We’re already well into the “lessons learned” phase of the manufactured fiscal crisis just ended (or possibly just suspended). And despite a lot of soul-searching and navel-gazing among Republicans, and a bit of internecine gore, it’s important to understand where the internal divisions begin and end. I addressed this issue today at Washington Monthly:

[I]f the end of the fiscal crisis represents, as Ross Douthat calls it, a “Teachable Moment” for the GOP, what would the lesson, exactly, be? It mostly appears to be about strategy and tactics, not goals or ideology (or “principles” as ideologues like to say in their endless efforts to ascribe dishonesty and gutlessness to dissidents).
Even for Douthat, who clearly wants the memory of the Tea Folk (or to use his term, “populist”) failure in this incident to be seared into the collective memory of Republicans, it’s mostly about the how rather than the what and the why:
“The mentality that drove the shutdown — a toxic combination of tactical irrationality and the elevation of that irrationality into a True Conservative (TM) litmus test — may have less influence in next year’s Beltway negotiations than it did this time around, thanks to the way this has ended for the defunders after John Boehner gave them pretty much all the rope that they’d been asking for. But just turn on talk radio or browse RedState or look at Ted Cruz’s approval ratings with Tea Partiers and you’ll see how potent this mentality remains, how quickly it could resurface, and how easily Republican politics and American governance alike could be warped by it in the future.”
“So for undeluded conservatives of all persuasions, lessons must be learned. If the party’s populists want to shape and redefine and ultimately remake the party, they can’t pull this kind of stunt again.”
The problem was “the stunt,” not the violent antipathy towards a pale version of universal health coverage or the conviction that the New Deal/Great Society legacy is fatal to America or the belief that nearly half the country is composed of satanic blood-suckers and baby-killers.
Eric Cantor stressed this distinction between strategy and tactics, on the one hand, and ideology on the other in his speech to yesterday’s doomed House Republican Conference:
“We all agree Obamacare is an abomination. We all agree taxes are too high. We all agree spending is too high. We all agree Washington is getting in the way of job growth. We all agree we have a real debt crisis that will cripple future generations. We all agree on these fundamental conservative principles… . We must not confuse tactics with principles. The differences between us are dwarfed by the differences we have with the Democratic party, and we can do more for the American people united.”
Don’t get me wrong here: there’s great value to the nation in convincing one of our two major political parties to respect the results of elections and eschew wildly disruptive legislative strategies and tactics. But even if that “lesson was learned,” and the jury’s still out on that proposition, it’s not the same as a serious reconsideration of today’s radical conservatism, which may well emerge from this incident as strong as ever.

The importance of sorting out strategy and tactics from values and goals is an abiding theme here at TDS. It’s a good time to pay special attention to these distinctions in evaluating where the GOP is heading next.

