In her post, “Obama’s Permanent Campaign: Can He Use His Reelection Playbook to Change Washington?” at The Atlantic, Molly Ball addresses a question on the minds of many Democrats who are concerned about party-building. Ball’s post explains the new strategy, which is anchored on the creation of a new group ‘Organizing for Action’:

…Organizing for Action could be the key to enacting the president’s agenda. Obama’s best hope for his aggressive program may lie in the same innovative campaign techniques of grassroots mobilization and data-based field organizing that got him reelected in November. And if he pulls it off, he could revolutionize lawmaking the way he’s already revolutionized campaigns.
Politicians talk about an outside game, but no president has ever commanded a standing army of organized supporters who could be summoned at a moment’s notice to put pressure on Washington at his command. That is what Obama is proposing to do, said Addisu Demissie, who served as political director of Organizing for America, the heir to Obama’s 2008 campaign organization.
“A lot of the things the president has proposed are popular — pieces of gun safety, immigration, and so on,” Demissie said. “The people are with him. But those people have to be heard, to step up and be counted, particularly in Republican congressional districts.”
To be sure, there’s a network of progressive advocacy organizations who are active on a wide range of issues. “But none of them have the sole job of mobilizing on behalf of the president’s agenda,” Demissie said. Obama’s grassroots supporters “have been trained now, through two presidential election cycles, to work and organize and do the hard work of politics. Now, Obama can really use that power and those skills…Having a grassroots army could be the whole ballgame.”

It’s been a tough slog for the new organization, as Ball explains,

Insiders are calling Organizing for Action “OFA 4.0” — the fourth iteration of the acronym. OFA 1.0 was the first presidential campaign; 2.0 was its successor, Organizing for America, which became an arm of the Democratic National Committee in 2009; 3.0 was the reelection campaign.
OFA 2.0 is the most direct precedent for the current effort — and a cautionary tale. Organizing for America was largely blamed for having squandered the momentum of Obama’s first victory, allowing the president to get mired in D.C. deal-making and leaving his rank-and-file supporters out in the cold.
Veterans of the group bristle a bit at this characterization, but most acknowledge that Organizing for America took too long to get started, lacked a focused mission, didn’t play well with other actors (such as local Democratic parties) and, because of its affiliation with the DNC, suffered from conflicting imperatives. Was its job to push Obama’s plans, or was it to get more Democrats elected.

Despite the obstacles, however, the group has had some impressive success, and claims a measure of credit for helping to enact the Affordable Care Act. “…by the end of August, we were showing up at events and outnumbering the Tea Party folks 3 to 1 or 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 depending on the area.,” noted Evan Sutton an OFA field director in Nevada.
Ball concludes her post with a quote from former DNC chair Howard Dean: “Lots of presidents have tried to rally the public on an ad hoc basis…But I don’t believe any president has ever maintained a standing grassroots army …. Obama built the best grassroots campaign I’ve ever seen by a mile. Nobody has done this successfully before, but if anyone can do it, he can.”

At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz’s “Republican Electoral College Plan Would Undermine Democracy” provides a revealing overview of the latest GOP effort to dominate politics through morally-corrupt ‘reforms’. In an introduction to Abramowitz’s post, editor Sabato, who writes from a nonpartisan perspective, has this to say about the revelations in the post:

We have asked Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, to examine the proposal and outline its likely effects. As we suspected, it would permit a GOP nominee to capture the White House even while losing the popular vote by many millions. This is not a relatively small Electoral College “misfire” on the order of 1888 or 2000. Instead, it is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb — the whole hand, in fact — on the scale for future Republican candidates… A party in decline is Nixonian and fears the future; it sees enemies everywhere, feels overwhelmed by electoral trends, and thinks it can win only by cheating, by subverting the system and stacking the deck in its favor.

