Those who were wondering how low Republicans are willing to go in suppressing Latino and African American votes should read Brad Friedman’s “GOP voter registration scandal widens: A Virginia official is busted for tossing voter forms. Turns out he works for the national party, too” at Slate.com. Here’s an excerpt, beginning with the lede:

A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.
“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.
But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.
The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Read more…

Bob Hotakainen of McCatchey newspapers relays some good news for Dems: “Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the Cook Political Report, says there’s a 60 percent to 65 percent chance that Democrats – who now have 53 of the 100 seats – will keep control of the Senate in 2013.”
I guess Romney won’t have to explain his secrecy on his personal taxes in the final debate, since the topic is foreign policy. It’s a shame, literally, that he gets a free ride on this issue in all three debates. Dems should slam his tax secrecy hard in ads in the swing states.
Dave Nyczepir & Shane D’Aprile have a post on “A roadmap for the final 72: How your campaign can make the most of the run-up to Election Day” up at Campaigns & Elections. One tip: “Among the toughest decisions the campaign has to make is how to spend late cash. While it’s easy to get sucked in by the low cost and speed of robocalls, Democrat Marty Stone says there are much better ways to use phones…”Don’t just think about 30-second blasts of messages, but think about where the voters are,” Stone says. “Do push-button auto calls, getting their opinions back.””
From the L.A. Times article by Christi Parsons and Seema Mehta, “Obama and Romney campaigns battle to mobilize voters” : “By the numbers, Obama would appear to have an advantage. He has more than double the paid staffers on the ground as Romney, and many are veterans of his earlier operation. In Ohio, which is seen as a must-win state for Romney, the Obama operation has opened 120 outposts, 45 more than it had in the state in 2008. Romney has 40.”
This is why campaigns need smart optics analysts.
What’s the matter with Tennessee? Put another way, why can’t Democrats get much traction in the Volunteer State? This, despite a long heritage of producing distinguished Democratic leaders like Andrew Jackson, Kefauver, the Gores and Fords, to name a few, and a history of reaping tremendous benefits from Democratic leaders, like FDR. Today, incumbent Republican Scott DesJarlais, embroiled in a particularly ugly scandal, still leads his Democratic adversary Eric Stewart in their 4th district race. Greg Johnson addresses the race and TN Dems frustrations in general in his Knoxnews.com post, “Is Democratic brand irretrievably and permanently damaged in Tennessee?”
Meanwhile, The Economist has a good update, “New South, Blue South?” on the purpling of TN’s neighbor, NC.
Do read Jason Easley’s PoliticusUSA post,”Audio Reveals Mitt Romney is Behind Employer Layoff Threats if Obama Wins ” and listen to the audio clip embedded in his post. Easeley reports: “According to the Working blog at In These Times, Romney said, “I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope, I hope you pass those along to your employees.”
ProPublica’s latest rap video “Money is Speech: A Musical History of Campaign Finance” is a hoot.
Just saw a sneak preview of Speilberg’s “Lincoln,” which is all about the politicking to get the 13th amendment to the Constitution passed in the House of Reps, along with a character study of Lincoln, ably played by Daniel Day Lewis. It struck me as sad that a party once lead by giants like Lincoln and the abolitionists has now been totally taken over by moral midgets who suppress the citizenship rights of people because of the color of their skin. Sadder still that some of the most respected conservative journalists betray the GOP’s once proud heritage with their unconscionable silence about voter suppression.

