Arizona is starting to look like blue territory. Latino voters are wielding new clout, even on the Republican side. John Nichols reports in The Nation:

Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearse, the author of that state’s draconian anti-immigrant legislation, was removed from office in a recall election that saw the right-wing Republican defeated by moderate Republican Jerry Lewis. Randy Parraz, the co-founder of Citizens for a Better Arizona, the group that organized the recall drive, said: “This election shows that such extremist behavior will not be rewarded, and will be held accountable.”

Andrei Cherny, Arizona Democratic Party chairman (and TDS Advisory Board member), issued the following statement:

“Tonight, mainstream Arizona dealt a bitter blow to extremism. In choosing Greg Stanton as Phoenix’s mayor, in electing Jonathan Rothschild as Tucson’s mayor, and in recalling Senate President Russell Pearce, the voters have launched a new era of responsible leadership.
“I congratulate Greg Stanton and Jonathan Rothschild, two honorable public servants who share the voters’ priorities for their cities. For the first time in a generation, there will be Democratic mayors in both Phoenix and Tucson — a victory not just for Democrats but for every citizen who cares about the future of these great cities. And I especially congratulate the voters of Legislative District 18 for their courageous decision to stop Russell Pearce’s reckless reign of power over their district, the state Senate and the state of Arizona. Voters are fed up with overreach, abuse of power and attacks on common sense. They expect leaders who will focus on a stronger economy, safer streets and better schools. Tonight, voters are the real winners.”

Other Democratic victories in AZ included: Daniel Valenzuela, Phoenix City Council; Paul Cunningham, Tucson City Council; Regina Romero, Tucson City Council; Shirley Scott, Tucson City Council; and John Williams, Surprise City Council.

Thomas B. Edsall argues in his “The Politics of Austerity” in the New York Times Opinion pages that Republicans may be “playing with fire” for themselves, as well as for the nation. First, observes Edsall:

As the national debt grew from $10.6 trillion when Obama took office to $13.7 trillion on Election Day 2010, the stage was set for a conservative revival. Conservatives successfully shifted the focus of American politics to the twin themes of debt and austerity — with a specific attack on means-tested entitlement programs.
The Republican Party, after winning back control of the House in 2010, has reverted to the penny-pinching of an earlier era, the green eyeshade Grand Old Party of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, advocating a “root canal” approach to governance evident in the first budget passed by the Republican-controlled House — the Paul Ryan “path to prosperity” budget with $4 trillion in cuts — and the subsequent Aug. 2 debt ceiling agreement.

Edsall argues that “The new embattled partisan environment allows conservatives to pit …those dependent on safety-net programs against those who see such programs as eating away at their personal income and assets.” Edall notes further, how “The conservative agenda, in a climate of scarcity, racializes policy making, calling for deep cuts in programs for the poor.

…The beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately black and Hispanic. In 2009, according to census data, 50.9 percent of black households, 53.3 percent of Hispanic households and 20.5 percent of white households received some form of means-tested government assistance, including food stamps, Medicaid and public housing.
Less obviously, but just as racially charged, is the assault on public employees. “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” declared Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.
For black Americans, government employment is a crucial means of upward mobility. The federal work force is 18.6 percent African-American, compared with 10.9 percent in the private sector. The percentages of African-Americans are highest in just those agencies that are most actively targeted for cuts by Republicans: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 38.3 percent; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 42.4 percent; and the Education Department, 36.6 percent.

Edsall succinctly defines the salient principle of ‘austerity politics’: “Once austerity dominates the agenda, the only question is where the ax falls.” But he also sees Dems having leverage in conservative overconfidence:

Still, conservatives have a tendency to overestimate public support for their agenda and consequently to overreach: recall the two government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996; the 1998 Clinton impeachment; and the Ryan budget, which gave Democrats a recent victory in upstate New York.
…Republicans are playing with fire, though, when they threaten American standing in the world, as they did in provoking Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating to AA+ from AAA in August. Confidence in Congressional Republicans fell 36 points after the debt ceiling debacle, compared with a 22-point drop for Mr. Obama.

In Edsall’s view, however, Dems can be faulted for weak messaging, which allows the tax and spend meme to stick to their party, alienating a good many swing voters. Edsall stops short of offering solutions in his post. But his post helps clarify what Dems should emphasize more sharply in their attack messaging, as well as in shoring up their defenses.