NBC News political reporter Michael O’Brien reports, “Thirty-eight percent of Americans said Republicans were to blame for the shutdown, versus 30 percent who blame the Obama administration and 19 percent who blame both, according to the Pew poll, which was conducted in the days since the shutdown came to pass. (For context, a Pew poll before the shutdown found that 39 percent would blame the GOP, 36 percent would blame Obama and 17 percent would blame both if the shutdown were to occur.)…The ABC News/Washington Post poll, meanwhile, found that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of the way congressional Republicans are handling negotiations over the federal budget, while just 24 percent approve. (Last week, 26 percent approved of the GOP’s handling, and 63 percent disapproved.)
Don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice that the Obama administration captured another al Qaeda bigwig The story has been all but smothered by shutdown coverage.
In his National Journal post, “19 Times Democrats Tried to Negotiate With Republicans: The GOP’s biggest talking point of the shutdown is only true if you ignore everything that happened before last week,” Alex Seitz-Wald makes an important point that apparently confounds the rest of the print and broadcast media.
At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Mark Coddington reports on “False Equivalence in Shutdown Reporting,” and flags several articles on the topic, including a post by Jay Rosen, who notes that “with the critique of ‘false equivalence’ now a part of the journalist’s daily life and the rise of point-of-view reporting to normal status online, the artifice is shakier than ever.” We hope.
For one of the better recent discussions of the problem, read Time Magazine’s “Not “Both Sides,” Now: Why False Equivalence Matters in the Shutdown Showdown” by James Poniewozik. “Both sides are to blame; the truth is somewhere in between”-that has always been the political media’s happy, safe place…Seeming fair becomes more important than being fair…At worst, a legitimate impulse (“Let’s make sure we’ve checked out the other side”) becomes skewing reality for the sake of appearances (“We have to put in an example of the other side doing this”).”
CBS News says there are 215 House votes ready for a clean CR to end the shutdown, 2 votes short of a majority. Many believe the spotlight would flush out a healthier majority.
At Wonkblog, Neil Irwin’s “Can business take the Republican Party back from the Tea Party?” notes “…So far the business-oriented, pragmatic wing of the Republican coalition has done more private grumbling about their Tea Party brethren than outright intra-party warfare. The question for 2014 is whether the current shutdown and debt ceiling crisis pushes them to actually recruit and fund candidates — and whether Republican primary voters in at least a few districts buy the pitch those candidates are selling.”
Beth Reinhard’s National Journal post, “Democrats Read Virginia As A War-on-Women Winner: Success with the strategy in 2013’s marquee race has Democrats hoping it will be equally effective in big 2014 contests” offers some promising observstions for Dems, including: “What we’re seeing in Virginia is incredibly validating,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which is airing a $1 million television and radio campaign against Cuccinelli. “I believe this race has set the table for these issues and for women to be determinative in 2014.”…Closing the gender gap was one of the major goals identified by the Republican National Committee in a sweeping review of the 2012 election, but a new United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll suggests the GOP is still struggling to connect with women. Only 14 percent of women said the Republican Party better represented their views. More than twice as many women, 33 percent, said the party had drifted further away, while 46 percent saw no change.”
Gallup oozes out yet another ‘congress job approval’ poll that somehow avoids the “which party is to blame” question.

