The following article, by Andrwew Sabl, author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics, is cross-posted from samefacts.com.
In 2004, John Kerry said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention,

we shouldn’t be opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America.

The line got huge applause. Christopher Hitchens noted and feared this, calling it “one of the sourest and nastiest and cheapest notes to have been struck for some time.” But Kerry knew a good line when he heard it, and re-used it endlessly in his stump speech and the debates–which he won.
Kerry played Mitt Romney in Obama’s debate prep. He taught some lessons that Obama used last night. Obama’s version of the same riff was:

The other thing that we have to do is recognize that we can’t continue to do nation building in these regions. Part of American leadership is making sure that we’re doing nation building here at home.

…and it wasn’t an accident or a minor point: Obama used versions of the line four times, unprompted.
I haven’t seen a single commentator noting the line. But I’ll wager it played a huge role in convincing undecided voters to give Obama a huge lead, 30 points, in the CBS instapoll. Though I can’t find the article, I remember a Kerry aide from 2004 commenting, a bit uncomfortably, that swing voters, who then as now tended to be low-information voters, were particular fans of the firehouse spiel.
Washington is a city of self-styled internationalists. (It would be bad manners to say “militarists,” much less to note that the Pentagon is a huge driver of the local economy, along with lobbying.) There’s a strong institutional bias in favor of candidates who call for higher military spending, lots of military interventions, and a hair-trigger attitude towards crises. But the American people have always been much more leery of military spending and foreign wars than the political class is. Scott Rasmussen–yes, that one–noted the disjuncture last month, in explaining why Republican efforts to make higher military spending a campaign winner were destined to fail. Polls on military spending are so unfavorable to the Republican position that Obama is running ads attacking Romney for wanting to spend more on defense. Military spending hikes are favored by 58 percent of Republicans–but only 40 percent of all voters.
American isolationism has very large costs. It drives our shocking lack of policy learning–our unwillingness to learn from other countries that do anything better than we do–as well as relative indifference to global problems from hunger to climate change and beyond. But it also has its benefits: the war machine that Romney and the neocons would like to sell, the public isn’t buying.
This is a line of attack likely to fly under the radar of elites, or even offend them. But this is a democracy. And I think Obama just won Ohio.

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:
We are now officially at the end game. What this election boils down to now is simple as can be: pumping up and getting out the Democratic base vote.
It really helps that Obama so dominated last night’s debate. He was steady and authoritative, putting Romney on the defensive early and keeping him there all night. The horses and bayonets line, unanswered by a stunned Romney, is the keeper debate line of the 2012 cycle, destined to join “there you go again, Mr. President” from Reagan in 1980, and the “you are no Jack Kennedy” line from Bentsen in ’88, as one of the most repeated debate lines in American history.
What was most fascinating about last night’s debate happened in the first minute, though. When moderator Bob Schieffer opened the debate by asking Romney the Benghazi question, I think everyone watching assumed that this would be the biggest flashpoint and battle of the debate, that this would be the fireworks and the news coming out of the night. When Romney chose instead to immediately punt on first down and turn the very specific and pointed Benghazi question into a rambling generic answer about foreign policy in general, he stunned everyone — and he took the biggest potential weakness for Obama on foreign policy off the table for not only the rest of the night but the rest of the campaign. If Romney didn’t have the guts to challenge the president on it when the question got teed up so directly for him, how is the Romney campaign going to make a credible case against Obama on it for the next two weeks? They aren’t. I don’t know whether there was some kind of big campaign decision that, having swung and missed in the last debate, he just wouldn’t go there, or whether Romney just flat out choked (I strongly suspect the latter) but, either way, having buried it in the debate, that issue will be very hard for the Romney campaign to resurrect.
The president fired up the Democratic troops last night. Now it is up to the troops to deliver. In the battleground states, we have to not only do the crucial mechanics of turning out the vote — door to door, calls, early voting, visibility, friend to friend and neighbor to neighbor — we have to fire our people up and get them motivated to vote. I have a great deal of confidence in the Obama ground game, but it won’t be easy.
Poll after poll has shown that some of the most important Democratic base groups are less engaged in this campaign and less fired up about voting than they were in 2008. In fact, it is young people, unmarried women, Latinos and African Americans that have been hardest hit by economic hard times, and when you are struggling economically it is a lot harder to get excited about voting. Because of those hard times, more of the voters in these demographic groups have also been wavering in terms of the president, as well. In 2008, Obama won 69 percent of the voters in those demographic groups, but according to the new Democracy Corps poll just out yesterday, Obama is only winning 62 percent right now. In the last two weeks of this campaign, our highest strategic priority should be to focus on these voters, remind them of how terrible Romney’s policies would be for them and do everything in our power to pump them up about voting and voting for Democrats.
The good news is that despite those lower numbers from our base, the DCorps poll showed Obama going into the final two weeks ahead by three, 49-46. I put a lot of trust into DCorps’ numbers, as Stan Greenberg has an extraordinary amount of experience polling in presidential politics and they have the best predictive record of any poll out there. Especially given Obama’s decisive victory last night and the small but steady edge in most of the key swing states, DCorps’ numbers make me think we are going to win this race. But absolutely key to the endgame is appealing to and firing up Democratic base voters. Our success with those voters will determine this election.

