Democrats should enjoy an edge in GOTV information and technology for at least a couple more elections, suggests Nate Silver in his FiveThirtyEight post, “In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns.” Silver explains:

Companies like Google and Apple do not have their own precincts on Election Day. However, it is possible to make some inferences about just how overwhelmingly Democratic are the employees at these companies, based on fund-raising data. (The Federal Election Commission requires that donors to presidential campaigns disclose their employer when they make a campaign contribution.)
Among employees who work for Google, Mr. Obama received about $720,000 in itemized contributions this year, compared with only $25,000 for Mr. Romney. That means that Mr. Obama collected almost 97 percent of the money between the two major candidates…Apple employees gave 91 percent of their dollars to Mr. Obama. At eBay, Mr. Obama received 89 percent of the money from employees.
…Mr. Obama’s popularity among the staff at these companies holds even for those which are not headquartered in California. About 81 percent of contributions at Microsoft, which is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., went to Mr. Obama. So did 77 percent of those at I.B.M., which is based in Armonk, N.Y.

With such numbers, it’s hard to see how Republicans close the GOTV technology gap in time for the 2014, or perhaps even the 2016 elections. As Silver concludes, “It does not require an algorithm to deduce that the sort of employees who may be willing to donate substantial money to a political campaign may also be those who would consider working for it.”
it’s not just the excellence of Democratic GOTV technology that made a major difference; there’s also the dismal failure of Gov. Romney’s widely dissed ‘Project Orca’ GOTV machine. All in all, however, the Dems had a much larger ‘talent pool,’ from which to recruit for their technology infrastructure — and that may have provided a pivotal advantage.

If you read just one article today about the ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations, a good choice would be Jonathan Chait’s “Another GOP Leader Recognizes Reality” at New York Magazine, which takes an insightful look at who has the edge. Chait observes:

The showdown over the “fiscal cliff” has taken its first major turn, as Representative Tom Cole — a former minority whip and still a leading House Republican — is now urging his party to extend the Bush tax cuts for income under $250,000 a year. Meanwhile, Ari Fleischer is spinning this move as a big Republican win.
It’s not. It’s a recognition by at least some Republicans that their strategy of using the threat of an economic crisis to improve their bargaining position is likely to fail.
The key factor driving the entire negotiation is the baseline. The baseline determines what policies you can assume will happen, as against those you need to bargain for. Republicans want to bargain from a baseline of current tax policies — i.e., the tax code that has been in effect since George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 in 2003. Democrats want to negotiate from a baseline that assumes the tax cuts that benefit only people earning more than a quarter of a million dollars have expired.

Chait goes on to explain that some Republicans are still entertaining delusions of having big leverage in the negotiations, but the smarter ones are accepting the reality: “At least some Republicans understand that this isn’t a gun aimed at Obama’s head. It’s a gun aimed at their own. (Cole: “Some people think that’s our leverage in the debate. It’s the Democrats’ leverage in the debate.”).”
At this juncture, it’s still unclear whether the delusionals or the realists will carry the day within the GOP. But it puts Speaker Boehner in a tough bind. As Chait concludes:

Let’s put all the pieces together. House Republicans remain about as crazed and intransigent as ever, and as a result John Boehner remains almost totally unable to bargain. Cooler heads within the party see this intransigence careening toward a political debacle for the party that will wind up handing Obama even more leverage, and they’re looking toward the path of least resistance to avoid such a debacle. That path is to extend most of the Bush tax cuts, spin it as a partial win, and live to fight another day.

Democrats shouldn’t get too cocky about the negotiations, since we want to keep public opinion on our side. But the president and Democratic congressional leaders clearly have the leverage for a favorable outcome.

David Corn’s “The Myth of the Obama Cave-In” in Mother Jones is one of the most perceptive analyses of President Obama’s legislative and economic strategy yet written. Corn, a solid left-progressive and author of “Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Battled the GOP To Set Up the 2012 Election,” tells the story of how the President shrewdly took the heat from his left flank and let the Republicans crow about how they forced the President to accept a renewal of the Bush tax cuts during his first term. In reality, however, Obama achieved something of immediate benefit to working people and laid the groundwork for a host of progressive reforms that were not likely to pass had the President chosen to let the tax cuts expire. Corn explains, citing:

…a notion that took root within the mainstream media and progressive circles: Obama surrendered in the lame-duck session of late 2010, when he and the Republicans tussled over continuing George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the well-heeled. In this view, weeks after the president’s party was trounced in the midterm congressional elections and weeks before the tea partyized GOPers were to take control of the House, Obama, who had vowed during the 2008 campaign to kill those tax cuts, acceded to Republican demands for continuing tax relief for those pocketing more than $250,000 a year. The establishment media reported that Obama had lost the showdown; liberal House Democrats and progressives off Capitol Hill complained Obama had turned his back on his promise and blinked. There was grousing that Obama either had no taste for a political battle or no spine (or both) and that he had sold out a fundamental principle.