And reading Abramowitz’s insightful commentary confirms the worst —that the current Republican Party has wholeheartedly embraced a power-grabbing philosophy, which one usually finds in the worst tyrants and which threatens to make a mockery of our democratic traditions. As Sabato explains:

As the electorate continues to become less white and more liberal in its outlook on social issues, Republicans have two choices about how to improve their party’s prospects in future presidential elections. One approach would be to adopt more moderate positions on issues such as immigration, abortion, gay rights and health care in order to make their party more appealing to young people, women and nonwhites. But that strategy would risk alienating a large portion of the GOP’s current base, especially those aligned with the Tea Party movement. So rather than adopting that risky strategy, some Republican leaders appear to be opting for a different approach — changing the electoral rules to make it easier for a Republican candidate to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
Several Republican governors and state legislative leaders in key battleground states have recently expressed support for a plan to change the method of awarding their state’s electoral votes from the current winner-take-all system to one in which one vote would be awarded to the winner of each congressional district in the state and two votes would be awarded to the statewide winner. In the aftermath of the GOP’s 2012 defeat, this plan appears to be gaining momentum and was recently endorsed by the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus…
…There is a serious problem with this approach. Despite a superficial appearance of fairness, the congressional district plan would be profoundly undemocratic — skewing the results in favor of the party drawing the congressional district lines in a state and greatly increasing the chances of an Electoral College misfire (a victory by the candidate losing the national popular vote)…Despite Obama’s comfortable margin in the national popular vote, a system that awarded one electoral vote for each House district plus two votes for the statewide winner would have resulted in a Romney victory by 276 electoral votes to 262 electoral votes.

And it gets a lot worse if Republicans are able to force proportional allocation on key ‘battleground’ states they have targeted. As Abramowitz notes,

…There is a chance that this system could be adopted by six battleground states that were carried by Obama in both 2008 and 2012 but where Republicans currently control the governorship and both houses of the legislature: Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin…If these six battleground states were to adopt the congressional district method of awarding electoral votes, it would not guarantee a Republican victory in the 2016 presidential election but it would make such a victory much more likely. That’s because the congressional district lines in these states were gerrymandered by Republican legislatures following the 2010 census to give their party a huge advantage. As a result, even though Obama carried all six states in 2012, it appears that Romney carried 61 House districts in these states to only 33 for Obama. Romney appears to have carried 16 of 27 House districts in Florida, 9 of 14 House districts in Michigan, 12 of 16 House districts in Ohio, 12 of 18 House districts in Pennsylvania, 7 of 11 House districts in Virginia and 5 of 8 House districts in Wisconsin.
If the congressional district system had been used in these six states in 2012, instead of Obama winning all of their 106 electoral votes, it appears that Romney would have won 61 electoral votes to only 45 for Obama. As a result, Obama’s margin in the national electoral vote would have been reduced from 332-206 to only 271-267.

The result would not just be disastrous for the Democratic Party; It could also do profound damage to democracy in the U.S., as Abramowitz concludes:

Under current circumstances, the congressional district system could well result in a Republican victory even if the Democratic candidate were to win the popular vote by a substantial margin. Such a situation would undoubtedly lead to widespread questioning of the legitimacy of the election and, potentially, a public backlash against the victorious Republican candidate and the GOP itself. Before engaging in a cynical attempt to rig the electoral system, Republican leaders and strategists should consider the potential harm that their actions could do to our democratic form of government and to their own party.

It is a sad day when one of America’s two most venerable parties decides it can only win by thwarting the will of the people. As Sabato suggests, the GOP’s devolution to “Nixonian” manipulation leaves our system with only one party that practices fair politics and ernestly seeks majority support.

Here’s the lead from an article in Politico this weekend titled “GOP leaders insist no overhaul needed”

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Republican Party honchos who huddled here for their first big gathering since the election devoted lots of time talking about the need to welcome Latinos and women, close the technology gap with Democrats and stop the self-destructive talk about rape. But the party’s main problem, dozens of Republican National Committee members argued in interviews over three days this week, is who delivers its message and how, not the message itself. Overwhelmingly they insisted that substantive policy changes aren’t the answer to last year’s losses.
“It’s not the platform of the party that’s the issue,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday after being easily reelected to a second, two-year term. “In many cases, it’s how we communicate about it. It is a couple dumb things that people have said.”
…New Hampshire chairman Wayne MacDonald said party leadings need to work on “not being sour-pusses on television or the radio” – that there is a way to be firm and assertive without being mean-spirited.
“Nobody is saying the Republican Party has to change our beliefs in any of our platform planks,” he said

Now here are a few excerpts from the 2012 Republican Platform Plank on Immigration
Encouraging Self-Deportation:

We will create humane procedures to encourage illegal aliens to return home voluntarily, while enforcing the law against those who overstay their visas

Supporting State Efforts to “make their lives so miserable they go back home.”