Ben Schreckinger reports in his post “Democrats Widen Enthusiasm Gap” at The National Journal that “Democrats are now significantly more engaged by the presidential race and view it more favorably than Republicans, according to a Pew survey published on Wednesday…Two-thirds of Democrats find the campaign “interesting” compared with only half of Republicans, while 68 percent of Dems find it “informative,” compared with just under half of Republicans, according to survey, conducted over the weekend by the the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.”
Nate Silver has a lot more to say about the “decline of the enthusiasm gap” at FiveThirty Eight, which leads him to conclude that “for now, our forecast has stabilized a bit, with Mr. Obama holding in the range of about a four-point lead in the popular vote and an 80 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.”
If you thought that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus might want to lay a little low for a while and let the wake of his hideously bungled convention quietly subside, you would be quite wrong. David Atkins cuts Priebus and his party no slack at Hullabaloo, regarding the RNC chair’s inane tweet “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.” Says Atkins: “That’s the actual, nominal head of the Republican Party speaking, not some radio shock jock…But this this is who they are, and what the official Republican discourse has been reduced to. It’s time the press started reporting the callous, lying extremism of the mainstream Republican Party for what it is.”
The Boston Globe piles on in today’s editorial “Romney’s comments raise doubts about his foreign-policy savvy,” as did The Washington Post editorial “Mr. Romney’s rhetoric on embassy attacks is a discredit to his campaign.”
In keeping with Romney’s dazzling display of diplomatic ineptitude, note that Russian President Vladimir Putin has thanked the GOP nominee for his myopic comment that Russia is our “number one geopolitical foe.” As Kirit Radia reports at abcnews.com’s ‘OTUS’ blog, Putin said, “I’m grateful to him (Romney) for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems,” Putin told reporters, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.”
Here’s some really great stats for the Obama campaign, from The New York Times editorial “Fewer Uninsured People“: “The Census Bureau reported on Wednesday that the number of people without health coverage fell to 48.6 million in 2011, or 15.7 percent of the population, down from 49.9 million, or 16.3 percent of the population, in 2010. Health experts attributed a big chunk of the drop to a provision in the health care reform law that allows children to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26. Some three million young adults took advantage of that provision, other surveys show.”
Add to that a new government report that the Affordable Care Act has saved health care consumers an estimated $2.1 billion in premiums, as Allison Terry reports at The Monitor..
Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes a sneak peek at an article taking an overview of 13 current political forecasting models in PS: Political Science & Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. Sabato’s summation: “…They vary widely, with eight of the 13 showing victory for President Obama and five seeing Mitt Romney as the next president. The chances of an Obama plurality range from a mere 10% to a definitive 88%. For whatever it is worth, the average of the models’ projected vote for President Obama (of the two-party total, excluding third-party and independent candidates) is 50.2% — a tiny advantage for Obama, but hardly ironclad.”
Lots of buzz about a new study of facebook as a GOTV tool. As John Markoff reports in the New York Times, “The study, published online on Wednesday by the journal Nature, suggests that a special “get out the vote” message, showing each user pictures of friends who said they had already voted, generated 340,000 additional votes nationwide — whether for Democrats or Republicans, the researchers could not determine. ”
In a more partisan vein, GOP-friendly consultant Vincent Harris reports at Campaigns & Elections on how Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ted Cruz used social media in his upset win of his party’s primary in Texas. Harris explains: “Most importantly, digital was baked into all aspects of the campaign from communications to political fieldwork to polling….Ted announced his candidacy for Senate on a conference call with conservative bloggers. Texas has a large network of active conservative bloggers and giving access to them was important to promoting Ted’s conservative message and helping generate buzz about his candidacy among the party base. Ted met with bloggers in person and via phone often, and the campaign created a robust blogger action center encouraging bloggers to post supportive widgets, and created a segmented email list to update bloggers from.” Dems take note.