However, explains Corn, “that narrative was wrong when it emerged–and it is not the key to predicting what Obama will do in the present predicament.” Corn adds:

…Obama didn’t wave the white flag in 2010. He turned a face-off over the Bush tax cuts into an opportunity to enact a second stimulus that he otherwise could not get past Senate Republicans. His failure at that time was not that he mustered insufficient mettle; he failed to convey to the world that he had jujitsued the GOPers.
…A game of chicken was on. Obama and the Democrats claimed the Republicans were holding tax cuts for the middle class hostage. (No tax breaks for the rich, then no tax breaks for anyone else.) And the GOPers were daring Obama to stick to his position, see all the tax cuts perish, and end up being blamed for a rise in taxes for everyone.
…In the fall of 2010–both before and after the midterm elections–Obama and his aides cooked up a different script. Fretting that the slow recovery was bottoming out, they had been searching for ways to juice up the economy. But they knew the notion of additional stimulus was a political nonstarter. Though Obama’s original stimulus had worked, raising employment levels by millions of jobs (according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office), Obama had lost that message war. The idea of government spending to boost the economy had become discredited. (See the tea party victories in the congressional elections.)
Obama’s aides, though, also knew that by the end of the year there would be some legislation regarding the Bush tax cuts–however that knotty issue was to be resolved–and they came up with a plan to turn this measure into something of a Trojan horse that could contain (or hide) various stimulative measures. Before the midterm elections, Obama’s economic team began compiling a list of possibilities, including a payroll tax cut and various tax credits.
At a postelection meeting with labor leaders and progressive activists, several of whom were itching for a tax cut fight with the Republicans, White House aides were blunt. To win these stimulative shots, Summers told them, we’re going to have to give up on killing the tax cuts for the rich. “Getting more for our people is more important than getting less for their people,” he said at the meeting.

The heat from the left was formidable, and many progressives began to angrily denounce the deal as a sell-out. Corn notes, however, that “Obama was willing to eschew the fight his Democratic comrades yearned for in order to win something bigger and better: more stimulus to aid the ailing economy.” Corn adds:

…Obama was looking to rack up other accomplishments during this lame-duck session, before the House would be in the hands of tea partiers. He was hoping to end the Pentagon’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, to ratify the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, and pass the DREAM Act reforming immigration law. If he went DEFCON-1 on taxes with the Republicans, there would be no opportunity to steer these other measures through Congress in the holiday season, as it was wrapping up its business. It was quite clear: a bare-knuckles brawl on taxes would mean no more stimulus and no chance to abolish Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, ratify that treaty, or pass any other legislation.
So Obama went after a deal. And what Biden cooked up with McConnell was pretty good for the White House. The package would extend the Bush tax cuts for all taxpayers for two years and would reduce estate taxes for the wealthy (a move many Democrats couldn’t stand), but it also included a payroll tax cut, a child tax credit, additional unemployment insurance, renewable energy grants, and other stimulative measures. A White House chart noted that Obama had won $238 billion of stimulus in return for yielding on $114 billion in high-income tax cuts.

“In policy terms,” Corn explains, “Obama clearly had gotten the better deal.” However, “the media depicted the compromise as a loss for Obama, and progressive Democrats squawked mightily about the continuation of the tax cuts.” However, adds Corn, “This was not full capitulation. It was a strategic retreat to accomplish a bigger mission.” Corn quotes President Obama:

Well, two years ago, the economy was in a different situation. We were still very much in the early parts of recovering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And ultimately, we came together not only to extend the Bush tax cuts, but also a wide range of policies that were going to be good for the economy at that point–unemployment insurance extensions, payroll tax extension–all of which made a difference, and is part of the reason why what we’ve seen now is 32 consecutive months of job growth and over 5.5 million jobs created and the unemployment rate coming down…What I said at the time is what I meant, which is this was a one-time proposition. And what I have told leaders privately as well as publicly is that we cannot afford to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. What we can do is make sure that middle-class taxes don’t go up.

All of which puts the President in a stronger position to challenge the Bush tax cuts this time around. As Corn concludes, “What happened two years ago is not an indication that Obama is likely to yield in the new face-off, but that he will be assessing the political dynamics in gridlocked Washington and be willing to bargain hard for a good deal with true benefits. That’s not caving in. It’s governing.”

