Democratic strategist Robert Shrum has a good post, “Obama Must Fight One More Campaign: To Keep Senate & Win House in 2014” up at The Daily Beast. Shrum has a challenge for the President, who is riding high with some of the best approval ratings of his presidency:

…What can and should Barack Obama do to secure his landmark objectives and assure that his final two years aren’t a token presidency in the domestic arena? He will have to invoke the full persuasive power of the bully pulpit–and sustain the full firepower of his vaunted political organization in 2014. In effect, he will have to run all-out for a third term in the midterms.
…To confound the conventional, almost ominous predictions about 2014, Obama will have to articulate and amplify the narrative of his campaign last year. He will have to argue not intermittently but consistently that it’s time to do the country’s business and fulfill the voters’ mandate. He will have to say to them: You elected a president who’s on your side. Now will you elect a Congress on your side so we can move America forward? And he will have to be as totally engaged as he was in 2012.
…From the bully pulpit, Obama can provide air cover; he can even appeal to national-security voters by holding the GOP accountable for the indiscriminate slashing of the defense budget. But something more will be required. On the ground, Obama for America, now renamed Organizing for America, will have to wage a non-stop battle to reach and mobilize the sometime voters who can make the difference if they just turn out. If you receive the OFA emails, you are looking at the early signs of just such an effort.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and campaign chair Steve Israel have identified the districts where Democrats can capture the 17 seats that will give them a majority…But she and the members of her party–in House contests and in vulnerable and winnable Senate seats, too–absolutely need the full weight of the Obama enterprise: social media, granular voter contact, and tailored messages that push and follow potential supporters all the way to the ballot box. Democrats also need a relentless, OFA-led movement to combat suppression and persuade voters to wait in long lines if they have to…OFA should launch and fund a super PAC targeted on the most promising and perilous races–and designed as well to replace Republican governors and legislators in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Shrum’s challenge is loaded with difficulty and obstacles. But no one has come up with a better strategy, and the political stakes could hardly be higher. Fortunately, we do have a president who understands the leverage that comes from bold action. As Shrum concludes, “No past president has ever pulled off something with the scope and impact of what I’m suggesting here. But Obama has already written singular chapters in American politics. In 2014, for the sake of his vision, his legacy, and the land he has twice been elected to lead, he may–and probably will–have to upend the settled order of things one more time.”

How’s this for a nostalgia-provoking lede:

In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for another twenty-five years. The legislation passed 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. Every top Republican supported the bill. “The Voting Rights Act must continue to exist,” said House Judiciary chair James Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican, “and exist in its current form.” Civil rights leaders flanked George W. Bush at the signing ceremony.

It comes from Ari Berman’s article, “Why Are Conservatives Trying to Destroy the Voting Rights Act?” in The Nation. We normally don’t think of recalling something that happened just seven years ago as nostalgia. But in this case the difference between the Republican party of ’06 and today is so stark that it now seems like another era. As Berman puts it, “Seven years later, the bipartisan consensus that supported the VRA for nearly fifty years has collapsed, and conservatives are challenging the law as never before.”
On February 27th the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which compels16 states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election law ‘reforms’ with the federal government. Berman lays out the challenge facing Democrats:

The current campaign against the VRA is the result of three key factors: a whiter, more Southern, more conservative GOP that has responded to demographic change by trying to suppress an increasingly diverse electorate; a twenty-five-year effort to gut the VRA by conservative intellectuals, who in recent years have received millions of dollars from top right-wing funders, including Charles Koch; and a reactionary Supreme Court that does not support remedies to racial discrimination.
The push by conservatives to repeal Section 5 comes on the heels of what NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has called “the greatest attacks on voting rights since segregation.” After the 2010 election, GOP officials approved laws in more than a dozen states to restrict the right to vote by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, shutting down voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, disenfranchising ex-felons and mandating government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot–all of which disproportionately target communities of color. The states covered by Section 5 were significantly more likely to pass such laws than those that are not.

