It’s pretty bad for the GOP when one of the America’s top conservative columnists feels compelled to blister the Republican nominee 7 weeks before the election. Responding to Romney’s comments (see post below) about nearly half of Americans being trapped in a culture of dependency, Brooks writes,

Romney, who criticizes President Obama for dividing the nation, divided the nation into two groups: the makers and the moochers… Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.
The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view — from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers. There’s no way the country will trust the Republican Party to reform the welfare state if that party doesn’t have a basic commitment to provide a safety net for those who suffer for no fault of their own.
The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

Brooks continues with a searing observation that “as a description of America today, Romney’s comment is a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney.” Brooks is also right that Romney is “running a depressingly inept campaign,” which many would agree bodes ill for his credibility as a potential leader of the free world.

John b. Judis’s post “Nobody Likes Mitt: The election is a popularity contest. And that’s OK.” at The New Republic has added resonance today, in the wake of Romney’s ill-considered comments that nearly half of Americans are “people who pay no income tax,” are “dependent upon government” and see themselves as “victims” who are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Writing a few days before Romney’s latest blunder was outed, Judis noted:

…In public opinion surveys, what has jumped out for months is the large advantage that Obama enjoys over Romney on questions related to character and personality…In the same poll that Gallup found voters preferring Romney on the economy, it found that Obama enjoyed a 23 percentage-point edge on who is more “likeable,” a 16 point advantage in “who cares about the needs of people like you,” and a 12-point edge in who is more “honest and trustworthy.” Other polls show similar results. In four polls conducted from April 8 through September 9, The Washington Post and ABC found that voters by over two-to-one margins thought that Obama “seems the more friendly and likeable person.”
If the 2000 election had been decided entirely on specific policy grounds, Vice President Al Gore probably would have won fairly easily. But George W. Bush enjoyed a consistent edge on character questions. According to Gallup polls in October 2000, voters found Bush more likeable by 60 to 31 percent and more honest and trustworthy by 47 to 33 percent. In the 2004 election, Bush enjoyed a similar edge over challenger John Kerry. After the October 13 debate, CNN/Gallup found voters preferring Kerry on every measure except one: who was “more likeable.” Bush, not Kerry, went on to win the election.

It’s a good read. Pick it up here.

Despite the conservative argument that President Obama’s stimulus plan was an ineffective waste of money, new opinion data indicates that “the stimulus–whatever its flaws might have been–played an important role in keeping the economy from getting far worse than it did,” says TDS Co-Founder Ruy Teixeira. As Teixeira continues:

…In a new United Technologies/National Journal poll, respondents were given a description of the stimulus program–from the standpoint of both its supporters and its detractors–and asked how much they’d heard or seen about the program. Almost all (85 percent) had heard at least something about the stimulus.
Those who had heard at least something about the stimulus program were then asked whether the stimulus was the right or wrong thing to do for the country. A solid majority (55 percent) thought the stimulus program was the right thing to do.

The Romney and Republican meme that the stimulus failed to improve the economy has been broadly rejected. “In the public’s view, the stimulus may not have been perfect, but it was integral to helping our economy get back on track,” explains Teixeira.

