The President and the Democrats are indeed doing very well at the outset of 2012, and the Republicans are doing pitifully. They are not unrelated. Republicans in Congress and in the primary battles are driving independents into the Democrats’ camp and consolidating and energizing parts of the progressive base. There is improved optimism about the macro economy and the President’s approval rating is up to 50 percent.
But Democrats should keep their wits. Nearly all the gains have been produced by the Republican slide, not Democratic gains. Both parties and politicians are reviled. And most important, the voter has not seen personal economic gains and Democrats are no more trusted on handling the economy – the heart of this election. Some of the emerging Democratic messages are on target, but others miss what is really happening and pose considerable risks. The on-target messages set up an effective electoral choice around the middle class, but the off-target ones could give the Republican nominee a platform for challenging the President’s economic record.
See the full report Here
Voters are still very negative about the economy and their lives and a large majority of 56 percent want a change of economic direction. Voters report no improvement since last June in their job situation, experience with reduced wages and benefits, and health insurance coverage. Fewer have fallen behind on their mortgages, but this is a weak recovery at the personal level.
While Republicans have collapsed on nearly everything, 44 percent continue to trust them on the economy – unchanged over four surveys back to August. Just 40 percent trust the Democrats on the economy – about the same as the party’s average for 2011. The stubbornness of the Democrats’ disadvantage on the economy should be a lesson if they are really to prevail. These are still tough economic times.
Thus, it is critical that Democrats get to the right economic narrative that allows the President and progressives to identify with what is happening in the country, create an aspiration for the country and the middle class and pose a big choice with the Republican nominee.
Based on the State of the Union dial group research and this new national survey, we have to say the jury is out on the Democrats’ current economic narratives.

Wingnuts are still bent out of shape about the federal requirement that insurance companies provide full reimbursement for birth control for women, even when the women work at religously affiliated institutions. And they’re still angry about the Obama administration’s compromise requiring that the insurance plan, not the institution, pay the full cost of the contraceptive coverage.
As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ “In fact, conservatives are doubling down on their opposition and are pushing the Blunt amendment in the Senate that allows any insurer or employer to deny coverage of any health service, including birth control, if they find such coverage morally objectionable.” Teixeira adds:

Conservatives seem convinced that this kind of “culture wars” approach will yield a substantial dividend of public support. Well, maybe in some alternative universe, but not in this one. A just-released CBS/New York Times poll finds the public supporting “a recent federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female patients” by a wide 66-26 margin. Moreover, the poll finds that the requirement is supported by women (72-20), moderates (68-22), Catholics (67-25), independents (64-26), and even Republicans (50-44).
Even if the question is narrowed to focus on “religiously-affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university,” the public still favors full coverage of birth control by these institutions’ health insurance plans by a very substantial 30-point margin (61-31).

“Maybe conservatives should start looking for that alternative universe,’ says Teixeira. “Because their approach sure isn’t going to work in this one.”

Before Mitt Romney’s “The trees are the right height” meltdown, you could say that at least one GOP candidate appeared to be fairly sane, if totally unprincipled in his waffling on every major issue. Now, however, even that exception is in some doubt.
As a result of Romney’s unhinged rant, the growing chorus of Republicans calling for a replacement messiah has begun to rattle the rafters. The prospects are not promising, as Michael Tomasky explains in his Daily Beast post, “There Will Be No Saviors for the GOP in 2012.”

What the party needs is not simply a new candidate. It needs someone with the courage to stand up and say that the GOP has gone completely off the deep end–and that the party could run an amalgam of Ronald Reagan and Mahatma Gandhi and he wouldn’t win as long as the party’s inflamed base keeps with its current attitudes. But it lacks such a person utterly. It’s a party made up of on the one hand unprincipled cowards, and on the other of people devoted to principles so extreme that they’d have serious trouble attracting more than about 42 percent of the vote.

Tomasky considers the possibility of one of the three most frequently-mentioned saviors, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie or Mitch Daniels, stepping up, and assesses their prospects:

…Here’s the problem. First, let’s consider the three men named above. What’s so savior-y about them? The Bush name? Please. It’s better than Nixon, but that’s about all that can be said for it. Christie’s tough-talking personality? That appeals to people on the right. But it could wear thin. And yes, the avoirdupois factor is an issue. Most Americans don’t want a president who looks like that. And Daniels has the charisma of an econ-department chair.
More importantly, each has litmus-test difficulties. Jeb, as Rich Yeselson pointed out over the weekend at the Washington Monthly, is kind of soft on immigration, and there is no single issue that revs the engines of the far right like that one. (Jeb opposed Arizona’s immigration law, among other things.) Christie appointed a Muslim judge and said, in a lacerating statement aimed directly at the kind of people who make up the GOP base, that opposition to said judge was based on “ignorance.” Daniels, back when he was a potential candidate, was regularly savaged by Rush Limbaugh. These are suddenly going to be right-wing heroes? Others mention Paul Ryan, but they’re just being delusional. Ryan would win about the same 15 states Santorum and Gingrich would, maybe 20, but most definitely not the right 20.