Berman goes on to recount the troubling history of Chief Justice John Roberts fierce opposition to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And despite conservative arguments to the contrary, Berman explains:

…Past remains present to a disturbing degree in the South. States and ounties with a history of voting discrimination in the 1960s and ’70s are still trying to suppress their growing minority vote today. Six of the nine fully covered states have passed new voting restrictions since 2010, including voter ID laws (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), limits on early voting (Georgia) and restrictions on voter registration (Alabama and Texas). But only one-third of noncovered jurisdictions passed similar restrictions during the same period. The worst of the worst actors are still those covered by Section 5…It’s certainly true that voter suppression efforts have spread to states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If anything, though, that’s an argument for expanding the statute, not eliminating it.
…In addition to passing a raft of new voting restrictions, Republicans across the South used their control of state legislatures following the 2010 election to pass redistricting maps that have led to a resegregation of Southern politics, placing as many Democratic lawmakers into as few majority-minority districts as possible as a way to maximize the number of white Republican seats [see Berman, “The GOP’s New Southern Strategy,” February 20, 2012]. Republican leaders say they’re only following the guidelines of Section 5, but in reality they’ve turned the VRA on its head. (Most recently, on Martin Luther King Day, the GOP-controlled Virginia Senate redrew its maps to reduce Democratic seats by diluting black voting strength in at least eight districts.)
Expanding voting rights in these areas has been shaky at best. “Black voters and elected officials have less influence [in the South] now than at any time since the civil rights era,” says a 2011 report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which points out that only 4.8 percent of Southern black state legislators serve in the majority, compared with 54.4 percent in the rest of the country. Before the 1994 election, 201 of 202 black state legislators belonged to the majority party. Following the 2010 election, only fifteen of 313 did. There are more black elected officials in the South today, but they have far less power. And without Section 5, there would also be far fewer.
In Alabama, for example, Republicans targeted nearly every white Democrat in the state legislature for extinction but preserved the twenty-seven majority-minority districts in the House (even adding one more) as well as eight in the Senate in order to clear the maps with the feds. (At the time, the head of the Senate Rules Committee, Republican Scott Beason, referred to blacks as “aborigines.”) “If there’s no Section 5, all those majority-black districts are now vulnerable,” says Jim Blacksher, a longtime voting rights lawyer in Birmingham. “And there is no question in anybody’s mind what will happen next.” He calls Section 5 “the most important sea anchor against the ongoing, uninterrupted, virulent white-supremacy culture that still dominates this state.”

In reality, enforcement of the Act, has been more than prudent. As Berman notes, “Section 5 is invoked only in the most extreme circumstances and remains an imperfect and underused remedy. From 2010 to 2011, the Justice Department has objected to only twenty-nine of 19,964 submitted voting changes.”
Given the dramatic increase in voter suppression in recent years, Roberts and the other conservatives on the high court will have quite a stretch in building a persuasive case for voiding the VRA. That doesn’t mean they won’t issue such a ruling, however. Indeed, it will be surprising if they don’t. Either way, it is certain that pro-Democratic constituencies will face continuing obstruction of their voting rights until Republicans are soundly defeated in federal and state elections nationwide.

In his well-titled Washington Post column, “Are Republicans rebranding or rethinking?,” E.J. Dionne, Jr. pinpoints the meaningful distinction that should be made in any discussion about where the Republicans are headed and what they are trying to project. He then adds:

The bad news: In some states where Republicans control all the levers of power, they are rushing ahead with astonishingly right-wing programs to eviscerate government while shifting the tax burden toward the middle class and the poor and away from the wealthy. In trying to build the Koch brothers’ dystopias, they are turning states into laboratories of reaction…
…This deeply anti-majoritarian, anti-populist approach explains the really bad news: Some Republicans show signs of not worrying about winning majorities at all. Gerrymandering helped their party win a majority in the House (no longer so representative) in November while losing the popular vote overall by nearly $1.4 million. Some are trying to rig the electoral college in a way that would have let Mitt Romney win the presidency even as he lost by about 5 million popular votes.
And they are willing to use the Senate’s arcane rules and right-wing courts in tandem to foil the policy wishes of a majority of Congress and the president — witness the precedent-less U.S. Court of Appeals ruling voiding Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The president took this course because intransigent Republican senators blocked the nominations. There should be a greater outcry against such an anti-democratic power play.

If there’s any good news for Dems here, it’s that “The “Red State model” is likely to take hold in only a few states — and may provoke a backlash,” as Dionne puts it. For Dems, it’s about calling them out and making them own it publicly at every opportunity. But it’s also about stepping up our game by recruiting, training and funding better candidates and mobilizing better GOTV — a daunting challenge to be sure, but still an easier way to go than accepting the alternative.