At the Atlantic Andrew Cohen’s post, “Think the Florida Recount Was Bad? Just Wait Until November 6” merits concern and attention from all Democrats. Cohen warns:

You think the hanging chads in Florida were bad in 2000? You think the patch of procedures, appeals, and standards of review was crazy? At least a human being was looking at those ballots. At least some of the rest of us were able to look at that human being looking at those ballots. At least there were ballots to be seen. In 2012, on the other hand, loose technology, lax industry oversight, political indifference, and partisan bigotry mean there is the potential for mischief — and by that I mean democracy-crushing voter fraud — on a scale that would make the high drama and low comedy of November 2000 seem mundane.
How about thousands upon thousands of votes instantly disappearing from the electronic count of one candidate, or being added to the count of another, with no paper trail left behind? How about electronic voting machines whose programs can be breached and hacked — patched for fraud, is the new term — from thousands of miles away? How about new voting technology controlled largely by corporations with strong partisan ties? Not only can it all happen in two weeks, there is a viable case to be made that it’s already happened — in both the decade before and the decade since Bush v. Gore.
And of course the great irony of it all, one of the most under-reported stories of this campaign, is that the politicians and activists who have tried so hard this election cycle to make it harder for poor, ill, and elderly voters to vote are some of the ones most closely aligned with the operatives who can, with a click, determine the outcome of the coming election. Instead of securing accurate voting rights for all, they want to deprive voting rights for some…

Cohen quote from an article by Victoria Collier in the November issue Harper’s *, titled “How To Rig An Election,” (excerpt only online):

Old-school ballot-box fraud at its most egregious was localized and limited in scope. But new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a statewide or even national scale. And whereas once you could catch the guilty parties in the act, and even dredge the ballot boxes out of bayou, the virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programming could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It’s the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.

Cohen adds:

…According to VerifiedVoting.org, there are more than 45 million registered voters in America whose electronic votes will not be backed up with a paper record. In Pennsylvania, the vast majority of counties fall into this category. Speaking of which, how much do you trust the folks running your own state’s electronic voting?

There is a lot to be alarmed about in Cohen’s article, as well as Collier’s. Cohen has some suggestions for reform, as well. Do read the rest of Cohen’s post.

The following is cross-posted from the Carville-Greenberg Memo:
Today, just hours before the final debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, we’re unveiling a new Democracy Corps poll that shows the president with a 3-point lead. But we have a lot more to say than that. We explore in detail [in the video below] just why we think our new national survey means more than many others–especially the Gallup poll that got so much attention showing Romney ahead–and exactly how President Obama can close the deal in tonight’s showdown.

