Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times, gives Governor Romney a richly-deserved skewering over his “spineless” refusal to challenge a woman who said President Obama should be “tried for treason” at a Romney town hall gathering in Ohio. Rosenthal notes that former Sen. Santorum also wimped out when he had the chance to correct another woman in a Florida coffee shop who had called President Obama an “avowed Muslim.”
Rosenthal points out that Romney later said he did not agree with the woman, when he was called to account for his lack of response at the time.
Both of these incidents stand in stark contrast to Sen. McCain’s stepping up to correct a supporter who said that the President was a Muslim back in 2008. Whatever else can be said of McCain during his campaign, on that day he showed a streak of decency and a commendable commitment to honesty. Today, such a gesture on the part of any Republican would be cause for considerable surprise.
It’s a disturbing incident because it reveals a shameless willingness on the part of the GOP nominee-in-waiting to exploit a vicious distortion. Worse, since no other Republican leaders spoke out about the incident, it suggests a party-wide decency deficit.

Brian Beutler has an excellent post up at Talking Points Memo, debunking an alarming Washington Post report that “The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to the Obama campaign…” Here’s the crux of Beutler’s take-down:

In recent years, according to Michael McDonald, a government and politics professor at George Mason University, the Census’ Current Population Survey statistic the Post relied on has varied in a troubling way with the ultimate turnout figures. Whether you compare presidential years (2004 and 2008) or midterm-years (2006 and 2010) the CPS measure has found turnout decreasing. The opposite has been the case.
That, McDonald argues, is because of a peculiarity in the way Census compiles its registration and turnout figures. It asks one adult to answer for all members of a household, and counts those who fail to respond “yes” or “no” to the voting survey question as having not voted.
When you revisit the numbers after throwing out all the non-respondents, the results track the official figures much more closely.
What does all this have to do with registration (as opposed to turnout)? When you perform the same correction to the registration results — the ones the Post used — the problem goes away.

You can almost hear a collective ‘ouch’ coming from WaPo’s HQ. Beutler quotes McDonald’s conclusion:

“The Obama campaign appears better situated in terms of registering of Blacks and Hispanics in the wake of the 2010 election than in the wake of the 2006 election. That these minority populations are also growing in size relative to the non-Hispanic White population should give more worry to the Romney campaign than to the Obama campaign.”

Apparently the sky isn’t falling on the Obama campaign after all. Nice catch for Beutler and TPM.