A note from Ed Kilgore:
Dear Readers:
In their public pronouncements since November the leading figures in the GOP have essentially attributed their defeat in 2012 to the inept communication of their entirely correct message. In their view their major errors were “Saying some stupid things,” “failing to be welcoming to all Americans,” and, implicitly, picking a candidate voters genuinely didn’t like. All that is necessary, they publicly argue, is to correct these failings in order to achieve success in 2016.
At the same time, however, outside observers have noted a range of other, less publicly discussed strategies for winning the 2012 elections that the GOP employed and which it continues to refine for the future.
The Democratic Strategist is pleased to present the following perceptive look at this issue by Paul Booth, the Executive Assistant to the President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers and an innovative political strategist within the trade union movement. As he says: “After an election it is always a good idea for Democrats to try to see the contest through the eyes of their opponents”.
How the GOP Can Win in 2016
To read the memo, click HERE.

TDS has run a number of posts lately on the Republicans’ undermining U.S. democratic institutions. It’s an important topic which deserves even more coverage than it has been getting, since the principle of majority rule in U.S. democracy is at immediate risk. David Horsey writes on the topic in today’s L.A. Times and his “Short of voters, Republicans gerrymander their way back to power” sheds new light on the issue:

Republicans have become a devious party that believes if you cannot win by following fair rules, there is nothing wrong with rigging the game. To their constitutionally endorsed advantage in the Senate, they have added a manipulated advantage in the House of Representatives that some Republicans would like to leverage into an advantage in presidential elections.
…This push was rewarded in the 2012 election. Sam Wang, an associate professor at Princeton University, has done a thorough analysis of election results that was published in Sunday’s New York Times. Wang found that even though Democrats received 1.4 million more votes than Republicans in House races, the GOP won 234 seats to the Democrats’ 201. How did this happen?
Wang identified 10 states in which representation has been skewed by gerrymandering. In Illinois and Texas this has created a mild bias toward Democratic candidates; in Indiana there is a mild bias toward Republicans. In Arizona, the distortion in favor of Democrats is bigger. Most significantly, though, in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, Republican candidates have been given a huge advantage by legislative redistricting driven to favor the GOP.
As a result, in those 10 states collectively, the Republican vote in 2012 was just 7% higher than for Democrats, yet Republicans took 76% more House seats. In most games, that would be called cheating.

Horsey concludes with a sobering warning: “You could call all of this the desperate act of a dying political party, but so far it looks more like the brilliant strategy of a powerful minority determined to prevail.”
In effect, Republicans are thumbing their collective noses at American voters. ‘Don’t like our finagling with the principles of democracy? Whaddaya gonna do about it?’ It’s up to Democrats to see that they will get a resounding answer in November ’14.

Writing at The Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore takes a peek at the latest GOP makeover and finds it wholly insubstantial…as usual:

The latest of the many Big Speeches delivered by Republicans aimed at changing the party’s image without changing its ideology was delivered today by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of VA in the friendly confines of the American Enterprise Institute. So important was this speech, it seems, that Republicans accused the president of trying to “step on it” via remarks at roughly the same time on how the administration proposed to avoid the pending March 1 appropriations sequester.
Cantor’s Big Speech was officially advertised as a “rebranding” of the GOP into a nice, positive, friendly band of pols who just want to help middle-class Americans improve their daily lives. And according to National Review’s Robert Costa, what would make the speech especially interesting was that it would focus on policies, not just rhetoric.
Well, you can read Cantor’s prepared remarks yourself. It certainly does avoid the usual harsh War For Civilization rhetoric usually employed by House Republicans of late. It issues no ultimatums and threatens no revolutions. But after three eye-glazing readings, my main question was: Is this all you got, Eric? Nestled in an endless series of soft-focus rhetorical gestures and “real people” shout-outs, the speech was the policy equivalent of a side order of chicken nuggets: small, greasy, and not very nourishing.

Kilgore goes on to note Cantor’s yawner proposals for education reform — 27 graphs into his Big Speech — along with some piddly job training and equally-predictable calls for giving states more leeway on Medicaid and easier visas for the highly qualified. Kilgore adds, “But wait: Cantor also came out for reducing loopholes in the tax system! And at the same time he endorsed the child tax credit that’s been in the code since the 1990s.”
We’ll try not to keel over from all of the excitement. Clearly, Dems need not over-worry that the GOP is getting it’s act together for a major turn-around in public opinion. As Kilgore concludes, “If Republicans are actually proud of this essay in policy minimalism–delivered at a think tank, no less!–then they are further away from any real reinvention of themselves than even hostile observers like me thought possible. ”

In his New York Magazine article, “Who Needs to Win to Win? Can a party rule by capturing most of the country but less than half of the people? We might be about to find out,” Jonathan Chait sheds light on the history, motivation and the crippling power of gerrymandering and rigging the electoral college as Republican strategies.
The Republicans faced what appeared to be just two choices as a result of the November 2012 elections, says Chait: “Change or continue to lose.” However,