The following excerpt by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Progressive organizations based in DC have historically focused most of their attention and political muscle on fighting legislative fights, getting Congress and the President to get new legislation passed or stop legislation they don’t like from passing. That will of course need to be part of the progressive movement’s agenda over the next two years, especially when it comes to fiscal policy and immigration reform, but with the House in the hands of far right Republicans and the Senate rarely able to move at all, I believe that with a few exceptions, much more of our attention needs to be focused on pushing the President to use the power he has to use executive action to improve the economy and fight for the middle class.
Case in point: there was an important article on the front page of the Washington Post on the 23rd, an article about how several of the leading economists in the country had advised the President in the first term that the biggest reason the economy hadn’t recovered as well as hoped was the overhang of unsustainable housing debt on homeowners because of the collapse of the housing bubble. In a revealing sequence, the story describes how the President opened the meeting saying he wanted to hear their honest policy advice not bound by what they thought was politically feasible, that the gathered economic experts strongly encouraged him to do more to explore a far bigger mortgage debt forgiveness plan, and that Treasury Secretary Geithner immediately said nothing that ambitious was politically possible because you couldn’t get a bill through Congress.
Although this particular meeting had not been reported before the WP piece on Friday, the recommendations by these top economists are hardly news: mortgage debt writedowns have been something that a wide range of economists from right to left have been pushing ever since the collapse of the bubble. The weakness of policy initiatives in this area is undoubtedly the biggest economic mistake the administration made in the first term. But there is a bigger problem that the story of this meeting highlights as well. Throughout Obama’s first term, according to administration officials and those economic policy people who have met with the administration that I have talked with, a variety of administration officials led by Geithner have been consistent voices of saying why things can’t get done when it comes to policies that would be tougher on Wall Street banks and/or spur the housing market’s recovery (which, not coincidentally, would also cost the biggest banks a lot of money at least in the short term). Sometimes Geithner’s excuse, as it was reported to be in the meeting with top economists, is that nothing can’t get through Congress; sometimes it is just that the administration lacks the power to act for a wide variety of other reasons. Of course the first excuse doesn’t explain why the administration did not lift a finger to help their closest Senate ally, Obama’s mentor in the Senate Dick Durbin, pass the so-called “cramdown” bill, which would have made it far easier for judges to force banks to write down mortgage debt- the bill’s failure prompting Durbin’s famous complaint that “the banks own this place”. And it doesn’t explain Geithner and the administration’s failure to support many of the strongest amendments on the Senate floor and in conference committee during the fight to pass financial reform. While it is true that there are plenty of things which will not pass Congress, when the administration had a legitimate shot at getting things done that would have helped the economy’s banking and housing problems, the sad truth is that they just failed to do them too much of the time.

