huge advantage when fielding candidates for higher office.” However, he continues “There’s little doubt that running and winning an election is the best kind of practice for running and winning elections in the future.”
Former Vermont Governor and DNC Chairman Howard Dean has committed $750,000 to the ‘Purple to Blue Project.’ HuffPo features an extended discussion in the video below:

At The Washington Post Jonathan Bernstein adds,

…Kudos to Dean for attempting to find something useful to do with campaign money. I’m hoping it pushes more PACs and individual donors from both parties to make similar commitments. The presidential campaigns will get along just fine with even a tenth of the money they spent in 2012. Getting some money into down-ballot races is both a more useful way to use your resources, and good for democracy to boot.

Democrats who want to support Democracy for America’s ‘Purple to Blue Project’ can do so right here.

Jonathan Haidt has an interesting post, “Of Freedom and Fairness: The new culture war is about economic issues, and the side that better sells its idea of fairness will have the upper hand” up at Democracy Journal. With the old culture war moving off center stage, Haidt argues that,

…Economic issues such as taxation are moral issues–no less so than social issues like gay marriage–and neither side has full control of the key moral foundations that underlie economic morality: fairness and liberty. Both sides are vulnerable to being outflanked and outgunned. Both sides could use a detailed map of the moral ground on which economic battles are waged.
In this essay I offer such a map, showing the territory currently controlled by Democrats (equality and positive liberty) and by Republicans (proportionality and negative liberty). What remains up for grabs is “procedural fairness”: the integrity of the process by which we decide who gets what. Both parties are open to charges that they don’t want everyone to “play by the same rules.” Both parties have ways of answering this charge and persuading the broader public that its concept of fairness is the better one. The party that wins that point will have the upper hand in this new culture war.

Haidt sets out to probe the moral foundations of political choice with respect to economic policy-making, noting the “taste buds of the moral mind: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation…I wanted to find out if left and right in the United States were in some sense different nations, each with its own set of beliefs, facts, and values.” He adds,

To find out, my colleagues and I created a website at www.YourMorals.org, where we posted more than 60 psychological surveys and experiments. More than 300,000 people have completed one or more of those surveys. When people register at the site, they indicate their political orientation on a seven-point scale running from “very liberal/left” to “very conservative/right,” with additional options for “don’t know” and “libertarian.” The results on our most basic survey, the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire,” support our basic prediction that liberals rely primarily on the first three foundations, whereas social conservatives use all six. People who identify as libertarian, or who say that they are liberal on social issues but conservative on economic issues, tend to look more like liberals–they have little use for the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations. Where these “economic conservatives” differ from liberals is in having much lower scores on the Care/Harm foundation–they dislike the “bleeding heart” attitude often seen on the left.

It’s a long post and Haidt has a lot more to say on the topic, and pinpoints some potential trouble spots for Dems down the road, such as perceptions about Dems protecting trial lawyers and affirmative action. He concludes,

Andrew Jackson’s campaign slogan from 1820 seems apt for our time: “Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.” If Democrats can manage the pivot from race to class in the coming years, and can make the argument for how and why government programs should be used to create positive liberty for the poor, in ways that violate neither proportionality nor the negative liberty of others, they’ll be able to reclaim Jackson’s slogan. It will be an inspiring banner for them to wave in the new culture war over fairness and liberty.

Indeed, effective messaging rooted in shared morally-sound values about economic fairness will be critical for Dems in the near future — as will economic performance.

There’s a funny thing about the way TV feels about respect for the President: when it’s George W. Bush, it’s important, when it’s Obama, it’s not.
Consider the contrast between the History Channel’s “The Bible” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” To start, here’s the story on Obama as the spitting image of Satan:

NEW YORK (AP) — The producers of the cable TV miniseries on the Bible say Internet chatter that their Satan character resembles President Barack Obama is “utter nonsense.” Mark Burnett and Roma Burnett said Monday the Moroccan actor who played Satan in the History channel series, Mehdi Ouzaani, has played Satanic characters in other Biblical programs long before Obama was elected president. The connection got widespread attention after talk show host Glenn Beck last week tweeted: “Does Satan look EXACTLY like Obama? Yes!”

You can take a look for yourself HERE and see just how close you think is the resemblance, but the producers deny any ulterior motive and accuse critics of trying to “discredit” the bible:

History said in a statement that the network has “the highest respect” for Obama, and that “it’s unfortunate that anyone made this false connection.” “Both Mark and I have nothing but respect and love our president, who is a fellow Christian,” said Downey, the “Touched By an Angel” actress who is married to Burnett. “False statements such as these are just designed as a foolish distraction to try and discredit the beauty of the story of the Bible.”

