James Hohman’s Daily 202 column at WaPo, “The Daily 202: Trumpism rejected by Obama in State of the Union and Nikki Haley in GOP response,” spotlights a host of interesting reactions to President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Here we’ll just share some responses to the GOP rebuttal by Governor Nikki Haley:

— In the latest sign that the GOP establishment fears an electoral debacle if Trump is the nominee, the official Republican response from Nikki Haley also made the case – albeit a little more gently – against going down the path Trump offers. “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” the South Carolina governor said. “We must resist that temptation.”
— Haley’s speech has become a Rorschach test on the right…The far right hated it.
Breitbart headlined its story: “Republican Party Uses State Of The Union Response To Attack Trump.”
“Trump should deport Nikki Haley,” Ann Coulter wrote in one of six-anti Haley tweets.
Radio host Laura Ingraham chimed in: “The country is lit up w/ a populist fever & the GOP responds by digging in, criticizing the GOP candidates dominating polls?! NOT SMART.”
Former Ted Cruz aide Amanda Carpenter wrote: “Haley’s speech would’ve been good except for the GOP self-loathing.”
More mainstream elites in the right-leaning media loved Haley’s speech:
Charles Krauthammer, on a Fox News panel, called it the best State of the Union response he can ever recall hearing.
The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker said Haley’s response “will likely elevate her to the top of the list of potential vice presidential contenders.”
National Review editor Rich Lowry said it’s “always a tough assignment”: “Haley was a little shaky at beginning, but moving treatment of Charleston shooting and nice riff on GOP agenda.”

If one of Obama’s goals was to out the Republicans’ internal divisions, the President succeeded admirably.

We have become accustomed to superb speeches by President Obama, and his final State of the Union Speech not only documented his remarkable accomplishments as our national leader, but also charted an inspiring path to the future for the nation and for Democrats. Video and text of his speech follow:

OBAMA: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, my fellow Americans: tonight marks the eighth year that I’ve come here to report on the state of the Union. And for this final one, I’m going to try to make it a little shorter. (APPLAUSE)
I know some of you are antsy to get back to Iowa.
(LAUGHTER)
I’ve been there. I’ll be shaking hands afterwards if you want some tips.
Now, I understand that because it’s an election season, expectations for what we will achieve this year are low. But, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the constructive approach that you and other leaders took at the end of last year to pass a budget and make tax cuts permanent for working families.
So I hope we can work together this year on some bipartisan priorities like criminal justice reform, and helping…
(APPLAUSE)
… and helping people who are battling prescription drug abuse and heroin abuse.
(APPLAUSE)
So who knows. We might surprise the cynics again.
But tonight, I want to go easy on the traditional list of proposals for the year ahead. Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty, from helping students learn to write computer code to personalizing medical treatments for patients.
And I will keep pushing for progress on the work that I believe still needs to be done: fixing a broken immigration system…
(APPLAUSE)
… protecting our kids from gun violence, equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage.
(APPLAUSE)
All these things — all these things still matter to hardworking families. They’re still the right thing to do, and I won’t let up until they get done. But for my final address to this chamber, I don’t want to just talk about next year. I want to focus on the next five years, the next ten years and beyond. I want to focus on our future.
We live in a time of extraordinary change — change that’s reshaping the way we live, the way we work, our planet, our place in the world. It’s change that promises amazing medical breakthroughs, but also economic disruptions that strain working families.
It promises education for girls in the most remote villages, but also connects terrorists, plotting an ocean away. It’s change that can broaden opportunity, or widen inequality. And whether we like it or not, the pace of this change will only accelerate.
America has been through big changes before — wars and depression, the influx of new immigrants, workers fighting for a fair deal, movements to expand civil rights.
Each time, there have been those who told us to fear the future, who claimed we could slam the brakes on change, who promised to restore past glory if we just got some group or idea that was threatening America under control. And each time, we overcame those fears.We did not, in the words of Lincoln, adhere to the dogmas of the quiet past. Instead we thought anew and acted anew.
We made change work for us, always extending America’s promise outward, to the next frontier, to more people. And because we did, because we saw opportunity where others saw peril, we emerged stronger and better than before.
What was true then can be true now. Our unique strengths as a nation — our optimism and work ethic, our spirit of discovery, our diversity, our commitment to rule of law — these things give us everything we need to ensure prosperity and security for generations to come.
In fact, it’s in that spirit that we have made the progress these past seven years. That’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations.
(APPLAUSE)
That’s how we reformed our health care system and reinvented our energy sector.
(APPLAUSE)
That’s how — that’s how we — that’s how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops coming home and our veterans.
(APPLAUSE)
That’s how we — that’s — that’s how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.
(APPLAUSE)
But such progress is not inevitable. It’s the result of choices we make together. And we face such choices right now. Will we respond to the changes of our time with fear, turning inward as a nation, turning against each other as a people? Or will we face the future with confidence in who we are, in what we stand for, and the incredible things we can do together? So let’s talk about the future, and four big questions that I believe we as a country have to answer, regardless of who the next president is or who controls the next Congress.
First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy?
(APPLAUSE)
Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us, especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change?
(APPLAUSE)
Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?
(APPLAUSE)
And finally, how can we make our politics reflect what’s best in us, and not what’s worst?
(APPLAUSE)
Let me start with the economy and a basic fact. The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world.
(APPLAUSE)
We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history.More than 14 million new jobs, the strongest two years of job growth since the 1990s, an unemployment rate cut in half. Our auto industry just had its best year ever.
(APPLAUSE)
That’s just part of a manufacturing surge that’s created nearly 900,000 new jobs in the past six years. And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.
(APPLAUSE)
Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction. Now…
(APPLAUSE)
What is true — and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious — is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit, changes that have not let up. Today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated. Companies in a global economy can locate anywhere, and they face tougher competition.
As a result, workers have less leverage for a raise. Companies have less loyalty to their communities. And more and more wealth and income is concentrated at the very top.
All these trends have squeezed workers, even when they have jobs, even when the economy is growing. It’s made it harder for a hardworking family to pull itself out of poverty, harder for young people to start their careers, tougher for workers to retire when they want to. And although none of these trends are unique to America, they do offend our uniquely American belief that everybody who works hard should get a fair shot.
For the past seven years, our goal has been a growing economy that also works better for everybody. We’ve made progress, but we need to make more. And despite all the political arguments that we’ve had these past few years, there are actually some areas where Americans broadly agree.
We agree that real opportunity requires every American to get the education and training they need to land a good-paying job. The bipartisan reform of No Child Left Behind was an important start, and together, we’ve increased early childhood education, lifted high school graduation rates to new highs, boosted graduates in fields like engineering.
In the coming years, we should build on that progress, by providing Pre-K for all and offering every student…
(APPLAUSE)
… offering every student the hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready on day one. We should recruit and support more great teachers for our kids.
(APPLAUSE)
And — and we have to make college affordable for every American.
(APPLAUSE)
No hardworking student should be stuck in the red. We’ve already reduced student loan payments by — to 10 percent of a borrower’s income. And that’s good. But now we’ve actually got to cut the cost of college.
