You’ve read all of the good arguments for increasing the minimum wage to a living wage. But to win wider support for this long-overdue reform, we have to make people feel it. Sharing this young man’s testimony widely is a good start:

Here’s an excerpt from Democrat John Bel Edwards’ inspiring victory statement on winning the Louisiana governorship: “This election shows us that the people of Louisiana in a time of deep cynicism about our politics, and also about our future, that the people have chosen hope over scorn, over negativity,” Edwards told a crowd of supporters at his victory party at the Monteleone Hotel. “I did not create this breeze of hope that’s rolling across our beautiful and blessed state. But I did catch it…”This breeze has its roots in the songs of the Louisiana Hayride, the food of our cajun ancestors, the spirituals of our African-American churches and the faith of our Italian … strawberry farmers, and the energy of Native Americans and our Hispanic immigrants. No I didn’t start the breeze of hope, but I did catch it. And so did you.”
Wish we could say that Edwards’ win is a beachhead for Dems in the South. But, with benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a more beatable incumbent than Vitter, as The Fix’s Phillip Bump explains — nor a tougher candidate to take him on. Still the 12-point margin of victory is impressive, and Edwards deserves credit for relentlessly pounding Vitter’s scandal and shrewdly coupling it with Vitter’s failure to support veterans. Edwards won’t be sworn in as Governor until January. But don’t be surprised if he makes the short list of potential 2016 running mates.
Here is the “answering the call” ad that has been credited with helping Edwards:
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Perfect storm that it was, the reverberations of Edwards’ victory may indeed help Dems get some traction down the road, as Tim Murphy’s Mother Jones post “Louisiana Just Voted to Give a Quarter of a Million People Health Care” suggests. Matthew Yglesias adds at Vox, “This was the issue on which Edwards positioned himself as an orthodox Democrat and he won. It’s also the issue on which a number of Republican governors in the midwest and southwest have felt the need to compromise.”
The Republicans’ Medicaid expansion blockade is also starting to crumble in Georgia, reports Jim Galloway in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “On Dec. 4, up in the northwest corner of Georgia, Hutcheson Medical Center will close its doors for the last time….The Fort Oglethorpe institution, which once employed 900 and had an annual payroll of $29 million, will be the fifth hospital in Georgia to fail in the last two years. To describe the clientele that the 179-bed facility once served as overwhelmingly Republican is to dabble in understatement. The hospital’s obituary is sure to reignite the debate over whether the state should find a way to come to terms with Obamacare and extend Medicaid coverage to hundreds of thousands of Georgians who lack health insurance…”This greatly hinders the state’s hopes of ever bringing another industrial or IT firm or any other major employer into that area. It really hurts those efforts,” Robinson said. “All those jobs move to Chattanooga, at the closest.””
Already he’s waffling about a third party run, and that’s a good thing…for Dems.
Alec MacGillis’s NYT Sunday Review article “Who Turned My Blue State Red? is generating buzz with his explanation why “Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.” MacGillis presents Pew Research polling data indicating that “likely nonvoters” more often need or receive government assistance than do “likely voters.” Further, argues MacGillis, those who are doing a little better than aid recipients are often quite critical of government benefits and its recipients. But rather than voting against Democrats, it’s more the reality that they have “become profoundly disconnected from the political process” and don’t vote, which has turned some blue states and localities red. MacGilliss’s proposed policy remedies seem like very long-term solutions. Democrats may need to focus more on targeting their GOTV with a little more precision to reach the “profoundly disconnected” nonvoters.
CNN’s Eric Bradner reports that “Republicans split on guns for terror watch list members,” forcing GOP candidates to make a problematic choice: piss off the NRA or voters concerned about national security.
And the most unpopular governor in the U.S. is…

Tonight the premier Christian Right organization in Iowa, and hence an organization with national influence, the Iowa Family Leader is holding it presidential forum, with at least seven presidential candidates showing up. I wrote about the atmosphere surrounding this event at the Washington Monthly:

Word going in is that Ted Cruz, who was endorsed by Steve King earlier this week, might get endorsed “personally” tonight by Family Leader majordomos Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley, a move they made (albeit a bit later) for Rick Santorum in 2012. BVP, and his most simpatico national Christian Right warhorse, Tony Perkins, have been making a lot of noise about the need for conservative evangelicals to unite behind a single candidate before Iowa. Cruz does seem to be the best positioned. It would likely be a pretty deadly blow to Santorum and Huckabee, and at least a challenge to Ben Carson, who’s been polling very well among Iowa evangelicals.
But there’s a discordant voice at the edge of these Christian Right counsels, shouting “Not so fast!”–Southern Baptist Convention spokesman Russell Moore, who thinks it would be a terrible mistakes for Christians to identify with any candidate who has been demagoguing refugees.
Moore said so in a WaPo op-ed published yesterday.

[E]vangelical Christians cannot be the people who turn our back on our mission field. We should be the ones calling the rest of the world to remember the image of God and inalienable human dignity, of persecuted people whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Yazidi, especially those fleeing from genocidal Islamic terrorists.
We should remember the history of the 20th century, of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and Refuseniks from the Soviet Union who were largely ignored by the world community. We can have prudential discussions and disagreements about how to maintain security. What we cannot do is to demagogue the issue.

Moore didn’t name names in the op-ed, but did upon sitting down with BuzzFeed‘s McKay Coppins for an interview:

“Donald Trump is saber-rattling about shutting down mosques in this country, which, as somebody who works every day on religious liberty, I’m astounded that we could have a presidential candidate of either party speaking in such a way,” Moore said. “Evangelicals should recognize that any president who would call for shutting down houses of worship … is the sort of political power that can ultimately shut down evangelical churches.”
Moore was also critical of candidates like Ted Cruz who are now arguing that the U.S. should only accept Christian refugees from Syria, not Muslims.
“I don’t think we ought to have a religious test for our refugee policy,” Moore said, adding that a rigorous vetting process could still make room for innocent Muslims. “We really don’t want to penalize innocent women and children who are fleeing from murderous barbarians simply because they’re not Christians,” he said, though he added that persecuted Christians in the region haven’t received enough attention from the U.S.

This is hardly the first time Moore has cut a very different figure from his predecessor, Ted Land, who was an old-school Christian Right agitator like Perkins and Vander Plaats. It’s also not clear how much if any political influence Moore has; he’s a guy who has criticized conservative evangelicals’ excessive ties to the Republican Party, and even questioned how high a priority conservative cultural issues ought to have for active Christians. Southern Baptists are not especially numerous in Iowa, but nor are they out of synch with the state’s conservative evangelicals, viz. 2008 Caucus winner Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, and Cruz himself, who is a Southern Baptist.
We’ll see if Cruz starts to lock up some visible support this weekend, and then we’ll see of Russell Moore digs in.

It would be refreshing to have something emanating from the conservative Christian political world beyond the usual Kabuki Theater of demands for a better seat at the GOP table and then complaints about the chow.

Writing in The Nation, Eric Alterman has a blistering critique of the Republican Party presidential candidates and their operatives in his article, “The Crazier the Republican Candidates Sound, the More Popular They Become.” In one take-no-prisoners excerpt Alterman observes:

… The party is being led by a group of people with politics so extreme and explanations so silly–and often transparently dishonest–that one cannot help but question their sanity. Can Donald Trump really believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that virtually all undocumented immigrants are potential rapists and murderers? Can Ben Carson truly consider Obamacare on a par with slavery? And which answer would be more comforting: shameless liar or lunatic fantasist?
… this same disease has infected the entire Republican field. In the hopes of appealing to angry, ill-informed, and xenophobic primary voters, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Carly Fiorina are all adopting positions that are not only beyond the boundaries of the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans, but also contrary to the laws of physics, economics, and, of course, common sense.