Read more…

This article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
To hear some pundits tell it, the Lame Duck budget battle is about the “unsustainable federal deficit,” or “entitlement reform,” or even “tax rates.” These characterizations make it sound like a contest between two competing sets of policies and programs.
But underlying all of the policy-speak, the Lame Duck budget battle is really about one question. Will the 1% of Americans who had the party that caused the deficit be asked to pay the bill?
The pain of “fixing” the deficit should not be distributed widely. It should be distributed fairly – to the people who caused the problem and reaped the benefit – the wealthiest people in America.
The Lame Duck battle goes right to the most important question facing our political and economic decision-makers at this moment in American history: will we continue to allow the wealthiest 1% of Americans to siphon off all of our economic growth for themselves, or will the benefits of that growth be widely spread to ordinary Americans? What portion of the goods and services produced by our society will go to the wealthiest 1% of Americans – and how much goes to everyone else?
From what some right wing pundits and “wise men” from the business community say, you’d think that America is poorer today than it was fifty years ago, when Medicare and Medicaid became part of our social contract – or 70 years ago when we created Social Security. Some of the “entitlement programs” we’ve had for decades are now “unsustainable” they say.
We no longer can afford to guarantee seniors a decent retirement? We can’t afford to guarantee every American the right to decent health care? We can’t afford to provide guaranteed pensions – or to provide a living wage to our workers so they can look forward to providing a better standard of living for their kids? We just can’t do big things anymore like build the Interstate Highway system, or send someone to the moon, or create the Internet? They claim that “we” – meaning most of us but certainly not the 1% — have to get used to the new “normal” of austerity and lowered expectations.
To put it bluntly, that is simply ridiculous.
To understand what is really going on all you have to know is three critical facts:
1). First, for the last three decades our per-person gross domestic product – the amount that the average person in America produces in goods and services — has consistently increased. That increase has been slowed by several economic downturns and by the Great Recession, but over time, we have more to go around today than we did thirty years ago.
In fact, real (adjusted for inflation) per capita gross domestic product (GDP) increased more than 80% over the period between 1975 and 2005. In the last ten years, before the Great Recession, it increased at an average rate of 1.8% per year. That means that if the benefits of economic growth were equally spread throughout our society, everyone should have been almost 20% better off (with compounding) in 2008 than they were in 1998.
2). But ordinary people weren’t better off. In fact, median family income actually dropped in the years before the recession. It fell from $52,301 (in 2009 dollars) in 2000 to $50,112 in 2008. And, of course it continued to drop as the recession set in. In fact, as a group, ordinary Americans haven’t had a raise in about 30 years.
How is that possible?
Was it – as the Right likes to argue – because of the growth of the Federal Government? Nope. In fact, the percentage of GDP going to federal spending actually dropped during the last four years of the Clinton Administration. When Bush took office it began to increase again as the Republicans increased spending on wars. Over the last 28 years, federal spending has averaged about 20.9% of the GDP and varied within a range of only about 5%, with the high being in 1983 (in the middle of the Reagan years) and the low in 2000 before Bush took office. It has never even come close to the 43.6% of GDP that it consumed during World War II in 1943 and 1944, or the 41.9% it consumed in 1945. The percent of GDP that goes to Federal spending went up in 2009 and 2010 – but that was mainly because the economy shrunk on the one hand, and a major, temporary stimulus bill was need on the other to prevent another Great Depression.
Was it because taxes have skyrocketed? No again. In fact, Bureau of Economic Analysis data indicates that Americans now pay 23.6% of income for state, local and federal taxes compared to 27% from the 1970’s through the 1990’s. In fact, the overall tax burden is the lower today than it has been since 1958.
Was it that labor became less productive? No. In fact, there has been a major gap between the increase in the productivity of our workforce and the increase in their wages. Even when wages were improving at the end of the Clinton years, productivity went up 2.5% per year and median hourly wages went up only 1.5%.
From 2000 to 2004, worker productivity exploded by an annual rate of 3.8% but hourly wages went up only 1% and median family income actually dropped .9%.
The bottom line is that people who work for a living (most of us) are getting a smaller and smaller slice of the nation’s economic pie.
In fact, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government started keeping records in 1947. And corporate profits have climbed to their highest levels since the 1960’s.

Read more…

At Politico, Alex Isenstadt explains why he thinks “House Democrats face uphill slog in 2014” with another argument based mostly on historical precedent — the so-called “six-year itch.” But he quotes Democratic pollster Andrew Myers, who advises, “If I’m a member of Congress and I want to beat back the trend, I turn my focus to constituent services and forge a relationship with voters. That way, I’m with the constituents and not Washington.”
You gotta love this title of an article excerpt by Rahm Emanuel at The Root. Read Rahm’s entire WaPo op-ed right here.
WaPo’s Al Kamen has some scuttlebutt on possible cabinet appointees for Obama’s second term, focusing on Latinos.
Two more big name Republicans back away from the Norquist pledge.
Meanwhile, Stephen Moore has a Wall St. Journal interview article on Norquist’s denial that the pledge is in trouble, arguing that a few are having “impure thoughts…but no one is caving.”
Ross Ramsey, executive editor of The Texas Tribune, explains why “Democrats Did Not Do All That Badly on Election Day,” even in the Lone Star state.
Black Friday is over. But here’s a quickie guide to some of the more popular retailers that support Democrats and some that don’t by The Monitor’s Peter Grier.
It’s more like “fiscal phantoms” than a ‘fiscal cliff,’ explains Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who adds “…We have our own currency — and almost all of our debt, both private and public, is denominated in dollars. So our government, unlike the Greek government, literally can’t run out of money. After all, it can print the stuff. So there’s almost no risk that America will default on its debt — I’d say no risk at all if it weren’t for the possibility that Republicans would once again try to hold the nation hostage over the debt ceiling…But if the U.S. government prints money to pay its bills, won’t that lead to inflation? No, not if the economy is still depressed.”
And in the Sunday New York Times, Warren Buffet updates his case for higher taxes on the wealthy, also explaining that “it’s sickening that a Cayman Islands mail drop can be central to tax maneuvering by wealthy individuals and corporations…We can’t let those who want to protect the privileged get away with insisting that we do nothing until we can do everything.”
Salon.com’s Jonathan Bernstein addresses the issue of the hour in his post, “How to stop GOP obstructionism.”