It looks increasingly like another botched GOP vetting job behind the Ryan pick. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from Jennifer Bendery’s “Paul Ryan Only Passed 2 Bills Into Law In More Than A Decade” at HuffPo. One bill was a post-office renaming; the other was imposing a tax on archery arrow shafts. This is the Republicans’ big thinker?
Dems looking for a manageable soundbite on the Ryan pick should consider this one by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, reported in The Monitor: “As a member of the Budget Committee myself, I’ve had a front row seat to witness the architect of the Romney-Ryan budget…It suggests that we should end Medicare as we know it, shred the safety net for seniors in health care that we had in place for more than 50 years, turn Medicare into a block grants and send it to the states, which would really jeopardize seniors in nursing homes, potentially take 10 million students off of Pell Grants, cut health care, cut education.”
Or, try Paul Krugman’s take, from his NYT blog on “Galt/Gekko 2012“: “…Anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered…He is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine…Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.”
For bumper-sticker brevity, however, nobody is going to top President Obama’s zinger characterizing the Romney-Ryan economic plan as “trickle-down fairy dust.”
For least credible walkback on the Sunday political yak shows, I would like to nominate Newt for his comment on ‘Face the Nation’ that Ryan’s Medicare-to-voucher plan “is the right direction” for America — which is quite a stark contrast from his earlier characterization of it as “right-wing social engineering” and “too big a jump.”
Writing in Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Buffalo-SUNY Proff James E. Campbell makes an economic determinist argument that growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) is the most important economic statistic to watch in presidential campaigns. Campbell, a Republican, believes President Obama’s chances are fading with his real GDP stats. But the utility of his forecasting model suffers in this case by not factoring in Romney’s extraordinarily-high negatives, nor the quickening demographic transformation that is now underway.
Nader makes the definitive take-no-prisoners case for the $10 minimum wage.
A New York Times report by James B. Stewart sheds light on the possibility that Romney paid zero or very little in income taxes during the last decade: “…This summer the Internal Revenue Service released data from the 400 individual income tax returns reporting the highest adjusted gross income…Buried in the data is the startling disclosure that six of the 400 paid no federal income tax…The I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010…More than a quarter of the people earning an average of over $200 million in 2009 paid less than 15 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes.”
At Politico Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman write in “Romney-Ryan map has Florida at the center” that “The biggest danger for Romney is in Florida, with its must-win 29 electoral votes and heavy senior population, Republicans said it was crucial to inoculate voters on Ryan’s “Roadmap,” part of which would turn Medicare into a voucher-based system for future retirees…A well-placed source said Republicans recently did an extensive regression analysis war-gaming what states are most crucial given the polling…The single state that Romney absolutely had to have in all the various combinations: Florida.”
Paul Begala’s Daily Beast post “With Ryan, Romney Has the Plutocrat Ticket” concludes with what is so far the best line (and most disturbing image) about the Ryan selection: “And somewhere in hell, Ayn Rand is cackling with glee.”

With the selection of Paul Ryan for V.P. The Democratic Strategist is reissuing several posts about his political philosophy. This post by James Vega is from April 25th 2011
Paul Ryan is unusual among politicians because – unlike most — he is actually committed to a specific, explicitly formulated social philosophy – the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are three facts that make the depth of his commitment unmistakably clear:

• Paul Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said.
• He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on Rand. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,”
• He distributes copies of Rand’s books to his staff and requires them to read them.

So is Ryan really a committed and genuine follower of Rand? Let’s try just a little bit of intellectual honesty here. Just replace the name Ayn Rand with V.I. Lenin and imagine a Democrat trying to get away with doing the things listed above without being labeled a hard-core Leninist fanatic.
OK, so let’s accept that Ryan is a serious, dyed-in-the-wool Ayn Rand-ian. So what? Well, listen to these quotes from Rand about ordinary working people:

“The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains…
…Wealth is …made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent, by the ambitious at the expense of the lazy….
“What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

No, these are not out of context, uncharacteristic remarks and no, they are not referring only to people on welfare. They are the core of an organized philosophy that glorifies the wealth-creating businessman and dismisses the ordinary working stiff as a dumb and lazy parasite whose mediocrity is his own damn fault and who lives off businessmen’s productivity like a blood-sucking leech. It’s the philosophy at very heart of “Atlas Shrugged” the book that made Rand a right-wing hero.
Now here is Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given. It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Ayn Rand on the Cross:

“It is the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”

“Mysticism” and “superstition” were two of Ayn Rand’s favorite derogatory terms for religion and her dismissal of Christ for sacrificing himself for his “inferiors” ties together her contempt for both ordinary working people and Christianity at the same time. There are in her works countless statements that literally drip with scorn and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.
Many conservative Christians who take their Christianity seriously do face up to the genuinely creepy and sinister “uber-mensch” (superior man) and “unter-mensch” (inferior man) elements of Rand’s philosophy and reject it categorically.
Here, for example, is Michael Gerson:

Reaction to Rand draws a line in political theory. Some believe with Rand that all government is coercion and theft — the tearing-down of the strong for the benefit of the undeserving. Others believe that government has a limited but noble role in helping the most vulnerable in society — not motivated by egalitarianism, which is destructive, but by compassion, which is human. And some root this duty in God’s particular concern for the vulnerable and undeserving, which eventually includes us all. This is the message of Easter, and it is inconsistent with the gospel of Rand.