CNN.com’s Deirdre Walsh reports that GOP moderates huddle as conservatives set agenda , noting that a “senior Republican familiar with the talks” says the effort may be small now, but it is expanding, and will grow as more Republicans hear from constituents back home that are hurting from the shutdown…”It’s Day 2 of the shutdown — we went from six or seven (members) to over 20 today…”
The New Republic’s Nate Cohn answers the question “Who Are the 17 Republicans Willing to End the Shutdown?” Cohn names names and adds, “Fifteen of the 17 representatives are from the mid-Atlantic or California. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most are from relatively competitive territory: Romney only won five of the 17 districts by more than 3 points…Perhaps because of their districts, these representatives are also relatively moderate–13 are among the 40 most liberal Republicans, as measured by DW-nominate. Eleven of the 17 representatives voted for the Senate’s fiscal cliff compromise last January…And perhaps as a result of their moderation, relatively few of these representatives appear vulnerable heading into 2014. Each of these candidates won by at least 7 points last November. The Cook Political Report only characterizes one seat as “lean Republican;” the rest are either “likely” or “safe” Republican.”
At the Week Keith Wagstaff reports on an emerging (we hope) trend in his post, “Blaming Republicans for the government shutdown: The end of false equivalence?: Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board is urging the GOP to throw in the towel”
Sabato’s Crystal Ball guest columnists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck offer this insight about “persuadable voters”, gleaned from their book, The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election : “…We can look at what voters told us in December 2011 and then after the election in November 2012. The vast majority of these voters — about 87% — preferred Obama, Romney or some other candidate in December and reported voting for the same candidate in November. That suggests a lot of stability — which isn’t surprising given that most voters are partisans and partisans are increasingly loyal in presidential elections…But that also leaves 13% who shifted — some from Obama to Romney or vice versa, and most of the rest from being undecided or preferring another candidate to preferring Obama or Romney. That’s a lot more movement than the 5% shift that averaging the horserace polls would suggest…How is it possible that 13% shifted their votes but the horserace polls moved so little? The answer is that these shifts — between the candidates, into and out of being undecided — usually didn’t advantage one or the other of the candidates.”
Also at the Crystal Ball, UNC Charlotte Professor Emeritas Theodore S. Arrington performs “simple least square” regression calculations to determine ‘partisan bias’ in the upcoming House elections. He concludes, “Looking forward from the 2012 election result, this research finds that Democrats would have to get around 53% of the two-party national House vote to have a shot at winning a majority in the lower chamber.” Arrington adds, “This is not impossible, as they performed above this level in 2006 and 2008, but it makes the task of winning a majority of the House seats an uphill climb.”
GOP SHUT DOWN COSTS AMERICANS OVER $30 MILLION PER DAY. Howzat for a headline? At Daily Kos, Laura Clawson reports on the cost of federal park shutdowns inb surrounding communities: “The National Park Service is losing $450,000 a day in entrance fees and other revenue thanks to the Republican shutdown, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in park-related economic shutdown losses. The communities surrounding national parks will suffer, too, to the tune of $30 million a day…With vacationers banned from the parks, they won’t pass through towns by park entrances. That means business lost for hotels and restaurants, grocery stores, supply stores and more.” So much fore the GOP’s “friend of small business” meme. And none of the estimates affecting other government agencies thus far factor in the opportunity cost of not doing the peoples’ business.
Worse, yes worse, Josh Levs reports at CNN: “The government shutdown is “extremely damaging” to U.S. intelligence operations, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Wednesday…The shutdown “seriously damages our ability to protect the safety and security of this nation,” he told a Senate panel…Approximately 70% of employees were furloughed, he said.” So much for the Republicans’ cred for protecting our national security.
At Alternet, syndicated talk show host Thom Hartmann does a good job of explaining how the Boehner shutdown robbed the ACA exchange rollout of millions of dollars of free television publicity: “Every news organization in the country had prepared detailed packages and reports on what Obamacare is, how to sign up for it…and all the details…Obamacare experts were being lined up as guests for September 30 and October 1 on radio and television networks and stations across the country. Local stations planned their local versions of this, talking about their state programs…Those two days we’re going to be a big deal, programming wise. I know. I’m in the industry. We were planning it, too…All those programs on radio and television would have given the equivalent of millions of dollars worth of advertising to Obamacare, and caused tens of millions of young people to learn about the program, get excited about the program, and begin signing up right away.” Nearly all of those programs were blacked out by the shutdown.
Liberal Democrat though I am, I like this image crafted by Grover “The Pledge” Norquist, as reported by Talking Points Memo’s Igor Bobic: “Cruz said he would deliver the votes and he didn’t deliver any Democratic votes. He pushed House Republicans into traffic and wandered away.” More humane, at least, than drowning the baby in the bathtub.

From Paul Krugman’s “Attack of the Killer Hipsters” at his Conscience of a Liberal NYT blog:

Never mind the polls showing approval of Obamacare moving one way or the other; they are all being taken in an environment where people are amazingly ignorant about the law, with a large minority believing that it has been repealed. What matters is how the thing works — and that, in turn, depends crucially on sufficient numbers of young, currently uninsured people signing up for the exchanges. Advocates will try to get those people signed up; Republicans will try to convince them not to. So how are the two sides’ chances.

A good point. Polls and how they are spun matter less for the implementation of Obamacare than how the universe of potential participants responds to the requirements and opportunities presented by the act. Krugman correctly identifies some key demographic groups that must step up for Obamacare to succeed — the young, non-affluent and largely non-white uninsured. He quotes Jonathan Chait on the challenge:

Fortunately for Obama, this field of battle favors his side. To pass the law, he needed to win over skeptical senators. To defend it in court, he needed conservative jurists. But identifying and persuading young people is a battle Obama does not expect to lose to Republicans, and in place of the federal outreach funds, the administration is deploying a campaignlike array of weapons: microtargeting, including door-to-door outreach, and all forms of media. (A few weeks ago, Katy Perry tweeted out a link informing her 42 million followers that health care was available beginning October 1.)

