By now you’ve probably heard one version or another of the whine of the disappointed Democrat, which goes something like “Obama hasn’t done everything I wanted, so I’m gonna teach him a lesson – I ‘m not gonna vote.” But there is an alternative for progressive grown-ups who feel some disappointment, but don’t think turning everything over to Republicans is such a great idea. It’s about working to create a more progressive congress that can move the “center” leftward, as Chris Bowers, Campaign Director for Daily Kos, explains in an e-blast to progressive Dems:

…Two Blue Dog Democrats–aka, corporate Democrats–were defeated for re-election in Democratic primaries last week….This is huge: if Democrats who frequently side with Republicans and Wall Street keep losing primaries, then all Democrats in Congress will be motivated to more effectively stand up against Republicans and Wall Street.
On June 5 in New Mexico, we have a chance to hand the Blue Dogs another loss.
In the Democratic primary for Congress in New Mexico’s first congressional district, two of the three major candidates are outspoken progressive Eric Griego and conservative, anti-labor Marty Chavez. Making sure that Griego wins and Chavez loses will keep the anti-Blue Dog momentum going, and be an important step toward building a better Democratic Party.
Please, contribute $5 to Eric Griego, and help build a better Democratic Party.
Griego is in a strong position. Because of national grassroots support, he is ahead of Chavez in fundraising. Back in March, Griego won the local Democratic Party’s preprimary nominating convention, leading analysts to start calling him the frontrunner. Griego is running an extremely well-organized voter turnout campaign, and will hit the airwaves with ads this week.
This is a moment where a small donation will make a big difference. Not only will it go to a smart campaign that uses money effectively, and not only will it go to a candidate who has been endorsed by both co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but it will play a strategic role in a larger movement that has a real shot to build a better Democratic Party.
Please, contribute $5 to Eric Griego.
Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos

Beats the hell out of grumbling, staying at home and letting Republicans take over all three branches of government.

Ed Kilgore has an insightful and entertaining post up at Political Animal, taking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to task for his less than credible dismissal of Ayn Rand as his philosophical guru. Riffing on a Ryan interview with National Review’s Robert Costa, Kilgore explains:

So we learn this week from an interview with National Review’s Robert Costa that Paul Ryan laughs off his identification as a big fan of Ayn Rand as an “urban legend,” based on little more than his youthful enjoyment of (and later, philosophical “bantering” about) her “dusty novels.” No, he sternly asserts, he rejects Rand’s “atheist philosophy;” give him St. Thomas Aquinas any old day!
Costa does not report that Ryan specifically denies the actual foundation for the “urban legend” associating him conspicuously with Rand: his remark in 2005, when he was hardly a callow teenager, that Rand inspired his entire career in public service, or his habit of giving copies of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s militant magnum opus, to his congressional interns in 2003.

All of this wouldn’t matter much, except for the fact that Rand is the philosophical godmother of modern GOP obstructionism, the rigid refusal to compromise on legislation to benefit working people or inconvenience the wealthy in any way. Kilgore elaborates:

…The thing about Ayn Rand, as anyone who has actually read her works can attest, is that she offered readers an all-or-nothing proposition. She didn’t entertain, she instructed. This was most evident in Atlas Shrugged, whose centerpiece was an endless didactic “radio broadcast” by her hero John Galt, identifying all human misery with the “mysticism of the mind” (supernatural religion) and the “mysticism of the muscle” (socialism, or more accurately, the rejection of strict laissez-faire capitalism), and with the ethics of altruism both reflected.

As Kilgore quotes from Whitaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal…”
As for Ryan’s reputation as a top GOP thinker, Kilgore concludes,

It’s possible, I suppose, that Paul Ryan is a secret “Objectivist” who keeps gold dollar sign pins in his underwear drawer. More likely, though, he doesn’t understand Ayn Rand any better than he seems to understand Catholic social teachings. In either event, his reputation as a deep thinker whose brilliance and good will demand respect from everyone across the political spectrum strikes me as entirely undeserved.