(APPLAUSE)
Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year. It’s the right thing to do.
(APPLAUSE)
But a great education isn’t all we need in this new economy. We also need benefits, and protections that provide a basic measure of security. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that some of the only people in America who are going to work the same job, in the same place with a health, and a retirement package for 30 years are sitting in this chamber. For everyone else, especially folks in their 40’s and 50’s, saving for retirement, or bouncing back from job loss has gotten a lot tougher. Americans understand that at some point in their careers, in this new economy, they may have to retool, they may have to retrain, but they shouldn’t loose what they’ve already worked so hard to build in the process.
That’s why Social Security and Medicare are more important than ever, we shouldn’t weaken them, we should strengthen them.
(APPLAUSE)
And for American short of retirement, basic benefits should be just as mobile as everything else is today.
That, by the way, is what the Affordable Care Act is all about. It’s about filling the gaps in employer based care so that when you lose a job, or you go back to school, or you strike out and launch that new business you’ll still have coverage. Nearly 18 million people have gained coverage so far, and in the process…
(APPLAUSE)
In the process health care inflation has slowed, our businesses have created jobs every single month since it became law.
Now, I’m guessing we won’t agree on health care anytime soon.
(APPLAUSE)
A little applause right there.
(LAUGHTER)
Just a guess.
But there should be other ways parties can work together improve economic security. Say a hardworking American loses his job, we shouldn’t just make sure he can get unemployment insurance; we should make sure that program encourages him to retrain for a business that’s ready to hire him. If that new job doesn’t pay as much, there should be a system of wage insurance in place so that he can still pay his bills. And even if he’s going from job to job, he should still be able to save for retirement and take his savings with him. That’s the way we make the new economy work better for everybody.
I also know Speaker Ryan has talked about his interest in tackling poverty. America is about giving everybody willing to work a chance, a hand up, and I’d welcome a serious discussion about strategies we can all support, like expanding tax cuts for low-income workers who don’t have children.
(APPLAUSE)
But there are some areas where we just have to be honest. It has been more difficult to find agreement over the last seven years, and a lot of them fall under the category of what role the government should play in making sure the system’s not rigged in favor of the wealthiest and biggest corporations.
(APPLAUSE)
And it’s an honest disagreement. And, the American people have a choice to make.
I believe a thriving private sector is the lifeblood of our economy. I think there are outdated regulations that need to be changed, there is red tape that needs to be cut.
(APPLAUSE)
There you go. Yes.
(APPLAUSE)
See?
But after years of record corporate profits, working families won’t get more opportunity or bigger paychecks just by letting big banks or big oil or hedge funds make their own rules at everybody else’s expense.(APPLAUSE)
Middle-class families are not going to feel more secure because we allowed attacks on collective bargaining to go unanswered. Food Stamp recipients did not cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.
(APPLAUSE)
Immigrants aren’t the principal reason wages haven’t gone up. Those decisions are made in the boardrooms that all too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns. It’s sure not the average family watching tonight that avoids paying taxes through offshore accounts.
(APPLAUSE)
The point is, I believe, that in this new economy, workers and start-ups and small businesses need more of a voice, not less. The rules should work for them. And…
(APPLAUSE)
… I’m not alone in this. This year, I plan to lift up the many businesses who’ve figured out that doing right by their workers or their customers or their communities ends up being good for their shareholders…
(APPLAUSE)
… and I want to spread those best practices across America. That’s part of a brighter future. In fact, it turns out many of our best corporate citizens are also our most creative.
And this brings me to the second big question we as a country have to answer: how do we reignite that spirit of innovation to meet our biggest challenges?
Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny Sputnik was up there.
We didn’t argue about the science, or shrink our research and development budget. We built a space program almost overnight, and twelve years later, we were walking on the moon.
(APPLAUSE)
Now, that spirit of discovery is in our DNA. America is Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers and George Washington Carver. America is Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson and Sally Ride. America is every immigrant and entrepreneur from Boston to Austin to Silicon Valley racing to shape a better future.
(APPLAUSE)
That’s who we are, and over the past seven years, we’ve nurtured that spirit. We’ve protected an open Internet, and taken bold new steps to get more students and low-income Americans online.
(APPLAUSE)
We’ve launched next-generation manufacturing hubs and online tools that give an entrepreneur everything he or she needs to start a business in a single day. But we can do so much more.
You know, last year, Vice President Biden said that, with a new moon-shot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they’ve had in over a decade.
(APPLAUSE)
Well, so — so tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of mission control.
(APPLAUSE)
For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all. What do you think? Let’s make it happen.
(APPLAUSE)
And medical research is critical. We need the same level of commitment when it comes to developing clean energy sources.
(APPLAUSE)
Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it. You will be pretty lonely because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.
(APPLAUSE)
But even if — even if the planet wasn’t at stake, even if 2014 wasn’t the warmest year on record until 2015 turned out even hotter — why would we want to pass up the chance for American businesses to produce and sell the energy of the future?
(APPLAUSE)
Listen, seven years ago, we made the single biggest investment in clean energy in our history. Here are the results. In fields from Iowa to Texas, wind power is now cheaper than dirtier, conventional power. On rooftops from Arizona to New York, solar is saving Americans tens of millions of dollars a year on their energy bills and employs more Americans than coal — in jobs that pay better than average.
We’re taking steps to give homeowners the freedom to generate and store their own energy — something, by the way, that environmentalists and Tea Partiers have teamed up to support. And meanwhile, we’ve cut our imports of foreign oil by nearly 60 percent and cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth.
(APPLAUSE)
Gas under $2 a gallon ain’t bad either.
(LAUGHTER)