No doubt the Obamacare mobilization is also tapping African American and Latino icons to reach youth of color (we hope). In any case, it’s an option that the right doesn’t have. Hard to imagine the wingnuts having the Nuge or Kid Rock doing ads saying “Hey don’t sign up for Obamacare. It sucks” persuading many youth to disobey the mandate, compared to Perry’s positive pitch.
Dems have other unique advantages, as Krugman explains:

But that’s not all: there are also channels of influence the party of Fox News simply cannot reach: Spanish-language radio and TV, black churches (which played a big role in 2012), and more.
I don’t know whether anyone thought this out in advance, but the battle of the exchanges is indeed being fought on remarkably favorable ground for the reformers. And I, for one, find the thought of conservatives humiliated by an army of tweeting hipsters remarkably cheering.

Implementing the Affordable Care Act is not going to be an easy struggle going forward. But Krugman’s and Chait’s insight that supporters of the legislation have some significant advantages makes sense — and look a lot more promising at this political moment than Sen. Cruz’s ready-for-his-close-up drama queen antics do for the right.

The Republicans have had a delightful summer, despite their miserable approval numbers, doing very little, other than wallowing in fantasy scenarios, well-described by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson:

As the August recess unfolded, Republicans — including a number of prospective presidential candidates — contemplated whether to shut down the government as a protest of Obamacare and whether to refuse to honor the nation’s debt as a cri de coeur against Obamacare or the deficit or Obama himself or perhaps modernity in general. These issues were debated at length, if never quite in depth, on right-wing talk radio and Web sites. That nobody but the hard-core Republican right seemed stirred by shuttering the government and defaulting on the debt mattered not at all.
If the American right increasingly seems to occupy an alternative planet, that’s largely because its media outlets — we can throw Fox News into the mix — dwell on stories so exquisitely calibrated to excite the right that they may not be stories at all. The New Black Panther Party? The Epidemic of Voter Fraud? The calculated perfidy of Benghazi? The impeachable crime of Obamacare (a socialist scam actually modeled on a proposal from a conservative think tank 20 years ago)? It’s not the editorials and opinionating of right-wing broadcasters and journalists that are driving the right into fantasyland. It’s the tales they spin into stories and the time and space they devote to events that never actually happened or that they surreally misconstrue.

It’s been quite a frolic for the fantasy party, earning Speaker Boehner the crowning achievement of his career as least-productive speaker in U.S. history, while his GOP brethren in the Senate did almost as little. If you had to pick a famous painting that would depict the essence of their languid, hazy days of summer, Bruegel the Elder’s “Land of Cokaigne” would do.
But alas, reality eventually intrudes, as Meyerson writes:

By seeking congressional approval for military action against the Syrian government, President Obama has accomplished something that the nation hasn’t seen in some time: He’s compelled Republicans to divert their attention from their concocted crises to an issue of actual substance…By throwing the Syrian conundrum to Congress, Obama has at least confronted Republicans with a real-world choice. Since Saturday, the drumbeat for closing down the government has been muted in its usual haunts.
That’s why the coming collision of libertarian fantasies with reality will be instructive. Can a congressman vote to defund the government and approve a military action in the same month? Or vote to authorize cruise missile attacks while insisting the government default on its debts? All these issues will soon come before Congress in rapid succession.

Never mind, as Meyerson notes that “the U.S. government has obligations to the American people even more fundamental than seeking to stop the use of chemical weapons that are killing innocents in a foreign land. It provides pensions to the elderly, health coverage to the old and the poor, and, in a few months, it will help Americans without health insurance buy private coverage. It has obligations that conservative opposition has kept it from meeting — among them, repairing and modernizing the nation’s infrastructure and creating the jobs (say, by repairing the infrastructure) that the nation’s private-sector employers are unable or unwilling to create.”
As Meyerson concludes,

…Now Syria has popped the balloon of their insular summer. Right-wing Republicans may decide not to authorize a strike because they want to embarrass the president, but even they must know that there’s more at stake than their war on Obama: life and death; the future of a crumbling country and a volatile region; our own security as well as U.S. credibility. There may even be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in what passes for their philosophy.

As the Republicans’ summer of sloth comes to a close, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the GOP has devolved into a party which finds it easier to address conflicts in distant nations than the health, welfare and security of Americans.