The following, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Al Gore once famously talked a lot about a lockbox for Social Security, and it would have been nice if we had kept one. But though no one has used the phrase in the 12 years since, in this presidential election we have a lockbox as well — or at least a locked box. It is the one Mitt Romney has to try to campaign in, and unless he figures a way out sometime soon, the drama in this election year may become more about whether Democrats can win back the House than whether Obama will be re-elected. Now don’t get me wrong: with the economy not out of the woods and the Super PAC slushfund money still pouring in, with debates coming that could change the dynamics, there is no taking this race for granted, and Democrats should be taking no breathers. But there will come a moment in early October where Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and all those other sleazy big money boys are going to have to decide whether to keep gambling on propping Mitt up or whether he is too trapped in his lockbox to win. If they decide he can’t do it, we will see a sudden shift of Super PAC money into trying to save the Republican House.
The box Romney is locked into has been constructed by his own base. His base so thoroughly controls the party and the money and the echo chamber that Romney can’t move without stirring up a major internal brushfire. When he tries to appeal to Latino swing voters, he can’t talk about immigration, so Latinos are staying overwhelmingly with Obama. When the campaign tried to appeal to women in the Republican convention, they had to mostly focus the appeal on traditional stay at home moms, so now he’s losing unmarried women and working women by bigger and bigger numbers. When he tried to sound like a moderate on health care last Sunday, he was forced to pull back within hours. When he says something stupidly macho on foreign policy, he can’t afford to soften it or back down, so he has to double down and make himself look even more ridiculous.
It is a huge problem for Romney, as polls are showing. The polling is showing that Romney is running into a ceiling beyond which he can’t rise, and he can’t change course because his base would go ballistic and blow the whole campaign up. And now we’re getting close, and the dynamics in this race are hardening.
In the last three days I have seen seven polls showing the Obama lead at 7, 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, and 4. While there is also one outlier that has the margin at only one, I think it is safe to say that the President has opened up a real lead of about five points, which is the Democracy Corps number that just came out and I consider the most reliable. Given that (a) some of these polls were just finished and it is more than a week out from the convention, and (b) the bad publicity Romney has gotten over yet another not-ready-for-primetime foreign policy gaffe, it seems likely that the lead won’t fade much, maybe a point or two, over the next couple of weeks. It also seems likely that, absent some huge new development, at least through the first debate on Oct 3, the basic shape of this race is unlikely to change and Obama will be leading both nationally and in the swing states for a while.
That means certain really critical things. First, what I learned when I was on the targeting committee for the ’92 Clinton campaign is that when a presidential campaign is ahead it can force the other side into hard targeting decisions. Even with all of Romney’s money, their campaign may soon have to decide whether to cut their losses and stop playing in expensive states like PA and MI where they are several points behind. Once they start narrowing the field like that, it allows a focus of money by the Obama team that will make it hard to lose states where they have a narrow edge like Ohio and CO.
Second, it will mean bet-hedging by the big money guys investing heavily in Romney, which will narrow the money gap considerably. Big corporate interests have their favorite in Mitt Romney, but they sure do want to be able to talk to the Obama people, and in politics, even if it buys nothing else, contributions to fundraisers at least buy you a chance at conversation.
Third, with early voting, it is going to mean the Obama team can lock in a whole lot of votes before any dynamics start to shift. Early voting has already started in NC, and will begin before September closes in NH, MI, VA, and IA. It starts in FL and OH the day before that first debate. If we have a five point lead and Democrats feeling good about Obama, those early votes are a lot easier to put in the bank.
Finally, it means that the stakes for Romney in the first debate are enormous. If he goes into the debate 3-5 points behind and fails to score a big victory in the first debate, you know what is going to happen? Rove and all the big money boys are going to have a conversation that goes something like this: “Romney’s probably not going to make it no matter how much we spend, and Obama could have coattails. It’s time to switch our money to House races. Mark my words: if Romney loses that first debate, you swing state residents are going to see a lot fewer anti-Obama ads, and a lot more ads in your local House races.”
This election is far from over. The swing states are going to stay close; the economy will turn some swing voters away; there are hundreds of millions of dollars of ugly negative ads yet to come; gaffes and subpar debate performances and unforeseen world events could change a lot of things. We Democrats need to work our butts off to make sure we win, and this is a critical period — we can’t let up. But I would also urge my friends in the Democratic organizational, donor, blogger and activist community to be just as prepared for success as we are for tough turns in the presidential race: in this nationalized election, we could have a real shot in October of riding a 5-6 point Obama edge to a majority in the House. (I’m not mentioning the Senate because I feel extremely confident that if Obama is winning by five, we won’t have any problem keeping the Senate majority.) If that scenario is within range, we need to be ready to strike while the iron is hot, because Rove and the Koch’s and Adelson’s and all their friends will be moving their money tootsweet into House races.

