It seems to have escaped MSM attention, but congressional dithering about the depressed housing market and the home foreclosure epidemic could be a sleeper issue with voters. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira observes in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages:

…In a new CBS/New York Times poll, 53 percent say the federal government should be helping people who are having trouble paying their mortgages compared to 40 percent who disagree.
And a solid plurality (45 percent) say the government should be doing more to help the housing market improve compared to just 16 percent who think the government should be doing less and 30 percent who believe the government is currently doing the right amount.

As Teixeira concludes, “The sorry state of the housing market may be off the current congressional agenda. But it remains very much alive among the many who feel its effects everyday.”

Mark Engler has a revealing post up at Dissent, “Boycott Power and the Fall of Glenn Beck,” which ought to open up a new era of political activism for those who are looking for ways around tiresome political gridlock. As Engler explains Beck’s demise as King of wingnut TV:

One can find a variety of explanations for his departure. Observers invariably note Beck’s declining ratings. (According to the New Republic, his viewership fell “from an average of 2.9 million in January 2010 to 1.8 million in January 2011.”) Some also cite political reasons for him and Fox splitting ways. Hendrik Hertzberg speculated at the New Yorker that Beck was bad for morale at the network because he became an embarrassment for those on staff who consider themselves “news professionals.” More recently, Leslie Savan argued at the Nation that Beck was expendable because “he’s served his purpose for Fox and its subsidiary, the Republican Party.” Once the backlash against Obama was well underway and more respectable faces of extreme conservatism were in power–folks like Paul Ryan and Scott Walker–Beck was no longer needed.
These things may have been part of the story. But, if we’re handing out credit, I think we need to take time to recognize the innovative and relentless boycott that set out to strip Glenn Beck of his sponsors. The boycott was amazingly effective at doing just that–ultimately convincing several hundred corporations (including major names such as Wal-Mart, GEICO, and Procter & Gamble) to agree not to advertise on his show.
The online advocacy group ColorOfChange.org first launched the boycott in August 2009, after Beck stated that President Obama was a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” Following this, the activists did a great job of documenting the crazy and offensive things that Beck would say, and then presenting advertisers with the evidence. They got 285,000 people to sign a petition to Beck’s sponsors, and they used online tools to transmit people’s concerns to the targeted corporations. Advertisers, generally averse to controversy, left in droves.

Impressive, and it gets better. As Engler notes “ColorOfChange.org crunched some numbers and estimated that the boycott was costing Fox News more than $500,000 per week.” The boycott was shrewdly targeted, as Engler observes:

There are some lessons here about what makes a good boycott. The ColorOfChange.org drive wasn’t about getting the average American not to watch the show. It was different from the endless array of lefty boycotts that tell people not to shop at this store or buy that product, campaigns that–beyond those commandments–have no real plan for winning their demands or even for quantifying the impact they’ve made. The Beck boycott was far more strategic. Its organizers identified wary advertisers as their point of leverage, targeted specific corporations that were buying ads, and used the announcement of each new company that agreed to withdraw as a way to build momentum. By March 2011 the New York Daily News reported that “the number of advertisers currently boycotting Beck’s program is now closing in at 400.”

Engler notes that MSM explanations for Beck’s demise credit myriad factors and tended to diss the boycott. But Engler makes a strong case, and activists looking for new avenues to battle the right wing obstructionists should give his piece a read.
MLK once said advocates of social justice should do two things in every campaign: register voters and conduct boycotts. In recent years progressives have done some voter registration (not enough) but very little boycotting. Apparently the time is right to pick up the slack.

In yesterday’s edition of Daily Kos, Chris Bowers had a pitch and a good point to make — and it’s still cross-post worthy:

Today is the last day of the second fundraising quarter in 2011. Hundreds of federal candidates are racing to fill their campaign coffers so that they can boast as large a total as possible in their next FEC disclosure report. The idea is that the larger their fundraising total, the more seriously they will be taken by party higher-ups, the better coverage they will receive from political reporters, and the more fear they will put into electoral challengers both real and potential.
Due to the political ramifications of these fundraising totals, today’s frenzied quest for donations is undeniably an important event. However, it’s also very abstract and insidery. Candidate fundraising totals are completely disconnected from the reality of the lives of the voters who will, eventually, determine the fate of the political careers of these candidates. No swing voter is out there thinking, “Well, I haven’t gotten a raise in three years, but I’m voting for the guy who had a huge Q2 FEC haul.”
Contributing to the Wisconsin recall elections is very different. For one thing, the recall elections are happening this summer, rather than in 2012. Further, there is nothing abstract about it. The Republican budget went into effect yesterday, causing tens of thousands of Wisconsinites to lose their collective bargaining rights. Teachers are already being laid off too, including several hundred just in Milwaukee.
Right now, fundraising in Wisconsin is not a contest over favorable coverage from beltway rags, scaring candidates out of campaigns, or other insider positioning for 2012. Instead, contributions to Democratic recall candidates in Wisconsin will go directly into what is already the end-stage of biggest electoral fight–and arguably political fight–of the year.
As I wrote yesterday, it’s a fight that can prove a determined, people-powered movement can defeat the wave of austerity conservative politicians are pushing at the behest of billionaires and big corporations.
You have probably been bombarded with fundraising requests today, but I humbly ask that you contribute $1 to each of the Democratic candidates in the recall elections on top of what you have already given. When you do, you will be joining with nearly 18,000 of your fellow Kossacks in one of the most remarkable grassroots fights this country has seen in a long while.
Please contribute $1 to each of the Democratic candidates in the Wisconsin recall elections. The FEC deadline is important, but right now what’s happening in Wisconsin is much more so.

Supporting the restoration of collective bargaining rights in a bellwether state — a great way to celebrate America’s patriotic holiday weekend.

John Nichols’ post, “Democracy is Coming to Ohio: 1.3 Million Voters Force Referendum to Restore Labor Rights” in The Nation does a solid job of updating the popular uprising against GOP union-bashing.
Nichol’s focuses on Ohio, where Republican Governor John Kasich is undoubtedly grateful that his state does not have a recall provision, which would have put his tenure at serious risk. But he can’t be too happy that Ohio voters can repeal legislation he sponsored to eradicate collective bargaining rights for state employees. As Nichols writes:

Opponents of Ohio Governor John Kasich’s push to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights–as part of a national push by newly elected Republican governors to silence opposition to their cuts in funding for public education and services — needed to collect 231,000 valid signatures to force a referendum that would override anti-labor legislation enacted by Kasich and his allies.
That was a tall order. But the labor and community groups that have come together to defend public employees, teachers, schools and services have exceeded it –by more than one million signatures.
With petitions carrying 1,298,301 signatures packed in 1,500 boxes carried by a semi-truck, organizers of the We Are Ohio campaign and thousands of their allies marched to the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office in Columbus Wednesday–one day before the deadline–to file the paperwork necessary to force a November vote on overturning Ohio Senate Bill 5 and Kasich’s attack on labor rights.

The Ohio GOP also has cause for concern:

Wednesday’s festive Million Signature March–complete with bagpipes, drum lines and antique fire truck blaring their sirens offered a taste of what is to come in a referendum campaign that labor leaders say will be the most energetic the state has seen in decades–perhaps since the famous 1958 referendum in which historically Republican Ohio rejected an anti-labor “right-to-work” law and swept Democrats into the governorship and other state posts.

Putting the GOP’s nation-wide union-bashing campaign in perspective, Nichols explains:

But the anti-labor push met with fierce opposition, first in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker’s proposed legislation drew mass demonstrations of as many as 150,000 people outside the state capitol in Madison. The demonstrations in Lansing, Indianapolis, Columbus and other capital cities quickly grew in size. But so, too, did the recognition that electoral strategies would need to be coupled with the protests.
In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of signatures were gathered in petition drives that have forced recall elections against six Republican senators who backed Walker’s agenda. Primary elections associated with those recalls will begin July 12, with the runoff elections in August. If three GOP senators are removed (and if three Democratic senators who have been targeted by Republicans retain their seats), control of the state Senate will flip to the Democrats and Walker will no longer have complete control of the governing process.

And putting the ‘We Are Ohio’ campaign in historic perspective, Nichols adds “The Ohio petition drive, which began a statewide phenomenon, has yielded the largest number of signatures ever gathered in the state’s history. In fact, the almost 1.3 million signatures filed Wednesday represents one of the most remarkable examples of petitioning for the redress of grievances–and of popular democracy–in American history.”

Writing in Time magazine’s ‘Swampland’ blog, Michael Scherer takes an insightful look at President Obama’s messaging options, going forward into the 2012 elections. Schere quotes TDS Co-Editor Stanley Greenberg, pollster for President Bill Clinton, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Israel’s Ehud Barak, explaining that leaders have an instinct “to prove that their economic policies have worked.” But it’s only a good strategy when the economy is booming. Scherer adds,

In times of plenty, that gut feeling is right. The nation cheered the gangbusters growth under Ronald Reagan in 1984, and the mid-1990s Clinton economic boom. But when the economy is sour, politicians who litigate the past risk sounding tone-deaf to the troubles of the present. This is why Greenberg is now speaking up. He fears President Obama may make a huge mistake by trying to convince voters he saved the economy from a much worse fate. “No one is going to give you much credit for what you have done for this recovery,” says Greenberg, who has been testing messages in focus groups and polls for Democrats to use in the coming election. “Saying the economy is starting to make progress is bad.”