Among the causes of the GOP’s domination of the House of Reps, state legislatures and governorships, Alterman cites the Citizens United decision and gerrymandering. But Alterman doesn’t let Democrats off the hook, either:

The Democrats are also at fault. By failing to present a class-based appeal to Americans besieged by a pitiless global capitalism, they’ve allowed themselves to be defined as elitist snobs who view the everyday struggles of working-class Americans–especially white males–with contempt. At the same time, they have failed to protect vulnerable minorities from the consequences of the rage and fear felt by this class–manifested most obviously in oppressive patterns of policing that victimize people of color, impoverishing their families, weakening their communities, and ensuring their lifelong alienation from mainstream society.

Yet few objective observers would deny that the policies of individual Democratic leaders that affect both white working class and African American voters are substantially more progressive than anything the Republicans propose. In fact, everything Alterman says about Democrats is far more true of Republicans. Yet the image he describes persists.
It may have to do, in part, with expectations — many African Americans and white workers want a stronger voice for reforms that can benefit their lives, and they are not getting it. So the more progressive, but not progressive enough party gets stigmatized as betraying its ideals. For some voters, that is worse than open opposition.
Most Democratic elected officials are far more progressive than their party’s image, which is sort of a tribute to the GOP’s superior message discipline. Even when the message is rooted in lies and distortion, their echo chamber functions efficiently. Democrats are all over the place.
One possible remedy: more Democratic ad campaigns directed at defining the difference between the two parties, instead of just the usual yada-yada from different candidates. Republicans understand “brand identification” a lot better than their opponents. We almost never see that. It’s time Dems got a clue.
Alterman provides an equally-blistering take-down of the false equivalence default position of much of the mainstream media:

Liberals like yours truly spend a lot of time obsessing over Fox News and talk-radio. But no less a significant factor in the success of the irredentists has been the willingness of so many members of the mainstream media to run interference for–and therefore legitimize–the same dangerous nonsense in the guise of allegedly objective reporting. The mainstream media’s coverage of every Republican debate so far has had the effect of subordinating reality to fantasy. Jonathan Martin’s front-page New York Times report on the most recent debate deemed that fib-fest to be a “robust seminar on the issues.” In an article devoted to the lies dominating the election cycle, the Times’s Michael Barbaro could not bring himself to go further than to say that Carson “harshly turned the questions” about inconsistencies in his life story “back on the reporters who asked them,” and that Fiorina “refused” to back down from a story about Planned Parenthood that was “roundly disputed.” And in what read like a parody of the idiotic “both sides do it” meme, Barbaro equated all this with the fact that Hillary Clinton once described herself as being the granddaughter of four immigrants when, in fact, one was born shortly after her family arrived in the United States–something she quickly corrected. Beyond that, he found a few (largely personal) fibs from Democrats who ran for president in the late 1980s and ’90s, as if these were somehow equivalent to the lies that Republican candidates are telling today. (Barbaro also appeared unimpressed with Clinton’s explanations about her e-mail accounts, as though these might qualify as lies.)

A great deal of the reporting Alterman describes is very deliberate. But I get the feeling that a lot of it is simply lazy reporting by writers who fall back on “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” formulas to cover their asses. It might help if J-schools did more to stress critical thinking. Other than that, calling them out more energetically will have to do.
Dems can hope with some reason that the GOP is headed for disaster in 2016. But counting on it would be foolish and dangerous. What Democrats must do over the next year is shore up their GOTV, because it sure looks like Republicans have done so, and hone a compelling message that distinguishes their party as the best option for voters who are paying attention.