The horse-race polls show that the presidential race is narrowing. But when it comes to the views of working-class voters, the President is holding an impressive lead, according to “New Poll Shows Working Families Trust Obama on Economy, Social Issues” by Mike Hall of AFL-CIO Now. As Hall reports on the poll, which was conducted On October 17:

…Working family voters–union and nonunion–who have been contacted by the labor movement’s voter outreach program, overwhelmingly believe that President Obama is far more in tune with their needs and is vastly more trusted to handle the economy and social issues, such as Social Security and Medicare, according to a new poll.
…People surveyed believe that Obama has a better understanding of their everyday struggles than Mitt Romney by 54% to 16% among union members and 50% to 20% among nonunion workers.
When asked, “Who do you trust to do a better job handling the economy?” 62% to 27% of union members and 48% to 39% of nonunion workers said Obama. There were similar trust factor numbers for who they trusted to protect Medicare–65% to 24% of union members and 55% to 32% of nonunion workers said Obama. For Medicaid, 63% to 22% of union members and 53% to 31% of nonunion workers said Obama.
…While Romney wants to turn Medicare into a privatized “coupon care” system, respondents said Medicare should stay as it is and not change to a public/private hybrid system: 68% to 21% of union members and 64% to 24% of nonunion workers…When asked if they supported cuts to Social Security, which could be on the table for the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, just 8% to 86% of union members and 10% to 85% of nonunion working family voters said they supported cuts.

Read the rest of the AFL-CIO report right here.

The following article, by Democratic strategist and organizer Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross posted from HuffPo:
As Election Day grows closer, some pundits seem almost breathless in their prediction that the Presidential election will be close. Well, of course it will be close. It has been obvious from the campaign’s first day that it would be close. But there is overwhelming evidence that President Obama will win.
Why is the race so close?
1). First and foremost, the Republicans’ trickledown, let-Wall-Street-run-wild policies sent the economy into a catastrophic recession just as Obama took office. This was not your run of the mill business cycle recession. It was caused by a financial collapse the likes of which America had not seen since the Great Depression.
The historic evidence is very clear that whenever there is a recession induced by a financial collapse, it take years for an economy to recover. American did not fully recover from the Great Depression itself until World War II — almost twelve years after the stock market collapsed.
Had the Republicans remained in office and responded as Republican President Hoover did in 1929, the same fate could have awaited America once again. But instead, the Obama Administration moved immediately to stimulate the economy and shore up the financial system — and especially to rescue the auto industry — using policies that in most cases the GOP opposed.
Those policies have set the economy on a path toward sustained growth. But the Republicans have been hell-bent on stalling growth with the expressed purpose of defeating Obama this fall. They have sabotaged the economy by preventing even a vote on the Americans Jobs Act that most economists believe would create another 1.7 million jobs and would have prevented massive layoffs in state and local governments.
Mitt Romney is like an arsonist who complains that the fire department isn’t putting out his fire fast enough, then tries to convince America to allow him to take over the effort armed with buckets of gasoline — the same failed policies that caused the fire in the first place.
But the Republicans are right about one thing. It’s hard to get re-elected in a tough economic environment — even one that is improving. That is the main reason this election is close. If unemployment were at six percent, Obama would be re-elected by the same kind of electoral vote margins the Bill Clinton piled up in 1996.
2). The election is close because Wall Street — and super-wealthy right-wing oil tycoons like the Koch Brothers — have spent huge amounts of money to defeat Obama. This week alone, Romney and his outside group allies have booked $57 million in TV time.
Their financial advantage has been neutralized by the spectacular Obama fundraising operation — particularly the incredible small donor program that has raised funds from over 10 million individual contributions.
And its effect has also been ameliorated by the fact that TV spots can be bought by both campaigns at the lowest possible rate, and super PACs or outside groups must spend much more per television viewer.
But the fact remains that all of those negative attack ads about Obama have kept the race close.
3). The American electorate is closely divided. In 2008 the economy had collapsed under Republican rule. The GOP candidate was not very popular. And the Republican incumbent President was downright radioactive. Regardless, the Republican candidate still got 47 percent of the popular vote.
Of course the race will be close.
But there are at least eight very good reasons why Obama will win. The first four have to do with extreme right wing policies Romney has advocated that have made it clear to key blocks of voters that he is simply not on their side.