The Nation’s Ari Berman has done a great job of monitoring voter suppression in the election, and he continues to report as new evidence comes in the days and weeks afterward and also notes the successful resistance effort, as well as the continuing threat. As his post on “The GOP’s Voter Suppression Strategy” explains:

In a little-noticed yet significant development on election day, Minnesota voters defeated a constitutional amendment that would have required them to present a government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. It was the first time voters had rejected a voter ID ballot initiative in any state.
In May 2011, a poll showed that 80 percent of Minnesotans supported a photo ID law. “Nearly everyone in the state believed a photo ID was the most common-sense solution to the problem of voter fraud,” says Dan McGrath, executive director of Take Action Minnesota, a progressive coalition that led the campaign against the amendment. “We needed to reframe the issue. We decided to never say the word ‘fraud.’ Instead we would only talk about the cost, complications and consequences of the amendment.” According to the coalition, the photo ID law would have disenfranchised eligible voters (including members of the military and seniors) dumped an unfunded mandate on counties and imperiled same-day voter registration. On election day, 52 percent of Minnesotans opposed the amendment.
The amendment’s surprising defeat has ramifications beyond Minnesota. “There’s been an assumption of political will for restricting the right to vote,” says McGrath. “No, there’s not.” The amendment backfired on the GOP. “Voter ID did not drive the conservative base to turn out in the way that Republicans thought it would,” adds McGrath. “Instead, it actually inspired progressive voters, who felt under siege, to fight stronger and turn out in higher numbers.” The minority vote nearly doubled in the state, compared with 2008. Minnesota was a microcosm of the national failure of the GOP’s voter suppression strategy.

Berman adds further,

Ten major restrictive voting laws were blocked in court over the past year, and turnout among young, black and Latino voters increased as a share of the electorate in 2012 compared with 2008. The youth vote rose from 18 to 19 percent, and the minority vote increased from 26 to 28 percent; both went heavily for Obama.
…The black vote rose in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, while the Latino vote grew in Florida, Colorado and Nevada. “There were huge organizing efforts in the black, Hispanic and Asian communities, more than there would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts,” says Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions, a Latino polling and research firm.
n late September, Project New America, a Denver center-left research group, tested more than thirty messages on “sporadic, less likely voters who lean Democratic” (which included young, black and Hispanic voters) to see what would motivate them to vote. “One of the most powerful messages across many different demographics was reminding people that their votes were important to counter the extremists who are kicking people off of voter rolls,” the group wrote in a post-election memo.

Berman points out that these successful resistance campaigns don’t mean that all voter suppression efforts failed. On the contrary,

A flood of horror stories poured in during early voting and on election day: voters waiting in line for seven hours in Florida, wrongly turned away for lack of photo ID in Pennsylvania, improperly forced to cast provisional ballots in Ohio. The day after the election, 600,000 early votes and provisional ballots remained uncounted in Arizona, most of them in heavily Latino Maricopa County. According to Hart Research Associates, black and Hispanic voters were two to three times more likely than whites to wait more than thirty minutes to cast their ballot.
In-person early voting declined in Florida because of fewer early voting hours, compared with 2008. Florida voter registration dropped by 14 percent because of the twelve months in 2011-12 when the state shut down voter registration drives. The 1-866-Our-Vote hotline received more than 9,000 calls from Pennsylvanians on election day, many from voters wrongly told by poll workers that a photo ID was required in order to vote. Twice as many voters in Philadelphia as in 2008 had to cast provisional ballots because their names were missing from voter rolls. Of all the swing states, Pennsylvania had the sharpest drop in voter turnout, down by more than 7 percent from 2008, which could be attributable to confusion over its suspended voter ID law.

Berman notes that various legislative reforms have been proposed, but adds that “Before Congress tries to pass sweeping election reform, it should take the baby step of getting an election commission back up and running.” Then there is the very real threat that section 5 ‘pre-clearance’ provision of the Voting Rights Act will be overturned by the Supreme Court. Yet the 2012 election proved that the law is still urgently needed. As Berman concludes, “If anything, Section 5 should be expanded to include states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Losing Section 5 would greenlight the very kind of voter suppression that proved so unpopular in 2012.”