Black Lives Matter is increasing its involvement in electoral politics, reports John Eligon in The New York Times: “Two groups have started political action committees to back candidates who support ideas espoused by Black Lives Matter activists. One, Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee, started by a St. Louis radio host, plans to raise money for voter education in races for law enforcement-related offices, including for district attorney and judgeships. The second, Black Lives Matter Super PAC, was started by New York activists who hope to raise large donations from celebrities to influence campaigns for a variety of offices…”At this point, marching and protesting, it’s not going anywhere,” said Tarik Mohamed, treasurer and a founder of the super PAC. “So we’re trying to find new avenues of engaging people for change.””
At The Upshot Brendan Nyhan explains why “It’s Easy to Overestimate Effect of Paris Attacks on 2016 Race.”
It appears that the Administration has a tough sell ahead regarding bringing more Syrian refugees tot he U.S. At NBCNews.com Allison Kopicki, John Lapinski and Hannah Hartiga report that a “Majority of Americans Oppose Accepting Syrian Refugees.” The authors write, “The latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey online poll shows that 56% of Americans disapprove of allowing more migrants fleeing violence in Syria and other nations into the country, while 41% approve and the issue divides sharply across party lines…About 8 in 10 Republicans disapprove of accepting more Syrian refugees – including 64% who strongly disapprove. Nearly two thirds of Democrats support the president’s policy, while more independents disapprove (59%) than approve (40%).
The New York Times editorial board nonetheless makes a case against the House GOP’s “the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act of 2015” as “election-year pandering to the xenophobia that rears up when threats from abroad arise.”
William Saletan provides a Slate.com take on the political ramifications of the GOP’s Muslim-bashing.
Unless this poll is an outlier, Democrats have work to do in this swing state.
At Huffiest Pollster Political scientists Keith Gaddie and Kirby Godel chart “The Donkey’s Narrow Path” to victory in the Louisiana governor’s race, which will be decided this Saturday, November 21st. “Analyses of early voting in Louisiana indicate that turnout will likely be higher than in the primary, increasing from 39 percent to 44 percent. And the electorate will be more Democratic and more African-American, according to early voting data, These are ominous signs for David Vitter. Runoff turnout surges are more common in Louisiana, and usually result from increased black voter participation in the second round. The Louisiana Troopers Association endorsement of John Bel Edwards likely solidified the frontrunner’s level of support among whites — which has run between 34 percent and 38 percent across public polls and in private tracking polls…For Democrats in running deep red states, there is a lesson here. Republican divisions may create opportunities for victories, but the path is narrow requiring both a flawed Republican nominee and a divided GOP.” The authors also credit Edwards messaging, citing his “military experience, pro-life identity, and moderate politics out in stark contrast to Vitter’s known associations.”
Karen Bruggeman provides additional analysis in National Journal’s “Democrats Stunned They Could Win Louisiana Governor’s Race.”
Democrats interested in media outlets to reach the white working-class with ads should check out Ken Tucker’s Yahoo post, “‘The Middle’ Is TV’s Top Working-Class Comedy.”

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who spent many months trying to outflank the rest of the GOP presidential field to the Right, finally packed it in today, and I had a lot to say about it at Washington Monthly.

It seemed like every time you turned around Jindal was relaunching or rebranding himself. Indeed, it tells you everything you need to know that I was mocking his eternal shape-shifting back in February of 2014, several incarnations ago:

His first big national audition, a universally panned State of the Union response in 2009, was a large whiff, given the drama of that moment, which exposed his signature talk-down-to-the-dummies problem as the smartest guy in the room trying to connect with the Unwashed. His next foray into national politics was to become the most conspicuous 2011-12 surrogate for Rick Perry just before the Texan’s once-formidable candidacy headed straight down the tubes.
Then, after a brief stint on Mitt Romney’s short-list for the vice presidency (before being elbowed out of the way by his rival whiz-kid Paul Ryan), Jindal was among the first Republicans out of the box with a big “rebranding” speech to an RNC audience in January of 2013. It created a slight buzz, but since its thrust was to tout the policy genius of state governments (while implicitly disrespecting all of his congressional rivals), it did not survive Jindal’s subsequent patch of very poor luck back in Baton Rouge, where his big tax proposal (phasing out the income tax in favor of higher sales and business taxes) was shot down by his own Republican-controlled legislature, while the courts sidelined his private-school voucher initiative.
By last autumn, Jindal was running in low single-digits in early 2016 presidential polls, and was pretty much being shoehorned into a small “diversity” box alongside fellow Indian-American Gov. Nikki Haley of SC….
But then Jindal finally caught a break, when the vagaries of the culture wars suddenly made one of his constituents, Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson, a national conservative icon of the highest order. Bobby clung to the grizzly homophobe like a life jacket, and now seems inclined to make his latest, and perhaps final pitch to a national conservative audience posing as the maximum defender of “religious liberty” against the politically correct hordes of secular elitism.

