Gerald F. Seib’s “Blue-State Math Is Boon to Obama, Target for GOP” in today’s Wall St. Journal discusses the President’s Electoral College edge: “Specifically, there are 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have voted Democratic in all five presidential elections since 1992. Combined, they carry 242 electoral votes–90% of the votes needed for victory.” Seib also notes Obama’s trouble spots, most notably Ohio, “the juiciest target for Republicans.”
Media Matters for America reports on the Fox News week-long attack on government regulation, ordered by Roger Ailes. Elsewhere, ProPublica’s Marian Wang debunks the myth that government regulation is a job-killer.
In The Nation, John Nichols reviews the arguments for primary challenges to President Obama, noting Ralph Nader’s foray as an activist working inside the Democratic Party to change it. Although many progressives hold Nader’s hard-headed political analysis in high regard, CNN Opinion’s Donna Brazile makes a strong case that the net result of his campaigns thus far has been of great benefit to Republicans.
Lew Daly’s post “The Church of Labor” at Democracy addresses a provocative notion — that “collective bargaining is, ultimately, a victim not just of America’s right-leaning politics and market liberalism, but of America’s pervasive institutional and legal secularism–our so-called “wall of separation” between church and state.”
Republicans favorite tax stat these days is the one about the top 1 percent of all earners paying 40 percent of the taxes, usually followed by the question “isn’t that enough?” Robert Frank has a smart answer to the question in his Wall St. Journal article “Why the Rich Pay 40% of Taxes“: “…the top 1% share of income grew nearly five times faster than their share of taxes..”
On October 1, the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project will hold a major panel discussion on “Election Integrity — Past, Present and Future” at M.I.T.’s Kirsh Auditorium in Cambridge, MA. According to the Keene Sentinel, “The event will host a wide range of panelists from academia, systems and elections offices, and will have a relevance to all Americans with an interest in voting integrity where machines are involved — meaning practically everybody.” Indeed.
NPR’as Pam Fessler’s on line story “Voters May Face Slower Lines In 2012 Elections” suggests that there is more than a little to worry about regarding voting machines: “One of the big concerns is the impact budget cuts will have on voting machines. Most places bought new electronic equipment after the 2000 elections. But Charles Stewart, an election expert at MIT, says this new equipment is much more costly to maintain than the old punch-card and lever machines…”I don’t think many people, myself included, really recognized back a decade ago that this computerized equipment has a relatively short lifespan,” he says…”The worry, of course, is that either machines will fail, causing localities to have to kind of double up or to borrow machines, or not have enough on Election Day…”
In “Analysis: Democrats Hit Reset on Health Care,” Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press writes that Dems are betting a lot on the GOP’s recent fumbles on Medicare. He quotes Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: “This is not a theoretical issue, it is a place where Republicans have taken votes that are very unpopular…It would be foolish of Democrats to waffle on this issue…Cutting Medicare is a much more dicey proposition in the general election. Medicare is popular even among the people who think it’s in trouble.”
Emily Ekins of the libertarian magazine Reason addresses the question “Is Half the Tea Party Libertarian?“, analyzing Reason-Rupe polling data indicating that the tea party is divided between social conservatives and “libertarian-leaners.” The data indicates that the tea partiers are fairly unified on economic questions, but some tea partiers may balk at voting for social conservatives.
Republicans are making a lot of noise about jobs, ‘job-killers’ and job-creation. But James Surowiecki argues in his “Jobs and the GOP” post in the New Yorker that Republican office-holders tend to get more of a free ride on jobs from voters – as a result of low voter expectations. The opposite holds true for Democratic political leaders and Democratic voters.
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham has never provided a voice of sanity on foreign policy in his party. Having advocated military conflict with Iran, he now urges escalating U.S. military confrontation with Pakistan, despite their nuclear weapons, standing army of more than 600K and 500K in reserves. Juan Cole has the takedown here.
Maria Cardona’s “No Casa Blanca for the GOP” at HuffPo may be the definitive dismissal of Republican hopes for winning the Latino vote in 2012.