The following excerpt by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I know there will be a lot of very thoughtful and moving blog posts today at all my favorite blogs and news sites about what different people are thankful for. Truth be told, I am actually a pretty sentimental guy, and if this Thanksgiving is like most of the rest, some of those pieces will probably make me a little teary-eyed. I know I am incredibly thankful for how lucky I am, that I live in such an incredible country and have such a remarkable family. I am thankful as well for a country where my mom and other older relatives have Social Security and Medicare to rely on; where my brother Kevin had disability support throughout his life; for a country where an elderly and disabled homeless man I know finally is getting government housing after a long wait.
But I have to admit a certain cynical side as well, because when I see a video like this, I also become very thankful for policy opponents like this:

It is interesting that Mr. Blankfein’s video came out the same day a much smarter, savvier proponent of Social Security and Medicare cuts came out with a memo about how to sell such cuts. Lloyd did pretty much everything wrong, as far as what the memo recommended, and I’m sure my friends at Third Way would not have wanted the CEO of Goldman Sachs as their lead spokesman on the campaign to make those cuts. But God bless him, I am so very thankful: having a man as wealthy and privileged and powerful as Blankfein, a man who is the CEO of a company which has gotten enormous government bailouts and largess over the last 5 years, tell people they need to retire later and have their benefits cut is a great boon to folks like me who are opposing such things.
The people at Third Way are a much tougher foe. They are old political warriors who know how to craft messaging research to make it look like voters are with them, and know how to use people’s love of Medicare and Social Security as a way to scaring them into making cuts in the programs.
It is heart-breaking to me to read the coldly analytical memo describing the focus groups they did with a goal of figuring out how to build support for cutting the programs these voters love, rely on, and are desperately worried about losing. These paragraphs are powerful:

When imagining a future where Social Security and Medicare were not fixed, everyone of our participants imagined a bleak existence, not just for the country, but for themselves personally. They described that scenario as being one in which people “can’t get care,” “die earlier,” “are unhealthier,” and “work longer.” That was a future in which “our system has failed and there were no financial supports.” And how do they view people standing in the way of fixing these programs? As one Minnesota Democrat put it, “blissfully ignorant of the issues or too selfish to care about someone else to deal with these problems.
It’s personal.
Even though our focus group participants were all over the age of 45, with some significantly older and already benefiting from Social Security and Medicare, they all worried that the programs’ financial problems would jeopardize their own benefits – not just those of future retirees. They felt personally threatened and feared a loss of control over their own lives in the absence of changes. One noted, “I don’t think it’s going to be around when I get it.” And another said, “We’ve been told for 30 years it [Social Security] won’t be there and we got into that mindset that we’re not going to get it.”
When asked to write a postcard to their grandchildren in a future where our country had not taken action to shore-up Social Security and Medicare, these participants revealed their deep fear of losing their homes and becoming a burden on their families. One participant wrote to his grandchildren, “You now are responsible for starting a new family while you must also care for your parents.” Another described the consequences to their grandchildren as “that’s why I live off Mom and Daddy. They have to take care of me.” Another said without fixing Social Security, “the payment I am receiving is not enough for me to live by myself so I would like to live with you.” A recurring theme with Medicare was the stability it afforded seniors to stay in their own homes and not burden their children. One woman noted that “you shouldn’t need to be rich to get a lawyer to protect your house” from medical bills. Another described the consequences of inaction more bluntly, “Grandpa and I live in a nursing home. [We] lost our house…and are getting abused.”

As that focus group participant said, for 30 years the fear-mongers have been telling people that Social Security and Medicare weren’t going to be there for people, and because these programs are so loved and so needed, the plan now is to use that fear to sell them on the idea that cuts to benefits are needed. Because of the fear-mongering, people are worried that these programs need to be “fixed”. But here’s where the Third Way memos are especially revealing: they don’t ever seem to tell people, or ask them poll questions, about Third Way’s preferred solutions such as cutting benefits or raising the retirement age. The reason they don’t ask such questions is that they know how unpopular those policy ideas are. Instead, they keep everything general and generic, a classic tactic of people doing a poll for public consumption where they know the specifics of what they are proposing are unpopular.
Republicans, of course, have been doing this for years. You ask questions like “is government too big?”, “would you like a tax cut?”, “do you believe in traditional values?” or “are deficits a problem?”, people tend to nod along and say sure. You get into any kind of policy specifics, people quickly will tell you they prefer Democratic policy positions. Third Way is playing the same kind of game. They ask people whether they want to “fix” Social Security and Medicare, of course they will say yes — they love and need them, and don’t want them threatened as the folks at Third Way and their allies keep saying they are. You ask general things like they asked in their poll, people will say yes. Are deficits a problem? Do they want leaders to come together and compromise? Do they want bipartisan solutions? Isn’t America a great country? Aren’t loving mothers and grandmothers wonderful? Okay, they didn’t ask the last two questions, but they might as well have. Pollsters ask questions like these not because they teach us anything useful, but because they want to release the poll and spin things their way.
But progressives can learn things from the Third Way polling too. We now know what the opposition plans in the fiscal showdown: scare people into thinking that Social Security and Medicare are threatened, and that only by agreeing to cuts in benefits can it be saved. We have to be prepared to lay out the clear facts on Social Security and Medicare, and have our own policy alternatives to promote. The Social Security formula can be shifted so that wealthier Americans contributions are not capped at $95,000, a simple fix Third Way never mentions that would easily solve all of Social Security’s long term fiscal issues for the foreseeable future. Hundreds of billions in Medicare dollars can be saved over the next several years by forcing the drug companies to negotiate with Medicare on their prices, and by cracking down on providers gaming the system. These are simple solutions that don’t require screwing over the middle income and poor seniors dependent on these programs.
You know what is disturbing about the Third Way’s release of these memos at this juncture of the debate? They undercut the President’s and Congressional Democrats’ bargaining strategy with the Republicans on these issues. Republicans all over town were touting the Third Way’s memos yesterday, very excited to have a Democratic group join them in their mission to cut middle class benefits from Medicare and Social Security. This is, sadly, a repeat of an earlier pattern of undercutting Democrats: Third Way in September called Elizabeth Warren’s message “catastrophically anti-business,” a quote the Chamber of Commerce delightedly picked up and ran with in trying to help Scott Brown defeat her.
So on this day before Thanksgiving, let me be gracious to my opponents on these policy debates. Lloyd Blankfein, I salute you for giving us such a great example of a wealthy powerful man who takes massive government largesse and who wants to slash benefits for the middle class and make them work longer before retirement; our side will be able to use that video well in this debate. And to the smart folks at Third Way, thank you for spelling out clearly the kind of messaging the Republicans will be using in their war on Social Security and Medicare.
The class war continues unabated, even on Thanksgiving week: the wealthy and their allies trying to take money out of the hands of the middle class. I’m thankful the middle class is still in the fight.