The following article by TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from the Washington Monthly:
So the big buzz in Washington today is that House Republican leaders have turned the corner in tamping down sentiment for a suicidal drive to shut down the federal government unless the administration and Senate Democrats suicidally agree to “de-fund” (or as some argue, systematically delay) implementation of the Affordable Care Act. National Review’s well-sourced Robert Costa offers a tick-tock on the House GOP leadership’s campaign against a shutdown, concluding with Eric Cantor’s appearance at “the Weyrich lunch,” the regular Washington gathering of “movement conservatives” named after its original convener, the late Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and ALEC.

Later Wednesday, around noon, Cantor headed to the Weyrich lunch, an off-the-record gathering of conservative-movement leaders chaired by Morton Blackwell, the president of the Leadership Institute. Cantor reiterated what Boehner had told the conference that morning, and he talked about the shutdown question in a clinical way, telling the conservatives that he was with them on tearing apart and delaying the law wherever possible, but he didn’t want to risk the House GOP’s political capital on an unwinnable play for Senate votes. If the votes for defunding somehow emerged, he said, he would bring such a continuing resolution to the floor; but if the votes were not there, he’d advise against it.
There was disappointment at the Weyrich lunch, just as there was disappointment in the Capitol basement. But there was no uproar. A day later, on August 1, the “Big Four,” as the group of four top-ranking House Republicans is known, met to go over the events of the previous day and the state of play, pre-recess. Boehner reflected on the relative peace of the conference meeting, and Cantor relayed stories from his lunch. Whip Kevin McCarthy of California and conference chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers of Washington relayed what they were hearing from members. The consensus from the Big Four was that they’d keep moving ahead with their soft push to avoid a shutdown. They’ll aim to nudge the GOP caucus in this direction, and hope members will see it their way once the House reconvenes.

After a while, you get used to reading these insider accounts of Republican leaders talking to representatives of their own party’s “base” as though they are small children with learning disabilities, who must be calmed and coaxed into rational behavior and then rewarded with condescending praise and a sugary snack. I honestly can’t think of any parallel on the Left in recent memory; Democratic leaders are more likely to lecture “base activists” on responsibility and the awful alternative of Republican rule when they resist the party line. Lord knows there are plenty of things the federal government spends money on that are offensive to liberal activists. But even in the rare occasion when they’ve demanded a hard line on, say, funding the Iraq War, the debate has been over the possibility of discomfiting the Pentagon or interrupting “funding for the troops,” not the apocalypse of a government shutdown or debt default. And intramural disputes have largely been conducted in the open, without the strange and duplicitous tactics we are seeing today as Republican leaders claim to share the same atavistic goals as their activists but are simply pursuing a smarter, more “adult” strategy.
Whatever Costa is hearing, moreover, it’s not clear that the “adults” are winning the internal war even if they manage to win the immediate battle. One child who clearly hasn’t been given enough sugary snacks to stand down is RedState’s Erick Erickson, who pitched a veritable hissy fit today under the headline “Wimps, Frauds and Charlatans:”

The whole of the GOP save a handful is so intent on winning reelection they’re perfectly happy to lose the country. They will not do what is right because they might put in awkward positions. When groups like the Heritage Foundation pressure them, they send out Jenn Rubin to bad mouth the Heritage Foundation on the Washington Post’s website.
On Sean Hannity’s radio program yesterday, Senator Mike Lee and Karl Rove debated defunding Obamacare. Lee just devastated Rove and made the point, which had to be conceded, that the GOP always caves. Leadership, Jenn Rubin, and Karl Rove say the President will never blink. They presuppose that they themselves will blink.
Why?
As Ted Cruz said at the RedState Gathering, it is very simple. Just don’t blink.
It is time conservatives throw out their own bums. It is time to stand with the challengers. It is time to replace the wimps, frauds, and charlatans with men and women who will stand up and do the right thing. It’s time for a change. Until conservatives collect scalps from their own side, nothing will change. Obamacare will be funded. The GOP will keep claiming they oppose it. And conservatives will keep being lied to.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz goes to Iowa and is treated like a conquering hero and a “unifying” figure for Republicans.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for any concession to sanity in the GOP ranks, and am happy to hear that Boehner and Cantor may well be able to negotiate the next few months without bringing Washington to a standstill or wrecking the economy. But they will pay a price for any success in “tamping down” activist hysteria, whether it’s quiet concessions on the next policy battle in Congress, or primary challenges, or a revolt against Boehner’s speakership, or a broadly accepted “stab in the back” myth that makes today’s sensible accomodations of reality a legendary “abandonment of principle” that will keep the rightward pressure on the GOP ratcheted up for years to come.

