This item by James Vega was originally published on July 26, 2012.
A recent profile of Colin Powell described his growing concern about Romney’s disturbingly narrow range of foreign policy advisors. As the article noted:

Romney’s team of about 40 foreign policy advisers includes many who hail from the neoconservative wing of the party…Many were enthusiastic supporters of the Iraq War, and many are proponents of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran.

This group includes a number of well-known Neo-con figures like John Bolton, Elliot Cohen and Robert Kagan but it also includes a variety of lesser-known individuals who were intimately connected with the botched planning and execution of the war in Iraq. As a Nation review of Romney’s advisors noted:

Romney’s team is notable for including Bush aides tarnished by the Iraq fiasco: Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who inserted the infamous “sixteen words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger; Dan Senor, former spokesman for the hapless Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq; and Eric Edelman, a top official at the Pentagon under Bush. “I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says the Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble.

Given Romney’s very narrow set of pro-invasion advisors, it becomes particularly important to review what the invasion of Iraq actually accomplished in strategic terms. Dan Froomkin, who wrote penetrating commentary about Iraq for the Washington Post during the period of the Iraq War, recently wrote a very useful review of that history and an overview of the situation today. He began his review as follows:

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, neoconservative hawks in and out of the Bush administration promised that the U.S. invasion would quickly transform that country into a strong ally, a model Arab democracy and a major oil producer that would lower world prices, even while paying for its own reconstruction.
“A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region,” President George W. Bush told a crowd at the American Enterprise Institute in 2003, a few weeks before he launched the attack.

In fact, the Neo-con promises for what the invasion of Iraq would produce were actually even more flamboyantly manic and — in retrospect — patently delusional then even this summary suggests. The Neo-con’s actually promised that the invasion would achieve two objectives of absolutely breathtaking scope.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 3, 2012.
Greg Sargent reports on the decision of five Republican governors to screw impoverished and working people out of the health care they are supposed to get from Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Sargent explains:

Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.

…And counting. Sargent rolls out the breakdown estimates for the five states, with Florida leading the pack with more than 683,000 citizens at risk by Governor Scott’s threat. Sargent adds,

Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out…Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.

if there is a silver lining behind the shameful threats of the five Republican governors, it is that there is a good chance that their actions will provoke mass demonstrations in at least some of their states, hopefully right in front of the gubernatorial mansions, where possible. And wouldn’t it be justice, if those demonstrations were lead by people with serious health problems, bringing along their oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, dialysis machines and other health care devices, joined by nurses and hospital workers in uniforms for exactly the kind of photo ops these governors don’t want?
Perhaps the key player in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the Republican Medicaid-bashers would be the nurses unions, which did such an outstanding job of making former Governor Schwarzenegger eat crow in CA over staffing ratios in hospitals.
In a way, the five governors are daring sick and needy people to protest against being targeted for health hardships. Given the large numbers of those threatened in these states, it’s an arrogant dare they may regret very soon — as well as on November 6.