This article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
It’s great news for us Democrats that former Romney partner in Bain Capital — Edward Conard — is out with a new book on economics, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy is Wrong. My first guess when hearing about the book was that some devious liberal in the publishing industry talked Conard into this timing, telling him that his arguments were so compelling that the book would no doubt help Romney win the election if it came out in the spring of 2012. However, having read more about Conard, I am now convinced that he really is arrogant enough to believe that making his case would help Mitt’s cause. God bless him for it. The more attention we can give to the starkness of his celebration of Romneynomics, the better.
Conard’s book is essentially Ayn Rand with more math. (He might say with more economics, but as the title of his book suggests, the theories he describes are far more theological in nature than economic, as he essentially ignores most of the well-grounded economic research of the last 70 years.) Conard believes that growing concentration of wealth is not just a good thing, but a fantastically great thing. The only problem our economy has, he suggests, is that we need a lot more of it. The mind-blowing gains in wealth over the last 30 years by the top 1 percent, the dazzling fortunes of a very few while most people’s incomes and salaries have flat-lined, the fact that 95 percent of the gains in wealth the last four years have gone to those top 1 percent or that they now own over 40 percent of the wealth in this country: the only downside according to Conard is that it is not enough. Because, as he says, “It’s not like the current payoff is motivating everybody to take risks.” He suggests that if the wealth concentrated at the top were twice as large, more unproductive people (“art history majors,” as he derisively refers to non-rich people) would be motivated to become risk-takers.
It’s big of Conard to admit that this is counterintuitive (one of the few things I do agree with him on). But, he insists, only by the super-wealthy people getting rewarded (deeply, richly, extravagantly, overwhelmingly rewarded apparently) does society advance. Their investments are, he says, what makes our economy more efficient and more productive, saving money for everyone. In true Ayn Rand form, he even criticizes Warren Buffet for giving money to charities rather than investing it in new products and companies, arguing that the latter is far better for society than curing disease or feeding children or educating people. And here’s a shocker: he doesn’t blame Wall Street bankers at all for the financial crisis in 2008. Just bad luck, he says, one of those “run on the bank” things that happen from time to time in a capitalist economy.
The economic history you have to ignore to believe all this is pretty extraordinary. You have to ignore that of the three most prosperous decades of the last century, two (the 1950s and ’60s) were in an era with tax rates on the wealthy between 70 and 90 percent, and that the third (the 1990s) started with two rounds of tax increases on the rich. You have to ignore that the massive concentrations of wealth and tax cutting for the rich of the last three decades seem to have produced very little of the job creation or income enhancement for the middle class Conard says would come, as well as the fact that the last two periods of great wealth concentration in this country produced the worst economic depressions in our history (in 1929 and 1894). You would have to ignore the fact that there were no major financial collapses in the years between the passage of Glass-Steagall in 1933 and its repeal in 1999, and only nine years later we get one almost as big as those previous two. You would have to ignore the massive amounts of research that have shown the huge economic gains that resulted from investments in people’s education like the GI Bill, Head Start, school lunches and Pell Grants — as well as the huge impact that private charitable programs have had in turning people’s lives around and making them productive citizens.
In addition to ignoring history and research, Conard ignores common sense and simple facts. In the Adam Davidson article, he goes on and on extolling the investment he made that saves a fraction of a penny on every can of soda. He brags, “It makes every American who buys a soda can a little bit richer because their paycheck buys more.” Really? I’m sure the companies make a little more money because of that, but I haven’t noticed the price of soda dropping. And if paychecks keep losing ground, grocery bills keep going up, people keep getting laid off or having their hours cut, the company makes a little more on every can but the rest of us aren’t helped at all. But none of that bothers Conard at all, because to him if the rich are getting richer, all is well. As Davidson puts it, “Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society.”
What does all this have to do with Romney, besides their close personal ties and the fact that Conard is one of Romney’s biggest supporters (he was the one that set up the phony corporation to funnel money into a pro-Romney Citizens United slush fund)? These views are at the core of Romney’s — and Paul Ryan’s, and the entire Republican Party’s — economic philosophy. One of Romney’s chief economic advisers, Glenn Hubbard, admitted that Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.” The entire Romney-Ryan budget is a document built on these kinds of ideas: structure society so that the rich make more and more money, and everyone will benefit forever after.
This is bad economics, as history — including the recent history of the Bush years — has clearly demonstrated to us. But the values of this thinking are even worse. Here’s Conard’s summary of his philosophy: “God didn’t create the universe so that talented people would be happy. It’s not beautiful. It’s hard work. It’s responsibility and deadlines, working until 11:00 at night when you want to watch your baby and be with your wife. It’s not serenity and beauty.” No, it certainly isn’t. I prefer the thinking of another wealthy man whose family made lots of productive investments in the private sector, and who was part of an administration that presided over the most prosperous decade in American history, but who also knew there were other things that mattered in life:

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

That was Bobby Kennedy, and I will take his view of life over the ugliness of Romneynomics every day of the week.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Believe that, as President, Mitt Romney would revert to his days as a “Massachusetts Moderate?” Think again.
Every bit of evidence indicates that if he were President, the Far Right would lead Romney around by a ring in his nose.
Just last week, we saw it clearly on display. It didn’t take but two weeks for the Far Right to force the Romney campaign to sever its ties with openly gay Richard Grinnell, who it had hired as its foreign policy spokesman. The campaign itself argued that it had begged Grinnell to stay. But right wing talk show host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association, who had led the drive to force Grinnell’s resignation, declared it a major victory.
On his radio show, Fischer bragged that Romney had learned his lesson and would never again hire a gay or lesbian in a major campaign role. And you certainly didn’t see Romney contesting that assessment.
Instead we’ve seen Romney lined up shoulder to shoulder on TV with Tea Party icon Michele Bachmann, and Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell — a potential Romney VP pick and a champion of “trans-vaginal ultrasounds.”
The reason why there is not a chance that Romney will ever reinvent himself once again as a “moderate” is that he wasn’t really a “moderate” in the first place. He’s always practiced one version or the other of ultra right wing, “let Wall Street run wild” Romney economics. And he’s never given one thought to firing workers, cutting pensions, loading companies with debt and bleeding them dry of millions of dollars.
But you can’t really say that he is a committed believer in any economic principle or political value. Mitt Romney is committed to one thing and one thing alone — his own success. He has shown he has no core values whatsoever.
That’s why it wasn’t hard at all for Romney to shed his “moderate” past positions on issues like abortion rights, contraception, gay rights and immigration and to become what he himself calls a “severe conservative.”
Why will he remain a “severe conservative” if he is elected President? Because people who have no core values have no backbone. You won’t find Mitt Romney taking a stand against the dyed-in-the-wool ideologues that dominate the Republican caucus in Congress.
Those Republican ideologues may be way out of the mainstream, but they definitely have core values. Some of them were so committed to those values that they were willing to take our country to the brink of bankruptcy last year due to their unwillingness to give an inch of compromise.

Read more…

While many progressives think of evangelical voters as predictably Republican, Stanford professor of anthropology T. M. Luhrmann has an article at The New York Times offering some interesting advice to progressives who want to get a bite of the evangelical vote:

If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on. They should talk about how we can grow in compassion and care. They could talk about the way their policy interventions will allow those who receive them to become better people and how those of us who support them will better ourselves as we reach out in love. They could describe health care reform as a response to suffering, not as a solution to an economic problem.
To be sure, they won’t connect to every evangelical. But the good news for secular liberals is that evangelicals are smarter and more varied than many liberals realize. I met doctors, scientists and professors at the churches where I studied. They cared about social justice. They cared about the poor. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many of them got into their cars and drove to New Orleans. This is a reachable population, and back in 2008, a quarter of white evangelicals voted for Mr. Obama. Democrats could speak to evangelicals more effectively if they talked about how we could develop our moral character together as we work to rebuild our country.

Dems should remember that not all self-described evangelicals are conservative on social issues. Indeed, a significant portion embrace something akin to ‘social gospel’ Christianity, in which compassion for the poor and suffering is an important value. These voters are approachable by progressives who can speak their language.

Michael Tomasky has an appealingly titled post, “The GOP’s Impending Electoral College Meltdown” up at The Daily Beast, and his analysis of the latest snapshot polls should gladden the hearts of Dems:

…When you look at the likely swing states, it is not right now a close race at all. RCP’s Electoral College map gives Obama 227 electoral votes from states that are solidly or pretty clearly leaning in his direction. It gives Romney just 170. It lists 11 toss-up states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia…
…Obama leads in nine of the 11 states. Romney leads only in two, and he leads in the two whose mere presence on a list of swing states suggests trouble for him–Arizona and Missouri. Romney’s lead in those states is small (3.2 percent in the former, 3.0 in the latter). Of the nine states in which Obama leads, he is ahead by outside your typical three- or four-point margin of error in four: Colorado (9.5 percent), Nevada (6.7 percent), Pennsylvania (6 percent), and Ohio (5.3 percent)…There appear to be lots of ways for Obama to get to 270 losing either Ohio or Florida. But there appear to be almost no plausible ways for Romney to get to 270 without winning both of them, and one or two major swing states besides, states where he is behind right now.