Scherer adds that recent projections of low economic growth (under 3%) and 8.5+% joblessness, with 4 out of 5 Americans rating the economy as “poor” pretty much end Obama’s hopes for running as an economic savior. Still, Scherer feels the president has a “backward-looking message” bragging about job-creation, which Greenberg also believes it is the wrong message at this juncture, as was the “car in the ditch” metaphor of last year.
Obama Advisor David Axelrod, on the other hand, argues that the president has to put the economy in historic context: He has to emphasize his economic accomplishments, as well as GOP responsibility for for the economic disaster he inherited and the current gridlock as part of the president’s message strategy.
According to Scherer, Greenberg’s polling indicates that economic discontent among voters goes back a decade and now they don’t want to hear assertions that the recovery is underway. Scherer reports that polling now indicates that they are more interested in “long-term fixes, like rebuilding the middle class and taking on China, or moving beyond the politics of blame.” He adds that “Obama has shifted to a message of ‘winning the future,’ pushing an ‘innovation’ agenda.”
The goal now for Obama strategists, says Scherer, is to avoid making the 2012 election “a referendum on the last three years” and get voters focused on which candidate is more qualified to lead America into the future. The Republicans are hoping to sell the meme that President Obama has failed to create jobs. As Stan Greenberg explains the challenge ahead, “If they make the election about ‘Did we get the stimulus right?,’ and we make the election about how to create jobs, we win that. That could be a trap for them.”

Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies of The Brookings Institution, has a post that should be of interest to Dem candidates and campaigns: “Ten Ways Social Media Can Improve Campaign Engagement and Reinvigorate American Democracy.”
West explains:

…Using social networking outreach tools such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter, a number of Democratic and Republican candidates raised money, identified supporters, built electoral coalitions, and brought people in closer touch with the electoral process. Despite social networking’s track record for generating democratic engagement, though, it has proven difficult to sustain political interest and activism online over time and move electronic engagement from campaigns to governance…

Brookings convened a panel of experts on using digital resources in politics to address reviving political engagement among citizens. It would be good if Dems considered the panel’s ten suggestions for using social media, which include, according to West’s report:

Future Political Effectiveness Is Going to Be Based on Social Networks Because that is Where “Trust Filters” Operate. In a world of information over-flow, it is hard for people to evaluate competing claims. Politicians often disagree not just on interpretations, but on the facts. Increasingly, people are using their personal networks to fact-check claims, evaluate the quality of information, and alert them to what is important in the world. As pointed out by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, these developments allow individuals and their networks to “act like broadcasters and publishers” and therefore transform the nature of political communications. Those seeking to engage citizens and get them involved in the political process must win the trust of social networks to be influential during the contemporary period. Future political influence is going to be network-based because those are the filters used to access and evaluate political information. Unless you can get past those trust filters, you will not be able to engage the public and influence the course of electoral events.

Read more…

Many have noted the irony of GOP front-runner Mitt Romney having to downplay his most impressive achievement, ‘Romneycare.’ As his attack ads blasting President Obama for weak job-creation begin to appear, however, Romney has an even more troublesome record that he will hide, distort and deny, — his utter failure to create jobs as Governor of Massachusetts.
As Andrew Sum and Joseph McLaughlin, director and research associate respectively of the Center for Market Studies at Northeastern University, noted in a Boston Globe article back in 2007,

…Our analysis reveals a weak comparative economic performance of the state over the Romney years, one of the worst in the country.
On all key labor market measures, the state not only lagged behind the country as a whole, but often ranked at or near the bottom of the state distribution. Formal payroll employment in the state in 2006 was still 16,000 or 0.5 percent below its average level in 2002, the year immediately prior to the start of the Romney administration. Massachusetts ranked third lowest on this key job generation measure and would have ranked second lowest if Hurricane Katrina had not devastated the Louisiana economy. Manufacturing payroll employment throughout the nation declined by nearly 1.1 million or 7 percent between 2002 and 2006, but in Massachusetts it declined by more than 14 percent, the third worst record in the country.
While the number of employed people over age 16 in the United States rose by nearly 8 million, or close to 6 percent, between 2002 and 2006, the number of employed residents in the Commonwealth is estimated to have modestly declined by 8,500. Massachusetts was the only state to have failed to post any gain in its pool of employed residents. The aggregate number of people 16 and older either working or looking for work in Massachusetts fell over the Romney years.
We were one of only two states to have experienced no growth in its resident labor force. Again, without the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina on the dispersal of the Louisiana population, Massachusetts would have ranked last on this measure. The decline in the state’s labor force, which was influenced in large part by high levels of out-migration of working-age adults, helped hold down the official unemployment rate of the state. Between July 2002 and July 2006, the US Census Bureau estimated that 222,000 more residents left Massachusetts for other states than came here to live. This high level of net domestic out-migration was equivalent to 3.5 percent of the state’s population, the third highest rate of population loss in the country. Excluding the population displacement effects of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana, Massachusetts would have ranked second highest on this measure. We were a national leader in exporting our population.