Well, maybe they are just kind of naïve and it simply didn’t occur to them that their audience might make such a connection.
Well, um, no. Here’s what Businessweek says:

…the miniseries appears to have been conceived primarily for religious audiences–or at least those knowledgeable of scripture. It’s also packaged with enough bloodlust to capture channel surfers. In that regard, the series resembles Mel Gibson’s 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ, a movie bloggers called The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre–and which raked in more than $600 million at the box office.
Burnett hasn’t just re-created Gibson’s righteous bloodshed, he’s also adopted The Passion’s marketing methods. The producers linked up with faith-based groups, distributed study guides, and previewed the series at churches. They courted big-name evangelical figures. Discussing The Bible with his congregation in March, Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren declared, “God is about to do something really great.”

Now the possibility that all these devout people saw previews without happening to notice the resemblance kind of makes zero look like a big number. But, maybe that’s just the way TV always deals with situations like this.
Well, um, no. Here’s what happened over at HBO last year.

HBO apologizes for fake George W. Bush head on ‘Game of Thrones’
The creators of HBO’s” Game of Thrones” found themselves in a bit of hot water on Wednesday when word spun around the Internet that former President George W. Bush’s likeness made a very unflattering cameo in the first season of the epic fantasy series. More specifically: a prop severed head bearing the former president’s likeness appeared mounted on a stick. Though the head was given a wig of long hair, spattered in mud and turned mostly away from the camera, the distinctive upper lip was a giveaway….
On Wednesday, HBO and Benioff and Weiss issued statements of apology…”We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush…We meant no disrespect to the former president and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.”
HBO added, “We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.”

Wow, what would HBO have done if one of their producers had actually made a mini-series based on the Bible that depicted George W. Bush as Lucifer himself? One somehow doubts that they would say it was “utter nonsense” and blamed their critics for trying to “discredit the beauty of the story.”

Across the country, we’re looking at state and local budget fights, and finding strong support for fair taxes. People want to see corporations and the very wealthy pay their fair share, rather than seeing the tax burden shifted towards working people or having their services cut.
• In Philadelphia, our most effective strategy has been to use a message that combines the increase in property taxes with the decrease in city services. For example, our organizers are saying, “We pay more to the city and get less from it while Mayor Michael Nutter hands out huge tax breaks to major corporations like Comcast. It’s just not fair.”
• In North Carolina, our organizers are having success talking about how the proposed tax reform will adversely affect unemployed folks. For example, our organizers will say something like, “This reform will greatly increase taxes for the unemployed–those who can afford it least of all.” Our organizers are using a similar approach when talking to folks who identify secure retirement as their top issue, by talking about how the proposed tax reform will adversely affect seniors.
• In Ohio, we’ve been successfully using a chart from Policy Matters that shows taxes being raised on a majority of Ohioans through Gov. John Kasich’s proposals.
• We’re seeing that these tax shifts and service cuts are negatively affecting how people feel about Gov. Kasich and Mayor Nutter.

This article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There is a real, looming danger for the Republican Party — and it goes well beyond the Party’s failure to use the latest digital or analytic tools.
The dilemma facing the Republican Party today can be traced to the massive social changes that erupted in the 1960’s. The civil rights movement, women’s rights, and ultimately the gay rights struggle all spawned a backlash among many traditional elements of society. Sometimes it was called the “culture war.”
The GOP used the “Southern Strategy” to harness the fears of many white southern voters and to transform the Democratic “solid South” into a sea of red.
The “Moral Majority,” anti-abortion movement and religious right all tapped into that backlash. Anti-immigrant groups were born and some pastors railed against homosexuals. Even groups like the NRA used the sense that traditional values were under attack as a means of mobilizing voters to oppose efforts to curb gun violence. Appeals for “smaller government” often had their real roots in attacks on the Federal Government’s enforcement of civil rights laws, and “welfare” for African Americans.
For a number of decades the GOP establishment successfully used these social issues to attract voters whose economic interests were really aligned with the progressive policies of Democrats. Social issues became “wedge issues” that split apart the potential Democratic base.
Author Tom Frank, in his classic book What’s the Matter with Kansas, explored in detail how that process worked in one Midwestern state.
In fact, back in the 1980’s someone said that the Democratic Party was a coalition of rich people who hated the Moral Majority and poor people who hated Mutual of Omaha, and the Republican Party was a coalition of rich people who hated the AFL-CIO and poor people who hated the ACLU.
Here’s the problem for the Republican Party — from the standpoint of national public opinion the culture war is over — and they lost, particularly among young people.