Writing at CNN Politics about a ‘Plan B’ memo circulating in GOP circles, CNN Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger and Senior Producer Kevin Bohn also note the growing desperation in the Republican camp:

…One knowledgeable GOP source confirms that some Republicans are circulating the deadlines and the basic math that would allow another candidate to get into the nomination fight and take it all the way to the convention. More than a half dozen states’ filing deadlines have yet to pass. A majority of the delegates to the national convention are still up for grabs. One more factor to be considered: many states are choosing their delegates proportionally, which makes it easier for a candidate pick up delegates without outright winning a state…
…One of the Republicans who has seen the memo said “no one is hoping that this will come to play,” regarding a new candidate entering the fray. Yet some Republican partisans feel they need to make some contingency plans depending on the outcome in coming primaries. Other veteran Republicans contacted by CNN dismissed any possibility of another candidate entering the contest at this date.

Tomasky surveys the wreckage and potential ‘saviors’ and concludes,

“…There is no one who can satisfy the base of the GOP–a cohort so drunk on ideology and resentment that they cheer electrocutions and boo a soldier–and be elected president of the United States. Period…They can’t see the obvious paradox–that their lust for the White House is making them submit to all the wishes of a fanatical base, which is exactly what will keep them from winning the White House.

In other words, anyone smart enough to craft and deliver a sensible message isn’t going to get any traction with the tea party and wingnuts, who appear to have veto power in today’s GOP. Still, we know that someone will be nominated — just don’t expect a lucid moderate Republican on a white horse to appear on the horizon.

This post by John Russo, Coordinator of the Labor Studies Program at Youngstown State originally appeared in Working-Class Perspectives which is the blog site for the Center for Working-Class Studies at YSU.
As a professor, I am always interested in teachable moments. When it became apparent in late 2010 that Ohio Gov. John Kasich planned to introduce legislation depriving public sector workers of basic bargaining rights, I told reporters that it was a teachable moment about the role of public sector workers. After all, they were the ones who made all other work possible.
Both organized labor and community groups quickly embraced the idea that Ohio Senate Bill 5 could be a teachable moment. They launched a hugely successful campaign to put a referendum on the bill, Issue 2, on the November ballot, and then led the fight to persuade voters to oppose the issue and overturn the bill. Kasich’s attack and the forceful response to it may make it possible for Obama to win Ohio in 2012, despite economic conditions and 2010 election results that would seem to prime the state to swing to the right this time.
Another teachable moment has arrived now that Republicans have introduced Right-to-Work legislation in New Hampshire and passed it in Indiana. Similar legislation may be on the way in Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio. Such moves may well undermine the historic white working-class support of Republicans, and that could bode well for Obama’s re-election.
RTW legislation differs from past Republican attacks on unions. As labor historian Joseph McCartin has recently chronicled, while courting union endorsements and union voters, Republicans have pursued strategies that, over the last 30 years, have quietly undermined administrative agencies and government policies that facilitated the formation of unions. The result has been the erosion and marginalization of organized labor and its ability to raise wages, improve workplace safety and health, and advance representative democracy not only in the workplace but in the body politic.
The current RTW legislation is a direct attack on organized labor and its ability to represent the economic and political interests of both the rank and file and those non-union workers whose wages and benefits are enhanced by employers to avoid unionization. No doubt, the role of unions in building and rebuilding economic security and the middle class, advancing workplace rights, and promoting political democracy will be a central part of the curriculum for this teachable moment.
All the current Republican candidates have refused opportunities to speak to union leaders. Instead, they have signed on to the anti-labor agenda, including RTW legislation, proposed by conservative corporations, business groups, and donors. Together with their other economic proposals, they have established a Republican brand that embraces and even celebrates a distorted sense of morality and inequality of income, wealth, and power.

