The following article by Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
After he lost the 1992 presidential election to Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush reportedly confided that one of his major political problems was “the vision thing.”
The first President Bush did not appear to voters to have a sense of where he wanted to take the country. At every level of government, and especially President, voters want leaders with vision. And vision is just one more leadership quality that is noticeably absent in Mitt Romney — unless, of course, what you want is “rear view vision.”
In the four and a half decades I have consulted or managed election campaigns, one thing has become indisputably clear. Elections are not fundamentally decided by debates about issues, or economic policies, or ideologies. Voters choose between candidates — between living, breathing human beings. And they make those judgments in the same way we make judgments about whom we want as a boss, or a friend or a spouse. Voters evaluate a series of character qualities and decide who they want to be their leaders.
Don’t get me wrong. The economic situation, positions on issues and policies and ideologies definitely affect voter evaluation of these candidate leadership qualities. These questions help us decide who we believe is on our side, who is an effective leader, who is committed to principle rather than simply his or her own success. These are critical questions for voters. But in making their decisions, voters — and especially low-information swing voters — don’t generally make detailed analyses of policy positions — or parse candidate statements. They make their decisions based on judgments as to which candidate possesses these leadership qualities, and others that are often even more intuitive. Into the decision mix go qualities like who respects us, who has integrity, who is self-confident, who is likeable and makes an emotional connection, who inspires us — and who has a sense of vision.
In this fall’s election these more intuitive factors will play an especially important role in the voting decisions of the historically low number of remaining swing voters. Last week, New York Times reporter Rebecca Berg profiled these swing voters — noting that many are low-information voters who rarely follow politics. The Times story describes Curtis Napier, a 52-year-old, swing voter from Ohio who says he does not yet have enough information to decide what to do in November.
“Between working full time for a fabrication company and attending school part time for a degree in manufacturing engineering, he said consideration of the presidential election was an afterthought,” wrote Berg.
In 2008, Mr. Napier drew much of his information from the presidential debates, in which he says, ‘McCain seemed to be distracted most of the time when he talked, and Obama seemed to be an educated man who has focus.’
In the end, swing voters will make an intuitive judgment about which of the two presidential candidates they want to trust as their leader.
Why do voters care about vision? The great baseball player Yogi Berra used to say: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Voters want leaders who know where they are taking us in the same way that you want a pilot who knows how to get to the correct airport.
And especially when it comes to presidents, voters want leaders who give them a sense that they understand the forces of history and change that will shape the future they are leading us into — the same way they want pilots who know what kind of weather lies ahead.
John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign centered around his vision for the future. Kennedy’s campaign themes: “A Time for Greatness” and “Leadership for the 60’s,” and “Getting America Moving Again” gave voters a sense that he had a clear vision for America’s future.
In 1996, Clinton’s attacks on Bob Dole for his lack of vision were devastating. In one commercial the Clinton campaign ran clips of Dole recounting how he had opposed Medicare, how he opposed the Department of Education and uttering his famous quote:
I’m not sure what everyone is looking for in a candidate for President. Maybe we shouldn’t have one at all, leave it vacant. But there’s going to be one, every country ought to have one, so we’re out here campaigning.
The spot concluded: “No Vision: Wrong in the Past, Wrong in the Future.”
Whether it involves the future of the middle class, or the earth’s environment, or national security, Mitt Romney is visionless.
Then again, what would you expect from a guy who spent his career focused only on the next quarter’s bottom line?
Romney seems clueless when it comes to the major forces that have affected the economic prospects of everyday Americans. He apparently never noticed that while per capita economic output (GDP) — and per capita productivity — have both steadily risen for the last twenty years, the incomes of everyday Americans have remained stagnant.
There is only one way to account for this phenomena: a tiny sliver of the population has siphoned off the fruits of that increased productivity for themselves. This is exactly what the economic data tells us is true. And that is what has left the middle class, and those who aspire to it, without the money in their pockets to buy the increasing volume of goods and services that have been generated by that increased productivity. The resulting stagnation, coupled with an orgy of reckless speculation on Wall Street, sent us tumbling off the worst economic cliff in 60 years.
But Romney’s prescription to improve the economy is to go back to exactly the same failed Bush era policies that lead to this disaster. Romney’s prescription: shower the top 2% with more tax breaks and they will allow some of that shower to trickle down to everyday people. And, of course, Romney wants to allow Wall Street to run wild. We tried that, just four short years ago. It didn’t work then, it won’t work now.