Read more…

Yeah, yeah, we know that history strongly suggests Dems have little chance of winning back control of the House of Representatives next year, as Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik argue quite persuasively in this Wall St. Journal op-ed. But maybe, just maybe there is a new form of ‘political jujutsu,’ based on Democrats’ edge with new GOTV technology, perhaps in combination with record-level public disgust with Republicans, that could turn the tide and provide the net gain of 17 seats that could put Nancy Pelosi back in charge.
Toward that end, we refer you to Stuart Rothenberg’s “Is the House in Play? A District-by-District Assessment” at Roll Call, in which he acknowledges that “the Democrats’ task is a challenging one,” but adds that “rules are made to be broken.”
Rothenberg explains that “Democratic operatives identify 30 House Republicans who won by less than 10 points last year and assert that the margin makes them vulnerable in 2014,” and then he gets down to cases:

After looking over the list of 30 Republicans who won by less than 10 points, I see no more than 11 who deserve to be on a list of initially vulnerable GOPers. But let’s be generous and add Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (who is likely to again win a narrow victory) to the list, bringing it to an even dozen.
To that dozen, add two California districts held by Republicans that voted for Obama — currently represented by David Valadao and Gary G. Miller — that the GOP won either because of a Democratic recruiting problem or the state’s runoff process. Given the fundamentals of Miller’s district, his seat is a Democratic takeover waiting to happen.
Now, add districts where Obama almost won and Democrats had relatively weak House candidates. That would include two districts in Pennsylvania — now held by GOP incumbents Patrick Meehan and Michael G. Fitzpatrick — and one in Ohio (held by freshman Rep. David Joyce).
That makes 17 districts where Democrats start with realistic opportunities to make gains. The list could grow, of course, with GOP retirements, unusually strong Democratic recruits or redrawn districts in Florida and Texas…

Rothenberg sees a few more possible pick-up opportunities. But the problem is that a number of Democratic seats — 11 or so, according to Rothenberg — are also vulnerable. He concludes that Dems need to put another two dozen seats in play, “a tall order” at this juncture admittedly. The equally-dim ray of hope would be that the GOP brand death-spiral will continue, or at least wear very thin by November, 2014. At least the CPAC clown show has done nothing to dispel that hope.

Bloomberg’s Greg Giroux has a post “Republicans Win Congress as Democrats Get Most Votes,” which provides some interesting behind-the-scenes detail about ‘Operation Redmap,’ the GOP’s successful plan to hold majority control of the House of through aggressive gerrymandering. Giroux explains:

The party began preparing two years in advance of the 2010 elections by concentrating on candidate recruitment and fundraising. The Republican State Leadership Committee, which focuses on state legislative races, called its effort the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP.
In the 2010 campaign, the Republican Governors Association outspent the Democratic Governors Association, $132 million to $65 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks campaign giving. The Republican State Leadership Committee outspent the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, $21 million to $5 million.
…The spending and timing paid off for the Republicans, as they won control of 57 legislative chambers, up from 36 before the 2010 elections, and increased their governorships to 29 from 23, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In the wake of the 2012 elections, Republicans control 56 state legislative chambers and 30 governorships.

Giroux quotes Chris Jankowski, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee: “You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars fighting over a couple dozen congressional districts over 10 years, or you can spend significantly less and impact the shape of those congressional elections over 10 years via state legislative elections…It was a cost-effective analysis that truly bore out in reality.” Giroux continues:

Map-making software is cheaper, more powerful and widely available, compared to a decade ago. State lawmakers can build databases with detailed voter registration figures, election results and population data to project campaign outcomes and demographic trends.
It may also be easier to predict voter preferences. Party- line voting is increasing: fewer than 30 districts backed the presidential candidate of one party and a House candidate of the opposite party in 2012, the lowest total in at least 90 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“If you’re a map-maker drawing lines, that’s just gold for you, because you can very reliably use partisan voting patterns in one election to predict what it might be in another, or much more so than you could before,” said Rob Richie, the executive director of FairVote, a Takoma Park, Maryland-based nonprofit that wants to change the redistricting process to reduce partisanship in Washington.

Democrats have been quick to note our edge in voter turnout technology, as displayed in the 2012 elections. But it appears that the Republicans out-maneuvered our strategists with respect to redistricting leading up to 2010, and they made effective use of the necessary technology to gain leverage, as well. Democratic leaders need a project to make sure it doesn’t happen again.