Jonathan Chait weighs in at New York Magazine about “Liberal Donors’ Ethical Confusion.” The article title refers to the decision of a group of a group of big progressive contributors to donate funds to GOTV, rather than Democratic ads. Chait thinks it’s a bad idea:

This is basically the kind of weenie attitude that periodically afflicts liberalism…The explicit argument for their decision is that the donors believe they can’t match the Republican outside groups in advertising, so why try?
…Let me phrase this way of thinking slightly differently: Obama already has a significant advantage in the ground game, but faces a potentially huge disadvantage in the air wars. Therefore, the donors have concluded, they should invest their money augmenting the ground game.
Does this make any sense at all? No, it does not. It’s backwards. The most effective way to spend money is where your side has the greatest disadvantage. Beefing up the already strong Democratic turnout machine would certainly help, but a marginal dollar spent to narrow the advertising gap would surely help more. The point isn’t to “match” Republicans. It’s not as if declining to compete in the field of advertising will make advertising less relevant.

Chait believes the misguided rationale for the strategy “is that liberal donors feel squeamish about entering the world of huge independent ad expenditures.” But the fund-raising system is not going to change between now and November and “Given the fact of the system’s existence, there’s nothing morally wrong about participating in it.”
Indeed, what may be morally wrong is deploying financial resources away from where they are needed the most. As Chait concludes, “Staying out of the advertising race isn’t going to make the system any more fair.”

The latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Public Campaign Action Fund [overview here] shows that voters care about money in politics and are prepared to vote for candidates who prioritize reform. All voters, and especially swing voters, support reforms that would limit big money, encourage small donors, and close the revolving door between government service and lobbying. Neither party currently owns this issue and with voters up for grabs, candidates who are willing to tackle money in politics could benefit at the ballot box.
Key Findings:
Money in politics is not a distraction from the economy, it is the economy. For ordinary Americans, this is not an either/or proposition; it is not a question of addressing money in politics at the expense of talking about pocketbook problems. Voters believe that Washington is so corrupted by big banks, big donors, and corporate lobbyists that it no longer works for the middle class. A large majority (60 percent) says candidates ought to tackle money in politics in order to make government work for the middle class.
As a result, voters from both parties, but particularly swing voters, feel strongly about reducing the influence of big money in politics. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of all voters, and majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, believe there should be common sense limits on the amount of money people can contribute to political campaigns. And a large majority (59 percent) is intensely committed to such limits. Voters do not believe that there are two equal sides to this debate; just a fifth (21 percent) of all voters say that limits on campaign contributions violate free speech.
Voters will strongly support candidates – from both political parties – who seize this issue. Voters do not currently trust either party to tackle money in politics. All voters, and swing voters in particular, strongly support candidates who are willing to take on money in politics as a serious campaign issue.
More detailed analysis can be found at Democracy Corps.

Writing in the Washington Monthly ‘Political Animal’ blog, Ed Kilgore argues persuasively that the tea party is not the sole or necessarily the primary cause of “The Slow But Very Steady Demise of Republican Moderates“. Noting that “The steady drift to the Right in the GOP Senate Caucus is more a matter of generational replacement than of “purges,” supplemented by the concentration of “conservatives” in states relatively invulnerable to general election swings,” Kilgore explains:

…Some political observers still seem to think the current ideological rigidity of the Republican Party is a sudden phenomenon created by the startling appearance of a Tea Party Movement in 2009. The often-unstated premise is that the GOP can be returned to its senses by a healthy general election defeat or two–or perhaps a win if it forces Republicans to come to grips with the responsibilities of governing.
Sorry, but I see no reason to think any sort of “course correction” is inevitable. The latest ideological lurch of the Republican Party came after two consecutive cycles in which the party was beaten like a drum. But it also drifted to the right during every recent Republican presidency; there’s a reason that GOPers were muttering about the “betrayals of conservative principle” their chieftains were exhibiting during W.’s, second term, his father’s one term, and yes, even Ronald Reagan’s second term. Like the tax cuts for the wealthy that are their all-purpose economic policy proposal, a shift to the right has become the all-purpose response to any political development over more than three decades. The Tea Party Movement is simply the latest incarnation of the conservative movement, which has been thundering against RINOs all the way back to the days when they actually existed.
There’s nothing new here, folks. There may be limits to how far the ideological bender of the GOP can be taken, but the idea that it will end next year or the year after is completely without empirical foundation.

It’s a useful insight, especially for Dems who may be entertaining the delusion that the Republican party will likely recover a semblance of the bipartisanship of earlier decades, once the tea party dissolves. More likely it will morph into something else, equally, or even more obstructionist.

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.