Since the New Year, though, a third possibility has emerged. What if Republicans don’t compromise with public opinion, but also don’t lose?
A glimpse of such a future came slowly into view in the weeks following the election, when Republican legislators in Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio floated, with varying levels of commitment, a plan to rig the Electoral College. Each of those states voted for Obama, yet Republicans controlled each of their state governments. The plan would entail allocating the electoral vote in each state not in a lump sum to the candidate who gets more votes, but piecemeal, to the winner of each congressional district.
As it happens, Republicans in those states had already stacked the congressional districts in their party’s favor, so that roughly two thirds of the districts supported Mitt Romney in the last election even though all the states went for Obama. Allocating blue-state electors by congressional district would hand the GOP a massive advantage in the presidential election. Had those states allocated electors this way in 2012, Wisconsin, where Obama won by 7 percent, would have split its electoral votes 5-5. Michigan, which Obama carried with 54 percent of the vote, would have given Romney nine of its sixteen electoral votes. Romney would have needed only to flip his razor-thin loss in Florida to win the presidency despite losing the national vote by four percentage points.

Chait quotes RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder commenting favorable on the scheme. Chait adds “That a party would even contemplate such a blatant scheme to rig the rules so that it might win elections, when any remotely fair standard dictates it ought to lose, boggles the mind.”
He acknowledges that electoral manipulations have a long and sordid history in the U.S. — “a durable American political tradition of skepticism of democracy,” and adds,

The Constitution itself was a compromise between advocates of majority rule and interests like slave-owners and small-state residents who demanded disproportionate representation. When we consider the dire position of the Republican Party–which, since November, has sunk even lower in opinion polls–we automatically equate political power with majority approval. The two things are not the same, and the discrepancy helps explain why the party, even in its reviled standing and without additional vote-rigging schemes, is in a better position than you might think.
…One oddity of the current moment, though, is that even as Democrats steadily built a natural majority, the geographic scope of their appeal has sharply constricted. In his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton won 1,524 counties nationwide. Obama’s reelection managed to win just 690–fewer than even Jimmy Carter (900) and Michael Dukakis (819) managed in their landslide defeats. Democrats have won the loyalties of a larger share of the voters, but their voters occupy a progressively smaller share of the land. And in our political system, occupying land matters.

Read more…

Nate Silver mulls over the demographic stats for key congressional districts and comes up with a list of “Republican-held districts with the largest Hispanic communities” for immigration reform advocates to consider.
Also at the Times, Bill Keller comes up with a strategy for “Selling Amnesty.”
it’s all good news for Dems, in MA, where yet another potentially strong GOP contender, former Gov. William Weld, decides not to run for U.S. Senate seat vacated by Secretary of State Kerry. Apparently Tagg Romney is considering a run.
Thomas Kochan has a couple of interesting ideas in his post, “4 Ideas Labor Unions Should Consider If They Want To Survive” at WBUR, Boston’s NPR station web page.
Meanwhile, 52 percent of the public approves of unions, with 42 percent disapproving in the last Gallup poll, conducted August 9-12. Further, “Union approval has always varied by party. Currently, 74% of Democrats, 48% of independents, and 31% of Republicans say they approve of unions.”
Did you, or any of your favorite public figures, groups, businesses or organizations or business groups make the “NRA Enemies List“? (Complete list here)
Former Democratic members of congress Ellen Tauscher, Tim Roemer and Jim Davis have a Politico update on “New Democrats offer solutions for new Congress.” s the authors note, “Counting the results of the 2012 election, the coalition gained 16 new members, bringing its membership to 50, which is more than 25 percent of the entire House Democratic Caucus. The New Democrat Coalition is prospering and is the only growing moderate faction of either two major political parties.”
Amid reports of dirty Twitter tricks by the right, a new organization, UniteBlue “functions on Twitter as a list to protect progressive accounts from being suspended via conservative “spam blocks” by getting them more followers,” according to Sarah Jones at PoliticusUSA. UniteBlue uses #TGDNexposed for this campaign.
Here’s an interesting twist. Andy Kroll reports at Mother Jones on “Karl Rove’s New Super-PAC: Republicans Attacking Republicans!.” The idea is to sink the Todd Akins of the GOP before they get momentum, thus rendering the “McCaskill strategy” unworkable in future GOP primaries. Wonder as you will whether Rove has the cred to raise enough dough, given his 2012 debacle.
At Daily Kos, Meteor Blades flags Mike Tidwell’s Grist post about Theda Skocpol’s “Cap and Dividend” idea that “the best alternative is a policy that caps carbon emissions through permit auctions and then rebates the money directly to all U.S. citizens with a monthly check — cap-and-dividend.”