Read more…

Mitt Romney has already made some history — no other presidential candidate in the modern era has refused to disclose more basic information about his policy proposals. As Thomas B. Edsall explains in The New York Times:

With the presidential election just two weeks away, Romney’s gamble may be paying off. He has failed to specify where he would wield the budget knife, and he has defied, with a striking degree of success, the relatively quiet group of people who have called for him to honor a host of traditional disclosure and campaign practices.
It hasn’t mattered. The Obama v. Romney all-poll average is now tied on RealClearPolitics and down to a tiny 0.4 point advantage for Obama on the Huffington Post politics section’s Election Dashboard.
Romney’s evasions of traditional disclosure have been ongoing and almost insolent.
In July, when Romney refused to release more than two years of tax returns — in contrast to previous candidates of both parties, among them his father — there was a huge uproar. National Journal published a list of 17 prominent Republicans, including four sitting senators, who called on him to release 10 or more years. Editorials in papers across the country denounced Romney’s secrecy. The conservative columnist George Will declared that Romney “must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” Will warned Romney that he was losing the argument “in a big way.”
But it is Romney who appears to have won the argument. His tax returns are a dead issue, except on the left and liberal fringe.

Edsall’s article goes on to explain that “Romney has repeatedly left unaddressed and unresolved a fundamental contradiction between his proposal to cut tax rates across the board by 20 percent and his claim that his fiscal policies will put the nation on a path toward a balanced budget.” Edsall’s article goes on to fault Romney for an almost complete lack of candor regarding his budget proposals, including his $2 trillion hike in military spending. Esdall goes on to add,

If Romney wins and actually tries to reduce deficits to the levels he has described during the campaign, he would have to make drastic cuts in widely backed discretionary spending programs. These programs would not just suffer cuts. Homeland security, the administration of justice, environmental protection, the National Institutes of Health: They would all face the prospect of being gouged or slaughtered.

Edsall explains further that “A Romney victory will make it possible for future candidates to take the same path of secretiveness. Non-disclosure could become the norm…Romney has demonstrated that the press is relatively toothless — that a candidate who is willing to take the heat for a while can outlast the media.”
At least some of the fault, however, lies with the lapdog media, who have given Romney a free ride. As Edsall notes,

To accommodate both the conservative wing of his party and the demands of mainstream voters has required Romney to dodge tough questions. In many ways he has gotten away with it…even judged by the standards of past dichotomies between election pledges and the realities of governing, Romney has placed himself in an exceptionally untenable position. This season’s rhetoric has exposed the spuriousness of the inflated promises of the Republican nominee.

Candidate Romney has set up a test of how much political arrogance and deceit of the rankest kind a presidential candidate can get away with. It’s up to Democrats to work unceasingly over the next two weeks for a turnout to end his shameless charade.

The following is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps e-blast:
With the election campaign reaching the eve of the last debate, President Obama has talked extensively about his future plans in the very successful second debate, and has aired an ad narrated by Morgan Freeman, talking about progress made in the last four years and concluding, “The last thing we should do is turn back now.” On the stump, the president has posed the choice between enriching the top again and finishing the job: “We can choose to go back to the same top-down policies that got us into this mess, or you can choose to move us forward with the policies that have been getting us out of this mess.”
Our fear was that the progress message would sound out of touch and fail to give those voters who are on the edge financially hope that life would be better in a second term, particularly when Mitt Romney was on the air with his plans to create 12 million jobs. Fortunately, the survey confirms the utility of both the progress/don’t go back and future policy messages.
We conducted a special web survey this week where we tested the actual Morgan Freeman ad aired against the Romney 30-second plan spot with 500 respondents. In a parallel sample of 500, we tested an Obama future plans spot (cut down to 1 minute, 25 seconds) against the Romney 60-second spot on his economic plans. We looked at agreement, credibility, and memorability, and most important, looked at the impact on the key question, who would do a better job handling the economy.
Most importantly, in video form and content both Obama ads scored more strongly than the Romney spot. Bottom line, Obama is closing in ways where he can make gains on the economy and in the race.
Read the full memo at Democracy Corps.