It’s not hard to understand why Ryan, like a deer caught in the headlights, would deny Rand’s formative influence on him, since she was not only a heartless reactionary, but also a militantly pro-choice atheist, who accepted Social Security and Medicare (According to “100 voices: an oral history of Ayn Rand“), while sneering at social programs for everyone else. But Ryan’s denials won’t be taken very seriously by anyone familiar with his record.

This weekend the Obama campaign begins training hundreds of volunteers at 24 sites throughout Florida. The training will carefully thread the new Florida voter registration law, which is designed, more than anything else, to make it harder for pro-Democratic constituencies to vote.
Under normal circumstances Florida should be a ‘leaning blue’ state. President Obama carried it by 2+ percent in 2008, and demographic changes during the last 4 years could swell the margin a little more. But the Republican campaign to make voting harder presents a tougher challenge for Dems, as Marc Caputo reports in the Miami Herald:

…The Republican-led Legislature passed the registration crackdown law in 2011…Under the new law, which is being challenged by liberal-leaning groups in court, voter-registration groups must register for the first time with the state. They have to meticulously track voter-registration forms and turn the completed paperwork into a Supervisor of Elections office within 48 hours. The previous deadline was 10 days.
Fines range from $50 for each late application to a maximum of $1,000 per organization per year. Two school teachers have faced fines for breaking the new law, which was recently mocked on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.”.
The law also scaled back early voting by eliminating it the Sunday before Election Day when African American and Hispanic voters cast almost 30 percent of their ballots, said Camila Gallardo, spokeswoman for National Council of La Raza, a Latino-advocacy group challenging the new law.

Democrats have experienced a 4 percent decline in “active voters” since 2008, while Republicans have increased by abiout 1 percent. But Dems do have some leverage in Florida, which makes the battle worth fighting, as Caputo explains:

Democrats still lead Republicans overall by a margin of 448,000 active registered voters. And, the Florida Democratic Party notes, they lead by an even greater amount — 540,000 — by including the pool of so-called inactive voters, who cast ballots so infrequently that the state doesn’t post information about them.
The Florida Democratic Party points out the inactive voters can become active. It says that about 100,000 of them showed up in 2008, when Obama won the state — and the White House in the process — by about 236,000 votes.
There are about 11.2 million active voters (plus 1.1 million more inactive voters). About 41 percent are Democrats, 36 percent Republicans, 20 percent have no party affiliation and fewer than 4 percent belong to a smattering of other parties.
…White voters appear to be dropping from the Democratic rolls, with 206,000 of them leaving since the last election. Black voters continue to leave the Republican Party, where African American active voters declined 7 percent to about 59,000…Since 2008, the Democratic Party’s Hispanic voter rolls have increased more than 10 percent to about 565,000. The Republican Party’s Hispanic increase has been more modest, about 2 percent, to about 453,000.
…From the beginning of the 2006 Democratic wave until the 2008 elections, Florida Democrats increased their rolls by a whopping 502,000 active voters, thanks to the organizing efforts of the Obama campaign and, especially, the group ACORN, which has since disbanded amid scandal and Republican attacks. As Democrats tallied up the gains, Republicans insisted that they’d still get their voters to the polls to best Obama. They didn’t. And they didn’t do much to register new voters, either.

Caputo notes that recent Florida polling indicates that President Obama and Gov. Romney are in statistical tie territory (47-45 edge for Romney). Florida Republicans will undoubtedly be exploiting every opportunity to suppress votes of pro-Democratic constituencies, since they know their candidate is not likely to inspire much of an increase in Republican turnout. In a close election, the quality of the voter registration and turnout training that Team Obama begins this weekend in Florida may indeed prove pivotal to America’s future.

One of the most frequently-deployed strategies from the Karl Rove/Frank Luntz playbooks is to ferociously attack the adversary at their strength. It appears that this is what Romney is now trying to do, as indicated by the New Hampshire launch of his campaign for the general election. As Benjy Sarlin reports at Talking Points Memo:

Romney outlined an agenda aimed at combating what he called “unfairness” in government, spinning a phrase often employed by Democrats as they make the case that wealthier Americans and corporations should pay higher taxes. Earlier Tuesday, Obama said the rich should “pay their fair share” in a speech to college students in North Carolina. While other Republicans often debate these arguments by emphasizing “opportunity,” Romney adopted the “fairness” language to criticize federal spending.

