Dems who want to get up to speed on the politics of gun control must read Sasha Abramsky’s “Democrat Killer?” in The Nation. Abramsky makes a compelling case that a one-size-fits-all pro-gun control policy is a huge loser for Dems in the west and south:

Nationally, as the Democrats do the Electoral College math and realize the rising importance of the mountain and desert West to their presidential hopes, more and more are making this realpolitik calculation. If the South is now virtually unwinnable for national Democratic candidates, the party can craft a new Electoral College majority only if it can figure out how to make significant inroads into this region, into beautiful Open Road states like Nevada and New Mexico that, in 2004, went mildly Republican in the presidential election, while notching up significant victories or maintaining power for local and state Democratic Party politicians. And crafting a new stance on guns seems to a growing number of Democrats to be just the way to do that.

A more carefully-calibrated approach to gun control, says Abramsky, could reap new victories for Democratic candidates:

Rethinking guns is not only less morally toxic and less politically costly than any effort to recalibrate the party’s position on abortion or gay rights but could yield far greater political gains…It would take only a few thousand such voters to change their votes in New Mexico and Nevada for a Democratic presidential candidate to win both those states; and while Colorado and Montana are harder nuts to crack, they are certainly on the party’s radar. Win three of these four states, or win two of them plus Iowa, and the Democrats have an Electoral College majority again.

Abramsky concedes that there are tough moral and political concerns to balance in reformulating the Dems’ gun control polices. But Dems must not lose sight of the central issue. As Abramsky asks,

After all, what’s the point in staking the moral and intellectual high ground on gun control, as I believe gun-control proponents have done, if in doing so you lose the larger war for political power and the ability to enact all the other aspects of your program?

A good question — and one which Democrats must address to win back control of the White House and congress.

Arguably, the most under-utilized resource rank and file Democrats have at their disposal is consumer spending choice. Worse, most of us inadvertantly give money to the GOP every day by supporting corporations that fund Republican candidates, while contributing very little, if anything at all, to Democrats. Grab a burger at Wendy’s, for example, and you have made a contribution to their PAC, which gives 93 percent of it’s dough to the GOP. (Click here for a longer list of companies that give more than 90 percent of their PAC money to Republicans.}
But who has time to keep up with the political spending patterns of Fortune 500 companies? The Center for American Progress, that’s who. The CAP’s American Progress Action Fund has launched a campaign to “Tell Corporate America to Drop the Hammer,” targeting five corporations that have contributed to Tom (“The Hammer”) DeLay’s defense fund. They are: American Airlines ($5K); Bacardi ($3K); Nissan ($5K); R. J. Reynolds ($17K) and Verizon ($5K).
At the link above, CAP has a nifty “send them a message form” which takes about 30 seconds of your time to express your disapproval to the five companies.

Republicans are always carrying on about how “we have to get government out of our lives.” But a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll just reported indicates that the public views the GOP as more meddlesome in Americans’ private lives than the Democrats — and by a healthy margin. Asked “When it comes to moral values, do you think the Republican Party is trying to use the federal government to interfere with the private lives of most Americans, or not?” 55 percent responded affirmatively, compared to 40 percent who felt that way when asked the same question about the Democrats.

The latest Gallup poll, conducted April 1-2, puts another nail in the coffin of Bush’s Social Security privatization effort.
Gallup asked about Bush’s plan in two different ways. Here’s the good idea/bad idea version:

As you may know, one idea to address concerns with the Social Security system would allow people who retire in future decades to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market and bonds, but would reduce the guaranteed benefits they get when they retire. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea?

The public’s verdict: 61 percent bad idea/33 percent good idea, which is even more negative than the last time this question was asked on March 18-20 when it was 59 bad/33 good.
And here’s the favor proposal/oppose proposal version:

As you may know, a proposal has been made that would allow workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock market or in bonds, while the rest of those taxes would remain in the Social Security system. Do you favor or oppose this proposal?