In The New York Times Sunday Review TDS Co-Editor William Galston makes the case for mandatory voting. Noting that 31 nations have some form of mandatory voting, with half of them also providing an enforcement mechanism, Galston highlights the example of Australia, which has some cultural characteristics similar to the U.S. and over 85 years experience with the requirement.:

…Alarmed by a decline in voter turnout to less than 60 percent in 1922, Australia adopted mandatory voting in 1924, backed by small fines (roughly the size of traffic tickets) for nonvoting, rising with repeated acts of nonparticipation. The law established permissible reasons for not voting, like illness and foreign travel, and allows citizens who faced fines for not voting to defend themselves.
The results were remarkable. In the 1925 election, the first held under the new law, turnout soared to 91 percent. In recent elections, it has hovered around 95 percent. The law also changed civic norms. Australians are more likely than before to see voting as an obligation. The negative side effects many feared did not materialize. For example, the percentage of ballots intentionally spoiled or completed randomly as acts of resistance remained on the order of 2 to 3 percent.

Galston fleshes out three basic arguments for mandatory voting in the U.S.: the need for more citizen responsibility, the need for broader participation of demographic groups and that it would reduce polarization. He adds that it would improve our dismally-low turnout rates in non-presidential years and it could lead to a more serious discussion of the issues during campaigns, among other benefits. He concludes with a challenge to the states:

The United States Constitution gives the states enormous power over voting procedures. Mandating voting nationwide would go counter to our traditions (and perhaps our Constitution) and would encounter strong state opposition. Instead, a half-dozen states from parts of the country with different civic traditions should experiment with the practice, and observers — journalists, social scientists, citizens’ groups and elected officials — would monitor the consequences.

An interesting idea. Perhaps one of those states could experiment with a tax credit for voters, in effect a penalty for nonvoters. Galston doesn’t discuss the difficulty of enacting such legislation, with Republicans across the country more interested in ‘reforms’ to suppress voting. More likely, states where Dems hold the governorship and majorities in the state legislature will be the first to experiment with it.

The New Republic brings together essays from 10 progressives in “Liberalism and Occupy Wall Street: a TNR Symposium,” which provides insightful and nuanced analyses of the Occupy Wall St. movement. It’s an excellent forum, in that it includes a full spectrum of Democratic thinking, pro to con and a range of perspectives in between.
After The New Republic published an editorial that took a skeptical view of the protests, several of its writers posted commentaries that took a favorable view of the demonstrations, including TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, John Judis and Timothy Noah. The subsequent forum features additional posts by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, Paul Berman, Will Marshall, Todd Gitlin, David Greenberg, Fred Seigel, Michael Kazin, Franklin Foer and Matt Yglesias. A sampling of excerpts:
Will Marshall’s “How Occupy Wall Street Will Hurt Liberals” provides a highly skeptical view, explaining, “…The protests don’t seem to be swelling into a mass movement. And they’re being hijacked by the usual congeries of lefty fringe groups, which are diluting the Occupiers’ most compelling message–that America is increasingly a land of unequal opportunity where hard work and self-reliance are no longer rewarded. Most important, though, the counterweight theory itself is flawed.”
In “Why I Support Occupy Wall St.,” Paul Berman writes “Occupy Wall Street and its sleeping-bag neo-hippies and its costumed street thespians and the touchingly hand-written placards and generally the display of eccentricity and impudence have focused America’s attention for a fleeting moment on economic wrongs and inequalities. How wonderful!”
“How Democrats Can Make Common Cause with Occupy Wall Street ,” by William Galston takes a different slant: “Many pundits are asking whether the Democratic Party and the White House should “embrace” the Occupy Wall Street movement. The question is poorly posed. The real issue is the nature of the problems that now confront us and the most effective response to them. The party and the administration should make common cause with OWS to the extent that doing so is consistent with an agenda and message that Democrats can take to the country next year with a reasonable hope of rallying majority support.”
Fred Siegel casts his take with the skeptics, adding “In their zeal to recapture the spirit of the 1960s, the Occupy Wall Streeters are replicating the very processes that produced the current crack-up of liberalism…It’s not just that the Occupy Wall Streeters are filled with hopes of recreating the spirit of the 60s. It’s that they are literally recreating the follies of the 60s in miniature.”
Ruy Teixeira explains “Why a Majority of Americans Are Getting Behind Occupy Wall St.“, noting “…Among Americans who have heard of the OWS movement, favorable views outnumber unfavorable by a margin of more than two to one. OWS is saying out loud what a lot of Americans are already feeling. The time is right for an outbreak of aspirational populism–OWS is now twice as popular as the Tea Party–and liberals should hop on board.”
We encourage everyone interested in the OWS protests to read all of the contributions to the symposium. All in all, The New Republic deserves plaudits for doing something well that is not done enough — providing a broad array of views on a critical issue from some of the leading progresssive thinkers. In this way, supporters and critics alike can gain better understanding of adversarial viewpoints, while strengthening their own arguments.