But Paul Ryan doesn’t believe this at all – he considers Rand his hero and inspiration – and it’s really vile and contemptible that so many conservatives who claim to be both devout Christians and great defenders of the average American are happily snuggling up under the covers and making goo-goo eyes with a guy whose philosophy should make them gag up their lunch and run to take a shower. Politics may make strange bedfellows, but this slimy and perverse union is particularly grotesque.

Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg report in the NYT that top GOP strategists have joined forces with conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts to prepare for a political ad campaign that may set a new standard for viciousness. According the the authors, one part of the plan includes,

…running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.
“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

The ad would reportedly front an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who would say that Obama presents himself as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.” This particular group of conservatives seems terminally obsessed with the Jeremiah Wright fuss, which the public may now see as a no-longer relevant yawner.
But it is a clear harbinger of the depths of the low road Republican campaign to come. It’s all part of the strategy of using Super PAC’s to do the dirty work, while the Romney campaign stays on the ‘higher’ road:

…Should the plan proceed, it would run counter to the strategy being employed by Mitt Romney’s team, which has so far avoided such attacks. The Romney campaign has sought to focus attention on the economy, and has concluded that personal attacks on Mr. Obama, who is still well liked personally by most independent voters surveyed for polls, could backfire.
…The strategists grappled with the quandary of running against Mr. Obama that other Republicans have cited this year: “How to inflame their questions on his character and competency, while allowing themselves to still somewhat ‘like’ the man becomes the challenge.”
Lamenting that voters “still aren’t ready to hate this president,” the document concludes that the campaign should “explain how forces out of Obama’s control, that shaped the man, have made him completely the wrong choice as president in these days and times.”

The ad would run during the Democratic convention in Charlotte. It also calls for billboards and aerial banners etc.
In his TDS strategy memo warning of a GOP “propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American History,” Andrew Levison predicted that the Republican PACs would take the lead in the low-road campaign. “The ads–which will come from Super-PAC’s more than official sources–will be ugly and distasteful: they will portray Obama as deeply “un-American”–foreign and alien to the heartland values and daily life of the “real” America.” the reasons, as Levison suggests,

…By the fall of 2012 Republicans and conservatives will be literally desperate to increase turn-out among a conservative political base that is very ambivalent about Romney and which has extremely little enthusiasm for him or his country-club Republican persona. There is only so much that conventional TV advertising can do to create an artificial “real folks” image for a candidate who is as ostentatiously privileged and aloof as Romney. In order to turn-out the base on Election Day Republican strategists will agree that it will be necessary to create a climate of genuine mass hysteria about the horrors of a second Obama term.
…The most important goal of this low road campaign will be to create a fierce and widespread hysteria among the conservative base–enough to overcome their lack of enthusiasm for Romney and bring them out to vote in record numbers. But this campaign will also have a significant impact on non-conservative, relatively apolitical voters as it circulates via social media and face to face communication. Among the vast majority of average Americans today there are now informal social media networks (e-mail, Facebook, photo-sharing sites etc.) of 10-30 or more family and friends. Within these networks there are almost always a small group of passionate tea-party/Rush Limbaugh advocates–cantankerous cousin Buford who continually passes around all the latest e-mail rumors (“they’re gonna’ secretly implant chips with 666 on em’ into all the dogs when they go to get their vaccinations”) and bossy Aunt Louise who thinks that photo-shopping Nancy Pelosi’s head onto a zombie or vampire photo or using the “fun-house mirror” tool on Obama is the absolute height of mordant satire. These individuals will be the conduit through which the massive low road campaign will circulate virally.

The best Democratic response suggests Levison, would be a “communications campaign that aggressively attacks the low road slanders from a relatively “middle of the road”, moderate perspective and which puts pressure on Romney to either embrace or repudiate them…forced to choose between alienating his conservative or moderate supporters.” Examples of messages Levison suggests include “”This election should be an honest debate and not a smear campaign using secret money” and “Oh come on. Get real. I’m sick of hearing lies every day on my TV and telephone.”
Clearly the Obama campaign needs a quick response team dedicated, not only to launching strong counter-punch attacks, but also sound bite-sized responses that appeal to average voters’ sense of decency. The right-wing Super PACs are poised to take the tone of campaign 2012 way south in terms of sleaze, and Dems should get ready to rumble.