This item by TDS Contributor and Democratic political strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 29, 2012.
The most important thing about today’s Supreme Court health care decision is the victory for the millions of Americans who will live longer, happier, healthier lives because of the new health care law.
It is also an historic day for the thousands of health care warriors who have fought to make health care a right in America for decades and have finally seen their struggle rewarded with success.
But the Supreme Court’s decision has massive political implications as well:
First, this victory will send another bolt of electricity through Obama’s base. Nothing succeeds better than a hard-fought victory at pumping people up — and firing them up for the next great battle. The victory will send thousands of volunteers streaming into Obama campaign offices — and millions of dollars into its coffers. It will invigorate Obama’s army of volunteers.
It is particularly important when coupled with the president’s decision two weeks ago, protecting Dream Students from deportation. That decision already had a major impact on enthusiasm among Obama supporters — and particularly Latinos.
Their Supreme Court defeat will also dispirit the right-wing — particularly because they were abandoned by their own iconic, conservative Chief Justice who wrote the opinion finding the law constitutional.
Enthusiasm is a huge factor in electoral politics.
Second, the Romney campaign — and Republican candidates across the board — have now been forced to double down on repealing the entire bill. They will argue that now, the only way to get rid of the bill is to elect a new president and a Republican House and Senate.
Opponents of health care for all can no longer rely on arguing that the bill is an “unconstitutional usurpation” of government authority. No less a conservative icon than Chief Justice John Roberts found the law constitutional.
Since Obama Care is now a reality, Democrats can now move from defense to offense on health care.
By supporting repeal of the entire law, Republicans also support taking away the law’s protections against discrimination because of pre-existing conditions.
They support taking away access to free preventive health care for seniors.
They support taking away health care from millions of young people who can now stay on their parent’s insurance policies until they are 26 years old.
They support taking away access to contraception for women.
They support taking away enhanced prescription drug coverage for seniors.
They support taking away provisions that no longer allow discrimination against women.
They support taking away provisions that prevent people from being just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.
The support ending provisions that require that insurance companies can must spend 80 percent of their premium dollars on medical care — not on administrative costs and profits.
People may be afraid of things they don’t know much about. That helps explain some of the past opposition to the health care law by people who would benefit from it. But people are furious when you try to take something away from them. Romney will lose that argument over the months ahead.
Third, ironically, the past unpopularity of the law now positions the president as a strong, resolute leader, who does things because they are right — not because they are politically popular.
Passing health care reform was incredibly difficult and politically risky. Barack Obama is a leader that is a committed to principle — the mirror opposite to Mitt Romney, who has no core values whatsoever. Most voters want leaders who stand up for what they believe. That is a huge advantage for Barack Obama’s candidacy for re-election.
Finally, the Supreme Court victory creates political momentum. In politics as in sports, momentum — the bandwagon — is absolutely critical to the outcome. People like winners — they like to be with winners. Today Barack Obama — and the people of the United States — were winners.
That fact will give the president a major boost — a long-term boost — among swing voters over the months ahead.
This is a very, very big day for the lives of ordinary Americans.
It is also a very, very big day for the critical November battle that will chart our nation’s future.

This post by TDS Contributor and Democratic strategist Mike Lux is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 22, 2012.
This news about Bain Capital being a pioneer in outsourcing, investing in some of the leading early companies that advised American companies in how to most effectively do it, is a pretty big deal on the face of it, but it has even deeper implications than many people realize. Being in this kind of business when the vast majority of Americans are so upset by out-sourcing is just one of Mitt Romney’s deep dark secrets that he has been trying to hide, and helps to powerfully make the case that Romney’s entire business career has been fundamentally at odds with the interests of the American middle class.
The other thing this news does is that it very likely ends the debate within the Democratic party as to whether it is okay to talk about Bain Capital’s business practices. There are still going to be Wall Street Democrats squeamish about beating up on this kind of wealthy financial company, but to defend a company that was literally a pioneer in helping American companies out-source jobs would be incredibly unpopular. Given how deeply unhappy voters are about out-sourcing, given how it generally is one of the top issues mentioned by voters in any poll I have seen over the last decade, it would be political malpractice not to attack Bain and Romney over this news, and any honest Democrat will have to understand and acknowledge that fact.
The reason this story goes so deep is that Romney’s entire political strategy is based on carrying blue collar white voters very heavily. Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008 while losing white working class voters by 18 percent. Even if you assume Obama doesn’t do quite as well turning out his base voters, to win this election Romney will have win that white working class demographic by at least 62-38 percent. Given how big a deal out-sourcing is to blue-collar workers, this story becomes close to a deal-breaker for Romney.
The Romney campaign’s reaction to the story is hilarious:
“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports.” The very incoherence of the quote speaks to their strategy: try to confuse the issue, try to make it sound complicated. The problem for Romney is that this is a remarkably simple story: whether you call it out-sourcing or off-shoring (and I don’t see how the new word helps him), Romney was caring only about his company’s profits and not at all about creating jobs here in the U.S., and he saw out-sourcing jobs as a great new way to make money.
Perhaps as interesting as the story itself is the fact that after four years as governor of Massachusetts, and more than six years of his running for the presidency non-stop, even with all his talk about his business career helping him understand job creation, this is the first time we have heard about these investments. Mitt Romney is big into secrets, and is very good at keeping them. He has Swiss bank accounts, and Cayman Island accounts as well. His financial disclosure for years past has been unusually secretive in nature. He won’t say what his positions are on a whole range of critically important issues. I think we can guess why Romney tried to hide the news about his being a pioneer in out-sourcing, but why does he have secret off-shore bank accounts and so little information in his financial disclosure reports? What has he invested money in all those years that requires such skullduggery? This is as secretive a man as has run for president at least since Dick Nixon with all his dirty little secrets.
This is the candidate who said that we must only speak of issues about the concentration of wealth “in quiet rooms”. He prefers speaking about these kinds of things in quiet rooms, because to be open about how he made his money would be such an insult to the exact voters he most needs to win this election. But Romney made his incredible fortune by doing insider deals in those quiet rooms, by quietly helping companies turn a profit by out-sourcing their workers. After he made his money off these kinds of deals, he hid a great deal of it in secret Swiss and Caymans bank accounts. Is a man with these kinds of values — and these kinds of secrets — the kind of man we want to be president?