The following article by Alan I. Abramowitz, author of “The Polarized Public,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
Based on the latest results from the HuffPost Pollster poll tracking model, with less than three weeks left until Election Day, the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is extremely close with both candidates estimated to have the support of about 47 percent of the electorate. The realclearpolitics.com average of national polls released over the past 10 days shows an identical result, a 47-47 tie. And the results of recent polls in the key swing states appear to be consistent with this picture of an extremely close presidential race.
There is, of course, some variation in the results of national polls that have been released in the past week or two but all of them show the margin between Romney and Obama to be within two or three points one way or the other. All of them with one exception, that is — the Gallup tracking poll. The Gallup tracking poll alone among national polls, including the usually Republican-leaning Rasmussen poll, shows Mitt Romney with a large lead over Barack Obama among likely voters — a seven point lead in the results released on October 18 and a six point lead in the results released on October 19.
Gallup is, without question, the biggest outlier among all of the national polls on the 2012 presidential election. But this is not the first time that Gallup has found itself in that position. Two years ago, Gallup was by far the biggest outlier in its forecast of the Republican margin in the 2010 midterm congressional elections. Gallup’s final estimate of the Republican lead among likely voters in 2010 was 15 points. Only Rasmussen at 12 points was even close to Gallup. The average GOP lead across all of the national polls was about seven points, which was very close to the actual Republican margin in the national popular vote.
So what’s going on with the Gallup tracking poll and why is it such a big outlier? Part of the explanation, as Mark Blumenthal pointed out in a recent post , is almost certainly Gallup’s complicated likely voter screen which gives considerable weight to voter attention and enthusiasm. As a result of this screen, the Gallup tracking poll has been showing a very wide gap between the preferences of all registered voters and likely voters — a 5-6 point difference in margin. In recent days, Gallup has been showing a very close race among registered voters but a big Romney lead among likely voters.
In 2010, the same large gap was evident in Gallup’s polling and in the end the actual Republican margin in the House elections was considerably closer to Gallup’s results for registered voters than to its results for its likely voters. It is entirely possible that the same thing is happening this year.
But beyond just the impact of Gallup’s likely voter screen, there is another factor that may explain why Gallup is once again a big outlier. Despite some recent changes in its sampling procedures designed to make its initial sample of adults more representative of the U.S. adult population, Gallup’s likely voter sample appears to be substantially under-representing non-white voters. Although Gallup does not report the racial composition of its likely voter sample (or any of its other samples), based on the results presented in their October 16 report on the standing of the presidential candidates among whites and non-whites, one can use interpolation to estimate the racial composition of the likely voter sample. The results show that about 80 percent of Gallup’s likely voter sample consisted of non-Hispanic whites while about 20 percent consisted of non-whites.
Gallup’s estimate that only 20 percent of this year’s likely voters are non-white is far lower than the 26 percent non-white share of voters found in the 2008 exit poll or even the 23 percent share found in the 2004 exit poll. It is actually very close to the 19 percent share found in the 2000 exit poll. So according to the Gallup tracking poll, the racial composition of the 2012 electorate will be similar to that of the 2000 electorate despite the dramatic increase in the nonwhite share of the voting age population that has occurred in the past 12 years.
The fact that the Gallup tracking poll is a big outlier when it comes to estimating the standing of the presidential candidates this year is, by itself, a very good reason to view their findings right now with deep skepticism. The apparent under-representation of non-whites in their likely voter sample only reinforces that conclusion. The next two-plus weeks will tell whether the Gallup tracking poll continues to produce results that are far outside of the range of other national polls or whether its results move closer to the polling mainstream.

Those who were wondering how low Republicans are willing to go in suppressing Latino and African American votes should read Brad Friedman’s “GOP voter registration scandal widens: A Virginia official is busted for tossing voter forms. Turns out he works for the national party, too” at Slate.com. Here’s an excerpt, beginning with the lede:

A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.
“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.
But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.
The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Read more…