Read more…

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
From the point of view of a partisan Democrat, I can only think of one thing to say about the Republican Party’s escalating opposition to birth control: go ahead, make our day.
You have to wonder if the political consultants advising the Republican presidential candidates have lost their minds. In the competition for ultra-right wing voters in the Republican primaries, the Romney and Santorum campaigns have completely lost sight of how their positions on birth control appear to the vast majority of Americans — and especially to women — and affect their chances in a general election.
Outside of a very narrow strata of political extremists, birth control is not a controversial subject. At some point in their lives roughly 98% of women — including 98% of Catholic women — have used birth control — either to prevent pregnancy, regulate menstrual cycles and cramps or to address other medical issues.
Last week a PPP poll reported that:
This issue could be potent in this fall’s election. Fully 58 percent of voters say they oppose Republicans in Congress trying to take away the birth control benefit that saves women hundreds of dollars a year, including 56 percent of independents.
And a recent Pew Poll says only 8% of Americans believe that the use of contraceptives is “immoral.”
Democracy Corps published a polling memo last Thursday that said in part that:
…one of the most important factors powering Obama’s gains against likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney has been the President’s improving numbers among unmarried women, a key pillar of the present and future Democratic coalition.
Among this group, Obama now leads Romney by 65-30 — and there’s been a net 18-point swing towards the President among them…
The issue of access to birth control is very important among this group.
In addition, the memo went on to say that the battle over contraception could be another “Terri Schiavo moment” where the knee-jerk reaction of right-wing culture warriors runs afoul of Americans’ desire not to have government interfering with their most private personal decisions.
And the numbers understate another important factor — intensity. Many women voters in particular feel very intensely about the birth control issue. It’s not just another issue — it’s about their own control of the most personal aspects of their lives.
Notwithstanding these facts, Mitt Romney has come out squarely in favor of the “personhood” amendment that was soundly defeated in Mississippi — probably the most conservative state in the nation. That amendment would essentially ban most forms of hormonal birth control, like the Pill and IUD, that millions of women — and their spouses — rely upon to prevent unwanted pregnancy.
Santorum, in addition to his support of the “personhood” amendment, actually argues that contraception of any sort is immoral.
Both Romney and Santorum have attacked the Obama administration’s rule that requires insurance companies to make birth control available to all women with no co-payment no matter where they work.
Their positions are so far outside the political mainstream that they might as well be on the former planet Pluto.
And these are not positions that are peripherally related to voters’ opinions of candidates for office. For many swing voters, the GOP’s extremist positions on birth control could very well be dispositive determinants of their votes next November.
First, for a large number of women voters, their positions communicate two very important things:
They aren’t on my side;
They don’t understand my life.

Read more…

The latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund shows a Republican Party in deepening trouble and emerging underlying trends that may have shifted the balance for 2012. Barring sudden economic shocks, there is accumulating evidence that we have entered a new phase in the political cycle, substantially more favorable to the Democrats.
This survey sees a collapse of the Republican brand at almost all levels. Negatives associated with the Republican Party have not been this high since right after they lost the country in 2008. Their presumptive nominee flirts with a 50 percent negative rating and may now represent a big drag on the national party.
President Obama nears the 50 percent mark and is now just four points away from what he achieved in 2008. Democrats have newly consolidated the progressive voters of the Rising American Electorate who were responsible for Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008. These voters–unmarried women, young voters, and minorities–dropped off in 2010 and lagged throughout 2011. They have returned in a big way for Democrats, led by a resurgence and re-engagement of unmarried women. Only young voters have not been re-consolidated, which is either a problem or an opportunity.
Seniors, who abandoned Democrats in 2010, have come back two surveys in a row and suburban swing voters watch the Republican primary debate with growing alienation from the Republican Party. The tax issue, a presumptive Republican advantage, has moved dramatically in favor of the Democrats.
These results may not simply be the result of a spot of good economic news and rough news cycles for Republican nominees, but the beginning of long-term structural changes that will characterize the 2012 election cycle.
Recent controversies over Planned Parenthood and contraception will not revive the Republican’s standing, indeed, the opposite may be true, as this survey shows voters disagree with them on principle and wonder why at a time of great economic distress, Republicans are consumed with denying birth control coverage for women.
This survey provides fair warning to the Republican Party that they may be losing the country.

Kos makes an important point in his latest post:

In the idealized version of the GOP primary, establishment Republicans would curry favor with their Wall Street pals while sending coded dog whistles to their foot soldiers–on race, immigration, reproductive freedoms, etc. Those dog whistles would motivate the GOP base without revealing their true radical nature to the American mainstream. It was a genius system while it worked, one that saw no parallel on the progressive side.
But the days of the dog whistle are over. The election of President Barack Obama created an entire cottage industry trying to prove how un-American and Kenyan he supposedly is, while Republicans like Rep. Pete Hoekstra run blatantly anti-Asian ads. Republicans laugh about electrocuting immigrants who will cut off your head in the desert if they’re not stopped, while passing laws openly hostile to brown people. Attacks on homosexuals have escalated to new hysterical highs as society becomes more tolerant and open to equality [and] while many conservatives were disgusted at sex for pleasure, at least they had the good sense to publicly pretend that their entire motivation was to save fetuses. But of course, that mask is off. What they want is to control female sexuality, and the hell with any candidate who doesn’t scream it from the rooftops.
….every day that this race continues is a day in which base conservatives demand their candidates–including that former “moderate” Romney–pledge vocal and overt fealty to an agenda so outside the mainstream, that independents are flocking to the Democratic Party.

