As I’ve been arguing incessantly, one of the most basic strategic imperatives for Democrats everywhere is to force Republicans who are not currently in positions of authority to explain in detail what they would do if they were. When GOP candidates do move from a position of simply and vaguely deploring the status quo, interesting things are revealed about their priorities.
Consider the Republican nominee for governor of South Carolina, the self-styled “conservative reformer” Nikki Haley (mainly known out-of-state as the victim of nasty sexual rumors and ethnic slurs). According to The State newspaper (via Think Progress), Haley’s first big policy proposal is to eliminate income taxes on corporations. This would blow a significant hole in a South Carolina budget that’s already under considerable stress, but the more significant thing to understand is Haley’s rationale: “To be able to say we are a right-to-work state and a no-corporate-income-tax state is going to cause businesses to want to come, and it will create jobs in the process.”
In other words, Haley’s entire understanding of state economic development policy seems to boil down to the ancient race-to-the-bottom mentality of cutting business costs to raid companies from other states. But at the same time, according to the same article in The State, Haley favors eliminating a current exemption from the state sales tax for food purchases, because creating that exemption in 2007 “didn’t create one job.” Interesting way of thinking about taxes, eh? Low- and middle-income people may need to eat, but their eating doesn’t create jobs, it seems. So they need to pony up more tax dollars so that out-of-state corporations can get a tax break if they move in to exploit the state’s low non-union wage rates.
You can imagine the implications of this approach if elevated to the national level, where you can’t pretend that you’re going to be able to raid jobs from your neighbors, and you have to come right out and admit you believe that whatever’s good for corporations is good for America. So think about that next time you read about Haley being a future president of the United States, or when she throws her political prestige behind one of her recent benefactors like Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows the Democratic Party’s favorable rating dropping to 33%, the lowest level since July of 2006. The same survey, however, shows the Republican Party’s favorable rating dropping to 24%, the lowest level ever recorded by the pollster.
On another front, PPP has released one of its perioidic 2012 presidential election polls. It shows President Obama’s job approval/disapproval ratio as being slightly in negative territory at 47-48. But it also shows the favorable/unfavorable ratios for the most commonly named GOP opponents all in negative territory as well (Huckabee: 32-34; Palin: 37-54; Gingrich: 31-48; Paul: 23-34; Romney: 35-37). Obama also leads all these worthies in head-to-head match-ups.
It is often forgotten that elections do involve comparisons of parties and candidates. Perhaps the GOP will have a big mid-term election based on simply a rejection of Democratic governance or unhappiness with the status quo. But in presidential years, the “out” party needs a bit more than being “out,” and Republicans continue to show that they don’t have the platform or the leadership to look good by comparison.

On the outside chance that you are an incurable optimist who thinks the political, economic and international challenges facing the Obama administration have been overrated, you should check out Jeffrey Goldberg’s long article in The Atlantic about the slowly growing likelihood that Israel will soon decide to launch a unilateral military attack on nuclear facilities in Iran.
Putting aside the more obvious risks to life involved, the economic consequences of a regional war in the Middle East are simply terrifying. And it appears it will take an extraordinarily deft diplomatic stance by the United States–or abundant good luck of the sort that’s been hard to find of late–to head off some sort of armed confrontation between Israel and Iran, with “moderate” Arab states in the background urging the Israelis on.
If Goldberg’s even half right about the trajectory of events, this issue needs to become much more prominent in U.S. politics, beyond the saber-rattling of neocons whose Iraqi adeventure didn’t satisfy their taste for archair military strategery.

As charges fly back and forth in connection with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ outburst at “the professional left,” TDS contributors Robert Creamer and Mike Lux offer some useful perspective:
Here’s Creamer:

They used to say that the thing that is most likely to end war and conflict between the nations of the world would be an existential threat from a group of aliens from outer space.
The same must be true for Democrats and Progressives. Time to give up the bickering, the infighting, the name calling — and unite to prevent the Empire from striking back.
No more aspersions about the “professional left.” No more talk about how the Obama White House sold out this or that issue or cause.
For those who are so inclined there will be plenty of time for all that once again after November 2nd. Right now our job is to make sure that Republicans do not become a majority in either House of Congress, for that is certain to bring serious progressive change to screeching halt.

And here’s Lux:

Our job as progressives is to never be satisfied, to always be impatient with the pace of change. Frederick Douglass, Alice Paul, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, Jr.- none of them were ever satisfied with the progress being made, and the Presidents they worked with were constantly aggravated at the pressure they received. But big changes got done when Presidents understood the importance of working effectively with them and the movements they represented.

As both Creamer and Lux suggest, the White House and the “professional Left” have distinct jobs to do, and they should focus on doing them without unnecessary recriminations.