State efforts to reduce illegal immigration must be encouraged, not attacked. The pending Department of Justice lawsuits against Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah must be dismissed immediately.

Keeping Them Out

The double-layered fencing on the border that was enacted by Congress in 2006, but never completed, must finally be built.

Punishing Those Who Help Them

In order to restore the rule of law, federal funding should be denied to sanctuary cities that violate federal law and endanger their own citizens

Denying Funds to Universities

Federal funding should be denied to universities that provide in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens, in open defiance of federal law

But Latinos really shouldn’t worry. The GOP promises they won’t be “sour-pusses” about it.

Kenneth S. Baer, a managing director of the Harbour Group and a former official of the OMB in the Obama Administration, has a WaPo op-ed, “Obama’s Mainstream Pitch,” which challenges the popular view of his inaugural address as a “liberal” call to battle. Baer, author of “Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton,” cites a litany of commentators putting to speech into a liberal-progressive pidgeon hole and then explains his view in his nut graphs:

Obama’s address was firmly in the mainstream — of both the country and the Democratic Party, which has absorbed the lessons of its post-1968 defeats and synthesized into its core the New Democratic values of the Clinton era. The speech sounded so robustly liberal not because the president or his party has changed but because the Republican Party has, moving far outside the norms of American political thought…Defending the idea of a social safety net to guard against the vagaries of life is hardly radical.

Baer elaborates on the ‘Obama hasn’t moved left; the Republicans have moved right’ theme:

Defending a safety net and calling for opportunity for all is nothing new, though Obama’s call for full equality for gay and lesbian Americans is. Yet this, along with the calls for equal pay for women, welcoming immigrants and action on climate change, is radical only if viewed through the oversize tortoise-shell glasses of the 1980s.
…Perspective is everything in assessing Obama’s second inaugural address. One cannot ignore how the Republican Party’s move to the right has shifted the parameters of political debate. On economic policy, the president is in line with the bipartisan, postwar consensus on the safety net…On social issues, he is firmly in the mainstream and hardly a McGovernik.

Baer concludes with this kicker from Newt Gingrich:

I didn’t think it was very liberal…There were one or two sentences obviously conservatives would object to, but 95 percent of the speech I thought was classically American, emphasizing hard work, emphasizing self-reliance, emphasizing doing things together. I thought it was a good speech.”

Baer’s view probably won’t prevail among the snap-judgement punditry, though it makes sense nonetheless.

By now, readers of TDS and other progressive websites are no longer surprised by new revelations concerning the Republican project to undermine fair political representation by gerrymandering at every opportunity. But The Nation’s John Nichol’s puts it particularly well in his post, “GOP Version2013: Battling Not Just Democrats but Democracy.” Here’s how it happened, as Nichols explains:

On a day when most Americans were focused on the stirring second inaugural address of President Barack Obama–and on the broader majesty of the transference of an election result into a governing mandate–Republican state senators in Virginia hatched an elaborate scheme to rig the electoral system against democracy.
Prevented by an even 20-20 divide in the chamber from gerrymandering Senate districts to favor one party or the other, the Republicans knew that their only opening to draw lines that favored their candidates in this fall’s off-year elections would be if at least one Democrat were missing. Inauguration Day gave them an opening, as an African-American senator, a veteran of the civil rights movement, was in Washington to recognize the beginning of the new term of the nation’s first African-American president.
In a matter of minutes, the Republicans introduced and approved–on a 20-19 vote–a new map that is designed to concentrate African-American and liberal white votes in a handful of districts while virtually guaranteeing that Republicans will win a majority of the new districts and control of the legislature. And if a Republican wins the governorship this fall, the GOP will, thanks to a legislative coup and the electoral map it created, have complete control of a state that was easily won by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, that has two Democratic senators and that most observers believe is trending Democratic.