Read more…

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Today, Monday, January 11, will have a big impact on the American Middle Class and all of those who aspire to it.
Today, the United States Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
This case has been brought to the Court by the Koch-sponsored “Center for Individual Rights (CIR) ” — an outfit that made its reputation challenging civil rights laws. The CIR is asking the Court to break with forty years of precedent to impose radical new limits on the rights of workers to negotiate together for higher wages and better working conditions.
Four decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that since public sector unions must represent all of the employees in a bargaining unit, labor agreements can require all employees that benefit from that representation to pay a fair share contribution to support the costs of negotiating and servicing the labor agreement.
This does not mean that all employees are required to join a union and contribute to its lobbying and political work — or to anything else it might do that is not directly related to negotiating and enforcing the terms of a contract.
And recall that public sector unions represent only groups of workers that have voted to form — or join — a union to represent them.
The Supreme Court found that it would make no sense to allow a situation where employees get the benefit of wage increases, paid holidays, health care benefits, etc. that are negotiated by the union leaders elected by the employees — but they can simply refuse to pay the costs of getting those benefits.
Billionaires like the Koch Brothers think otherwise. They want to make it as hard as possible for all workers to bargain together for higher wages, because they actively support a low-wage economy where CEOs, big corporations and Wall Street Banks can pay employees as little as possible and they can keep as much as possible for themselves.
The Friedrichs case itself deals only with public employees. But the Koch Brothers would like to weaken the rights of all employees to organize unions — and they think that a sharp reversal by the Supreme Court would be a great first step in that direction.
Trouble is, if the Koch Brothers get their way it will deliver a body blow to the chances of ordinary Americans to live secure, middle class lives. Remember, the wages of ordinary people have not increased in the United States since 2000. In fact, virtually all of the considerable economic growth that we’ve seen in America over the last three decades has gone to the wealthiest 1%.
That’s because people like the Koch Brothers have used massive campaign contributions and an army of lobbyists to rig the rules of the American economy.
We desperately need to reform government so it will once again level the economic playing field and build an economy that benefits all ordinary Americans — not just the wealthy, CEOs and big corporations.
If the Kochs get their way at the Supreme Court, it will do just the opposite. It will tilt the game even more in the favor of huge CEO salaries, enormous Wall Street bonuses, and gigantic corporate profits.
And it will make it harder for people like teachers, firefighters, road workers, and paramedics to negotiate for the kind of wages that allow them to live secure, middle class lives.
These are the kinds of people that were the foundation of the American Middle Class. It was their skill that educated and protected Americans for generations. And it was their middle class incomes that provided the buying power that allowed the American economy to explode — to become the economic envy of the rest of the world.
And let’s remember that it was the ability of public sector employees to organize and negotiate together for decent wages and safe working conditions that lifted so many out of poverty and made them part of the Middle Class.
Next week Americans celebrate a national holiday to commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. Fifty-one years ago, Dr. King was shot in Memphis where he had gone to support a strike by mainly black sanitation workers who were organizing to demand the ability to negotiate together for better wages and safer working conditions
The event that touched off that strike was the death of two sanitation workers who were crushed by an unsafe, malfunctioning garbage truck compactor. It had been cheaper to pay the occasional death benefit to a low income, African American sanitation worker’s family, than to invest in safety equipment on those garbage trucks.
The ability of those workers to organize together to negotiate — to form a union — not only brought them higher incomes and safer working conditions. It gave them dignity. In fact, the slogan of that organizing campaign — and the civil rights marches that supported it was: “I am a Man.”
Dr. King always believed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Organizing campaigns like the Memphis sanitation workers strike bent that arc. So did the Supreme Court case that legitimated the rights of public employees to organize and provided them the ability to succeed.
It’s not surprising that an organization like the CIR — that has tried to weaken civil rights laws for decades — wants to bend that arc back toward injustice — to gut the ability of working people like those sanitation workers to organize to secure a decent middle class income and the dignity that accompanies it.
When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the rights of people like those sanitation workers 40 years ago, it did so unanimously. Every member of the Court — the most conservative Justices and the most progressive Justices — all of them certified the notion that when a majority of workers vote to form or affiliate with a union, then everyone who benefits should be asked to pay their fair share of the costs associated with increasing their pay or making them safer on the job.
Every one of them agreed with the sentiments of teachers like Reagan Duncan, a first grade teacher in Vista, California, who was quoted last week in The New York Times:

It’s not right for some people to get union benefits for free while others have to pay. If I went to a grocery store, I wouldn’t walk out with my groceries and not pay while the guy behind me had to pay for my groceries and his groceries. She added: “It’s corporate special interest that are backing this…”

Precisely.
And frankly. it would be shocking if the Supreme Court of the United States were to over turn a 40-year-old unanimous precedent and make it even harder for ordinary people to restore the American Middle Class.

Karl de Vries reports at CNN Politics that former NY Mayor “Bloomberg commissioned poll to test 2016 waters, source says” — as a third party candidate.
In “The Democratic Party in the South Has Changed for Good: The party has been decimated in the South in the Obama era. But it is rebuilding itself in his image” in The New Republic, Michael A. Cooper, Jr. quotes Dr. Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at North Carolina’s Catawba College: “Southern Sun Belt states may ultimately become more important for Democratic campaigns than the aging Rust Belt. North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida already have a higher percentage of liberals than Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, New Hampshire, or Ohio. And “if Democrats win Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, they deny Republicans the White House,” says Bitzer, all else staying equal.”
At Ring of Fire, Farron Cousins warns that “Low Voter Turnout Will Hand 2016 Election To The GOP.”
And Kira Lerner flags “Voter Suppression Battles To Watch In 2016” at ThinkProgress.
In similar vein, Salon.com’s Paul Rosenberg has “This is how they’ll gut American democracy: Scott Walker and the Kochs want to f**k America as bad as they did Wisconsin — Dark money, gerrymandering, super-majorities, undemocratic actions that leave the plutocrats in charge. It’s coming.”
And if all of that wasn’t enough to worry about, Herbert Gans details “The Republican Establishment’s Overthrow Project” at HuffPo.
“YouGov’s latest research shows that Americans tend to describe themselves as working class (46%) rather than middle class (41%). Among Americans who live in households with incomes under $50,000 a year, 62% call themselves working class and only 25% think of themselves as part of the middle class. Among households who earn $50,000 to $100,000 a year 34% still call themselves working class and 60% middle class. People earning over $100,000 a year are the most likely to call themselves middle class, with 75% saying that they are middle class and only 11% describing themselves as upper class,” notes Peter Moore at yougov.com.
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall reports that “a White Nationalist Super PAC (yes, that’s now a thing) is now blanketing Iowa with Robocalls on behalf of Donald Trump.”
“Has Trump Made Political Ads Obsolete?,” asks Leslie Savan at The Nation. An interesting question, well-underscored in the observation in the subtitle: “His first TV spot was standard racist fear-mongering, as cheesy as a Trump hotel lobby. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush has spent over $100 million on ads, only to reach a humiliating 3.3-percent in the polls.” But it may be a long time before either party produces another candidate, who manipulates the media as consistently as does Trump. Savan asks and answers another interesting question in the article “So, again, why is Trump bothering to spend $2 million a week on TV spots? Howard Fineman has speculated that Trump is “spreading” around money to keep the local TV stations happy–it’s walking-around money for small-state media owners.”