For a long time now progressives have been pointing out that many mainstream commentators use a particularly vacuous and indeed dishonest kind of argument when they decide to criticize Obama. Rather than criticize Obama for failing to employ some specific alternative strategy to overcome GOP sabotage, they simply toss out metaphors and clichés about “strength” and “Weakness”, “arm-twisting” and “muscle” as if macho posturing by itself were a coherent political strategy.
Progressives call this the “Green Lantern” view of the presidency, the idea that presidents have essentially limitless power if they simply choose to wield it. It’s an essentially dishonest form of criticism because it allows a columnist to write an entire column blaming Obama for failing to overcome GOP resistance without once noting the unprecedented GOP resistance itself or proposing how it could actually be overcome.
Today’s Times has a particularly egregious example: in a single, short column Timothy Egan tosses out no less than 10 vacuous, clichéd criticisms.
Gaze in awe:

…too often, Obama (1) phones it in from 35,000 feet, far from the (2) sweat, grime and blood of the battlefield of politics.
[He] continues to (3) give limp speeches and moan about how he can’t get anything done with a Congress of Neanderthals and talk-radio spawn.
[He] did not (4) have enough muscle to (5) marshal through something favored by 90 percent of the American people — background checks to keep criminals and crazy people from getting guns.
He’s allowed himself (6) to get boxed in…
[His] policies — on immigration, marriage equality, tax fairness, guns — are sound and have majority support…It’s the way he runs the executive branch, (7) his fear of taking the fight to Republicans, that is so maddening.
… (8) He’s defensive, forced to defend his presidency as still being alive and well. Obama doesn’t have to be Lyndon B. Johnson, (9) twisting elbows to shape history. But maybe he can hire an L.B.J.
(10) Leaders find a way.

My god, just look at this forest of clichés. You can criticize Obama all you want but let’s face it, this drivel reads like something that was written by a computer program that randomly accessed a database of clichés and spit them out in any arbitrary order.
And here’s an interesting contrast to consider: study the editorial pages of New York Times and the Washington Post and count how many commentaries you can find that criticize a major Republican Party figure with a similar blizzard of 10 equally vacuous clichés.
The fact is that you can count such commentaries on the fingers of one thumb. The Times and Post simply will not run commentaries of that kind because they would appear too blatantly “partisan,” “extreme” and “polemical.” It’s only with the president that they feel free to run relentlessly negative commentaries and pretend that they are dispassionate analysis.
America’s problem is not just that we have a political party that has descended into a profoundly dangerous extremism. It’s that we also have a mainstream media that is in a clinical state of denial about that basic reality.