Here’s how he twists the term “unfairness” in support of right-wing policies:

“…We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.”

Translation: :”We will twist and distort the concept of fairness to justify bashing government workers, crushing labor unions and privatizing public schools.”
Amazing, however, that Romney dared to even mention “the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses,” which pretty much defines the core value of the GOP.
It’s the old co-opt the opponent’s most potent terminology, muddy the waters and foment confusion among low-information voters about what it means. Hard to see how it would impress many swing voters who have even a rudimentary b.s. detector.

Matea Gold and Melanie Mason of the L.A. Times Washington Bureau have an article in todays’ edition comparing the ground game preparations of the Obama and Romney campaigns. Although it’s still pretty early it appears that Obama is developing a significant edge. In terms of economic resources and manpower, the authors report:

…An examination of how the two campaigns have spent their money in the last year starkly illustrates the huge advantage Obama will have in mounting a ground operation to identify voters and get them to the polls in November.
Spared a primary opponent, the president’s reelection campaign by the end of February had pumped nearly $79 million into laying the groundwork for the general election, deploying staff to far-flung corners of the country such as Laramie, Wyo., and Lebanon, N.H., as part of an ambitious, tech-savvy field effort.
Romney, mired for months in a contentious primary, has not yet devoted substantial resources to a national field program. Of the $68 million spent so far by his campaign, $25.4 million went to fundraising and media ads in primary states, elements that — while key to his front-runner standing — may not translate into lasting gains…He has spent only $5 million on staff, compared with the $20 million Obama has doled out for his campaign workers.

With Romney’s emphasis on hiring top media-savvy conservatives to head up his team, the authors see the battle taking shape ahead as a conflict between “the power of an aerial bombardment through television ads against an in-person voter mobilization months in the making.” Call it the Republican air war vs. the Democratic ground game.
It’s a strategy the Obama campaign is embracing wholeheartedly, as Mason and Gold note:

The campaign appears poised to be even more aggressive this year. Volunteers are registering new voters in an effort to expand the pool of supporters. They are knocking on doors to identify likely voters — an activity that usually occurs in the summer or fall. And the reelection effort has begun blanketing battleground states with field offices, including 18 in Florida, 13 in Pennsylvania and eight in Iowa. In the process, Obama’s apparatus has locked up local Democratic operatives across the country much earlier than expected…That traditional field work is being buttressed by a massive technological investment aimed at expanding the campaign’s voter database, which in turn fuels the organizing efforts.

The RNC does plan to increase its field staff by half, but an energetic Team Obama ground game is already in place — with more to come.

Jonathan Bernstein warns at WaPo’s ‘PostPartisan’ blog to “Be ready for goofy polls,” which is sage advice at the outset of the general election campaign. As Bernstein explains,

…With Gallup running a daily track, and other pollsters either running daily tracks or frequent polling, that we’re going to see quite a few bad numbers. Gallup, for example, has Obama’s approval spiking up to 50% today, but the odds are good that we’re just seeing a statistical blip, and his slump down to 43% late last month was also a meaningless blip.
Once again: look at the poll-of-polls averages. Mark Blumenthal’s Pollster trend line for approval sits at 47% and has hardly budget for weeks; the average over at Real Clear Politics is just barely higher.

As Bernstein sums it up: “The bottom line is that all the data help us know more about what’s going on, as long as we use it well – which means focusing on the averages, and not individual, anomalous readings. Remind yourself: we’re expecting a lot of those anomalies. In both directions. Just get ready to ignore them.”