But he probably picked the wrong year for this gambit, what with far more authentic and credentialed Christian Right figures like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson in the field.
Like other candidates, Jindal suffered through the summer of 2015 being completely thwarted by the Donald Trump phenomenon. So he then chose his penultimate persona as a parasite on the bloated political body of The Donald. In a September speech that could have been entitled, “You Have to Cover This!” Jindal called Trump an “egomaniacal madman,” and kept the barrage up for a good while, with no impact on his target and little benefit to himself. His last gambit, deployed in several “undercard” debate appearances, was to position himself as a sort of Ted Cruz doppelganger, supporting ever-more irresponsible hostage-taking behavior on behalf of culture-war priorities like “defunding” Planned Parenthood. But again, why support a Ted Cruz doppelganger with Ted Cruz in the field, particularly since Cruz is slightly (if only slightly) more adept at hiding his contempt for the “base” audiences that His Exalted Genuis was being forced to demagogue.
Speaking of contempt, the big piece of collateral damage of Jindal 2016 has been the state of Louisiana, which he has alternatively ignored, abandoned and abused. The most telling thing about today’s development is that Jindal pulls out of the presidential race with four days left in the jungle-primary runoff to choose a successor to him, and you’d have to guess what extremely embattled Republican candidate U.S. Sen. David Vitter fears most is “help” from the sitting GOP governor of the state….
It would be richly appropriate for Jindal to deep-six Vitter, deliberately or not. You get the sense that his bags have been packed in Baton Rouge for a good long while. Everything about his resume screams “Cabinet post,” but the question is whether the nasty piece of work he’s proven himself to be in this campaign might disqualify him if Republicans win the White House. He might fit in better on K Street.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Imagine that you and your family have been displaced from your homeland by an oppressive government. Imagine that if you are forced to return to that homeland you will likely be subjected to persecution — and potentially death.
Now imagine that the world’s democracies close their doors and refuse to give you asylum.
That is exactly what happened to thousands of Jews who were targeted for persecution and ultimately extermination by Hitler’s Germany.
In November 1938, the Nazis organized a systematic attack on Jews called Kristallnacht. That event escalated the growing anti-Semitism in Germany to a new level, and many Jews decided they must leave the country.
On May 13, 1939 some 900 Jews fled Germany aboard the cruise liner SS St. Louis. They had hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the United States and safety.
But when they arrived in Cuba they were not allowed to land. Then the captain steered the St. Louis towards the Florida coast, but U.S. authorities refused to allow the ship loaded with desperate refugees to dock.
In the end, the ship was forced to return to Europe — and 250 of those on board were ultimately killed by the Nazis.
Most Americans look back on our refusal to admit the Jewish refugees from Europe as a shameful blot on American history. We must not allow it to happen again.
Today the flow of refugees are Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi. They are fleeing ISIS and the horrific civil war in Syria.
Our most fundamental moral precept is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — the Golden Rule. When fellow human beings are fleeing their homes in fear of their lives, we must do our best to help provide them help and safety or we won’t be able to look at ourselves in the mirror.
What if we found ourselves on the other side of that equation? What if that child’s body on that Greek beach were one of our children? What would we expect and hope for from our fellow human beings?
It certainly is not the unforgivable demagoguery that flooded the airwaves on Monday from 24 GOP governors who issued statements saying they would “not take in” Syrian refugees in their states and would deny any aid to resettle them.
New Jersey Governor and long-shot GOP presidential contender Chris Christie said he wanted to keep out Syrian refugees even if they are children.
Another presidential candidate, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said he would use “all lawful means” to block Syrian refugees from coming to Louisiana.
Rick Snyder, Governor of Michigan, which has a large Syrian community, said he would do everything he could to keep Syrian refugees out of the state.
Illinois Governor, Bruce Rauner announced he had “suspended” taking refugees in Illinois.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a letter to Obama that begins “As governor of Texas, I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack in Paris.”