The following excerpt by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
…The many losers on the Republican side were to my mind some of the people and groups who have degraded our politics and policies in the worst kind of way — the biggest names among them besides the actual candidates including Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, the Wall Street money boys, Big Oil and Big Coal, and the extremist anti-gay and anti-choice groups. It is a pleasure to see these people, corporations, and groups unhappy for a while — not out of any sense of vindictiveness, but just knowing that if they were feeling happy the rest of us would be suffering mightily because of their terrible agenda for America.
But there is one other set of people and groups who lost in this election as well, and it is important to note that as well: Democrats who don’t want to have a populist “class warfare” kind of message. The Obama team, after wandering for two and a half years in the unproductive vineyards of D.C. centrism, finally planted its flag last fall in the populist turf of Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy and reframed the election as a make-or-break moment for the middle class, campaigned aggressively on more taxes for the wealthy and more regulation for Wall Street, and ripped Romney apart on the way Bain Capital hurt its workers and out-sourced jobs. Obama was in trouble before making that turn, but once made his poll numbers started rising and he was able to rally both the democratic base and swing vote working class voters to his side. Meanwhile, most of the Senate candidates who won tough races were flaming populists, people like the Wall Street accountabilty crusader Elizabeth Warren, the working class champion Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin who bragged in her stump speeches about opposng the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the fiercely anti-big money in politics Chris Murphy, and Heidi Heitkamp who bragged in her ads about suing big corporations as ND Attorney General.
But it wasn’t just the candidates who were populists, the voters clearly were as well — especially the swing voters. One of the most fascinating findings of post-election polling by Democracy Corps and CAF was that swing voters who ended with Obama were actually even more populist than Democratic base voters. Swing voters mentioned the 47 percent video as one of their top three doubts about Romney more than base voters 31-26, they mentioned Bain Capital more often by 24-16, and they mentioned that Romney would follow Bush trickle down policies more often by 22-16 percent. And for both swing and base voters on this three top doubts question, over half of all the responses were about Romney being for the rich and out of touch with regular folks, while the next highest basket of concerns related to fears about Romney cutting social insurance (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare). And voters strongly oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as part of the budget deal; they think creating jobs is a higher priority than cutting the deficit; they oppose cuts in college aid and education, programs for children, worker training; they are overwhelmingly in favor of public financing of elections and other proposals to take corporate money out of politics. There are plenty more statistics in the poll and memo, it makes for great reading, I’d encourage people to check it out.
This is an old argument. It started when D.C. Democrats close to the business lobby, mostly Southerners, started the DLC after Walter Mondale lost to Reagan in 1984. Populism never works, they claimed, although their old chair Bill Clinton won the ’92 race with a campaign based on taxing the rich and fighting for the forgotten people who “work hard and play by the rules”, which sounds oddly like populism to me. Pollsters like Mark Penn carried the no-populism for Democrats torch for many years, ending with Hillary’s campaign digging herself into too deep a hole to climb out of in the 2008 primaries before turning to working class populism to win most of the contests at the end of the primary season when it was too late. Third Way — the younger, hipper version of DLC — now is the leading advocate in the party of the no-populism cause. They decried Elizabeth Warren’s “catastrophically anti-business message” at the Democratic convention, then watched as the speech helped boost her from a couple points behind Scott Brown to a few points ahead of him, never to get behind him again in the campaign.
Now to be clear, I think the progressive populism message needs to be tempered (as both the President’s message and Elizabeth Warren’s was) in some important ways that would not muddle their progressive policies. For example, an understanding that cutting the deficit over the long run is important is both good policy and good politics. I think Democrats should have specific proposals that cut waste in government such as subsidies to huge profitable agribusinesses and energy companies that don’t need to be subsidized, and clean up the weakly written federal government contracting policies that allow cost over-runs with no penalties. I also think Democrats should do far more than they are doing, both in policy and in their message, to focus on helping small business start-ups, and helping small business compete on a level playing field with the corporate behemoths who are trying to run them out of business in order to destroy the competition. Beefing up anti-trust enforcement, breaking up the big banks so that smaller community banks and credit unions have more ability to give loans to small businesses, giving the Small Business Administration more money for loans to small business, enforcing trade laws to make sure countries like China aren’t cheating medium and small companies here, and creating contracting and procurement rules that make sure the federal government doesn’t do most of its business with big companies are all ways progressive populists Democrats can promote small business.
So, yes, Democratic populist candidates need to be clear that they are for lower deficits, reducing waste in government, and helping small business. But none of these points takes away from that populist message of fighting for the middle class against Wall Street and other big money special interests. I think anyone looking at the message and electoral coalition for candidates like Obama, Warren, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Chris Murphy, and Heidi Heitkamp, and doesn’t see populism there is smoking some strange weed bought from their friends on Wall Street. The argument that populism doesn’t work for Democrats comes out of the 2012 elections in about as good a shape as Karl Rove’s reputation.