Read more…

From TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, “Who’s Really Threatening to Gut Welfare Reform?“
So the lies go on: yesterday the Romney/Ryan campaign put out a set of talking points commemorating the sixteenth anniversary of Bill Clinton’s signing of the 1996 welfare reform legislation by continuing to ignore Clinton’s own rebuke of their race-baiting, mendacious ads on the subject and repeating the lies all over again.
But Team Mitt stepped in at least one cow pie in the latest broadside: linking to a 2006 Clinton op-ed ruminating on the lessons of the original debate over welfare reform….
Read the whole post here.

The following comes from an e-blast by Chris Bowers, campaign director of Daily Kos:
Our fight against Pennsylvania’s voter ID law just got a huge boost. In less than 24 hours the Daily Kos community has raised $45,000 to run online ads to sign up thousands of volunteers who will make sure that everyone in this must-win swing state can still vote.
Our volunteers will be partnering with experienced organizers who know how to register voters, get them in compliance with voter ID laws, and then get them to the polls on Election Day. This is the roll-up-your-sleeves groundwork of phone calls, door knocking, data entry, and trips to the DMV that absolutely must be done in order to prevent the nation’s harshest voter ID law from having its intended effect.
We need your help to win this crucial fight against voter suppression. The more ads we can run, the more local volunteers we can sign up.
Please click here to contribute $3 to Daily Kos so we can run online ads to sign up thousands of volunteers who will make sure everyone in Pennsylvania can still vote.
Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos

The following is cross-posted from an e-Blast by Chris Bowers, campaign director of Daily Kos:
Last week a judge upheld the new voter ID law in Pennsylvania. This is the law that the Pennsylvania House Republican leader said “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania” because it potentially disenfranchises 750,000 voters.
Well, that’s what he thinks. A huge coalition of 100+ labor and civil rights groups has come together to do the door knocking, phone banking and voter education necessary to make sure everyone in this must-win swing state can still cast a ballot.
At Daily Kos, we’re helping out by running online ads in Pennsylvania to sign up more than 1,000 volunteers so that this coalition has the people power it needs. Please, click here to contribute $3 to Daily Kos so that we can sign up the thousands of volunteers needed to overcome Pennsylvania’s voter ID law.
To get a sense of how blatant an attempt at voter suppression this voter ID law is, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation will not extend business hours or hire new staff to assist the nearly one million people who now need IDs in order to vote. Further, the contract to educate Pennsylvania voters about the law went to a public relations firm with deep ties to the Republican Party.
To stop this, we need to get thousands of volunteers on the ground working with an experienced coalition that knows how to get voters to the polls and in compliance with the new law. We can do it, but we need your help.
Please click here to contribute $3 to Daily Kos so we can run online ads to sign up thousands of volunteers in order to make sure everyone in Pennsylvania can still vote.
Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos

One of the memes Republicans hype up and down-ballot races is that the GOP is the party of ‘fiscal responsibility,’ balanced budgets and such, contrary to their track record. It’s an image of considerable importance to the Republicans, especially with conservatives who put a premium on prudent tax and spend ratios. As Matt Miller notes at The Washington Post,

“it’s impossible to overstate how central the unjustified label of “fiscal conservative” is to the Ryan brand and the GOP’s strategy. As Clinton understood in the 1990s, “fiscal responsibility” is a values issue important to the voters who decide modern presidential elections…The point: Democrats can’t afford to let Ryan/Romney’s phony image as superior fiscal stewards survive.”

Miller discusses a recent interview Britt Hume did with Paul Ryan, who squirmed uncomfortably when Hume tried to pin him down about the time-table for the first balanced budget under the Romney-Ryan ‘plan.’

…For context, recall that in the last era of epic budget smackdowns, 1995 and 1996, Newt Gingrich would have had an equally simple answer: in seven years. President Bill Clinton’s failure to embrace the goal of a balanced budget at all was a major political liability that Clinton finally (and shrewdly) erased when he came out with his own 10-year plan in mid-1995. (It’s worth underscoring that a 10-year path to balance was viewed then as the outer limit of credibility — pledging to end the red ink any further than a decade out didn’t pass the laugh test.)