The following is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
President Obama emerged from his convention with the biggest lead of the year in our polling—and at 50 percent in the race. According to the latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, the President holds a 5-point lead on the ballot, up a net 3 points since just before the Republican convention. With the Romney campaign reeling on issues unrelated to the economy, the President enters the fall campaign in a much stronger position to sustain a lead, bolstered by the dynamics of the race. He has made gains among key groups in the progressive base, including unmarried women and young people and with key swing groups—climbing above 40 percent among white voters and making gains with white non-college-educated voters.
If the two conventions set out to reach women, the President won hands down here, making major gains with both college-educated and non-college-educated women. Obama is ahead with white women, 50 to 46 percent—an 18-point net gain since August.
And if the two conventions battled over Medicare and seniors, the President ended up with a 6-point advantage on who voters trust more on Medicare (with an 11-point advantage on intensity) and significant vote gains among seniors.
Key Findings:
•
Obama leads by 5 points on the ballot, 50 to 45 percent against Mitt Romney. All of the President’s gains came with what we have called the Rising American Electorate—young people, minorities, and unmarried women—the new broad base for progressives. This was a base convention for Democrats whose base forms nearly half of the electorate. Obama is now winning 68 percent of unmarried women – matching his 2008 level with this group.
• Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, is not helping the ticket. His personal rating has not improved in the three weeks since the Republican convention – stuck in slightly negative territory.
•
The engagement gap. Nearly an equal number of Democrats and Republicans now say they are following the election very closely. But minorities, unmarried women, and particularly women, trail the electorate overall on this key measure.
•
Both candidates improved their personal images in the conventions, but Mitt Romney remains in negative territory—and he is running out of opportunities to change voters’ gut feelings about him. In our monthly tracking dating back to January 2011, Mitt Romney has yet to receive a net positive personal rating.
•
Obama makes gains, but the weak economy still helps Romney. Obama has narrowed Romney’s advantage on the economy to a 2-point deficit, but that still creates downward pressure in the race. There is no improvement in the country’s economic mood, even if there is greater confidence in its leadership.
Read the full analysis at Democracy Corps.

As the Romney campaign struggles to get back on message (i.e. liberate the mighty jobs creators with high end tax cuts and oodles of de-reg) following Mitt’s Middle East meltdown, Ed Kilgore’s “Still More Laser-like Focus on Jobs” at The Washington Monthly has some fun with the GOP ticket’s attention deficit disorder, noting:

So yesterday on the presidential campaign trail we saw the econo-manic campaign of the business genius Mitt Romney do two basic things: (1) sourly reject with nineteenth-century cliches a step by the Federal Reserve Board that had markets here and around the world leaping like happy puppies; and (2) reiterate even more loudly than before the contention that only the manly-man-ness of Mitt Romney can keep Americans safe.
…No mention of any details about those “bold, pro-growth policies,” although the upper-end tax cuts that is the lodestar of his and his party’s economic philosophy would “create wealth” all right, for those who are already wealthy. But it’s the ancient gold-bug “printing money” denunciation of monetary stimulus that’s most striking, reflecting a world view in which high interest rates are considered a good thing and all seven deadly sins are inflation. Not exactly the hallmarks of a campaign looking high or low for ways to boost jobs.

Kilgore adds that “the Romney campaign is so locked down on tactical day-to-day maneuvering that it’s lost sight of any coherent strategy or rationale-for-candidacy, as the days quickly pass.” Read the rest of Kilgore’s post right here.

Abby Rapoport’s “Defenders of the Vote” in The American Prospect provides an encouraging look at the popular uprising against Republican voter suppression in Pennsylvania. As Rapoport sets the scene:

…In March, the state became one of 11 whose Republican majorities have passed voter-ID laws so restrictive they’ve raised worries about disenfranchisement. Pennsylvania, which makes the IDs unusually difficult to attain, could end up disqualifying more voters in November than any other.
…In July, the secretary’s office revealed numbers that were dramatically higher: More than 750,000, or 9 percent of registered voters, have no photo IDs from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), the most common and accepted form of necessary identification. While nobody knows the actual number, independent studies have yielded estimates of more than a million voters.
…In Philadelphia alone, 180,000 registered voters lack a PennDOT ID. At least another 150,000 have IDs that will, by November 6, be more than a year past their expiration dates–and therefore unacceptable. It all adds up to more than 30 percent of the city’s voters.
…In case anyone believed that Republicans were moved to pass the law to protect the “sanctity of elections,” as they insist, Pennsylvania’s House majority leader, Mike Turzai, let the truth be known in June. Turzai boasted to a GOP state gathering that voter ID would “allow Governor Romney to win the state.”