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 12, 2012.
In my June 8 post on “The Recall in Broader Perspective,” I briefly referenced the GOP meme “that public workers have extravagant pensions, propagated by Republicans who amplify a few horror stories as emblematic of public worker retirement benefits.” It’s part and parcel of a broader Republican scam vilifying public workers as overcompensated in general.
For a revealing example, see Josh Barro’s Bloomberg.com post, “Does Obama Know Why the Public Sector Isn’t ‘Doing Fine’?” in which he spotlights city employees of San Jose, CA, where

…Costs for a full-time equivalent employee are astronomical and skyrocketing. San Jose spends $142,000 per FTE [full-time employee] on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising.

The unspoken, but unmistakable gist of Barro’s post is “See, those greedy public workers are responsible for causing their own layoffs.” Without even taking a look at nation-wide data, Barro is clearly suggesting in his post’s title that San Jose’s experience is somehow typical of public workers in cities across the nation. Worse, he takes it a step further and blames public worker unions in his concluding sentence, “If the president wants to know why state and local governments can’t afford to hire, he could start by asking his own supporters in public employee unions.”
That’s why Romney can say stuff about President Obama like “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin?” and get away with it, while media dimwits point their fingers at Obama for his one gaffe in three years.
Had Barro clearly presented his horror story as an exceptional case, that would be defensible. Or had he backed it up with some credible national data, you could grudgingly credit him with a solid argument. But he didn’t do that because he couldn’t.
As David Cooper, Mary Gable, and Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute note in their report, “The public-sector jobs crisis“:

Despite these significantly higher levels of education–and contrary to assertions by some governors in recent state-level debates–the most rigorous studies have consistently shown that state and local government employees earn less both in wages and total compensation than comparable private-sector workers (Keefe 2010). Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and standard regression models for wage analyses, we compared the wage income of private-sector employees with that of state and local government workers. After controlling for education, experience, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, full-time/part-time status, number of hours worked, citizenship status, Census region, metropolitan status (whether residing within or outside the boundaries of a major metropolitan area), and employer size, we find that state and local government employees make, on average, 11.7 percent less in wages than similar private-sector employees.

if those greedy public workers can be faulted for their extravagant compensation packages, what should be done about their better-paid private sector cohorts?
Look, none of this is to deny that there are public worker pension/salary horror stories. But it takes a pretty shameless media to imply that extravagantly compensated public workers are the norm. Is it too much to ask that some honest journalists call Romney out on it?

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 7, 2012.
Ron Brownstein has a couple of recent posts tracking white working class political attitudes that should be of interest to presidential campaign strategists. In “Working Class Whites Still Wary of Obamacare,” he explains:

The problem, as on almost all issues relating to government’s role, is centered on whites, particularly those in the working class. According to figures provided by Kaiser, in their latest survey, 35 percent of non-white respondents believe that the law will benefit their family. That compares to just 14 percent who believe they will be worse off (the remaining 39 percent don’t think it will make much difference). Whites offer nearly a mirror image: just 18 percent believe the law will leave their family better off, compared to 38 percent who believe they will be worse off as a result.
The skepticism among whites is most concentrated among whites without a college degree. Just one-in-seven of them believe health care reform will personally benefit them or their family. Among college whites about one-in-four expect to personally benefit from the reform.
Gallup Polling in March 2010 found that while few whites expected to personally benefit from the law, a majority of them believed it would benefit low-income families and those without health insurance. That suggested they viewed health care reform primarily as a welfare program that would help the needy but not their own families. Kaiser didn’t replicate that question in their latest survey, but it may have detected an echo of that sentiment in the finding that twice as many whites believed the law would benefit children than thought it would help their own family.