Michael Tomasky’s “Obama Plays to the Base” in The Daily Beast mulls over the Administration’s strategy and offers an alternative:

…The Obama people feel that amping up the base is their best play. And yet, many will counter, won’t this strategy perforce alienate still more independents? If he spends the year playing identity politics with blacks and Latinos and Jews, he’ll kill himself with those in the middle. Filling in the picture a bit more, Bill Galston posted an ominous piece at The New Republic looking at some Pew polling that shows that “average voters” think of themselves as twice as far from the Democratic Party as they are from the Republican Party. They said the precise opposite in 2005, heading into two elections in which independents gave Democrats majority support.
So how can Obama serve both masters, base and swing? It’s the age-old question, and there aren’t any easy answers…

Tomasky urges Dems to take a closer look at common ground shared by the base and Indies:

…But I do think Democrats often make a terrible mistake in thinking that base Democrats and independents have completely opposing interests. Democrats tend to think of independents as Republicans Lite. This is true on some issues. Independents like deficit reduction, for example–well, that is, they actually like real deficit reduction, not the phony Republican view of deficit reduction, which backs reducing the deficit as long as the cuts kick poor people in the behind one more time and tell rich ones they’re safe.
But independents aren’t that monolithic. Of the 35 or so percent of voters who call themselves independent, according to Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux of Peter Hart Research Associates, about two thirds are basically Democrats or Republicans who just prefer calling themselves independent but whose votes are pretty reliable. That leaves maybe 10 to 15 percent of the electorate that is truly independent–still a big chunk, for sure, and a crucial or perhaps the crucial key to winning most elections. There are two things about these voters, Molyneux says.
First, they take some conservative positions and some progressive ones. Some recent polling data from the Kaiser Family Foundation confirm this. You can see from it that while independents as a group are astonishingly right down the middle between Democrats and Republicans on a number of questions, there are a few on which they’re closer to Democrats, like protecting Social Security and being open to some defense cuts. But there’s something else important to them. “They also want someone who can run things, a person who can make things work,” Molyneux says.
This is what Democrats misunderstand about independent voters. Obama and his people seemed to think that over the summer, independents wanted them to cut a deal with the GOP on the debt ceiling. He’d look moderate, reasonable. So they cut it. Result: they lost about 8 points among independents, who hated the deal because it symbolized dysfunction and because the president looked weak.
Republicans as a rule don’t pander to independents in so slavish a way. Rather than trying to cater to independents’ presumed ideological preferences, Republicans try to say things that will resonate with independents’ emotional posture. Remember Bush in 2004. What did he say to woo independents? “You might not always agree with me, but you know where I stand.” It was a line that traded exactly on this quality independents look for that Molyneux describes. And it worked well enough–the guy won. What Democrats say to independents is precisely the opposite. Democrats say, “You might not know where I stand, but I’m always trying to look like I agree with you!” It’s kind of pathetic. And it’s the same old Democratic error of trying to win people over intellectually rather than emotionally.

Tomasky sees a winning strategy Obama can play:

There is, then, a way for Obama to inspire both the base and swing voters, and it’s absurdly simple: he needs to accentuate the items on which the two groups more or less agree and fight hard for them. I’d call it a radical stylistic posture on behalf of an ideologically modest agenda. There’s something in that for both camps–base and swing–to latch onto. To do that, Obama and his people merely have to start thinking more about the similarities between Democrats and independents than about their differences.

it makes sense. Instead of going crazy trying to figure out what Independents, who are not ideologically monolithic, believe, appeal to the values many of them share with Democrats and emphasize the policies that reflect them as strongly as possible in messaging. There’s no real downside, and it just might make the difference in a close election.

Our 9/20 staff post commented on one of the unintended, beneficial effects of the Citizens United ruling – an affirmation of transparency in financial disclosure of political donations. In his “A Campaign Finance Ruling Turned to Labor’s Advantage” in today’s new York Times, Steven Greenhouse reports on yet another possible upside for Democrats:

Labor unions had initially assailed the ruling, known as Citizens United, for allowing corporations and wealthy donors to vastly expand their spending on campaigns. That has indeed happened, with the proliferation of a new generation of political action committees, known as Super PACs, that can accept unlimited donations.
But the ruling also changed the rules for unions, effectively ending a prohibition on outreach to nonunion households. Now, unions can use their formidable numbers to reach out to sympathetic nonunion voters by knocking on doors, calling them at home and trying to get them to polling places. They can also create their own Super PACs to underwrite bigger voter identification and get-out-the-vote operations than ever before.
…Before the Citizens United ruling, unions were banned from using dues money to reach out to nonmembers in political campaigns, but now unions plan to campaign among the 89 percent of Americans who do not belong to unions. Union officials have long complained that when their foot soldiers knocked on doors in, say, Milwaukee or Columbus, Ohio, they wasted huge amounts of time because they could visit only union members’ homes and often had to skip 90 percent of the houses. Now they can knock on every door on a block.