You probably didn’t know that you have been funding the work of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). That would include their efforts in helping to enact a gaggle of reactionary state laws — ‘Stand your ground,’ voter suppression, bashing immigrant workers etc.
No not directly. But your taxes have indirectly subsidized ALEC’s work because the organization has enjoyed status as a tax-exempt public charity. They haven’t paid taxes, so taxpayers have made up the difference. Here’s how Mike Baker explains it in his HuffPo post “ALEC Hit With IRS Complaint Filed By Common Cause“:

Advocacy group Common Cause said Monday it had filed an IRS complaint accusing ALEC of masquerading as a public charity. ALEC is formed as a nonprofit that brings together lawmakers and private sector organizations to develop legislation and policy.
ALEC says its work is not lobbying.
Common Cause disagrees. “It tells the IRS in its tax returns that it does no lobbying, yet it exists to pass profit-driven legislation in statehouses all over the country that benefits its corporate members,” said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, in a statement. “ALEC is not entitled to abuse its charitable tax status to lobby for private corporate interests, and stick the bill to the American taxpayer.”

Common Cause is demanding an audit, penalties and payment of back taxes. Baker adds, further, that “ALEC has been active since the 1970s and has long drawn the ire of open government groups who question the secretive development of legislation and close relationship between private sector officials and lawmakers who meet at conferences to jointly develop model legislation.”
All of which gives ALEC’s corporate supporters who have been departing for less thorny pastures at a quickening rate an additional reason to put their cred on the line elsewhere.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
By all rights, the Republican presidential candidate should have a lot of wind at his back in 2012.
*President Obama’s economic policies brought an end to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and have now yielded 25 straight months of private sector jobs growth. But many Americans are still out of work.
*The far right has been energized by passage of President Obama’s legislative agenda: health care reform, the equal pay for equal work, ending Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, Wall Street reform. They hate these policies and they are highly motivated to stop the President’s re-election.
*The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has allowed a flood of corporate and right wing money that should allow the right to out-communicate the President’s campaign for re-election.
Instead, Mitt Romney is struggling. There are many factors:
*President Obama’s well organized, highly disciplined campaign;
*A bloody Republican primary season;
*The high regard in which most Americans hold the President — last week’s ABC News poll showed 56% regard him favorably while only 40% regard him unfavorably.
But Mitt Romney’s biggest enemy is Mitt Romney.
That same ABC News poll showed Romney is the first major Presidential candidate in modern history to be “underwater” in his favorables. Only 35% of Americans regard him favorably, while 47% regard him unfavorably.
Why does Romney have such a “Romney problem”?
People are not just reacting negatively to the “public persona” of Romney. There is no evidence the Romney campaign simply needs to do a better job getting to know the “real Romney.”
In fact, it appears that the more people to know him, the less they like him. A February Washington Post poll showed that 52% of Americans responded that the more they know about Romney the less they like him. The same was true for 39% of Republicans. That trend seems to be continuing.
No, the problem is not that they aren’t getting to know the “real Romney.” The problem is the “real Romney.”
In elections — and especially highly publicized Presidential elections — voters do not fundamentally make choices between two sets of issues positions, or economic policies. They make a choice about who should be their leader. They choose between living, breathing human beings.
They ask themselves two major sets of questions:

Read more…

Michael Tomasky’s “Barack Obama and the ‘Centrist’ Fantasy About Dealing With the GOP” merits a slow, sober read by White House strategists. It’s a familiar argument from progressive Democrats. But it’s exceptionally well-stated — and very persuasive. Tomasky laments the return of the “Obama should compromise more to win centrists/independents/swing voters” meme-that-refuses-to-die, and then explains why it’s a sure loser:

…Let’s imagine a scenario. Obama comes forward with a tax-reform proposal along Bowles-Simpson lines, one that meets the GOP halfway. He comes up with three marginal rates for individuals, the highest one around 35, maybe 38 tops; or maybe he adds a fourth “LeBron James” rate, a higher rate on dollars earned above some fantastically high figure that applies to something like .2 percent of all tax filers; but that would probably be in there as a bargaining chip. He proposes the elimination of certain “tax expenditures,” or deductions and loopholes like the home-mortgage-interest deduction and the deduction for employer-sponsored health care, which are the two big ones; or maybe he’s more modest about this and places caps on those, not eliminating them entirely; or perhaps he sticks with something like getting rid of the state and local tax deduction. Finally, he lowers the corporate rate from the current 35 percent, but proposes closing several corporate loopholes, like energy-tax preferences for the oil and gas industry.
WWMD? That is, what would McConnell do–and Boehner, and Cantor, and the rest? Would they scratch their chins and say, “Gee, this is great. We’re delighted that the president has put something serious on the table, and we will work hard with him to find common ground”? Actually, they might say that, at first, just to pull the wool over people’s eyes. But in short order, the line from them and their confederates in positions of lighter responsibility would be: “This is a massive tax increase! Eliminating these deductions on middle-class people will raise their taxes, so he’s breaking his promise, see, we told you! The LeBron tax is just more ‘Democrat’ class warfare, more punishing the job creators.” “The corporate plan,” they’ll say, “sounds good on paper, but again, he’s attacking the job creators by eliminating these important deductions, and many corporations, especially small businesses”–you know they’ll throw that one in!–“are going to end up paying more.”

Hard to argue with that scenario. As for the ‘why’ of it, Tomasky adds:

If Obama meets Republicans halfway, and then they block a deal, the center will shift further to the right. Republicans know this. That’s why obstructionism suits them just fine.
And that’s just elected officials. At Heritage and Cato, they’ll comb through the fine print and find an Achilles’ heel, something that can be distorted to sound just hideous, which will of course be in there, because tax policy is unbelievably complex. And then, once Mr. Oxycontin and the Fox people start hooping and hollering about that, it won’t be long before the whole thing can be dismissed as something Marx would be proud of.
No they wouldn’t, you say? Why? Because their allegations wouldn’t be true? Oh, yes, that has regularly stopped them in the past. Or because there would be too much pressure on them to behave responsibly this time? Pressure from whom? The New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages? Please. Direct me to one instance–and no, the Post and the Iraq War doesn’t count, because that was the Post endorsing something Republicans were for anyway–when Eric Cantor has read a Times editorial and said, “Golly, these fellows make some very fair points, I must heed them.” The only pressure they pay attention to is from Limbaugh, Fox, and the base. And that pressure will consist entirely of one message: resist, at all costs, or perish.

Looking toward the future, Tomasky sees no reason to hope that the GOP will negotiate in good faith. “… There’s every reason to think it will be even worse in a second Obama term, because the base will be so enraged that the guy “stole” another election that the demand will be that the Republicans be even more obstructionist…”
The Republican strategy is ultimately very simple, says Tomasky: Resist all proposed compromises from the President and keep pushing the “center of gravity” to the right. But there is but one remedy, Tomasky sees: “What can change it? Not much. Losing lots of elections. If they’re ever down to 38 senators and 153 House members like the good old days, they’ll have to deal. Until then, Obama wouldn’t be a leader if he tried to negotiate with them in good faith. He’d be a fool.”
A harsh call. But there is absolutely nothing in the history of the President’s dealings with the Republicans to suggest it’s overstated.

Ed Kilgore asks a tough question in the title of a post at his Washington Monthly ‘Political Animal’ blog” “How Much Violence Against Women’ Do Republicans Support?” Kilgore explains:

If you’ve been following the debate in the Senate over the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act [VAWA], you know that Republicans are complaining that they don’t want the act to expire, but object to “poison pills” Democrats have added to the bill, particularly protections against domestic violence for undocumented women and for people in same-sex relationships.
But they are not handling the messaging of their position very well…This GOP exercise in damage control, however, may not be enough to spare their presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, for whom the VAWA issue is becoming another in a long series of examples of his weaselly refusal to take a distinct position. He’s sort of for VAWA renewal, but doesn’t think it should become a “political football,” and won’t say what version he’d support.

Kilgore quotes from Steve Benen’s Maddow Blog litany of Romney evasions on current newsworthy issues, including the Violence Against Women Act. he notes Benen’s observation that “The American electorate can tolerate quite a bit, but no one respects a coward.”
As Kilgore concludes, “…Maybe reporters navigating the Romney campaign’s evasions should try a different tack, asking exactly how much violence against women the candidate and his party are willing to accept? Maybe that will flush them out, and produce some straight answers.”