Ryan equivocates in an effort to dodge Hume’s question. He “stumbles momentarily before trying to move the conversation to his comfortable talking points about Romney’s goal of reducing spending to historic norms as a share of gross domestic product.” But Hume won’t let go, and,

…Ryan then adds that “the plan that we’ve offered in the House balances the budget.” But he immediately stops short of saying when — you see his eyes dart to the right at that moment, his next tell — because that would mean admitting it reaches balance in the 2030s. And Ryan wants to get through this interview without saying that, because he knows it doesn’t sound good. After all, what kind of “fiscal conservative” has a 25-year plan to balance the budget?

Bearing in mind that presidents alone don’t balance budgets, President Eisenhower was the last Republican to preside over a balanced budget, in both 1956 and 1957. Two recent Democratic Presidents presided over balanced budgets, LBJ in 1969 and Clinton in 1998 through 2001. During the last 4 decades there have been five budget surpluses under Democratic Presidents: 1969, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, compared to zilch for Republicans.
Miller goes on the cite “the big Republican lie — the idea that you can balance the budget as the baby boomers age without taxes rising” and he warns, “if Democrats spend all their energy on Medicare — and don’t knock out the GOP ticket’s undeserved reputation for fiscal responsibility — they’ll find themselves in unexpected peril as the race heads to the fall. ”

From TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, “Todd Akin, Superstar‘ at the Washington Monthly:

So the big question in Politicsland this afternoon is how and why Todd Akin was able to convince himself to defy the entire GOP establishment of his state, the GOP presidential nominee, the major national campaign funders, and nearly the entire Right-Wing commentariat, and stay on the ballot in Missouri. Is he crazy? Is he bluffing?

Read the whole post here.

At AFL-CIO Now, editor Tula Connell addresses a central question of the 2012 campaign, “Republican or Democratic President? Which Is Better for Your Pocketbook?” with some facts Dems would be smart to master in the weeks ahead. In her review of a new book, “Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box: How the Performance of Our Presidents Has Impacted Your Wallet” by Bob Deitrick and Lew Goldfarb, Connell explains:

Let’s say you had $100,000 in a 401(k) account in 1993, at the beginning of President Clinton’s eight years in office, and had withdrawn it in 2001 when he left. You would have amassed $341,894. If you invested the same amount in 2001, when President George W. Bush took office, and withdrawn it eight years later, you actually would have lost money, holding only $64,990…a difference of $277,000 between the two presidential terms.

The book was obviously published before President Obama finished his first term. But it does include evaluations for the last 13 presidents, with their criteria explained. You can see evaluations for each one by clicking on the widget at the top of this webpage. Further, adds Connell:

Topping the list for boosting the nation’s finances under this ranking are John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson–combined because Kennedy did not finish his term. Second place is a tie between Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. The highest-ranking Republican is Dwight Eisenhower, who created the national (read: federal government-funded) interstate system, Goldfarb said. The lowest of all: Hoover.

Although unemployment statistics, especially the monthly rate, get ample media coverage and attention from voters, the authors believe smart voters should pay attention to other indicators. As Connell quotes Deitrick and Goldfarb,

We believe that readers need to understand that whom they decide to vote for is very important to their personal bottom line, to their net worth and to their retirement and children’s education. We believe that Americans should consider voting for the economic wallet, for their IRA, their 401(k), their 403(b) plan and their kids’ 529 plan as well.

In addition to voters, presidential candidates and their advisers may benefit from the book’s “Presidential Rules for Economic Success (PRES Rules),” which the authors developed from the policies of the more successful of the 13 presidents.

Laura Clawson has a barbed riff on Paul Ryan’s ‘voice of the common man’ pretensions up at Alternet. Here’s a taste:

Only with Mitt Romney as the presidential nominee could you have a ticket in which a guy who was elected to Congress at 28 after working on the Hill for several years was tapped to play the role of the Everyman Who Understands You Commoners.

Clawson then quotes from a recent Ryan speech in which he gibbers on about his “flippin’ burgers at McDonald’s” and “…standing in front of that big Hobart machine washing dishes or waiting tables,” and then waxes all Ayn Randy about “I’m the American dream on a path and journey so that I can find happiness however I can find it myself,” whatever that means.
To which Clawson adds,

That is some optimistic, forward-looking, Grade-A American Dream bullshit right there. Because again, Paul Ryan’s stints at service work came between high school and the year or two immediately out of college, and in that year or two immediately out of college, he was already working on the Hill…But one thing he definitely didn’t learn from low-wage work was what it’s like to face a lifetime of low-wage work, what it’s like to try to build a life and support a family while working at McDonald’s. Ryan was already trying his damnedest to injure the people living those lives by raising their taxes and shredding the safety net. Now he’s adding insult to that injury, insulting his audiences and the people struggling to get by–to pay all their bills and raise their kids, with no marketing job or House seat on the horizon–by pretending he knows any of that.