Instead of funding Democrats in general, the federation is expected to cherry-pick pro-union political candidates, including the occasional Republican. The hope is that this will encourage Democrats to more ardently embrace pro-union policies.
In 2008 unions spent about $200 million to support Democratic candidates. But labor leaders were disappointed in the failure of many Democratic members of congress to support union priorities like the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Greenhouse adds that the federation is expected to set up a ‘super PAC’ that will function year-round, as opposed to only during campaigns. He quotes AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka: “Now we’re going to have a full-time campaign, and that campaign will be able to move, hopefully, from electoral politics to issue advocacy and accountability.”
There is the danger that the decline in union funding for Democratic candidates could lead to a GOP sweep — and and even stronger Republican assault on collective bargaining rights. But it is also possible that the new union policy could encourage Dems to step up and support unions, which may already be reflected in the President’s American Jobs Act, as Trumka suggests.
Greenhouse reports that the politically-active Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has seized the opportunity presented by the Citizens United ruling, sending “thousands of members to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors in blue-collar neighborhoods in Cleveland, Milwaukee and a dozen other cities, aiming to educate and mobilize union and nonunion workers on economic issues.” The union also mobilized a sit-in at the office of GOP Representative Paul D. Ryan to protest his proposals to gut Medicare.
Labor leaders are aware that the Citizens United Ruling is far more beneficial to corporations, with their much deeper pockets. But at least unions are using the ruling to optimize their strategy.

Michael Kazin, author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.” has an interesting article in the Sunday New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?,” which includes insightful observations on how progressives might become more assertive in the Democratic Party. Kazin notes the long evolution of progressive activism into a potent force:

How do we account for the relative silence of the left? Perhaps what really matters about a movement’s strength is the years of building that came before it. In the 1930s, the growth of unions and the popularity of demands to share the wealth and establish “industrial democracy” were not simply responses to the economic debacle. In fact, unions bloomed only in the middle of the decade, when a modest recovery was under way. The liberal triumph of the 1930s was in fact rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”

Looking towards the future, Kazin says the left “will have to figure out how to redefine the old ideal of economic justice for the age of the Internet and relentless geographic mobility.” He envisions a strong role for social activism that doesn’t depend on politicians:

… The left must realize that when progressives achieved success in the past, whether at organizing unions or fighting for equal rights, they seldom bet their future on politicians. They fashioned their own institutions — unions, women’s groups, community and immigrant centers and a witty, anti-authoritarian press — in which they spoke up for themselves and for the interests of wage-earning Americans.
Today, such institutions are either absent or reeling. With unions embattled and on the decline, working people of all races lack a sturdy vehicle to articulate and fight for the vision of a more egalitarian society. Liberal universities, Web sites and non-governmental organizations cater mostly to a professional middle class and are more skillful at promoting social causes like legalizing same-sex marriage and protecting the environment than demanding millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.

As Kazin concludes: “A reconnection with ordinary Americans is vital not just to defeating conservatives in 2012 and in elections to come. Without it, the left will remain unable to state clearly and passionately what a better country would look like and what it will take to get there.”

The following executive summary with key findings of a new report by Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Siefert of Democracy Corps, is cross posted from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:
The latest Democracy Corps survey of the Republican House battleground seats confirms that 2012 will be an explosive year. These Republicans swept into Washington on the tide of a change wave but are now facing what could be a change election with an even higher wave, and these seats are anything but secure. The difference from the last three elections is that this wave seems to be threatening everything in its path.
This is obviously not the best moment to judge the Democrats’ eventual fortunes–with fewer voters identifying as Democrats, with Democrats themselves less enthusiastic about the president, and with his overall approval rating down 7 points and losing independents in these districts. We do not yet know the public’s reaction to the president’s latest initiatives, but there is reason to believe they can help him and the Democrats here.
Whatever else is happening on the Democratic side, the bigger story is the growing vulnerability of the incumbent House Republicans. The mood of the country is deeply pessimistic and voter anger encompasses the Republicans as well, particularly the new House members. This survey in these mostly Obama-2008 districts does not ask generic questions but asks about the incumbent members by name. Consider the following:
Key Findings