According to Brian Beutler’s Talking Points Memo post “Dems Plot Payroll Tax Cut End Game,” Dems will amend the GOP proposal to include extended unemployment insurance and Medicare physician reimbursements. Expect tricky parliamentary chess moves ahead.
In a video released by the White House this morning, President Obama is urging supporters to pressure Congress to extend the payroll tax cut before it expires. Noting that wage earners will have to shell out $40 more per paycheck if the tax cut lapses after February, Obama called on supporters to post at Twitter and Facebook, explaining what they could do with $40 more per paycheck.
Rick Santorum is the only Republican presidential candidate who has ever won a swing state, as he recently bragged. But he is also the only one who lost one by 18 points, and it seems like a good time for Dems to better understand why. Julie Hirschfeld Davis has the skinny at Bloomberg Businessweek. It had to do with a little too much emphasis on “cultural issues” and alienating women, as well as Santorum “moving his family to suburban Virginia, yet still claiming a property tax deduction and tuition reimbursement in Pennsylvania.”
At The Daily Green Jim Dipeso, policy director for Republicans for Environmental Protection, has a post, “Swing Voters Want Renewable Energy.” Apparently there are a few Republican environmentalists, who are not just industry puppets providing cover. Dipeso cites a State of the Rockies Project poll of voters in six states indicating agreement that “renewable energy would create jobs in their states” and 80 percent believed “it’s possible to have both a strong economy and to protect land and water.” Dipeso also discusses an encouraging Third Way focus group of mid-western and southern swing voters who support moderate government regulation to protect the environment.
Speaking of swing voters, Ryan Lizza’s “Obama’s Swing Voters” in The New Yorker flags five interesting links. which are “far more informative than much of the horse-race analysis…”
Despite polls indicating most Catholics are not opposed to government funding for birth control, the Republicans continue to parrot the meme that President Obama is somehow dissing their faith. They are also trying to generalize it more broadly with repetition of terms like “Obama’s war on religion.” Unfortunately, memes don’t have to be true to be effective. “Since winning 54 percent of the Catholic vote in 2008, the president’s approval rating among Catholics had fallen to 39 percent in the latest Rasmussen Reports poll. And Republicans are eagerly trying to drive that wedge between Obama and Catholics even deeper,” reports Hayley Peterson in the Washington Examiner. it appears that the Obama campaign might benefit from more creative outreach to Catholics and other religious groups.
Craig Gilbert reports in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the impact of the Catholic vote in key battleground states. Gilbert notes that “New Hampshire (38%) and New Mexico (36%) had a higher percentage of Catholic voters than Wisconsin (33%) in 2008, according to exit polls.” Other battlegound states in which Catholics were a quarter or more of the electorate include PA, FL, MI, IA and CO.
Good to see that the Obama campaign is alert to the importance of the high-turnout senior vote, as evidenced by this excellent YouTube clip, which should be sent to all your senior relatives and friends. Actually there are quite a few YouTube video clips about Obama and seniors here.
Douglas Schoen warns at The Daily Beast that it’s “Not Too Late for Americans Elect to Win 2012 Presidential Election,” noting that “A recently completed Americans Elect survey found that and voters favor, 58 percent to 13 percent, having an alternative presidential ticket that is independent of the Democratic and Republican parties on the ballot in 2012.” Schoen also cites a Washington Post/ABC News poll in November showing even stronger support for an Independent ticket.