Noting that “the Republican senators adjourned their Rev. Martin Luther King Day session not in honor of the civil rights icon but “in memory of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.” In addition, Nichols explains that the GOP war on democracy “…is part of a national strategy to allow Republicans to “win” even when they lose. And its primary focus will be on gerrymandering not just state legislatures and the US House but on rigging the Electoral College.”
Nichols goes on to show that the Republicans’ electoral college vote allocation schemes, if implemented last year, could well have resulted in a Romney electoral college victory, even though Obama would have had a five-million vote popular vote edge. The GOP strategy being pushed by party Chairman Reince Priebus can be boiled down to: Cheat Democrats out of congressional strategy with gerrymandering and rip off electoral votes through proportional allocation schemes. Nichols continues,

..Just as Virginia Republicans were willing to abandon any pretense of fairness in order to game the system for statewide electoral advantage, there is every reason to believe that Republican legislators in states across the country will, with encouragement from the national chairman of their party, move to rig the Electoral College so that a losing Republican might again “win” the presidency–as popular-vote loser George W. Bush did in 2000, with an assist from a Republican-dominated US Supreme Court.
Americans who presume that there are limits to the willingness of Priebus and his Republican stalwarts to rig the rules in their favor have not been paying attention. The Virginia coup should serve as their wake-up call. Reince Priebus’ GOP Version2013 threatens not just Democratic victories but democracy itself.

The temptation is to hope the Priebus will bring the same level of competence to marshalling his war on democracy that he demonstrated in organizing the Republican Convention last summer. But Dems can’t count on that and need to be on high alert in every state where the GOP has enough leverage to game the system.

Here’s Managing Editor Ed Kilgore in his Political Animal column describing Paul Ryan’s latest attempt to clean up his Ayn Rand extremist act:

Paul Ryan exhibited some chutzpah today in a cry of foul play aimed at the president’s shot at those who divide Americans into “takers and makers,” which until it got him into trouble in 2012 was one of the Wisconsin Randian’s favorite rhetorical devices.
According to the Weekly Standard, Ryan went on television this morning and perhaps having read Michael Gerson’s WaPo op-ed accusing the president of creating a “raging bonfire of straw men, played the victim his own self:
Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan knocked President Barack Obama for “shadowbox[ing] a straw man” in his inaugural address. Speaking Tuesday morning on the Laura Ingraham Radio Show to guest host Raymond Arroyo, Ryan responded to Obama’s statement that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security “do not make us a nation of takers, they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”
Ryan called Obama’s insinuation that he and other reform-minded Republicans consider recipients of these benefits “takers” a “switcheroo.”
“It’s kind of a convenient twist of terms to try and shadowbox a straw man to try to win an argument by default,” Ryan said.
“No one is suggesting that what we call our ‘earned entitlements’, entitlements you pay for, you know, like payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security, are putting you in a ‘taker’ category,” Ryan continued. “The concern that people like me have been raising is we do not want to encourage a dependency culture. This is why we called for welfare reform.
Note first off that Ryan conveniently omits mentioning Medicaid in his self-defense against Obama’s alleged calumny, for the good reason that it is not an “earned entitlement” based on payroll tax deductions. For that matter, Ryan is advancing an interpretation of Medicare that he knows is completely erroneous, because over 40% of Medicare expenditures come from general revenues rather than payroll taxes or premiums. Who knows, maybe Ryan thinks Medicare beneficiaries are “takers” just three days out of every week, or is telegraphing a future intention to limit benefits to payroll taxes paid.
But in fact, Republicans deploying the taker/maker dichotomy, most especially Paul Ryan, are almost always referring to people who receive more federal government benefits, regardless of their type or justification, than they pay in federal taxes. Here’s an example from Ryan:

Read more…

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:
Barack Obama’s second inaugural address was steeped in the progressive traditions of our nation’s history. His speech built on the legacy of our country’s past giants, and added to that legacy.
Like Martin Luther King in his “I Have a Dream” speech, and Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, Obama started where it all began, with Thomas Jefferson’s stirring prelude to the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Lincoln built directly on Jefferson’s opening line as well, referencing the great event in his speech’s opening line:

Read more…