Ironically, adds Brownstein, “…non-college whites are uninsured at much higher rates than those with degrees; for that reason, the law would personally benefit far more of them than the college-educated whites who are somewhat more open to it.” Yet, “the targets of that effort remain entirely unconvinced that the law will benefit them. Rather than ameliorating their skepticism that government will defend their interests, it appears to have only intensified it.”
Brownstein warns that the skepticism about the ACA is “another brick on the load Obama is carrying with white working class voters, who appear poised in polls to reject him at levels no Democratic presidential nominee has experienced since 1984.”
In another post, “How Diversity Divides White America,” Brownstein addresses white working class attitudes towards immigrants revealed in the just released Pew Research 2012 Values Survey:

Among college-educated whites who identify as Democrats-an increasingly central pillar of the party’s coalition-over four-in-five say that the immigrants do not threaten American values. But nearly two-thirds of Republicans without a college degree-an increasingly central pillar of the GOP coalition-do consider immigrants a threat to American traditions…That overwhelming unease among the blue-collar (and older) white voters central to GOP electoral prospects today represents a huge hurdle for the Republican strategists who want the party to expand its Hispanic outreach.

One conclusion to be drawn from both of Brownstein’s articles is that the Obama campaign should upgrade it’s outreach to white workers as a large constituency which benefits from Obama’s reforms, yet remains unpersuaded — doubt which the Republicans are eagerly prepared to reinforce in their ad campaigns.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on June 4, 2012.
Now that Mitt Romney is officially the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and we have some distance from the primaries that decided it all, it’s time to consider the lessons. Otherwise, poor memories, shaky analysis and self-serving spin will combine to congeal a conventional “wisdom” that is anything but.
As someone who obsessively chronicled every twist and turn of this very odd nomination contest for TNR, here are my five top takeaways:
1.Mitt Romney is a very lucky man. The Republican Party’s dominant conservative wing resisted his nomination as long and as hard as it could, but in the end, had no better options. Herman Cain was not ever going to win the nomination. Nor, likely, was the immensely vulnerable, highly unpopular Newt Gingrich or the extremist Michele Bachmann, both of whom were an oppo researcher’s dream. The two potentially viable rivals were Tim Pawlenty, who gambled everything and lost on the fool’s gold of the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa last summer, and Rick Perry, who ran one of those rare, amazingly inept presidential campaigns that are a constant reminder of the importance of minimal competence in politics. It’s a sign of Romney’s vulnerability that Rick Santorum–whose 2006 Senate defeat told you everything you needed to know about how well he wore on voters, and how much ammunition his record provided his opponents–came within a few thousand votes in Michigan of sending Mitt’s campaign into a potential death spiral and the national GOP into a panic. Anyone who tells you Romney’s nomination was pre-ordained by some iron law of succession or some shadowy “Establishment” was obviously not paying much attention to how the deal actually went down.
2. Conservatives reasserted their control of the GOP. You’ll also hear that Romney’s nomination was a victory for Republican “moderates” over “movement conservatives” or their latest grassroots incarnation, the Tea Party. Don’t believe it. Yes, hard-core conservatives would have preferred a different nominee–for the most part, someone who wasn’t running, like Jim DeMint or Mike Pence or Marco Rubio–but they had issues with virtually everyone in the actual field, and more importantly, they got what they needed from Romney, who was, as everyone seems to have forgotten, their own preferred candidate in 2008. He’s atoned for his health care heresy by promising about ten thousand times to repeal ObamaCare root and branch. He’s on board with the twin pillars of the Small Government counter-revolution, the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, and the Ryan Budget. He’s foresworn increased taxes as any part of any budget deal, however large. He’s met all the basic social-issues litmus tests of the Christian Right. He was by most measures the hawkiest of all the candidates on foreign policy issues. And for good measure, he tacked hard right on immigration policy in order to croak Rick Perry. Thanks to his “flip-flop” problem and conservative hyper-vigilance, there will be no back-tracking by Romney between now and November, or most probably, between now and the end of time. Mitt’s no stubbornly independent cuss like John McCain. He’ll stay bought.