If you thought the Republican “anchor babies” scam to repeal the 14th amendment citizenship clause was just an escalation of their boilerplate xenophobia, Harold Meyerson gets down to the real nitty-gritty in his WaPo column today:

The Republican war on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is indeed directed at a mortal threat — but not to the American nation. It is the threat that Latino voting poses to the Republican Party.
By proposing to revoke the citizenship of the estimated 4 million U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants — and, presumably, the children’s children and so on down the line — Republicans are calling for more than the creation of a permanent noncitizen caste. They are endeavoring to solve what is probably their most crippling long-term political dilemma: the racial diversification of the electorate. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are trying to preserve their political prospects as a white folks’ party in an increasingly multicolored land.

Meyerson’s got numbers:

…The demographic base of the Republican Party, as Ruy Teixeira demonstrates in a paper released by the Center for American Progress this summer, is shrinking as a share of the nation and the electorate. As the nation grows more racially and religiously diverse, Teixeira shows, its percentage of white Christians will decline to just 35 percent of the population by 2040.
The group that’s growing fastest, of course, is Latinos. “Their numbers will triple to 133 million by 2050 from 47 million today,” Teixeira writes, “while the number of non-Hispanic whites will remain essentially flat.” Moreover, Latinos increasingly trend Democratic — in a Gallup poll this year, 53 percent self-identified as Democrats; just 21 percent called themselves Republican.

Meyerson has hit on the longer-term goal behind the repeal effort. But no doubt the Republicans hope to gain some short term advantage from swing voters by whipping up anti-immigrant animosity for the mid terms.
It’s a cynical bet — that Hispanic-bashing will win more votes from economically-fearful whites than they will lose from Hispanic voters. At last count, the Republicans had 91 House sponsors of the measure, which was reportedly submitted in the House last year by former congressman Nathan Deal, who was designated one of “the 15 most corrupt members of congress” by the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Today Deal became the GOP’s nominee for Georgia Governor. Georgia’s Latino population is smaller in percentage terms than many other states, although it is growing very fast. Still, it would be poetic justice if Deal lost the race by a small margin to Democrat Roy Barnes as a result of the latter’s lop-sided support from Hispanic voters.

Last night’s primary returns from four states were enough to keep me up past my bedtime. The biggest upset was probably Dan Malloy’ easy win over Ned Lamont in the CT Democratic gubernatorial primary, though the size of Michael Bennet’s eight-point win over Andrew Romanoff in the CO Dem Senate primary certainly surprised me. Three races expected to be very close–the Republican gubernatorial and Senate races in CO, and the GOP gubernatorial runoff–were in fact very close. Karen Handel’s concession to Nathan Deal in GA, with absentee ballots still to be counted and just over two thousand votes separating the candidates, was a bit of a surprise after a long and bitter campaign. Ken Buck’s 52-48 win over Jane Norton showed the value of political “home cooking;” virtually all of his margin can be attributed to a stellar performance in his home county (Weld) and the one next door to it (Larimer). You wish there could have been an exit poll for the CO GOP governor’s race to find out what voters thought they were doing when they cast ballots for Dan Maes. And you’d like to know if there was a point in the long evening when former Senator and now gubernatorial nominee Mark Dayton thought his long political career was finally over.
But here’s the really interesting thing: Democrats are at the moment front-runners in the gubernatorial contest in all four of these states, three of which currently have Republican governors. That’s a bit of good news for the Donkey Party during a tough year.

Probably no term in the political lexicon evokes more confusion that ‘populism,’ which has been carelessly tossed around to describe philosophies ranging from progressive to outright racist demagoguery. Fortunately we have Mike Lux to straighten out the mess and put the term in modern context to describe what it means for progressives and how it can be leveraged to help Democrats win a stable majority. In his HuffPo post “A Modern Progressive Populist Platform,” Lux explains:

With voters angry at the establishment and incumbents in general, and deals in particular, Democrats who are defenders of the established order are working overtime to beat down the idea of winning elections by using scary populism. Using faulty historical analogies, polls with carefully designed questions in order to elicit certain answers, and the specter of far-right anti-intellectualism as reasons not to be populist, they fear what might happen if Democrats actually start listening to real voters and make the changes people were promised in 2008.
The good news is that if the Democrats running for office in this tough, tough year will respond to the anti-establishment anger that is out there and ride it, they can do better than anyone is currently predicting. Of course, if that happened, it would be a very bad thing for corporate Democrats who don’t want anything to change, because it would prove the lie that the only way for Democrats to win is to kow-tow to special interest power and conventional wisdom.