But Pennsylvania activists are setting the standard for organized resistance to Republican voter suppression, as Rapoport writes:

Welcome to the world of the Pennsylvania Voter ID Coalition, made up of 140 organizations–churches, labor unions, civic groups–which began training volunteers in July. The group’s job is to let voters know that, thanks to a law passed in March, they will have to carry a government-issued picture ID to the polls to ensure that their vote counts. The coalition will also help voters who lack the proper ID to acquire one–a process that is, in some cases, time-consuming and complicated.
Most of the controversy over the law has focused on its political impact: Will it give Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney an edge in Pennsylvania, since the law overwhelmingly affects African Americans, students, the elderly, and low-income voters who mostly vote Democratic?
But the coalition, which prominently plasters “Non-Partisan” on banners all over the office, is concerned with something larger. “The greatest fear would be that people are disenfranchised, become discouraged, throw their hands up and say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about this, voting doesn’t matter anyways,'” says lead organizer Joe Certaine, a prominent voting-rights activist and the former managing director of Philadelphia, the city’s second-most powerful office.

Rapoport paints a vivid picture of the resistance coalition’s voter i.d. training session, which reveals the obstacles being thrown up to discourage voters and their determination to over come them. Yet, as Rapoport concludes, “No matter how many Pennsylvanians the Voter ID Coalition manages to help, Election Day 2012 could still be a nightmare unless the courts halt the law’s implementation.”
As for the likely ruling on the voter i.d. law by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, David Gambacorta reports at philly.com,

Justices Seamus McCaffery and Debra McCloskey Todd, both Democrats, wondered aloud why the law couldn’t be implemented over several years, instead of just before the election.
Justice Michael Eakin, a Republican, underscored the value of the law, noting that fraud has existed since George Washington.
So . . . now what?
* Voter ID is probably here to stay. The justices, who are split evenly – three Democrats, three Republicans – are expected to issue a ruling soon.
“I’m inclined to think it’s an uphill climb to get an injunction,” said Temple University law professor Mark Rahdert. “Once a lower court rules against the challengers, it sets all the machinery of justice against getting that decision overturned.”
Zack Stalberg, president of the good-government group the Committee of Seventy, said that Simpson’s ruling, coupled with the Supreme Court’s even political split, “adds up to there being a good chance that it will be upheld.”
Unless, of course . . .
* Something unexpected happens. “We have turned back similar laws in multiple states across this country . . . from Wisconsin to Minnesota to North Carolina to Texas,” NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said after Thursday’s hearing. “We’re cautiously optimistic.”
Drexel University political science professor Bill Rosenberg said it’s possible that the case could “get taken into the federal court system, away from the politics of Pennsylvania.”

With that uncertain prospect looming over the election, the outcome of the presidential election in PA — and possibly the nation — may depend on the sustained commitment of the Pennsylvania Voter I.D. Coalition.

Fox Nation Headline and Editors Picks, September 13, 2012
Obama Calls Libyan President to Thank Him After US Ambassador Murdered
Editor’s Picks
You might like:
• Rasmussen: Romney 47%, Obama 44% (Fox Nation – Politics)
• Anti-Obama Movie #1 at Box Office (Fox Nation – Politics)
• Obama’s Horrible, Gaffe-Laden Week Goes Unreported
• Ohio Miners Turn on Obama (Fox Nation – Politics)
• Clint Eastwood Hammers Obama Again (Fox Nation – Culture)

TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore posts at The Washington Monthly on “The Endless Whine,” referring to the latest Republican orgy of self-pity “about the vicious treatment of poor Mitt Romney by the vicious, hateful, Obama-loving media.” Kilgore provides a couple of examples, then adds,

I’ve never completely understood the persecution complex of American conservative gabbers. They are, after all, aligned with the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. They have their own large and very well-funded “shadow media” and public relations complex, even as the hated MSM constantly seeks to buy off criticism by conspicuously hiring conservative “voices.” They totally dominate one entire medium, radio, and dominate all media in many parts of the country. I get the distinct impression that conservative media types have a lot easier time supporting themselves than folks on the left…But to hear them, they are perpetually shunned and persecuted for their brave and selfless advocacy of the status quo and the status quo ante.

The GOP whinefest will undoubtedly continue ad nauseum. Meanwhile you can read the rest of Kilgore’s post right here.