Negative personal feelings about the incumbent members have jumped 10 points since March; disapproval of how he or she is handling the job has jumped 7 points.
The percent saying they “can’t re-elect” is up 4 points to 49 percent – compared to just 40 percent who say they “will re-elect because the incumbent is doing a good job and addressing issues important to voters.” This is substantially worse than the position of Democratic incumbents two years ago.
Among independents, disapproval of incumbent Republican House members jumped 12 points, and a large majority of independents (54 to 37 percent) say they “can’t vote to re-elect” the incumbent.
There has been a 9-point rise in the number saying the incumbent will not work with both parties to get things done; a 6-point rise in the number saying their representative does not fight for people in the district.
While the incumbent Republicans are at 50 percent in the named ballot, a slight improvement since March, the gains were produced almost entirely by consolidation of Republicans. They did not improve their vote position with independents.
Attacks on the Republicans in this balanced survey have a dramatic impact on the position of these incumbents. After the attacks and messages–with Medicare figuring centrally–the race for Congress is dead even at 45 to 45 percent. One in ten voters shifts away from these vulnerable incumbents.
“These Republicans swept into Washington on the tide of a change wave but are now facing what could be a change election with an even higher wave, and these seats are anything but secure. The difference from the last three elections is that this wave seems to be threatening everything in its path.”

Larry J. Sabato tweaks the common wisdom about unemployment and presidential elections a bit in his post “Unemployment and Potus 2012: Another Look.” Sabato presents the August unemployment rates for all 50 states in a color-coded by political-leanings chart and offers a provocative analysis:

Barring a massive GOP landslide, does anyone really believe California (12.1%) or Rhode Island (10.6%) will vote Republican? Yet their unemployment rates are in the top eight.
The list of Republican states with relatively low unemployment rates (under 7%) is longer: Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming. If you believe a single one of these states will be won by President Obama, you’re a Democrat in contention for the Optimists Club’s person-of-the-year.
Yes, there are states where the unemployment rate can help or hurt President Obama: The swing states where arguments on the economy may well sway independent voters. Low unemployment in places such as Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia could give the Democrats a boost. On the other hand, high unemployment in Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina could add to Obama’s troubles as he seeks a return victory in those three states. Any Republican nominee is going to make hay out of their high unemployment numbers every time he or she sets foot there.
And note Ohio: The ultimate swing state is the only state in the Union that has the same unemployment rate (9.1%) as the national average.
So, as usual, a sweeping generalization can’t take into account the complexity of American politics. The unemployment rate will be part of the debate in fall 2012, but the more nuanced state data will be more influential — though not determinative — in shaping the outcome.

Sabato makes an important point that the unemployment rate is not always the primary determinant of electoral choice of different states’ voters, in August at least. And it will be interesting to see state by state unemployment-electoral vote correlations after the election. That’s not to say that high unemployment is not an important factor in electoral choice; “It’s just not the alpha and the omega of an election,” as Sabato says.

The Republicans are going to have their hands full, trying to pin the ‘class warfare’ rap on Elizabeth Warren, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. Warren, a product of the working class, does not take a lot of guff from tax-evading fat cats or their GOP minions, as is apparent in this video clip in which she explains why wealthy employers must pay their fair share of taxes. Democratic candidates in particular should take note also of her impassioned delivery, her well-reasoned argument and the response she gets.

Gabriel Thompson’s “How the Right Made Racism Sound Fair–and Changed Immigration Politics” at Colorlines.com goes long and deep into the psychology of conservative lingo and terminology used by the MSM in the immigration debate. A teaser:

…Colorlines.com reviewed the archives of the nation’s largest-circulation newspapers to compare how often their articles describe people as “illegal” or “alien” versus describing them as “undocumented” or “unauthorized.” We found a striking and growing imbalance, particularly at key moments in the immigration reform debate. In 2006 and 2007, for example, years in which Congress engaged a pitched battle over immigration reform, the New York Times published 1,483 articles in which people were labeled as “illegal” or “alien;” just 171 articles used the adjectives “undocumented” or “unauthorized.”
That imbalance isn’t coincidental. In the wake of 9/11, as immigration politics have grown more heated and media organizations have worked to codify language they deem neutral, pollsters in both parties have pushed their leaders toward a punitive framework for discussing immigration. Conservatives have done this unabashedly to rally their base; Democrats have shifted rhetoric with the hopes that it will make their reform proposals more palatable to centrists. But to date, the result has only been to move the political center ever rightward–and to turn the conversation about immigrants violently ugly.

