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.

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.