This also receives a very negative response: 56 percent opposed/39 percent in favor. Note that this is quite a bit more negative than the previous time (March 18-20) Gallup asked this question when the verdict was close to split (45 favor/47 oppose).
The shift on the second version of the question and the convergence in negativity between the two versions of the question suggest that the public is becoming less sensitive to question wording when asked about Bush’s proposal. They’ve made up their minds what they think about his proposal (they flat-out don’t like it) and any reasonable question wording is going to elicit that strongly negative verdict.
So where does that leave us? Let me turn things over to Max Baucus, Democratic Sentaor from Montana, who Bush once fantasized might be a Democratic vote for privatization:

Frankly, my personal view [is], privatization is dead. It’s not going to be enacted. It’s not going to be enacted because it is so flawed and it is so wrong, and the American people sense that, they feel it, they know it.

You go, Max!
The rest of the Gallup poll is full of yet more bad news for Bush, reflecting the way things have generally been going for him lately. His overall approval rating is 48 percent, with 48 percent disapproval, his second worst approval rating since the election (after last Gallup poll’s 45 percent). His approval rating on the economy is now 41 percent approval/55 percent disapproval, down substantially from 48/49 in late February. His ratings on Iraq (43/54) and terrorism (57/40) are also down from their late February measurements, though less than the economic rating.
Speaking of Iraq, this poll finds a 53-45 majority saying it was not worth going to war in Iraq. Even more significant, for the first time a majority (50-48) says the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had WMD.
Bringing up the rear on Bush’s approval ratings are, unsurprisingly, Bush’s ratings on Social Security (now 35/57) and on handling the Terri Schiavo case (34/53).
And speaking of the Schiavo case, it now seems clear some serious damage has been to the GOP’s image by the intrusive and ideological way they handled it. As a USA Today story on the new Gallup poll points out:

By 55%-40%, respondents say Republicans, traditionally the party of limited government, are “trying to use the federal government to interfere with the private lives of most Americans” on moral values.
By 53%-40%, they say Democrats, who sharply expanded government since the Depression, aren’t trying to interfere on moral issues….
By more than 2-to-1, 39%-18%, Americans say the “religious right” has too much influence in the Bush administration. That’s a change from when the question was asked in CBS News/New York Times polls taken from 2001 to 2003. Then, approximately equal numbers said conservative Christians had too much and too little influence.

Final note: all this bad news, including the veritable death-knell for Bush’s privatization plan, comes courtesy of a Gallup sample that, as Steve Soto points out, is +4 Republican on party ID, a distribution inconsistent with almost all other recent polls, which have been showing a Democratic edge. So perhaps these results, bad as they are for Bush, may actually be understating his difficulties a bit.

In the current issue of Dissent, Harold Meyerson has a must-read article for Dems, “Beyond the Consensus: Democrats Agree on How to Play Defense, But What Are They Fighting For?” Meyerson offers a lucid assessment of the current state of the Democratic Party, its propects and what can be done to create a majority anchored in Democratic principles:

One point on which all Democrats agree is that the party needs a red-state strategy. In olden days, the DLC might have made this argument, to the strenuous opposition of social liberals. These days, labor has embraced a proposal from the Teamsters that the movement should focus its organizing in battleground and red states….
Consensus reigns. We are all Democrats; we are all cultural moderates…Though the killer issue in last November’s election, we know, wasn’t really moral values; it was national security. And we need to be for that, too.
Will that get us back into the majority? For the really disquieting thing about the exit polling was that it showed that the number of self-identified Republicans equaled the number of self-identified Democrats. It’s particularly instructive, and depressing, to look at the turnout figures in the non-battleground states, where neither party was buying the airwaves or flooding the mailboxes or walking the precincts to get out their vote. In battleground states, Kerry pulled down 3.6 percent more votes than Al Gore had four years before, and Bush exceeded his 2000 totals by 4.4 percent. But in non-battleground states, where voters were left to their own devices, Kerry increased his total over Gore by just 1.5 percent, while Bush boosted his total by 3.9 percent. In Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, where no major offices were on the ballot, turnout hit an all-time high. That’s the white working class, flocking to George Bush.
And did they ever flock! Kerry lost white, working-class voters-a group that constituted roughly half of the 2004 electorate-by 23 percent, six points worse than Gore had done in 2000. The shift away from the Democrats came chiefly among white, working-class women, who voted nine points more for Bush this time than they had four years ago. To a considerable degree, that’s a function of their trust in Bush on matters of national security: 66 percent of white, working-class voters said they trusted Bush to handle terrorism, compared to just 39 percent who trusted Kerry. (These numbers come from Democratic poll analyst Ruy Teixeira, who has been rummaging around in the raw data from the exit polling.)
But it’s a secondary result that should really give the Democrats pause: 55 percent of these voters trusted Bush to handle the economy, compared to just 39 percent who trusted Kerry. The economy? Bush? They trust the man on whose watch the nation lost three million manufacturing jobs in four years, whose recovery has seen the lowest increases in wages and salaries of any recovery since before the Great Depression? That Bush? And among precisely the voters-the white working class-who’ve lost the most economically during his presidency.
Perhaps this collapse of confidence in Democratic economics isn’t as bad as it seems. After all, once Kerry lost these working-class voters’ trust on national security, his trustworthiness on other topics likely plummeted as well. In addition, the Bush people were certainly more successful depicting Kerry as a cultural plutocrat (not that hard a job, really) than Kerry was in depicting Bush as the economic plutocrat’s favorite president. Kerry was always more comfortable talking about America’s proper role in the world than he was discussing America’s economy, and Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg faults Kerry’s campaign for failing to focus on the economy during the homestretch….
Politically, the declining strength of unions has hurt the Democrats most within the white working class. Over the past forty years, white union members have tended to vote Democratic at a rate roughly 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts. But with the rate of private-sector union membership now down to an abysmal 7.9 percent, the voting habits of working-class whites have shifted markedly rightward.

In addition to his sobering observations, Meyerson asks some tough questions and has a lot more to say about how Democrats can challenge corporate abuse of working people. Highly reccommended for Dems interested in building a stronger party.

Bush’s approval rating on the economy has been slipping lately and the latest Gallup poll has more evidence on one key reason for that: higher gas prices are hitting the middle class and they don’t like it.
According to the new poll:

Almost 6 in 10 say the higher prices are causing a hardship, including 15% who say the hardship is “serious.” More than a third of Americans have cut back on spending because of the higher prices, and about half have cut back significantly on the amount of driving they do. Lower-income Americans feel especially hard hit.
The poll, conducted April 1-2, finds that 58% of Americans have experienced hardship, the first time in the past six years that a majority has expressed this view.

Overall, 48 percent of the public has cut back on driving, due to higher gas prices, and 38 percent have cut back on household spending. By income group, these figures are 71 percent cut back on driving/68 percent cut back on household spending among those with less than $20,000 in household income, 54 percent/52 percent among those with $20,000-$30,000 income, 55/40 among those with $30,000-$50,000 and 42/29 among those with $50,000-$75,000. So the pinch from higher gas prices is now being felt at income levels well into the middle class. That’s a change and not a welcome one for those in the Bush administration.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the new foreign policy blog, Democracy Arsenal, sponsored by the new Security and Peace Institute, a joint project of The Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress. It’s well worth regular visits and, for openers, you might want to check out this very interesting “ten-step program to get Democrats back on the map” on foreign policy by Heather Hulbert.

With Republicans controlling the three branches of government and recently winning key votes in congress on the bankruptcy bill and ANWR oil exploration, it would seem there is not a lot for Democrats to be optimistic about. But some previously dim pricks of light are starting to flicker more brightly at the end of the tunnel. As yesterday’s post below indicates, recent polls show President Bush’s approval numbers tanking significantly and the public is clearly unimpressed with the Administration’s ‘leadership’ on issues, including Social Security, economic policy and GOP meddling in the Terry Schiavo tragedy. In addition, it appears that some serious rifts are appearing among the GOP rank and file. Adam Nagourney provides an interesting wrap-up of the Republicans’ internal troubles in his Sunday New York Times article “Squabbles Under the Big Tent”:

Conservative commentators and blogs are even warning that Republican divisions could turn into turmoil once President Bush begins his fade from power. “The American right is splintering,” the sometimes-conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote in a column for The Sunday Times of London headlined, “Bush’s Triumph Conceals the Great Conservative Crack-Up.”