2012 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and more recently CEO of Cannabis Sativa, a marijuana products and licensing company, announced this week that he would again pursue the radically anti-government party’s ballot line. At New York I discussed the significance of the vaccum Johnson is filling:

Johnson’s announcement probably marks the sad realization of many libertarians that the mainstream political breakthrough, or “moment” (as Robert Draper put it in a much discussed New York Times Magazine feature in August 2014), they had hoped for isn’t happening. That’s because the presidential campaign of the supposed vehicle for that breakthrough, Senator Rand Paul, has made even Jeb Bush’s effort look effervescent.
It’s instructive to compare Senator Paul’s standing right now to that of his father — supposedly marginalized by his eccentric congressional record, unsavory associations, and peculiar obsessions — at this point in 2012. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Rand Paul is currently running seventh nationally with 3 percent. Twenty-six days from the first votes in 2012, Ron Paul was running fourth nationally with just under 10 percent. In Iowa, Rand Paul is tied for seventh place with 2.6 percent. Ron Paul was tied for second place with 17.4 percent at this point in 2012. And in New Hampshire, supposedly a very libertarian friendly jurisdiction, Rand Paul is in ninth place with 3.8 percent. In 2012 at this juncture, Ron Paul was in third place with 14.5 percent.
The whole premise of the Draper piece was that Rand Paul had taken the old man’s creed and modified it enough to make it acceptable to mainstream Republican audiences, while potentially adding some independent and even Democratic voters to an old white GOP base badly in need of new recruits. Instead, he seems to have lost some of the old magic of the Revolution, and more than a few voters.

Some Libertarians, who are notoriously uncomfortable with compromise, are probably happy not to have to deal with the temptation of a Republican candidate who has come from but appears to have left behind the True Creed. There’s always John Galt to cite as an ideal.

At The Atlantic Molly Ball profiles “The Pugnacious, Relentless Progressive Party That Wants to Remake America,” a.k.a. the Working Families Party. In one part of her article, Ball focuses on the activism of one of the WFP’s top leaders, Analila Mejia, director of New Jersey Working Families:

A longtime union organizer who actually postponed her wedding to work on the Obama campaign, Mejia had previously served as New Jersey political director of the powerful mid-Atlantic janitors’ union, SEIU 32BJ, whose 145,000 members can be found everywhere from Yankee Stadium to the Pentagon…
Union work was satisfying but limiting for Mejia. Given the dramatic contraction of the labor movement, which has fallen to just 7 percent of private sector workers (in 1984, it was 16 percent), she longed to improve the lives of all workers, not just those lucky enough to be in a union. (In this sense, the WFP represents a stab at an American labor party, a common feature of European democracies that the U.S. has historically lacked.)
The WFP gives activists like Mejia an outlet for their frustration with national politics. It channels their anger at the constricting terms of the national debate into ground-level organizing–where the politics may seem unglamorously small-time, but there’s a chance to make a difference in people’s lives.
“We’ve found ways of electoralizing our issues,” Mejia told me. “We make politicians walk the walk–and pay the price if they don’t.” The idea is to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to Republicans. “The rules are rigged against working people, so we have to think outside the box to find different ways to win at this game,” Mejia said.
When the Democratic-controlled New Jersey Legislature wasn’t advancing a statewide paid-sick-leave bill, the WFP went to the municipal level to find a workaround; 10 New Jersey cities have now mandated paid sick leave. And when Governor Chris Christie vetoed a set of voting reforms–including automatic voter registration and restoring felons’ voting rights–the party set out to collect signatures to put it on the ballot instead, hoping to put the issue before voters in November 2016.
Mejia has also spearheaded the party’s role as Christie’s chief harasser–a task the state’s sclerotic, Christie-co-opted Democratic Party originally hesitated to take up. The WFP’s protests, ethics complaints, and calls for Christie’s resignation helped put the Bridgegate scandal on the map, severely wounding the presidential hopes of the man once considered a top 2016 GOP contender. The party also worked to elect Ras Baraka, an opponent of education reform, to succeed Cory Booker as mayor of Newark over a better-funded candidate. (WFP-style liberals generally side with teachers’ unions in viewing education reform, which the Obama administration and many Democrats have championed, as a corporatist plot to undermine public education.