The authors go on to note an equally-dismal litany of related economic statistics from Romney’s tenure regarding productivity, income, housing prices and outmigration. As the authors conclude, “Jokes about Massachusetts may receive some half-hearted laughter on the national campaign trail, but few working men and women in Massachusetts should see anything funny about the state’s lackluster economic performance during the Romney years..”
It’s not just his record in elective office. Writing in today’s edition of the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen notes in “The Jobs Issue is Romney’s Weakest issue” that Romney’s much-trumpeted success as a businessman (hedge funds) does not exactly merit kudos for job-creation:

Romney slashed American jobs as if his career depended on it — and it did. Indeed, it’s tempting to wonder how many of those folks in Romney’s new web ad, waiting in the unemployment line, were put there by Romney’s hedge fund?…Romney should also be aware of the fact that the more his campaign focuses on employment, the more Romney leads with his chin. Put simply, the jobs issue is Romney’s weakest issue…The more he pushes this, the more the public should be reminded of Romney’s atrocious record.

Before campaign 2012 is over, Romney may well become the new poster-boy for political denial — with his dodgy record on jobs as exhibit “A.”

From TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s weekly ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American progress web pages:

…In late March, I flagged recent results suggesting that we could be reaching the point where majority support for marriage equality solidifies…I noted a Washington Post/ABC News poll result where 53 percent said it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to get married compared to 44 percent who thought it should be illegal. This was the first time the poll found majority support for marriage equality since it started asking the question in 2003.

No, conservatives, it wasn’t just an outlier, as Teixeira reports:

Since then, two other major public polls have found that a majority of Americans support full marriage equality for same-sex couples. In an April CNN poll, 51 percent thought marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized by law with the same rights as marriages between a man and a woman…And in a May Gallup poll that used almost the same question wording, 53 percent endorsed legalizing marriage for same-sex couples.

Teixeira believes these polls “suggest we have reached the tipping point on this issue,” and he sees larger majorities ahead since “…this position as fair and reasonable” and continued opposition is “…both futile and mean-spirited.” Teixeira adds, “It’s time for conservatives to acknowledge the inevitable: They have lost and tolerance has won…”

RyanCare means you get discount coupons for health insurance instead of medicare. The coupons won’t be guaranteed to cover your insurance premiums and they will automatically pay less and less of your medical costs every year.
Do you really want to give up your Medicare for that?

For a fresh perspective on America’s unemployment problem, check out the Wall St. Journal’s post by Sara Murray, “Jobless Rate Lower or Flat in Most States” and accompanying rollover graphic widget. As Murray’s post explains,

Joblessness declined in nearly half of all U.S. states last month, the Labor Department said Friday.
Compared to a month earlier, unemployment fell in 24 states, rose in 13 and Washington, D.C. and was flat in another 13 states.
The unemployment rate has fallen significantly below the national average of 9.1% in May in 25 states. Rates were largely the same as the national average in 20 states and Washington, D.C. But five states — California, Florida, Michigan, Nevada and Rhode Island — continued to suffer from double-digit unemployment…For the year, 43 states and Washington, D.C. have seen a drop in their unemployment rates. Just four experienced an increase in joblessness and three states had no change.

The post’s color-coded map provides a visual sense of the geography of American joblessness, and mouse hovering reveals the numbers — which states are suffering the highest rates (NV, CA, FL, MS, SC, MI and RI) and the one state that is doing exceptionally well — ND with 3.2 percent unemployment. Don’t everyone pack for North Dakota just yet, however. Apparently there is a serious housing shortage in the midst of the job-creating oil drilling boom. The map widget also includes back and forward arrow widget that gives a nice visual sense of the monthly trend line, which does suggest a slow recovery in many states.
The map does make you wonder if maybe the recovery could benefit from targeting specific states for job creation.