Even better, adds Tomasky, the GOP’s anti-Latino policies seem almost custom designed to benefit Obama and the Democrats:

…We know all about the demographic changes of recent years, identified most comprehensively by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis. But there’s more to the story than that. Demography didn’t have to be destiny. If the Republican Party of the last few years hadn’t done everything it could possibly imagine do to alienate Latinos, “new-economy” professionals, and young people, the party would have remained competitive in Colorado (which, by the way, doesn’t really seem like much of a swing state to me) and some Great Lakes-Rust Belt states. That party would have easily maintained its historic advantage in Virginia and North Carolina. But the Republicans chose not to be that party. They decided to be the hate-and-anger party, and they veritably shoved states like those I just mentioned into the Democratic column….

All well and good. But Krissah Thompson notes in the Washington Post that there is a serious problem looming for Dems even in Tomasky’s encouraging scenario:

The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to President Barack Obama’s campaign in an election that could hinge on the participation of minority voters…This is the first time in nearly four decades that the number of registered Hispanics has dropped significantly.
That figure fell 5 percent nationwide to about 11 million, according to the Census Bureau. But in some politically important swing states, the decline among Hispanics, who are considered critical in the 2012 presidential contest, is much higher: just over 28 percent in New Mexico, for example, and about 10 percent in Florida.
For both Hispanics and blacks, the large decrease is attributed to the ailing economy, which forced many Americans to move in search of work or because of other financial upheaval…”There is the massive job loss and home mortgage foreclosures which disproportionately affected minorities,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a nonpartisan policy group that focuses on Latinos…”When you move, you lose your registration.”

But Romney has another strategy problem that may override all of the obstacles facing the Obama campaign, as Tomasky explains:

…Barring some huge catastrophe, the only way a not-well-liked candidate like Romney can make up five to seven points in expensive-market states is through massive doses of attack ads, both from his campaign and from the various Super PACs, which may spend a combined $600 million or more–solely on negative ads and chiefly in six or eight states. Hate and anger aren’t going anywhere.

If both Tomasky and Thompson are right, it may come down to big money vs. the ground game. In November, the number that may matter more than all of the polling data put together is the number of well-trained GOTV workers Dems are able to mobilize in the big cities of the swing states.

The Washington Post op-ed “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem” by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein is still generating buzz across the political spectrum, leaving the ‘false equivalency’ apologists groping for a credible response. Ornstein and Mann made a very tight case, but it’s worth revisiting a TDS strategy memo by Ed Kilgore, James Vega and J.P. Green for an important related observation.
As the authors note in “Wake up, commentators. The most dangerous group of “right-wing extremists” today is not the grass-roots tea party. It is the financial and ideological leaders in the Republican coalition who have embraced the extremist philosophy of “politics as warfare“:

….it is necessary to very clearly distinguish between two entirely distinct meanings of the term “extremism.” On the one hand, it is possible for a person or political party to hold a wide variety of very “extreme” opinions on issues. These views may be crackpot (e.g. “abolish paper money) or repugnant (“deny non-insured children medical care”). But as long as the individual or political party that holds these views conducts itself within the norms and rules of a democratic society, this, in itself, does not lead such groups or individuals to be described as “political extremists” by the media or society in general.
Libertarians and the Libertarian Party offer the best illustration. Vast numbers of Americans consider many libertarian views “extreme.” But, because the libertarians conduct themselves within the norms and rules of a democratic society, they are virtually never described by the media as “political extremists.”
The alternative definition of the term “political extremists” refers to political parties or individuals who do not accept the norms, rules and constraints of democratic society. They embrace a view of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as literal “enemies” who must be crushed. Extremist political parties based on the politics as warfare philosophy emerged on both the political left and right at various times in the 20th century in many different countries and circumstances.

When the extremism of the Republican Party is now discussed, this distinction is often lost, but it is crucial to understanding what is genuinely “extreme” and different about them.

Despite their ideological diversity, extremist political parties share a large number of common characteristics, one critical trait being a radically different conception of the role and purpose of the political party itself in a democratic society.
In the politics as warfare perspective a political party’s objective is defined as the conquest and seizure of power and not sincere collaboration in democratic governance. The party is viewed as a combat organization whose goal is to defeat an enemy, not a governing organization whose job is to faithfully represent the people who voted for it. Political debate and legislative maneuvering are seen not as the means to achieve ultimate compromise, but as forms of combat whose objective is total victory.