Harold Meyerson’s” WaPo column, “A judicial blow to fundamental rights” illuminates the GOP’s disturbingly successful campaign to eviscerate the rights of workers and consumers, most recently through the controversial decision of the all-Republican U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to invalidate President Obama’s recess appointments. For a better understanding of this shameful history, we encourage you to read all of Meyerson’s column. Here’s his concluding paragraph:

It’s critical to understand what has happened and how. By filibustering Obama’s appointees to these two agencies and by denying the president the long-established right to make recess appointments, a minority of senators and the three D.C. Circuit judges, respectively, have effectively removed the guts of the two landmark laws granting rights to employees in the workplace and to mortgage holders, small businesses and depositors in their dealings with their banks. The Supreme Court could still restore those rights by overturning the D.C. Circuit. The Senate could have kept this from happening had it abolished the filibuster procedures that give a minority the power to thwart majority rule — a long-overdue task from which it shrank, again, last week. In consequence, a Republican minority has managed to strip workers and consumers of fundamental legal rights.

As for the GOP’s motivation, Meyerson explains:

What Republicans really seek is a board without a quorum. Such a board would have no power, for instance, to intervene on behalf of workers illegally fired for union activity — 17,000 of whom brought complaints to the board in fiscal 2010 alone.
Last week’s ruling also imperils Obama’s recess appointment of former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans had filibustered Cordray, but many said that they weren’t objecting to Cordray so much as the bureau itself. They vowed not to confirm a director until the agency, whose structure had been laid out in the Dodd-Frank legislation, is placed under bipartisan control. Some lawmakers were troubled that the bureau would have as its sole charge the welfare of consumers, rather than balancing consumers’ interests and those of banks. In essence, they sought a house divided against itself — in the hope that over time, it could not stand.

Meyerson’s point makes it even harder to understand what, if anything, the Reid-McConnell filibuster agreement does to help Democrats return the Senate to a semblance of majority rule.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There are two major pillars of Republican economic ideology.
First is “trickle down” economics — the notion that if we allow the wealthiest two percent to accumulate more and more of the fruits of our economy, the benefits will “trickle down” to everyone else.
The second is fiscal austerity — the idea that the best response to an economic downturn is to “tighten our belts” and slash critical government spending that we “no longer can afford.”
Both of these pillars were created to justify the transfer of more and more income to the wealthy few and to provide a rationale for keeping their taxes as low as possible. But even recognizing the GOP’s motivation in proposing them, ordinary voters might be tempted to support them if they actually produced economic growth and good-paying jobs for everyday Americans. They don’t. And anyone who tries to make a case to the contrary must ignore the last century of economic history.
George Bush’s great experiment in “trickle down” economics produced irrefutable evidence of failure in 2008 when the economy collapsed and all of those tax breaks for the wealthy had produced exactly zero net private sector jobs over almost an entire decade — the worst job creation rate since the Great Depression. America has been recovering from that disaster ever since.
Now we have fresh evidence that the medicine of “austerity” is about as good at curing an economic downturn as arsenic is at curing a cold.
New numbers out this week showed the Gross Domestic Product actually shrank in the last quarter of 2012. It shrank despite the fact that consumer spending increased, businesses increased investment in new equipment and software, and the housing market continued to improve.
But those increases were offset by a major decline in federal spending, so the economy actually shrunk by .1 percent. Why did federal spending drop — even before the so-called “fiscal cliff”? One reason appears to be that federal agencies held back on spending in anticipation of the potential “sequester.”
Whatever the reason, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that if government spending drops, there will be less overall demand in the economy and fewer goods and services will be produced. But Republicans simply won’t admit that is true.
According to the Washington Post, when asked about the implications of the fact that GDP had contracted because Federal spending had dropped, Republican Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex) said that the idea that economic growth relies on government spending was a “Keynesian pipe dream.” He argued that the best thing government could do for the economy is “rein in the deficit.”
“Only the private sector can lead a robust, sustained recovery,” said a spokesperson for House Budget Committee Chair, Paul Ryan (R-Wis).
These statements are just plain stupid. It’s as if these people haven’t taken Economics 101.

Read more…