Read more…

In his Washington Post op-ed, “Why 2016 could be shattering for Republicans,” Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg predicts that “Election Day 2016 will produce a shattering crash larger than anything the pundits anticipate.” The reason, says Greenberg, is “because the revolutionary economic and social changes occurring in the United States have now pushed both the burgeoning new majority and the conservative Republicans’ counterrevolution beyond their tipping points.”
Greenberg provides a vivid picture of America’s demographic changes:

The United States is being transformed by revolutions remaking the country at an accelerating and surprising pace. Witness the revolutions in technology, the Internet, big data and energy, though just as important are the tremendous changes taking place in immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the family, religious observance and gender roles. These are reaching their apexes in the booming metropolitan centers and among millennials.
As the revolutions interact, they are accelerating the emergence of a new America. Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumber mainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

Political attitudes dynamics are no less striking. Greenberg explains that “diversity is becoming more central to our multicultural identity” and “Shifting attitudes were underscored in this year’s Gallup Poll when 60 to 70 percent of the country said gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce are all “morally acceptable.”
He cites a “a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials and seculars” which comprised 51 percent of voters in 2012, but will account for 63 percent of voters in 2016. he adds that the Republican Party brand “has probably not been as tarnished since the Watergate era.”
Greenberg notes that the GOP downhill slide accelerated in 2004, when Bush strategist Karl Rove decided to prioritize winning evangelical voters, while writing off swing voters. As a result the Republican demographic mix has been distilled down to “mostly married voters, as well as the oldest, most rural and most religiously observant voters in the country.” Greenberg argues that the GOP’s new demographic reality “creates formidable odds against its winning an electoral college majority.”
Further, there is a “shrinking proportion of people who think of themselves as conservative, down to 37 percent from 46 percent during the November elections.”For Republicans,” adds Greenberg 2016 “will confirm that the new America is here and that the counterrevolution has lost. That is why I expect the result to be shattering for the Republican Party as we know it.”
Greenberg believes it is possible that the Republicans can learn from their 2016 defeat and re-emerge with less bashing of immigrants and more tolerance for “the sexual revolution and the new gender roles and work to help the modern working family.” They might even be more open to investing in infrastructure upgrades and education.
Such a transformation, says Greenberg, could set the stage for “a different kind of debate within the Republican Party and, perhaps, a different kind of politics in the country,” just as Dems “modernized” their policies after their 1984 defeat. And that would be a welcome change for those who want to see America moving forward again.

How Will the terrorist attacks in France affect U.S. politics? It seems logical that Ben Carson might get a bump, if it is only temporary, since he seems to be riding a crest of Islamophobia. But I’ll be surprised if the other Republican candidates don’t try to top Carson’s fear-mongering. Watch what happens with Marine Le Pen’s campaign to be elected President of France. Trump and the neocons will be monitoring her tone for tips about xenophobic pandering.
“In Presidential Campaign, It’s Now Terrorism, Not Taxes,” as the lead issue of the 2016 campaign, writes Jonathan Martin at The New York Times. Further, says Martin: “Much is not known about the attack’s impact on the race, given short attention spans in politics and the news media and the fact that it did not occur on American soil…” However, notes martin, “Further, the scale of the assault, its direct link to the Islamic State and the fact that one of the attackers appeared to have been a Syrian refugee who came to Europe through Greece is also pushing the Republican candidates to speak more loudly about keeping Middle Eastern migrants out of the United States.”
At The Washington Post Jenna Johnson reports on what the candidates are saying about bringing Syrian refuges into the U.S. Johnson reports that some Republicans are advocating more liberal immigration policies toward Christian refugees, and further “Lavinia Limon, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Commission for Refugees and Immigrants, said she is surprised that the once-nonpartisan cause of helping refugees fleeing violence has become so politicized. She noted that it takes about three years for refugees to go through stringent security screenings — a process that she doubts terrorists would wait through when there are other ways to get into the United States.”
Republican Governors Robert J. Bentley of Alabama and Rick Snyder of Michigan are now refusing Syrian refugees, according to Rick Rojas, reporting in the New York Times.
In the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday, Former Secretary of State Clinton and former Maryland Governor O’Malley stressed the importance of coalition intervention against ISIS. O’Malley also emphasized he need for Americans to stand by their Muslim neighbors in the U.S., who may experience unjust treatment in the wake of the Paris atrocities. Sen. Bernie Sanders differentiates his views on the U.S. “regime change” from those of his fellow presidential candidates: “”These toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences,” he said. “On this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the secretary and I am not a great fan of regime change.”
“The Associated Press contacted all 712 superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention next summer, and asked them which Republican they thought would be their party’s strongest opponent in the general election…Of the 176 superdelegates who answered the question, 65 said Rubio, the first-term senator from Florida, would be the Democrats’ strongest opponent.” After Rubio, the delegates said Kasich and Bush would be the next strongest opponents for the Democratic nominee.
“GOP Candidates Suck Up to Hatemongers: Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee fete a man who thinks the Bible says we should execute gays,” writes David Boaz at The Daily Beast.
Sena McElwee explains why “Higher voter turnout could limit the far right” at Aljazeera America, and notes that data indicate that “Liberal Republicans” are the least likely self-identified group on the political spectrum to cast ballots. He concludes from his analysis of the data that “Increased voter turnout would bring more moderate, center-right and left-leaning voters into the electorate…Policies such as automatic voter registration, which would work to bolster turnout, could therefore reduce polarization and make our politics more representative of the popular will.”
Harold Meyerson addresses an important political topic that merits a lot more attention in his post “Why America Needs Another Trust-Busting Movement” at The American Prospect.