Ryan is apparently clueless that his ‘regular guy’ proclamations invite ridicule, though soon to be overshadowed by Romney’s reported image makeover for the Tampa convention.

The following is cross-posted from an e-blast from workingamerica.org:
It Just Makes Sense: Bring Jobs Home
We can connect jobs and tax fairness thanks to introduction of the Bring Jobs Home Act–and the Republican filibuster that blocked it.
Our members understand the basic unfairness of tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. For them, outsourcing is a critical and emotional issue.

· People appreciate a realistic, nuanced conversation. In Pennsylvania, we’re finding that 4 to 5 people each night ask if we think outsourcing can really be addressed. For people who are skeptical, it’s really helpful to describe the Bring Jobs Home Act as “a step in the right direction” rather than a simple, perfect solution.
· Many people are surprised and angry that their Senators wouldn’t vote for the Bring Jobs Home Act. One Wisconsin member described it as “a no-brainer.”
· When we note that there are tax incentives to ship jobs overseas today, and that the bill would use our tax dollars to keep jobs here instead, that gets a positive response, and the personal connection of the issue to their lives help distinguish our conversation from the usual platitudes of a political campaign.
· Retirees are identifying good jobs as a top issue because they’re worried about their children and grandchildren, because the kind of stable, secure jobs that supported them are harder than ever to find. They respond strongly to the issue of outsourcing–often with stories of people in their family having trouble finding work.

People connect to this issue on a gut level

· Stephanie, a member in High Point, N.C., explained that she worked for a credit card company call center, where employees started getting sent to other locations–even as far away as New Delhi–to run trainings. “The company executives marketed this training opportunity as a vacation,” Stephanie told us. “But they were really training their replacements. Soon after, the Greensboro call center was closed down…companies outsource jobs for cheaper labor.” Stephanie felt betrayed–angry, frustrated and demoralized over the loss of her job and the disrespect from her employer.
· Another new member in Sheboygan, Wisconsin said that, while he has worked at the same factory for 15 years, he’s seen three co-workers’ jobs get outsourced in the last year. “He worries every day that he’ll be next,” our organizer Michelle said.
· Two separate members in Beaver County, Pennsylvania brought up the example of a local steel mill bought and dismantled by an out-of-state company. Interestingly, both independently compared that mill closure to Bain Capital.

Ending the Bush Tax Cuts for the Richest

The idea that the richest 2 percent should pay their fair share is resonating, as well. We find very wide agreement with ending the Bush tax cuts for the richest.
· We’ve had success pulling together the Bush tax cuts and the Bring Jobs Home Act as part of a single message about tax fairness. People agree that corporations and the richest 2 percent aren’t paying their fair share, and working people are suffering the consequences.
· A small handful of people–a few people each night–disagree with the idea of ending the Bush tax cuts on the richest 2 percent, usually using some variation of the “job creator” \talking point.
· The most effective response to this is to point out the CEOs of big corporations like Verizon and GE aren’t paying their fair share in taxes and aren’t creating jobs.

“If it wasn’t for the middle class, the economy wouldn’t work,” is very effective language when making the case for ending the top-level Bush tax cuts.
Karen Nussbaum, Executive Director
Working America

Ed Kilgore’s “Mitt Digs in Deeper” at the Washington Monthly asks a good question about Romney’s declaration that he hasn’t paid less than 13 percent of his income in taxes:

I mean, 13% is not a high rate for a guy with Mitt’s wealth; certainly nothing approaching the allegedly confiscatory rates the poor job-creators of America are toiling under, making them wonder each and every day if it’s time to Go Gault. And the number raises the rather obvious question: 13% of what? Total income? Adjusted Gross Income? Taxable income? Ezra Klein suggests it may be that last measurement, which may be the only one under which he can claim a double-digit tax burden.

It’s a curiously inept media strategy. As Kilgore adds, Romney would probably be better off with a “none of your damn business” approach. Instead, “his drip-drip-drip of undocumented assertions raises a lot more questions than it answers.”
President Obama and Vice President Biden have released 12 and 14 years, respectively, of their tax forms. Romney can evade and jabber all he wants. But smart voters won’t be satisfied until he shows an equal commitment to openness and transparency.