The Republican primary campaign has provided a foretaste of the bitter and divisive super-PAC driven media tactics that will be used against Obama in the fall. The fundamental and inescapable fact is that Democrats will be on the receiving end of a propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American history. Democrats must begin planning now how they will respond.
The attack will be three pronged:
First, there will be a “high road” attack directly sponsored by the Republican presidential candidate – now almost certainly Romney – and the RNC. It will be based on sanctimoniously accusing Obama of having “failed” — that he has not fulfilled his campaign promises and that his policies have proved ineffective. The media has already reported on this planned campaign and how it will reduce the need for Romney to attack Obama personally by using Obama’s own words against him.
This part of the three-pronged approach does not represent any major departure from the practices of past campaigns. Where it will significantly differ is in the use of bogus “facts” and statistics on a scale that would have been previously unacceptable. Years ago statements such as “the stimulus did not create any jobs” and “unemployment has risen under Obama” would have been dismissed as simply false by the media as soon as “mainstream” economists objected. In the modern “post-truth” Fox News world, on the other hand, even the most unambiguously false charges will be described as “debatable” rather than nonsense.
The second prong of the strategy will be a feverish invocation of the culture war narrative — one that will far excel Sarah Palin’s sneering and divisive “we’re the real, the good America; they are the degenerate coastal elites” framework that she used in the 2008 campaign.
The ads – which will come from Super-PAC’s more than official sources — will be ugly and distasteful: they will portray Obama as deeply “un-American” – foreign and alien to the heartland values and daily life of the “real” America. Romney and the Republicans have already made this the centerpiece of their “hardball” attack. Obama “goes around the world apologizing for America.” “He wants to turn America into France.” “He is a socialist who hates free enterprise.” The third-party ads will repeat these same accusations but with an overt appeal to prejudices that will be more accurately described as xenophobic rather than racial. The ads will identify Obama not with ghetto hoodlums or Black Panthers but rather with foreign ideas and ethnicities — “commies”, “America-hating Muslims” and “illegal aliens and foreigners,” all of whom support his goal of undermining America.
The most important and destructive change in 2012, however, will be in the vastly expanded dissemination of a third, flagrantly dishonest and utterly propagandistic “low road” attack – one that will be conducted both above and below the radar.
In 2008 the low road attack on Obama was conducted largely outside the official candidate and Republican party media or the major PAC’-s (one clumsy ad by the McCain campaign that attempted to make a “dog-whistle” suggestion that Obama was the anti-Christ was a notable exception). Most of the 2008 low road attacks circulated under the radar – through distribution to informal e-mail lists and comment threads, through micro-targeted direct mail, through robo-calls and through phone banks run by shadowy outside firms. Within these closed communication channels the claims were widely circulated that Obama was a secret Muslim, a radical/communist, a sympathizer with domestic terrorist bombers, and that he was behind a range of “Birtherist” and other conspiracies. Media Matters for America made pioneering attempt to map these “below the radar” attacks during the 2008 campaign and to outline how they were circulated and amplified within the various conservative communication networks, but the study was discontinued after the elections.
Observers were at first uncertain how important these sub-rosa attacks would be in the 2008 election but the absolutely pivotal role they played became very clear as the passion and enthusiasm of the Republican base became largely driven by these “disreputable” views rather than the more policy-based attack made by McCain himself. The real energy of the Republican base in 2008 was reflected in the almost fanatical Sarah Palin supporters whose enthusiasm vastly exceeded any support for McCain himself and whose signs and shouted slogans reflected the “disreputable” rumor-based views rather than opposition to Obama’s actual platform or priorities.
(The influence of the rumor-based attacks reached a dramatic climax when McCain – in the most honorable single action of his campaign – explicitly rejected the claim of a woman who asked why he didn’t tell voters “the truth” – that Obama was a Muslim terrorist and a traitor during one rally in September. McCain tried to reason with the woman, arguing that Obama was not a terrorist but simply an American with whom he disagreed but the crowd howled its fierce disapproval of his conciliatory remarks.)
Democrats should not assume that Romney will behave as honorably in 2012 as did McCain in 2008. While Romney will hold himself personally aloof, there is little or no chance that he will explicitly disavow the massive low road campaign that will be launched on his behalf.
In 2012 this low road attack – which will once again circulate in large part “under the radar” by e-mail, phone, mail and social media –will have three key characteristics:

Read more…

A good place to begin your Tuesday reading would be John Nichols article in The Nation, “Occupy the Polls: Tuesday’s Critical Tests of Political Power” which spotlights a ten-pack of elections being held around the country today to watch for clues. Number one is the Ohio referendum to restore labor rights, which progressives are expected to win.
Dems should also keep an eye on swing state Virginia, where top Democrats are rallying to prevent Republicans from controlling the state senate, the last Democratic bulwark in the Old Dominion. The Washington Times’ David Sherfinski has a report here.
Seizing on a newly-released Florida poll indicating that a near-majority of respondents believe the Republicans are sabotaging the economy at the same time as the President’s approval rating is 41 percent in the sunshine state, Jonathan Chait makes the case that Obama’s low approval ratings are being overemphasized by the pundits. Chait notes that Bush’s mid-forties approval numbers improved significantly in ’04 as many voters decided they couldn’t cast ballots for Kerry. Says Chait: “…incumbent approval rating isn’t something that’s independent of the opposing candidate. Voters may shape their view of the incumbent by making a comparison…We have to be a little cautious about interpreting the importance of Obama’s mediocre approval ratings in the face of a polarized electorate and a still-discredited opposition party.”
Mounting opinion poll data indicates that the public believes the GOP is intentionally stalling the economy to hurt the President’s re-election prospects, according to Brian Beutler’s post “Three’s A Trend: Polls Show Voters Believe GOP Intentionally Stalling Economic Recovery” in Talking Points Memo. Salon’s Steve Kornacki has more to say about it here.
Ed Pilkington reports in The Guardian on “Koch brothers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind.” For those who were unaware of the extent of the brothers’ grandiose ambitions, Pilkington notes “The voter file was set up by the Kochs 18 months ago with $2.5m of their seed money…It has been given the name Themis, after the Greek goddess who imposes divine order on human affairs.”
Martha C. White has a Time Moneyland report “Bank Transfer Day, The Day After.” Although aggregate numerical data is not yet in, some anecdotal reports are impressive. Noting that the facebook-generated campaign had 86K supporters, White adds: “The Denver Post says more than 1,000 protesters marched from bank to bank and urged customers there to close their accounts, while the Colorado Independent says local credit unions have acquired $100 million in new deposits within the past month… In Sacramento, Golden1 Credit Union opened for extended hours, and Vice President of Marketing, Scott Ingram said “It’s a busy day for us. We were anticipating we’d see a lot of new members and that’s what’s happening at every branch,” reported
reported Leigh Paynter of News10 KXTV. Elsewhere, Suzanne Kapner of the Wall St. Journal reports “On Saturday, the Boeing Employees’ Credit Union in Seattle signed up a one-day record 659 new members. At the grand opening of a Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union branch in Pflugerville, Texas, the parking lot was so full that customers had to leave their cars across the street.” You want video? Anna Almendrala of HuffPo has some Youtube footage here.
Most of the action was in the west, but not all of it. Looking to the east, Rashid Mian of the Long Island Press reports in his “Bank Transfer Day: Hundreds Switch to LI Credit Unions” that “Bethpage Federal Credit Union reported that more than 1,200 new accounts were opened on Saturday alone, far more than the usual 300 accounts the credit union opens on average per week.” “We’ve been so busy I’ve been handling customers that are overflow,” says David Glaser, vice president of the National Capital Bank of Washington, in Washington, D.C. The two-branch bank has one location open on weekends, and Glaser says it added six new customers on Saturday. Ordinarily, he says a Saturday might yield just a single new customer or none at all,” according to White’s report in Time, cited above.
Dems need not be intimidated by GOP bluster and cherry-picked polls arguing for a return to “market-based” healthcare,’ because some polls show show quite the opposite, As Sarah Kliff of Ezra Klein’s wonkblog reveals in her “Unexpected chart of the day: Americans want more government in health care.”
Elizabeth DiNovella has a penetrating report in The Progressive on “The Group Behind the Republican Takeover,” the Republican State Leadership Committee, which “played a decisive role in the 2010 elections, and helped flip twenty state legislative chambers from Democrat to Republican. Republicans now control more state legislatures than at any time since 1928.” DiNovella notes that, “Able to raise unlimited funds, the Republican State Leadership Committee is a stalking horse for corporate America. Top contributors to the group include Altria (formerly Philip Morris), Anheuser-Busch, Citigroup, Comcast Cable, Exxon Mobil, Home Depot, Monsanto, PhRMA, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Verizon, and WellPoint.” Just thought you oughtta know.
Anyone who has any doubts that ‘felon disenfranchisement’ laws being strengthened by Republicans across the country are racially-motivated, should check out “Who Gets to Vote?,” a revealing NYT op-ed by New York law School professor Erika L. Wood.
Ronald Brownstein discusses “The Two Worlds of Whites” revealed in the Pew Research study last week in his National Journal column. Says Brownstein: “On the day after Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg described the modern Democratic coalition as diverse America and the whites who are comfortable with diverse America…That appears to be even more true today. The line between whites who are comfortable with the racial and ethnic change transforming America into a “world nation” and those uneasy about it increasingly looks like one of the most important boundaries of the 2012 campaign.”