Ball details many other WFP accomplishments, which leads readers to conclude that this is the progressive vanguard role the Democratic Party should be embracing and supporting to expand its voter base. The Democratic Party clearly needs more progressive activists with strong working-class roots, like Mejia, who would likely find traditional Democratic Party structures and too limiting, slow and timid. Yet when presented with the stark two party choice on the ballot, most WFP members will likely vote Democratic, instead of sitting it out or casting votes for a third party candidate who have no chance.
Ball quotes WFP National Director Cantor:

The WFP, Cantor explained, doesn’t expect to overthrow the two-party system–nor does it want to be a hopeless cause like the Greens or the Libertarian Party. “Every good idea in American history started with a third party: abolition, the eight-hour day, women’s suffrage, child-labor laws, unemployment insurance, Social Security,” he said. “These didn’t start with the Democratic or Republican Party–they started with the Free Soilers and the Liberty Party and the Populist Party and the Socialist Party. That’s where these things germinate, and then when you do well, they get adopted by one of the major parties, or in very rare cases the major party collapses.
“So we’re not naïve,” he continued. “The Democratic Party is not about to collapse. But we think there’s a huge number of people inside the Democratic Party that actually agree with us, and we want the Democratic Party to be feistier, tougher, and more focused on the needs of ordinary people, not the preferences of their donors.”

Ball adds “The WFP’s victories to date have been numerous but small-bore–a far cry from the Tea Party’s attention-getting mass rallies and defeats of veteran U.S. senators. But the WFP would argue that, with Congress gridlocked and in Republican hands, more effective policymaking happens at the state and local level.”
The WFP, which distributes “Kicking Ass for the Working Class” bumper stickers, endorsed the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in December. But Clinton, or any other Democrat, would likely get an overwhelming share of their votes if nominated.
Although many WFP members are quick to criticize the Democratic Party, many see themselves as advocates for the reforms Democrats must pursue to become a stable, majority party. Thus the Working Families Party is a significant plus for the Democratic Party, and it will become an even more influential force in the future.

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why “The gun lobby’s con game will come to an end..” As Dionne writes, “… Something important happened in the East Room when Obama offered a series of constrained but useful steps toward limiting the carnage on our streets, in our schools and houses of worship and movie theaters. He made clear that the era of cowering before the gun lobby and apologizing, trimming, hedging and equivocating is over…Bullies are intimidating until someone calls their bluff. By ruling out any reasonable steps toward containing the killing in our nation and by offering ever more preposterous arguments, the gun worshipers are setting themselves up for wholesale defeat. It will take time. But it will happen.”
From Pew Research Center, via Greg Sargent

At ABC News Gary Langer has “Views on Gun Control: A Polling Summary.”
Trump points the birther finger at Cruz.
WaPo’s Amber Phillips sees a Democratic leadership void emerging in the House after Speaker Pelosi, while departing Rep. Steve Israel sees a “pretty robust bench.”
At centralmaine.com Douglas Rooks explains why “Maine Democrats a poor party of opposition.” Subtitled “With a few exceptions, they talk about what Paul LePage wants to talk about, and accommodate what he wants to do.,” Rooks adds that “Democrats should stop talking about “welfare reform” and tax cuts and set their own course. Here’s a clue: The widest voter consensus on any current issues supports raising the minimum wage, and levying higher taxes on the wealthy…To again become relevant, Democrats must determine what they want to do, then tell people how they’ll restore enough of the state tax system to fund it. Bromides about “good jobs at good wages” and “investment” in a laundry list of unquantified good causes won’t do it…With a few exceptions, they talk about what Paul LePage wants to talk about, and accommodate what he wants to do.”
Bu there is also some very good news from a key swing state: Virginia Daffron reports at Mountain Express, “On Wednesday, Jan. 6, Rev. Dr. William Barber outlined a joint campaign launched by the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Democracy NC to empower voters through supporting access to voting and providing education on key issues…Barber, Moral Monday leader and head of the state NAACP, said a coalition of over 3,000 faith- and membership-based communities will implement the issues-based campaign to empower, educate and protect voters.”
At Huffpo, however, Samantha Lachman’s “Voting Laws Are Still Up In The Air In These States: And fights over voting restrictions could continue until Election Day” discusses “the major court fights that could affect voters’ access to the ballot in this year’s election.”
Joel K. Goldstein post, “Five Factors That Will Define the Running Mates: Lessons from history on how the nominees will balance their tickets” probes veep selection strategy at Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

The following article by John Russo, a Visiting Research Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, Visiting Scholar,Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor of Georgetown University, and former Co-director, Center for Working-Class Studies, is cross-posted from Working Class Perspectives:
While the white working class is shrinking in the US, it remains the largest voting block in the country. That may be why leaders of both parties are concerned that white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest and South, are supporting populist candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They don’t understand that many of these voters blame Wall Street, corporate leaders, and politicians – the East Coast establishment -for destroying their jobs and communities over the past few decades.
Recent polls suggest that almost 60% of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, “don’t identify with what America has become.” According to Cliff Young and Chris Jackson, these “nativist” Americans are older, whiter, and less educated than the rest of the population – more working-class, in other words. For some middle-class professionals, this “nativism,” exemplified in support for Donald Trump’s racial comments, simply reinforces the assumption that the white working class is inherently racist and foolish. They conveniently ignore the way racism is resurfacing among the middle class as they, too, feel resentment over their economic displacement. As Barbara Ehrenreich warns, “Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.”
The focus on racism and xenophobia ignores an essential reality: precarity is bringing working-class and middle-class voters together politically. As Guy Standing has argued, the emerging precariat is a political class in the making. We see this in the “Fight for $15.” The struggle to increase the minimum wage seeks economic improvement for both the non-college and college educated.