Lux takes writers Matt Bai and Kevin Mattson to task for adding to the confusion about populism, and critiques Mattson’s article in the Aug. 3rd edition of The American Prospect:

Read more…

Much as I enjoyed romping through the craziness that is the Colorado Republican Party in an earlier post, I have a more somber feeling about the Republican contest in one of the other states holding elections today, my home state of Georgia.
I’ve posted a detailed preview over at FiveThirtyEight, which I wrote in as detached a tone as possible. Here I’ll say that the Republican gubernatorial runoff is one of the most stomach-turning I’ve watched in a while (with the notable exception of the bald-faced-lie extravaganza of the June 8 California GOP gubernatorial primary).
One candidate, “conservative reformer” Karen Handel, has now spent more than a year attacking everyone in her path as a scum-sucking corrupt redneck robbing the taxpayers. The other, former congressman Nathan Deal, has engaged in an extremist attack on Handel that reeks of archaic homophobia and misogyny. Listening to them, you’d never guess Handel is the political protege of the incumbent governor of the state, Sonny Perdue, or that Deal faced voters as a Democratic candidate for office eight times before switching parties the moment it became convenient for him. And that’s just what bugs me about the style of their campaigns; the “substance” is worse. Handel’s main platform plank other than supreme self-righteousness is the demagogic and irresponsible idea of abolishing the state income tax, without any proposal to replace the vast revenues that would involve, even though the state is nearly broke as it is. And to gain interest-group support against Handel, Deal has committed himself to every crazy position on social issues demanded by the Georgia Right-to-Life organization and other elements of the hard-core Christian Right.
It doesn’t help that half the likely 2012 Republican presidential field came running down to Georgia to participate in this abomination.
As a Democrat myself, I ought to be enjoying the spectacle, since it improves my party’s prospects in November. But sometimes shadenfreude‘s not so easy when your own friends and families could be affected, and the familiar landscape of politics is razed by campaigns so cynical that the only thing it’s possible for them to regret is to lose.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The Republican Party is campaigning with a stiff wind at its back this year, thanks to a terrible economy, ripe targets created by two straight heavily Democratic cycles, favorable midterm turnout demographics, and the famous “enthusiasm gap.”
But, in Colorado, it seems as if the Republicans are conducting a meteorological experiment to test the strength of that wind, as they stumble disarrayed into today’s primary. The race for the Republican Senate nomination is ugly: Candidates Jane Norton and Ken Buck are locked in a klutzy and tasteless competition to see who will screw up least. And the gubernatorial race … well, it’s never a good sign when both of your primary candidates are facing widespread demands to resign from politics altogether. What’s more, the candidate who fails to lose that primary will face not only popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, the Democratic candidate, but also indignant third-party spoiler Tom Tancredo (who is in an unusually wrathful mood these days, even for him).
What the heck happened? How did the party end up looking so hapless in an election year that began with enormous optimism for a GOP sweep in Colorado?
Originally, former congressman Scott McInnis was cruising toward the gubernatorial nomination, while former Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton was the odds-on favorite for the Senate nod. Both were looking good in the occasional general election trial heat. Yes, McInnnis’s November battle with Hickenlooper would’ve been difficult, but he had no particular reason to worry about obscure self-styled Tea Party opponent Don Maes. And Norton, who is very mobbed-up in national GOP circles (her brother-in-law is uber-lobbyist and longtime campaign strategist Charlie Black), held a solid lead over district attorney Ken Buck, another Tea Partier, in Senate primary polls for many months.
Then, things started to unravel for the frontrunners.
By May, Buck, famous for spearheading a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants, developed enough steam among Tea Party loyalists and other conservatives that Norton decided to skip the ritual of seeking ballot access via the Republican State Assembly. Essentially a state party convention, the assembly was an activist stronghold, and Norton’s decision threw the endorsement to Buck by default. Then came a far more painful blow: On the night of that gathering, Sarah Palin cruised into Denver for a big speech and failed to deliver an expected endorsement of Norton (according to some reports, she was warned off by purists in Colorado and elsewhere). Norton’s poll ratings began sliding steadily downward, and Buck picked up national support from Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund and RedState’s Erick Erickson. By late June, he was in the lead.
There was another surprise at the State Assembly. The lightly regarded Maes edged out McInnis for the convention’s endorsement. Yet Maes lost this advantage almost immediately, when he was charged with embarrassing campaign-finance violations, backed up by fines that wiped out most of his very limited funds.
That’s when the real weirdness broke out.

Read more…

Kentucky senatorial candidate Jack Conway delivers a great speech, with a tight balance between highlighting his record, articulating his vision and ferociously attacking his opponent. All in all, this one is an excellent instructional video for Dem candidates:

Clearly, Conway could win — with a little support from Dems, which can be provided on Conway’s ActBlue page.