With the second Democratic presidential debate on tap for tomorrow night, there were two very good observations today at the New Republic for how the candidates might make the proceedings more relevant and urgent. I offered commentary at Washington Monthly:

The first [TNR piece], by Suzy Khimm, involves the actual choices a Democratic president would face given the extremely high likelihood that Republicans will hang onto the House and perhaps the Senate. That will heavily be influenced by the appetite and aptitude of said president for taking executive actions, especially in immigration and criminal justice policy. Khimm notes that some especially difficult decisions will have to be made in the latter area, since (a) bipartisan legislative action is a lively if not easy prospect, and (b) Democrats are not completely united about what to do at the federal level on, say, marijuana legalization. And then there’s this problem:

Some on the left…disagree, fearing that going too big on executive action could come back to haunt Democrats over the long haul. As University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner has argued in the New Republic, Obama’s turn to executive action on immigration could end up empowering future Republican presidents to push for non-enforcement of many other laws and regulations–and there are plenty, including environmental regulations and labor protections, that Republicans would love to get their hands on.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler looks at the same partisan landscape and deduces quite logically that the possibility of a Republican trifecta should make electability–specifically HRC’s electability–a much bigger issue in the Democratic contest than it has been up until now.

Sanders earned a lot of good will in the first debate by absolving Clinton of Republican attacks on her handling of State Department email. O’Malley has been consistently critical of Clinton not for being unelectable, but, if anything, for thinking too calculatingly about staying electable. “History celebrates profiles in courage, not profiles in convenience,” O’Malley said when Clinton endorsed a right to same-sex marriage earlier this year.
That’s the wrong approach for a serious candidate in the political climate Democrats face. If either Sanders or O’Malley can mount a convincing argument that Clinton–despite a vast name-recognition advantage, and unique appeal to female voters–isn’t the most electable Democrat, they are doing both themselves and their party a disservice by not airing it.

In other words, the enormous constraints facing a Democratic president that Khimm outlines make the implicit arguments of Sanders and O’Malley that HRC is not ideologically trustworthy could be a bit beside the point–especially if you adjudge Clinton as more willing or able to pursue executive action.
Beutler does not tell us how Clinton’s rivals can make electability a concern without being perceived as piling onto Republican attacks on her that (a) have no credibility among Democrats but (b) seem to be affecting indie perceptions of her. Indeed, he views this as a challenge so difficult–especially given Democratic fears of sexism in any left-bent criticism of HRC–that it might well push Sanders and O’Malley into conceding early if they cannot solve it. We’ll have to see if either rival to Clinton can begin to thread that needle in the next debate.

If fears of a Republican trifecta–and hence the urgency of electability–subside, then things will be looking up for Democrats sho nuff.