It’s a critical distinction. A great democracy is supposed to synthesize diverse points of view through reasoned negotiation and compromise. But ‘Politics as Warfare’ seeks to annihilate political adversaries and allow no flexibility to address their concerns. And there can’t be much doubt that it makes bipartisan compromise for the greater good of our country all but impossible.

The following article by political consultant Peter D. Rosenstein, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
It’s always interesting when people find it hard to say “thank you” and then ask for more at the same time. Politicians don’t have that problem. How many times do you get a request for more money either with the thank-you for your last donation or even before you got thanked? It may be a little annoying, but that is the way the game is played.
Advocates need to remember that we have to play the game the same way. We can thank someone for all they have done for us, make a contribution, and give support, while at the same time demanding that they do the things they promised but haven’t yet done. It is kind of like walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Read more…

Greg Sargent has a post, “Millions in TV ads, but no poll movement for Scott Walker” up at WaPo’s ‘The Plumline’ noting an interesting phenomenon.
Citing a new Marquette Law School poll indicating that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is locked in a dead heat with Democratic challenger Tom Barrett among WI RV’s, Sargent explains:

…Walker’s approval rating, and his head to head numbers with Barrett, have not changed in months — if anything, they’re going down. And this is in spite of the fact that Walker and his allies have vastly outspent rivals in TV ads.
Charles Franklin, a political scientist and expert in Wisconsin politics who directs the Marquette poll, sends over some numbers…In January, Walker’s job approval was 51 percent; in March, it was 50 percent; and this month, it’s 47 percent…In January, Walker was leading Barrett 50-44; in March, 47-45; and this month, he trails 46-47. (Among likely voters, Walker leads by a point; all of these findings suggest a mostly unchanging dead heat.)
“There’s been a great deal of advertising in the state, especially from the Walker campaign and Republican supporters, and we’ve seen virtually no movement in the Walker numbers,” Franklin tells me.

Sargent adds that Walker has just announced that “he’d raised a staggering $13 million in three months for the recall fight,” but still no improvement in the polls for Walker. Sargent quotes Franklin again: “This means the race is all going to come down to turnout — the one area where Dems and unions can match Walker in resources and organization, perhaps neutralizing Walker’s ad spending advantage…The advantages that Democrats and unions have traditionally had in the ground game is certainly an area where they can match Walker’s organization at the very least.”
It may be that the same dynamic is at work in the presidential campaign — that there comes a point at which each additional dollar spent on campaign ads brings diminishing returns. In the home stretch, however, it’s all about the turnout ground game — and that bodes well for Democrats.

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:
The banking wars are getting more and more interesting. The legal and political implications are bigger than most people understand, and the players involved need to be very careful with the loaded guns they are gesturing with or they might shoot themselves in the foot (or perhaps an even more vulnerable body part.)
Underlying the entire drama is this fundamental subtext: the American people are fundamentally (and correctly) cynical about how the big bankers always seem to get away with whatever they want to get away with. Bailing out the bankers with no strings attached in order to save an economy that didn’t seem to most people to be very well saved, then watching the banks get record profits and bonuses the very next year while the rest of the economy was in the toilet didn’t engender much good cheer about whether justice had been done. Neither have the tons of books, news articles, and blog posts about the things these bankers were able to get away with in the course of the buildup to the crisis and the things that have happened since.
The new financial fraud task force the president announced in his State of the Union address, co-chaired by avowed Wall Street antagonist Eric Schneiderman from New York, was supposed to help staunch the cynicism about whether the masters of the Wall Street universe would ever be held accountable. Many of us who have been working on banking and housing issues had been calling for a deeper investigation of the banks, and when we got it, we were delighted, especially with Schneiderman playing such a leading role. But the success of this task force still hangs in the balance. A lot of questions have been raised by various groups and individuals working on this, including me, about how fast the task force was moving and whether the White House was focused on making sure things were effectively moving. Meanwhile, Republicans like Rep. Patrick McHenry, eager to serve their corporate masters on Wall Street, have started harassing and trying to slow down the task force in its work by forcing them to respond to threatening letters that are pure fishing expeditions.
The good news is that after what felt to a lot of activists like a very slow start, things seem like they are starting to come together in the task force. From everything I hear, the DOJ staffers that were to be assigned to the task force are now working, an executive director is likely to be on the verge of being hired, and other agencies including CFPB and HUD are actively and productively engaged and contributing resources. My sense is that there was some initial foot dragging by DOJ, but things are starting to move. And I think the flurry of questions and email petitions over the last couple of weeks did have the desired effect in getting the White House more involved in encouraging the bureaucracy to keep moving.
It will be very hard to know, of course, what is really going in a legal investigation that has to be confidential in releasing information they are finding in the investigation. It will be a long spring and summer for those of us who care about accountability for the banks, because the wheels of justice take some time to move, and I would guess that the earliest indictments could start flying is several months from now. In the meantime, activists will need to keep the heat on.
Turning from the legal back to the problem of the public’s cynicism about whether the big bankers will ever be held to account, the Obama administration does itself no favors when Treasury Secretary Geithner makes it sound like the administration has already decided not to prosecute anything. From Reuters:

“Most financial crises are caused by a mix of stupidity and greed and recklessness and risk-taking and hope,” said Geithner, who helped tackle the crisis for the Bush administration when he was the head of the New York Federal Reserve and has been urging Europe to act more aggressively to contain its debt problems. “You can’t legislate away stupidity and risk-taking and greed and recklessness. What you can do is make sure when it happens it does not cause too much damage and to do that you have to make sure you have good rules against fraud and abuse, better protections and you force banks to hold more capital against their risk,” he said.

This statement unfortunately echoed Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement after the task force was announced that in his assessment the problems were not mostly related to law-breaking but to greed and stupidity. Whoever is writing the talking points for these guys needs to be fired. The politics and optics of the president announcing a task force to look into Wall Street fraud, and then having his AG and Treasury Secretary announce that there probably weren’t many laws broken in advance of the investigation, is atrocious. If the president loses populist swing voters mad at Wall Street, and therefore the election, I’d recommend looking for a cause first at Geithner for statements like this and policies that have treated Wall Street with kid gloves.
Speaking of those swing voters: one of the biggest unresolved issues in the 2012 election will be whether President Obama can convince the swing voters who are both angry at Wall Street and skeptical of government — in great part because they think it is bought off by wealthy special interests like Wall Street bankers — that he will actually hold Wall Street accountable. Thirty-seven percent of voters in the 2010 exit polls, when asked who was primarily to blame for the economic problems the country was facing, said Wall Street — far more than any other person or institution named. That populist group of voters who blamed Wall Street first ended up breaking 56-42 for Republican candidates (after voting for Obama 2-1 in 2008) because they perceived that Obama was, in the haunting phrase of EJ Dionne, a “Wall Street liberal” — someone who was both too close to Wall Street and pro-big government. These mostly working class voters, many of them hard pressed economically, many of them with underwater mortgages, are under no illusions that Romney is a Wall Street guy through and through, which is why he had so much trouble with working class voters in the Republican primaries. But they don’t trust government or Obama either, and might well vote against the incumbent if they don’t see him taking on Wall Street. If these voters think both presidential candidates will coddle Wall Street, their tendency will be to vote for the one they think will keep taxes down and lower the deficit.
The fraud task force is burdened by three and a half years of virtually no visible action against the Wall Street fraud that helped bring down this economy, and by big expectations coming from the activists on this issue. Cynicism is high, and patience is low. I sympathize with those inside the task force to whom this feels unfair, but the bottom line is that they have to deliver something tangible, and relatively soon, to show that the big boys on Wall Street have to obey the same laws that everyone else does- that when they cheat their clients and cheat on their taxes and fraudulently manipulate markets, that they will be investigated, prosecuted, and spend some time in jail. If the task force can begin to deliver that kind of accountability, people are going to be a lot less cynical about their government.