Scott Horsley’s npr.org post “Democrats Hope For A Bright Future In The Lone Star State” sheds light on Latino voter turnout: “According to the census figures, turnout among Latinos who were eligible to vote last year was just 48 percent, 14 points lower than the turnout for non-Hispanic whites. Latino turnout was considerably higher in swing states, though. These numbers aren’t as precise, because of smaller sample sizes, but the trend is clear: 52 percent of Latinos turned out to vote in Colorado, 62 percent in Florida and 67 percent in Virginia — all states where the Obama campaign invested heavily in Latino mobilization and won by narrow margins.” Horsley quotes TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira: “I think it tells you you get what you pay for…We know there’s this sleeping giant of the Hispanic electorate. So if you don’t do anything, or you just do the average amount, you’ll get your average turnout…But there’s a potential there to put more effort, more mobilization, more money, more time, into getting the Hispanic voters to the polls, and it should produce an increment in their vote.”
Of course, demographic trends would never deter Republicans from exercising their singular genius for seizing every opportunity to alienate Latino voters, as demonstrated by this latest example.
A statistic from a new Pew Research Center poll that should give Dems real hope for a 2014 upset: “…Just 22 percent approve of the job performance of GOP leaders in Congress.”
Dan Balz and Todd Mellnick report at the Washington Post that “In terms of participation rates, the Census survey said that 66 percent of eligible black voters turned out last November, compared to 64 percent of eligible white voters. In the course of three presidential elections, from 2004 to 2012, black participation has gone from seven points lower than white participation to two points higher.” However Balz and Mellnick also add that “The Census report notes that 2012 was marked by “large decreases in youth voting rates for all race groups and Hispanics.” Voting rates dropped by about 7 percentage points among both whites and blacks ages 18 to 24, and by almost 5 points among young Hispanics.”
NBC Senior Political Editor Mark Murray reports at NBC First Read that, according to a “new NBC News/Marist poll, 55 percent of Virginia residents say they want stricter laws governing the sale of firearms, versus 36 percent who want them left the same.”
Underdog Democrat Terry McAuliffe gains on VA A.G. Ken Cuccinelli in race for Governor, which is now a stat tie in new NBC/Marist poll.
Sarah Kliff has an interesting Wonkblog post, “Democrats say there’s a reason they’re not selling Obamacare yet,” noting, “I’ve put this question to top administration officials and advocates, and the answer tends to be this: If we start selling Obamacare now, we’re going to be raving about a product that doesn’t yet exist. That would, in turn, undermine the sales pitch they want to make in October, when enrollment in the new health plans opens…Both Enroll America and the Obama administration have discussed early summer, around June or so, as the point at which they’ll start ramping up their outreach campaigns. That’s when they believe they can start talking about health benefits that will become accessible a few months down the road…So, as Republican take more shots at the health care law, the Obama administration’s relative silence is part of a larger plan.”
Yet more evidence that progressives have a powerful weapon in consumer boycotts against wingnut media advertisers.
There may be more detail than you want to know about in Thomas B. Edsall’s NYT Opinionator post,”In Data We Trust” about Karl Rove’s ploy to be the GOP’s information technology czar. But this is required reading for Dem oppo researchers and data managers.
The Nation’s John Nichols explains why Mark Sanford’s win in SC-1 was pretty much a lock once he got the GOP nomination: “In 2012, the Democratic nominee took just 29 percent of the vote. Colbert Busch took 46 percent. So, in what was probably a best-of-all-worlds scenario for the Democrats, their candidate raised the party’s percentage of the vote by almost sixteen points. But she needed a swing of more than twenty-one points…What happened in South Carolina will keep happening there and in the vast majority of American congressional districts for so long as those districts are drawn to advantage one party or the others.”

if you have felt despair about the relentless dominance of the MSM as a force for stifling progressive change, ‘Proglegs’ has a Daily Kos post that should lift your spirits considerably. Here’s a taste:

Ever since hate radio golden boy Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke a year ago, karma has been a real bitch for Clear Channel–who stood by their man.
Clear Channel’s radio revenue has been decimated by the StopRush movement through the efforts of activist groups like Flush Rush Facebook. These activists have worked every day to monitor Limbaugh’s broadcasts across the nation, enter ad information in The StopRush sponsor database, and contact advertisers to convince them to withdraw ads from the offensive program.
Last month, Clear Channel reported losses of $424 million for 2012. The media company has been firing employees throughout the past year in an effort to stop the hemorrhaging, to no avail. And Chairman of the Board Mark Mays announced his impending resignation.

Proglegs has more details about the Clear Channel’s troubles, and concludes:

Decent folks who believe in tolerance and equality are no longer powerless against Limbaugh’s efforts to spread intolerance on the radio. StopRush is making a major impact–and with your help we can do even more. Just a few emails, tweets, or Facebook messages a week to Limbaugh’s advertisers can go a long way toward making hatred less profitable. It is our collective voice that makes us strong.

Yet another reminder that political activism has forms for involvement other than campaigns and elections, especially in times when our political institutions seem mired in gridlock. There was a time when Clear Channel seemed indomitable, so vast was it’s reach. But a few hearty groups of progressive activists are bringing an end to their reign, and it’s just possible that a new era of progressive radio can now begin to take root across the nation.