Nagourney also provides a typology of GOP subgroups, which Democratic strategists may find of use as a guide for peeling off potential Republican voters:

Gone are the days when the Republican Party could easily (if simplistically) be divided into social conservatives versus fiscal conservatives. There are libertarian Republicans, Christian conservative Republicans, moderate Republicans, Wall Street Republicans, balanced-budget Republicans, tax-cutting Republicans, cut-the-size-of-government Republicans, neoconservative Republicans supporting global intervention and isolationist Republicans who would like to stay at home.

Dems can also find some encouragement about GOP splintering in “Earthly Evangelist,” Deborah Solomon’s New York Times Magazine interview with Richard Cizik, head of the 30 million member National Association of Evangelists. Asked about his group’s influence on the future of GOP environmental policy, Cizik responded,

Look, the big corporate interests have an undue say in party policy. And into this reality come the evangelical Christians. And when confronted with making a choice, this administration will compromise. Because about 40 percent of the Republican Party is represented by evangelicals. They wouldn’t want the two major constituencies of the Republican Party at war with each other

Widening rifts in the GOP (see also March 30 post below) may well provide a margin of victory for Democrats in next year’s congressional elections and beyond, especially for Democratic candidates who make a clear and measured pitch for the votes of Republicans moderates and supporters of environmental reforms.

The new Time/SRBI poll, coming out on the heels of the very negative Gallup and Pew polls, has more bad news for President Bush.
Bush’s approval rating in the poll has declined to 48 percent, 5 points down from a week ago. Time/SRBI tends to run high on Bush approval relative to other public polls and that 48 percent rating is is the lowest for Bush they have ever recorded.
His rating on the economy is down to 42 percent, also his lowest ever in this poll. His rating on the Iraq situation is now 44 percent and even his rating on handling the war on terrorism is down to 52 percent, another low for this poll.
But his worst rating by far is on Social Security, which has sunk to 31 percent, with 58 percent disapproval–a rating even worse than in other recent public polls.
Turning to the Terri Schiavo case, the public says, by 59-35, that they agree with a Florida judge’s decision to uphold the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube. As in previous polls, support for removing Schiavo’s tube extends across the spectrum, including even the highly religiously observant.
The public judges the political intervention into the Schiavo case quite harshly. By 75-20, they say it wasn’t right for Congress to intervene in the case and, by 70-24, that it wasn’t right for Bush to intervene in the case. Moreover, by 65-25, the public believes Bush’s intervention in the case had more to do with politics than values.
The public’s probably right about that–and, based on these and other data, it would now appear Bush made a very substantial mistake in doing so.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has just released a very useful analysis of the rural vote in 2004, along with a chartpack of interesting graphs on the rural vote. Here is their summary of the memo’s major findings:

Rural America emerged as one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in the election. Both campaigns invested millions of dollars courting these voters, investing heavily in television and field outreach program. Kerry did not cede this vote any more than the Bush campaign took it for granted.
The final outcome in 2004 masks an often competitive political environment in rural America. Not only did Democrats closely contest the rural vote in recent elections (1992 and 1996), but even in 2004, the rural vote ebbed and flowed with the vagaries of the campaign, from Saddam’s capture to the debates. Only in the end did the Bush team salt away its win in rural America.
George Bush prevailed by successfully framing this election as a referendum on values and security. By moving the economy to the political back-burner and amplifying the disconnect between the perceived values of the Democratic nominee and the conservative, cultural values of the rural electorate, Bush improved upon his 2000 margin in rural parts of the country.
At the same time, rural voters signaled significant frustration with the economic course of the country. That Kerry could not capitalize on this frustration speaks to the power of values in shaping this vote, but more fundamentally, also to a missed opportunity among Democrats to speak to the populist anger of this vote in a disciplined and credible fashion.