New public opinion data indicates that Americans want more just economic polices, and they know where economic injustice is coming from. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his current ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

In the latest CBS/New York Times poll, by an overwhelming 40-point margin, the public endorses the idea that money and wealth in the country should be more fairly distributed (66 percent) over the idea that the current distribution is fair (26 percent).

And the public is quite clear about who is and is not responsible for economic policies favoring the rich:

These different priorities are not likely to escape public notice. In the same poll, just 28 percent said the Obama administration favored the rich, while 23 percent said it favored the middle class, 17 percent thought it favored the poor, and 21 percent thought all classes were treated equally.
That starkly contrasts with public assessments of conservatives in Congress. Almost 7 in 10 (69 percent) thought congressional Republicans favored the rich, compared to just 9 percent who thought they favored the middle class, 2 percent who thought they favored the poor, and a mere 15 percent who thought they treated all classes equally.

This opinion data helps to explain why conservatives and Republicans are adamantly opposed to the OWS demonstrations. As Teixeira concludes, “…That’s the real reason they don’t like Occupy Wall Street. The movement reminds the public of some very real things they don’t like about our economy–and the role of conservatives in stopping any real change.”

Elizabeth Warren’s Massachusetts candidacy for U.S. Senate is an easy sell for progressive Democrats, but WaPo’s Dana Milbank does a solid job of summarizing her appeal in broader terms. Milbank’s post is a good short-read, clip and share for Warren’s supporters looking to win swing voters. From Milbank’s article:

…Elizabeth Warren, the former adviser to President Obama who is now trying to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown, is no mere professor, or candidate. She is a phenomenon.
The source of the ardor is no mystery: Warren’s unapologetic populism and her fervent belief that corporations should be held to account for the economic collapse. Part Pat Moynihan, part Erin Brockovich, she has revived the energy of the left in a way no other Democrat has, including President Obama.

Milbank, quotes from a Warren speech: “We live in an America that has hammered, chipped and squeezed the middle class,” she told a crowd in Newton, Mass., while the government “has said to large corporations that you don’t have to pay anything in taxes.” From Milbank’s interview with Warren:

Warren has no interest in going to Washington to be “slow and polite,” she told me. She wants to go to fight corporate excess, because “the people who brought us the financial collapse have now doubled down” by resisting attempts to re-regulate business.
“The idea of going to the Senate to be the hundredth least senior person in a nonfunctional organization is not what attracts me,” she said. “I see going to the Senate as an opportunity to expand the platform” and as a way of “leading the charge.”

Clearly Warren’s candidacy provides a long-missing populist voice and vision for Dems. As Milbank observes, Warren’s election could mean that “…Democrats will no longer play by Marquess of Queensbury rules while their opponents disembowel them…what dispirited liberals are looking for is heat — somebody who believes, as Warren often puts it, that “some fights are worth having.””
In the comments following Milbank’s article, ‘Roaxle’ notes that Warren “coined the phrase ‘tricks and traps’ to describe bank policies. We knew we were getting screwed; she put it into the words we didn’t have.” The rising tide of populist resentment of abuse and corruption in the financial services industry being expressed in the Occupy Wall St. demonstrations suggest that Warren’s candidacy is right on time.
As Milbank notes, she is close to even in the polls. But no one should be surprised if her opponent, Sen. Scott Brown, gets blank check support from the financial services industry and its mega-rich right-wing beneficiaries, who are likely to make defeating Warren a priority. Those interested in helping Warren level the odds, should click here and here.

President Obama’s 2008 victories in VA, NC and FL have taught the political commentariat to be a tad wary of overgeneralizing about regional electoral predispositions. And yet there are strategic considerations that come with every region. Toward that end, Sasha Abramsky’s “The Democratic Plan to Recapture the West ” in The Nation provides some invaluable insights for the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.
Reporting from the Project New West Summit, a gathering of mountain west progressives, Abramsky recounts the litany of economic distress currently afflicting several western states and puts it into recent historical context:

In 2008, the economic malaise helped push much of this region into Barack Obama’s camp in the presidential election, and contributed to the Democratic victories in both houses of Congress. Increasingly urban–the combined population of Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City has grown by 38 percent since 2000, according to research carried out by University of Nevada in Las Vegas sociologists–and increasingly an ethnic pastiche, the interior West was no longer a reliably conservative voting bloc.
But in 2010, despite the urbanizing trends, that same malaise played to the Republicans’ advantage. With fewer people voting, and with those who did vote disproportionately allied with the GOP, Democrats in the region lost many Congressional seats and statehouses.
Although political leaders tout the region’s moderation and pragmatism–its resistance to extremes, its ability to negotiate workable budgets even in the face of partisan sparring–the Tea Party organized early and fiercely in the West. The anti-tax rebellions that have morphed into an anti-government monster also originated largely in the West, as have recent swells of anti-immigrant sentiment. (The Tea Party did, however, receive a bloody nose in Nevada, Colorado and Washington, where extreme GOP candidates fell to Democratic incumbents in 2010 Senate races.)