3. 2012 is not just “about” the economy. The primaries did not notably feature debates among Republican candidates about how, exactly, to bring the U.S. economy back. In part that’s because they were in total agreement on the big points: both fiscal and monetary stimulus of the economy are terrible ideas; excessive federal spending and extension of housing credit to irresponsible poor and minority folk caused the Great Recession; and a systematic agenda of universal deregulation, public-sector austerity, health-care rationing to reduce costs, restriction of collective bargaining rights, and high-end (including corporate) tax cuts are the prescription for recovery. That this is the conservative movement’s permanent non-cultural agenda for good times and bad is the tip-off that even the GOP’s “economic” plans are about an ideological commitment to smaller government–extending very nearly these days to a complete overturning of the New Deal and Great Society legacy–rather than any shrewd macroeconomic strategy. Beyond that, there is no question the primaries reflected an abiding preoccupation with cultural issues, whatever the candidates professed, viz. the endless angels-dancing-on-pins distinctions on whether to ban “abortifacient” contraceptives as well as clinical abortions, the war on Planned Parenthood, and the final plunge of the GOP (and for that matter, the Catholic Bishops) into full harness with the Christian Right’s long-standing position that church-state separation represents a “war on religion.” It’s hard to imagine much of anything about the subject-matter of the primary contest that would have changed had the economy been booming.
4. Super-PACs have changed politics. Whether it’s simply a matter of the drift towards uncontrolled campaign financing accelerated by Citizens United, or the hyper-mobilization of an unprecedented group of politically active billionaires, there’s no question the Super-PACs played a big role in the nomination contest. Newt Gingrich’s Palinesque media-bashing debate performances had a lot to do with his candidacy coming back from the grave twice, but he would have remained a novelty candidate like past debate phenoms had not it been for Sheldon Adelson’s decision to give him the resources to run an actual campaign. It was Romney’s Super-PAC that destroyed Perry in Iowa, Gingrich in Florida, and later on, Santorum in the Midwest. And when the losing candidates’ own sugar daddies (Adelson and Santorum’s friend Foster Friess) closed the checkbooks, it was all over. The same forces (and many of the very same people) may be about to save Scott Walker’s bacon in Wisconsin, and are in the process of challenging the assumption that the sheer power of paid media can’t win a presidential general election.
5. The crazy nomination process is here for another four years. The dog that didn’t bark in 2012 was the usual chorus of complaints about the crazy-quilt nominating process itself–the disproportionate power of the early states, and the buyer’s remorse of voters and elites stuck with a nominee they didn’t want. The stretched-out nature of the primary calendar–which kept Romney from formally claiming the nomination until late May–was part of that non-event. So, too, was the rapid consolidation of support behind Romney once he essentially clinched the nomination in Wisconsin if not earlier. There will be some grumbling about the procedural glitches that allowed Ron Paul’s minions to dominate delegate selection events long after the deal had gone down, but for the most part, minor adjustments should suffice. We’ll be stuck with the same crazy system in 2016.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 25, 2012.
Yesterday I flagged an AlterNet post by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers union about a coalition of shareholders, workers and public interest groups mobilizing to address outrageous executive pay, environmental and worker safety concerns. I expressed hope that this coalition would also address corporate contributions to political campaigns.
Having just read a New Republic article, “Reining In Corporate $$, The Back Door Approach,” I can report that such stockholder’s campaigns are already well underway. According to the author, Alec MacGillis, here quoting from a WaPo article by Tom Hamburger and Brady Dennis:

…Reformers have decided that their best hope for trying to rein in secret spending is to straight to corporations. As The Post reports: “One of the most polarizing fights over money in politics has been unfolding this spring at annual corporate meetings, where shareholders are mounting an intensifying effort to push companies to disclose the money they spend on lobbying and political campaigns. The transparency push, playing out at shareholders meetings from coast to coast this spring, has received cheers from campaign finance reformers and some corporate governance experts. It has drawn ridicule from critics such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who see the effort as an attempt by liberal groups to squelch the voice of the business world….