Kos is right that this represents a dramatic change, one with potentially substantial effects on the struggle between the two political parties.

From his New York Magazine column yesterday:

The unpredictable Republican presidential race has taken another surprising turn as recent numbers show Mongol warlord Genghis Khan seizing the lead in national polls of likely GOP primary voters. Benefiting from widespread doubts about Mitt Romney’s authenticity and ideological commitment, Genghis has changed the shape of the race by sounding sharp populist themes that resonate with supporters of the tea party. “Mitt Romney wants to manage Washington, D.C.,” he told an enthusiastic crowd in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I want to burn it to the ground, slay its inhabitants, and stack their skulls in pyramids reaching to the sky.”
…Genghis’s surge to the top of the polls began after a recent debate in Williamsburg, Mississippi. After moderator Brian Williams questioned if his popular campaign promise to not only defeat President Obama but to enslave his family was racially insensitive, Genghis angrily replied that he enslaves the families of all his defeated rivals, regardless of race. Then, in a dramatic touch that reminded many Republicans of Ronald Reagan’s famous I-paid-for-this-microphone moment, he charged down from the stage on horseback, decapitated Williams, and displayed his head before the roaring crowd. At a post-debate focus group led by pollster Frank Luntz, numerous attendees praised Genghis for standing up to, as one attendee put it, “the politically correct media.”

Read the whole thing, it’ll make your day.

For a revealing take on the warped spirit of the GOP front-runner-in-waiting, check out Ed Kilgore’s “Santorum’s Rhetorical Surge” at Washington Monthly ‘Political Animal.’ Kilgore pieces together a disturbing portrait of the candidate, “expressing the rawest right-wing sentiments on the campaign trail” from Dan Popkey’s report in the Idaho Statesman. A couple of gems from Santorum’s diatribe at an idaho rally:

“We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority…”
“Don’t you see how they see you? How they look down their nose at the average Americans. These elite snobs!”
“I believe that if we are unsuccessful in this election that we will have failed in that duty and it will have horrendous consequences. … It will be the end of the great experiment in the order of liberty and freedom.”

There’s more. But you get the idea. As Kilgore explains, “Seriously, folks, Ronald Reagan didn’t talk this way. Barry Goldwater went about half this far and was eternally labeled the most extremist major-party candidate in U.S. history. If in 2008 Barack Obama had used this sort of rhetoric about the electoral stakes of victory or defeat, or the nature of the opposition, he would have been accused of introducing Kenyan Mau Mau tactics to American politics. Even now, he’s called a dangerous demagogue for suggesting Wall Street was partially responsible for the recession, or that the richest people on the planet ought to pay higher tax rates than their employees.”
A revealing portrait, especially for those who thought Newt was the point man for Republican nastiness. Kilgore concludes of Santorum’s splenetic rant, “If Mitt Romney had an ounce of real courage, he’d call him on it.” Such are the stakes of 2012.

Ronald Brownstein’s “Obama Is Reassembling the Coalition That Swept Him to Victory” at The Atlantic delineates the breadth and depth of the Obama revival:

The Pew survey, closely tracking last week’s ABC News/Washington Post poll, shows that in a potential general election match-up against Mitt Romney, Obama’s support among many of the electorate’s key groups has converged with his 2008 showing against John McCain. In almost all cases, that represents gains for Obama since polls from last year.
Whether the electorate is viewed by race, gender, partisanship or ideology (or combinations of the above), Obama’s numbers against Romney now closely align with his support against McCain, according to the 2008 exit polls. Overall, the Pew survey put Obama ahead of Romney by 52 percent to 44 percent, close to his actual 53 percent to 46 percent victory over McCain.
On the broadest measure, Pew found Obama attracting 44 percent of whites (compared to 43 percent in 2008) and 79 percent of non-whites (compared to 80 percent in 2008). In the Pew survey, Obama attracted 49 percent of whites with at least a four year college degree (compared to 47 percent against McCain) and 41 percent of whites without one (compared to 40 percent in 2008).

Brownstein goes on to note an “almost exact” reversion to 2008 figures along ideological lines, with Obama doing the same with liberals, moderates, Republicans, Democrats and self-described Independents. In match-ups with Romney, Obama’s support from white men without a college degree is down 5 points from his margin over McCain in 2008, but he has offsetting gains with white women of all educational levels. Brownstein reports that Romney is also tanking with Independents and tea party-followers, mostly because of his inconsistency on issues and his elitist image.
Brownstein concludes that “The deterioration of Romney’s personal image, and Obama’s improved standing among the groups at the core of his 2008 coalition” indicate that Romney will have tough time reconstructing a winning image — if he gets the GOP nomination.