Read more…

Ever since it became obvious that Donald Trump’s most compelling appeal was to non-college educated Republican-leaners, it’s been difficult for the so-called Reform Conservatives, a.k.a. Reformicons, who had been arguing for a GOP focus on this category of voters. Needless to say Trump isn’t what these conservative intellectuals had in mind, as I discussed earlier this week at New York:

It’s been just over a decade since two young conservative intellectuals penned a challenge to Republican economic-policy orthodoxy at the Weekly Standard after noting the GOP’s dependence on white working-class voters:

This is the Republican party of today — an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now “the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.”
Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn’t just out of touch with the country as a whole, it’s out of touch with its own base.

Ross Douthat (now a New York Times columnist) and Reihan Salam (now at National Review) went on to lay out a policy agenda that they thought might finally begin to align the GOP with the economic interests of its middle-class, non-entrepreneurial supporters, focused on more generous child tax credits and other pro-parenting initiatives; “market-based” health-care reform; wage subsidies (as opposed to minimum-wage mandates); and a retreat from the Bush administration’s immigration policies.
Douthat and Salam expanded their essay into the 2008 book Grand New Party, and three years later, Mr. Sam’s Club Republican himself, Tim Pawlenty, launched an unsuccessful presidential campaign that mainly just looked like a bland effort to appeal to GOP voters across factional lines. But joined by others who began calling themselves “reform conservatives” or Reformicons (Ryan Cooper wrote a useful taxonomy of them early in 2013 for the Washington Monthly), those calling for a more middle-class-oriented domestic policy stance by the GOP (the Reformicons mostly ignored foreign policy) grew into a loose, if elite, faction that sought influence in various parts of the GOP. In early 2014, Reformicons put together something of a rough policy playbook under the sponsorship of then-high-flying House GOP leader Eric Cantor. And as the 2016 presidential contest took shape, Reformicons were found in prominent positions in the campaigns of Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Jeb Bush. Rubio looked to be the best vehicle for Reformicon ideas, given his youth, his warm embrace of “family-friendly” tax policies, and a Hispanic identity that made his sudden opposition to comprehensive immigration reform (an about-face that most, if not all, Reformicons supported) go down easier. Sure, Rubio’s tax plan gave trillions to corporations and wealthy individuals and relative peanuts to working-class families (a good reflection of the balance of power in the GOP), but it won plaudits for heretical courage nonetheless.
And then, like a very bad joke (You call that Sam’s Club Republicanism? Here’s Sam’s Club Republicanism!), along came a presidential candidate who represented what many in the white working class really wanted: not just a GOP Establishment figure who paid their economic interests lip service, but someone who violently opposed liberalized immigration policies along with the pro-trade, “entitlement reform” orthodoxy of wealthy GOP elites, and articulated a fear of cultural change and national decline that most well-off Republicans, continuing to prosper during the current economic “recovery,” could not begin to fathom. Worse yet, it seems Republicans’ best idea for “taking Trump down” was to show he is not a “true conservative” on economic issues. As Reformicons could have told them, neither are most white working-class Republican voters….
Could Republicans have headed off the calamity Trump may represent for them by listening to the Reformicons and paying greater tribute to the white working class? Maybe. But the other possibility is that we are seeing a long-suppressed explosion of conflict between Republicans motivated by cultural discontent and hostility to Democratic constituencies and those who actually buy into economic policies designed to propitiate wealthy “job creators.”

If that’s so, Trump is just the beginning of the GOP’s problems.

All Democrats who are interested in party-building should read “How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States: Conservatives have mastered the art of cross-state policy advocacy, while liberal efforts have fizzled. Here’s what has to change” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol. As the authors outline the challenge:

State politics loom large for liberals. As Washington gridlock halts big new national initiatives, states are where the action (or inaction) is to be found on important liberal priorities ranging from legislative redistricting and boosting wages to addressing climate change and, of course, expanding Medicaid coverage for low-income people as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
But just as state-level action turns out to be crucial, the legislative terrain across much of the country looks downright disheartening for centrists and liberals alike. Building on huge electoral gains in state legislatures and governors’ offices in 2010 and 2014, hard-line conservatives have wasted no time in passing state measures that gut labor protections and the ability of workers to organize, that eviscerate health and environmental regulations, cut spending on the poor, shrink taxes on business and the wealthy, and erect new voting restrictions that disproportionately affect young, low-income, and minority citizens. Radical policy changes, often undoing decades of progress on liberal issues, have not been limited to traditionally very conservative areas in the Deep South and inner West. “Purple” states in the upper South and once “blue” states in the Midwest have also been the sites of sharp rightward policy turns.