MacGillis adds:

…The Sustainable Investments Institute, a Washington nonprofit that tracks shareholder resolutions, found that 109 — nearly a third of those up for votes at annual meetings in 2012 — sought more disclosures about spending on politics and lobbying….To date, 101 major companies have agreed to disclosure and board oversight of some of their political spending, according to Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, which rates companies on the issue. Freed and others argue that disclosure can help executives and directors avoid reputational risk to their firms.

Naturally big business leaders and their journalistic apologists are in an uproar about the shareholder movements for disclosure of political donations, even though most of the resolutions have been defeated. But some companies, like Microsoft, are beginning to see the upside of transparency of their political donations.
As Dan Bross, Microsoft’s senior director of corporate citizenship, puts it, “As a company, we believe in openness, transparency and accountability…We are doing what we believe is right.”
As MacGillis notes, the shareholder movement does nothing to directly force more transparency among wealthy individuals or privately-held companies. However, he adds that “the momentum toward encouraging disclosure from corporations is as good as any place to start when the other avenues are blocked.” It seems to me that, by setting a higher standard of accountability, the shareholder movement may yet have a positive effect on individuals and privately-held companies.
The shareholder campaigns should not be considered a substitute for legislation and litigation to compel transparency in political donations. But they can contribute to public awareness that transparency of corporate political donations is both desirable and possible.

This item is by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on May 22, 2012.
In the two months since Eric Fehrnstrom’s “etch-a-sketch” gaffe, many political observers have waited for the iconic moment when Romney would move to the center or distance himself from the toxic conservative ideological battles of the primary season. But without much notice, that etch-a-sketch moment has already happened.
No, Romney has not shifted positions. Nor has he disrespected the conservative activists whose votes and trust he sought so relentlessly since 2007. What his campaign has done, however, is radically narrow its focus to a single message, one particularly attractive to swing voters: that this election is purely and simply a referendum on Obama’s economy. This focus comes at the expense of the philosophical, social, and cultural topics that dominated the primary season from beginning to end. There’s one problem though: His party’s conservative base may not let him get away with it.
Barely an hour goes by these days without a Romney surrogate staring into a camera and intoning like an incantation that the election is about nothing other than Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy. As Jonathan Chait recently noted, even the much-asked question on Romney’s poor standing with Hispanic voters is routinely answered by citing the economic sufferings of Hispanics and the certainty that they, too, will ignore every other factor and vote for Mr. Fix-It.
The narrow focus of Romney’s campaign makes it easier for him to deal with right-wing efforts to drag the campaign discourse into dangerous areas. This was evident in last week’s brouhaha over reports that billionaire Joe Ricketts and star GOP consultant Fred Davis were discussing a $10 million super PAC ad campaign resurrecting the president’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Romney’s campaign quickly repudiated the proposed ad, but just as quickly, RNC chairman Reince Priebus brought things back on message, accusing the Obama campaign of using criticism of the proposed ads to distract from the only issue that matters: Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy.
So long as his campaign doesn’t look like it’s on the verge of losing–as McCain looked in the fall of 2008 when conservatives began openly protesting his reluctance to bring up Jeremiah Wright–Romney can probably avoid visible conservative criticism for failing to raise a broader, cultural critique of Obama as a secular-socialist elitist whose association with Wright and Bill Ayers shows he hates America.
But there are other, less controversial, issues important to conservative voters that don’t nicely fit into a monomaniacal focus on the unemployment rate or monthly job figures. Romney is fortunate that Republicans agree that debts, deficits, and the size of government are all highly germane to the case for “firing” Obama on purely economic grounds. But many conservatives are concerned about these themes not because they affect the country’s short-term economic prospects, but for more ideological reasons: because they are morally offended by federal programs that “redistribute” wealth, or by the very idea of progressive taxation, or by the religious implications of environmentalism.
And unsurprisingly, many conservatives want their ideological motivations to be reflected in the Romney campaign’s rhetoric. As a result, Romney has been all but forced to endorse Paul Ryan’s budget, which makes explicit the conservative desire to abandon the Great Society safety net and to reverse any public-sector policies that alter the “natural” market-based distribution of wealth. In that way, the Romney campaign has the economic themes of a “centrist” campaign, but, in order to placate the concerns of his base, the details of speeches and other communications sometimes often veer into fringe territory. It is an open question how long the candidate can finesse this tension.
Beyond the cluster of economic-fiscal issues, there are a host of cultural issues which Romney’s campaign is trying to avoid, but which both conservative activists and the Obama campaign may insist he discuss. One of these is “religious liberty”–defined as the right for conservative religious organizations to discriminate against gays and lesbians or against reproductive rights for women. Another is same-sex marriage, an increasingly unavoidable campaign issue that pulls the campaign away from its focus on the economy. Conservative activists will also be eager to campaign against Obamacare, particularly if the Supreme Court forces the issue directly into the center of the presidential contest.
And even if conservative activists–and the Obama campaign–don’t succeed in broadening Romney’s economic focus, another factor may intervene: The economy could improve. more than is currently projected between now and November. Chait’s article on the Romney campaign’s economic monomania suggests it will shift to a “Plan B” argument that the economy is just not improving enough. But instead, they may be forced to refocus on all those broader ideological issues–religious liberty, same-sex marriage, and health care, and perhaps more–that they’re currently trying to avoid. If that happens, then both conservative activists and their enemies in the Obama campaign will get something they want, and the etch-a-sketch will shake up the message yet again.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 22, 2012.
If you were unaware of the stakes in the upcoming Wisconsin recall election on June 5th, John Nichol’s report in The Nation provides some perspective:

…Wisconsin is witnessing the most ambitious set of recall elections in American history: not just the executive branch but the most powerful legislative chamber could be flipped from Republican to Democratic control. If Walker and his allies are removed from office, the results will be seen across the country as a rejection of the false premise that cutting taxes for the rich while attacking unions and slashing services will somehow spur job growth. Walker promised that his policies would create 250,000 jobs. Instead of growth, the governor’s austerity agenda has brought about what the Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies as the worst pattern of job losses in the nation…

Democrats have a solid, well-experienced alternative to Scott Walker’s polarizing leadership:

…Walker’s Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, argues that the governor abandoned fiscal common sense and “created an ideological civil war…in the State of Wisconsin….Former Senator Russ Feingold hails Barrett, a former Congressman, as “a lifelong progressive [who]… stood with me in voting against the deregulation that led to the Wall Street crash, opposing the Patriot Act, and reforming our system of campaign finance.” Barrett also broke with Democratic and Republican presidents to oppose NAFTA and champion labor rights. But the Democrat is not just ideologically distinct from Walker. Whereas Walker’s a my-way-or-the-highway pol, Barrett is known for getting people to work together. Though his pragmatic approach to balancing budgets frustrated some local unions in Milwaukee and led to a split in the labor movement over whom to back in the primary, Barrett has now united unions and the party in the campaign to defeat Walker.

In terms of economic resources for Barrett’s campaign, progressives face a tough reality:

…Barrett spent around $1 million to win his primary; Walker has already burned through $21 million, and his billionaire backers have spent millions more on “independent” ads. The unprecedented spending on behalf of Walker and his allies has made these recall elections an example of what campaigning has come to look like in the Citizens United era: Democrats can’t hope to match the staggering level of corporate cash raised by the GOP, so they will have to accelerate grassroots organizing and get-out-the-vote drives. Wisconsin will test the prospect that people power might yet beat money power…

Dems and progressives have a big edge in ‘feet on the ground’ in the WI race, and both sides agree that this election will likely come down to turnout mobilization. But recent polls show Walker surging, so Walker’s money edge could prove decisive. Clearly, Tom Barret could use some help. If your Democratic governor is in good shape politically and/or financially, or if the governor’s race in your state is a done deal, or if there is no governor’s race at all in your state, consider a donation to Tom Barrett’s campaign at his ActBlue page right here.
The important thing for Dems to keep in mind about June 5th is that it’s not just about Wisconsin and public unions. If Walker wins, it will green-light intensified union-bashing by Republicans across the country and ultimately threaten living standards even for unorganized workers. But if Barrett wins, it will help rebuild the labor movement, check big money in politics and energize progressives for the November elections.