Thompson, author of “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do,” has written an excellent analysis which merits a close read — especially by Dem candidates and staffers who are involved in immigration politics.

The following article, “Obama Isn’t Trying to Start ‘Class Warfare’ — He Wants to End the Republican War on the Middle Class” by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer is cross posted from HuffPo.

History will record that on September 19, 2011, the Republicans made a huge political miscalculation — a miscalculation that could potentially doom their chances for victory next year.
If I were a Republican, the last thing I’d want to talk about is “class warfare.”
For 30 years — whenever they have been in power — Republicans and their Wall Street/CEO allies have conducted a sustained, effective war on the American middle class.
Much of the success of their war has resulted from their insistence that it didn’t exist. They have talked instead about how the economy needs to reward all those “job creators” whose beneficence will rain down economic prosperity on the rest of us.
They fund right-wing organizations that divert our attention by whipping up worry that gay marriage will somehow undermine heterosexual relationships. They start wars that help pad the bottom lines of defense contractors but do nothing to make us safer.
And all the while they quietly rig the economic game so that all of the growth in the Gross Domestic Product goes into the hands of the top two percent of the population — while they cut our pay, destroy our unions and do their level best to cut our Social Security and Medicare.
There has been a “class war” all right — a war on the middle class. And the middle class has been on the losing end.
Today the truly rich control a higher percent of our wealth and income than at any other time in generations. Income inequality is higher than at any time since 1928 — right before the Great Depression.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the richest five percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation’s gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983… ”
Today, 400 families control more wealth than 150 million Americans — almost half of our population.
American workers have become more and more productive — but they haven’t shared in the income generated by that increased productivity, so now they can’t afford to buy the products and services they produce.
The success of the Wall Street/CEO/Republican war on the middle class rests, in part, in the old frog in boiling water story. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, they say, the frog will jump right out. But if you put a frog in a pot and gradually turn up the heat until it boils you end up with a cooked frog.
Republican policies have gradually shifted wealth, income and power from the middle class — and those who aspire to be middle class — into their own hands and for obvious reasons they haven’t wanted to focus too much attention on “class warfare.”
So now if the Republicans want to talk about “class warfare” — in the words of George Bush — “bring ’em on.”

Read more…

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, writes about an overlooked upside to the Citizens United high court decision in his article, “A Blockbuster Case Yields an Unexpected Result.” While Democrats rightfully lament the free ride the ruling gives to corporate political expenditures, it turns out that it bolsters transparency in disclosure. As Liptak reports”

An often-overlooked part of the Citizens United decision actually upheld disclosure requirements, saying that “transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
Lower courts have embraced the ruling, with at least nine of them relying on Citizens United to reject challenges to disclosure laws, often in cases involving political spending related to social issues. In particular, courts have rejected efforts by groups opposed to same-sex marriage to keep their supporters and spending secret.
Put another way, you can make the argument that Citizens United has been good for gay rights. “Even Justice Scalia supports donor disclosure,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group.

As Scalia is quoted, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.” Liptak acknowledges, however, that the court did affirm “that secrecy may be warranted when there is hard proof of illegal harassment of supporters of controversial causes.”
The good news from the Republican point of view is that the filthy rich can spend unlimited amounts of money on ads to defeat progressive political candidates. The bad news for the GOP is that we get to know who they are. Scant comfort many Dems would say. But it could have been worse.
Interestingly, the decision has reversed a trend most Democrats have been concerned about, as Liptak puts it in perspective:

…The Supreme Court has long been comfortable with disclosure requirements. But Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University in Florida, said that lower courts had in the years before Citizens United grown skeptical of compulsory transparency, sometimes saying that it chilled First Amendment rights by imposing burdensome reporting requirements. “Before Citizens United, there was a very alarming trend in this area,” she said.
In a recent article in the Georgia State University Law Review, Professor Torres-Spelliscy described “the dramatic 180-degree turn that the law has taken” in the wake of Citizens United on the issue of disclosure…These days, Professor Hasen said, “lower courts have been taking their cue from Citizens United that disclosure laws, even if they are intrusive, are constitutional.”

No doubt the proponents of unbridled corporate funding for political ads were hoping for a provision affirming their right to total anonymity. Dems can at least be grateful that all but one Supreme Court Justice disagreed (Thomas). But Democrats should not delude themselves that transparency will be widely shared — and it’s up to Dems to make sure the public is well-informed about who is funding all the ads.