The authors add that “a lot depends on whether progressive organization-builders can figure out why previous efforts to organize cross-state policy networks have failed, and discover ways to fashion their own versions of successful right-wing strategies.”
Toward that end, progressives have launched the State Innovation Exchange (siX) to challenge the right-wing’s state initiatives, like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which many credit for empowering the conservative take-over of state governments, the State Policy Network (SPN) and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the latter of which has paid staff in 34 states.
Despite their “nonpartisan” fig leafs, these three Republican-controlled organizations have worked so well together that their joint efforts were instrumental, for example, in taking over the state of Michigan, a once-Democratic stronghold. But it’s not just MI. In other states, the three conservative groups have had alarming success, write Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez:

In Maine, for instance, bipartisan legislative majorities came very close to overriding vetoes of Medicaid expansion by a Tea Party governor, but a determined minority of GOPers, many of them ALEC members, got public backing from AFP-Maine and the SPN-affiliated Maine Heritage Policy Center to hold firm. In two pivotal states, Missouri and Virginia, the naysaying far-right troika has prevailed, using activist pressures stoked by AFP and other groups, along with opposition research and testimony to legislative commissions prepared by SPN think tanks. In Tennessee, the troika even defeated a conservative proposal to expand and revamp Medicaid that was put forward by an extraordinarily popular GOP governor, Bill Haslam, who had just been reelected with 70 percent of the vote.

The authors detail the strategy and tactics ALEC, SPN and AFP used to gain control in the states over the years, while progressives lacked an effective counter-initiatives. It’s pretty clear that Democrats and liberals were simply out-organized, as well as out-funded, at the state level. As a direct result, “ALEC-derived state laws tripled from the 1990s through the early 2000s.”
As for the remedy, Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol cite “two networks of state-based policy research organizations, which survive to this day and in some respects rival SPN think tanks across the country”:

One network, originally called the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative and recently renamed the State Priorities Partnership (SPP), is directed by Robert Greenstein’s Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). SPP has enrolled or stimulated the creation of policy research organizations in 41 states and the District of Columbia so far. These mini-CBPPs offer research on state tax and budget issues, with a special focus on programs to help the poor. Increasingly, they also help to build political coalitions of advocacy groups to lobby state legislatures and executives.
The other network, called the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN), is coordinated by Lawrence Mishel’s union-backed Economic Policy Institute. More loosely knit than the SPP network, this assemblage of 61 groups across 44 states and the District of Columbia disseminates research on wages, job benefits, and other economic issues relevant to unionized workers and the broad middle class.
Each of these networks convenes annual meetings and keeps in touch with affiliates, and SPP holds an additional meeting for state directors each year. EARN does not have many resources to invest in its affiliates, but SPP deploys funds from center-left donors such as the Ford Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation to provide some infrastructure support to affiliates, and it has a steering committee that thoroughly vets potential new state affiliates. Yet that process is so slow that some key, historically divided states like Tennessee have not installed SPP affiliates yet.

Progressives still lack an effective counter-force organization that can match ALEC’s success, particularly in fund-raising. “Supporters of past efforts to counter ALEC–including foundations, individual donors, and labor unions–have not matched the efforts of right-wing donors and, perhaps more importantly, have not provided sustained and predictable resources…In many ways, the funding problem has gotten worse now that unions are struggling with declining dues-paying memberships and adverse legal decisions that threaten their very existence.”
However, add, the authors, “We see five areas where SiX leaders–and others endeavoring to build liberal policy capacities in and across the states–might learn from conservative experiences. The trick is to look for the left’s own versions of clever innovations and organizational solutions discovered years ago by the right.” These include establishing ‘meaningful membership’; leveraging existing ‘networks and social ties within states’; creating ‘mechanisms for dealing with competing policy priorities’; finding ‘better funding solutions’ and viewing policy ‘as a means to political goals.’ Read the article for an illuminating discussion of the five strategies.
Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez conclude, “The challenge is bigger than simply raising more money. Network builders have to get out of their comfort zones in the worlds of liberal advocacy groups mostly headquartered in New York, Washington, California, and a few other blue enclaves to find and activate network connections across the vast heartland. And if progressives want to gain credibility and clout in the states, they will need to become far more strategic about engaging in widespread policy fights with the greatest potential to reshape the political landscape in conservative as well as liberal states across America.”
It’s a formidable challenge Democrats must meet, if we want to break the pattern of having gains achieved in national elections all but erased by the Republicans at the state level. National politics will continue to draw the most media and public attention in 2016. But Democrats should begin mobilizing their resources to meet the challenges presented by Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol. With such a commitment, we could have even more to celebrate in November than holding the White House.