Despite the rise of the tea party and the accompanying government-bashing irrationality, pragmatic, forward-looking policies have emerged in the western states, as Abramsky notes:

Yet amid the nastiness, many of the country’s most innovative environmental and water management measures are coming out of the West. Colorado, for example, recently passed legislation converting all state-run coal power plants to natural gas. Many of the region’s states have, via the initiative process, raised their minimum wages in recent years. Changing demographics are giving more power to cities and to progressive Democrats. And despite all the hardship there’s still a can-do optimism that’s fairly pervasive in the region. The historian Wallace Stegner once noted that the West is “the native home of hope,” and while that emotion has taken quite a beating in recent years, it hasn’t entirely vanished.

Conceding that “For many residents in the region, the battle for 2012 is about basic economic survival,” while noting the region’s embrace of innovative policies at the local level, Abramsky quotes Project New West President Jill Hanauer: “Now more than ever, the nation should look west for new ideas. We vote for the person, not the party; the policy position and leadership, not the ideology.”
Political leaders attending the Summit echoed the need for the western states to continue to embrace innovative development policies:

Repeatedly, summit participants–such as Senators Harry Reid, Tom and Mark Udall, and Mike Bennet, as well as influential House members like Colorado’s Diana DeGette–emphasized the need to generate clean energy and biotech jobs, to educate more people up to and beyond the college level, and to secure federal investment in large-scale infrastructure projects. Such investment, they argued, was the only way to bring impoverished and technologically underserved rural areas into a more prosperous era, and to generate large-scale clean-energy projects capable of competing with fossil fuels and the nuclear industry.
Such a concerted effort to kick-start the region’s economy was, they also argued, the surest way to bring Western independent voters back to the Democratic Party in large enough numbers to secure Obama’s re-election. Since independents will likely choose America’s next president, this is hardly an insignificant task.

As for the west’s big-picture political potential,

“The West is the focus of the presidential election,” Colorado Senator Mike Bennet told The Nation, and “Colorado is a critically important state.” If Obama wins Colorado’s nine Electoral College votes, he can afford to lose Ohio; if he wins Colorado plus New Mexico, Nevada, Montana and Arizona–admittedly a long shot–the president could, in theory, be re-elected even without the large battleground states of Ohio and Florida. Winning the West is also crucial to securing control of the Senate: if Democrats hope to retain their Senate majority in 2012, they will have to hold seats in New Mexico, Montana and elsewhere.
Beyond the area’s pre-eminent role in 2012 strategic thinking, its importance is increasing with each election cycle. According to Census figures, the West is experiencing rapid population growth. Nowhere is this more the case than in Nevada, which has the fastest rate of growth in the country. For the first 119 years of the state’s existence it had one Congressman; now the state has four. As a result, the party that puts down the deepest roots in the region will reap dividends for decades to come.
Progressive Western strategists grouped around the Project New West leadership, as well as many political leaders, think they see a way to do this: emphasize a combination of environmentally sensitive and pro-growth policies; talk about education; push public investments in roads, bridges and water pipelines; and reach out to the “minority” voters who increasingly constitute majorities.
These strategists also think that the GOP line in the sand on barring tax hikes for millionaires isn’t playing well here. Polling shows the public is deeply dissatisfied with the preservation of tax benefits for the wealthiest few at the expense of basic social insurance and safety net programs for the many…

Abramsky notes that the impressive western turnouts linked to Occupy Wall St. that were also recently cited in Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight post result from the concern for economic fairness shared by many westerners — in particular the free ride in taxation that the Republicans are demanding for millionaires. “The West could be America’s firewall against GOP extremism,” Abramsky concludes.

Any Democrat called to challenge deficit hawk arguments against investing in jobs will find an excellent resource in Ari Berman’s article in The Nation, “How the Austerity Class Rules Washington.” Berman has distilled some of the better arguments from top progressive experts, begining with his stage-setting opener:

In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.
The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis–when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them–did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?
An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class–an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Berman i.d.’s the deficit hawk elite spokespersons and organizations and then he describes how they leverage influence:

Read more…