This article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Sunday’s morning shows featured some astoundingly stupid comments from Republicans who claim to believe that on Election Day voters gave them a “mandate” to continue their attempts to obstruct President Obama’s agenda.
Apparently some Republican pundits are still living in the same parallel universe that allowed them to convince themselves that by now, President-elect Mitt Romney would be organizing his transition.
It really is mind-boggling. Notwithstanding all of the available evidence, they still believe that the American people want them to stand in the way of increases in taxes for the wealthiest 2 percent and to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits for future retirees.
Who got a mandate for his policies on Election Day?
The presidential campaign focused like a laser on the question of whether tax rates should be increased for the top 2 percent of Americans or whether we should adopt Romney’s proposal to lower tax rates for the wealthy by another $5 trillion, and inevitably increase taxes on the middle class.
The campaign centered on the Ryan-Romney budget that would have slashed spending on critical services for the poor and middle class, reduce funding for education, do away with Medicare and replace it with a voucher program that would increase out-of-pocket costs for seniors by $6,500 per year.
And it was clear throughout, that the Republicans continued to favor privatizing Social Security.
The Republican presidential ticket lost by 332 electoral votes to 206 electoral votes. Obama got 50.6 percent of the popular vote and Romney got 47.6 percent of the popular vote.
Democrats took two additional seats in the Senate and now hold a 55-45 edge. The Senate Democratic caucus now includes more Progressive members and fewer Conservative members.
Democrats picked up at least 7 and probably 8 seats in the House, and nationwide got over a half a million more votes for their House candidates than did the Republicans — even though the Republicans continued to control the chamber.
And the verdict that was rendered at the ballot box could be seen in virtually every national opinion survey.
The election was a battle over the future of the middle class, and Obama won that battle.
A Greenberg-Quinlan Research poll found that by 51 to 42 percent the voters said Obama would do a better job restoring the middle class.
They found that by almost two-thirds, voters believed Social Security and Medicare should not be cut as part of a deficit reduction deal.
A November 15, 2012 Hart Research poll for Americans for Tax Fairness found that:
By a strong 17-point margin, voters favor ending the Bush tax cuts on incomes over250,000 (56 percent) rather than extending the tax cuts for all taxpayers (39 percent).
President Obama now holds a commanding position in the debate over tax policy. When voters hear President Obama’s position on the Bush tax cuts — that he will sign a bill continuing them for 98 percent of Americans but will veto a bill continuing them for incomes over 250,000 — fully 61 percent agree with this stance. By contrast, when voters are read congressional Republicans’ position — that they will pass a bill continuing the cuts for all income levels, but will block any bill ending the cuts for those making over 250,000 — only 42 percent agree while a 53 percent majority rejects its plan.

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