Month: September 2012

Here’s another reason that the national polls don’t matter, even if the polls are taken of just white people.

A new survey of 2,501 adults, “Beyond Guns and God: Understanding the Complexities of the White Working Class in America,” published on Sept. 20 by the Public Religion Research Institute, reveals clearly that the white working class (broadly defined) cannot, at present, be described as a secure Republican constituency.

The P.R.R.I. study focuses on a group it defines as non-Hispanic whites without a four-year college degrees who are paid by the hour or by the job. That’s roughly one-third (36%) of all Americans. The study shows that Romney’s nationwide 48-35 advantage among these voters masks crucial regional differences.

The reason Romney has a strong, 13-point edge among all white working class voters, according to the P.R.R.I. findings, is that in the South his margin is huge. In the rest of the country, the white working class is much more closely divided.

Among southern working class whites, Romney leads by 40 points, 62-22, an extraordinary gap.

Romney leads with this group by 5 in the West and 4 in the Northeast, but trails by 8 in the Midwest. Auto bailout, anyone?

As for why the white working class of Pennsylvania has no time for Mitt Romney, this guy has an answer after my own heart (emphasis mine):

Steve Murphy, a media consultant working on congressional campaigns in Pennsylvania, characterized Romney’s problem somewhat differently: “I don’t think so much the argument is that he is anti-worker. It’s just that they just don’t like him. He seems like he is completely disconnected from people who have to work for a living.”

Why would he be disconnected from people who work for a living? He’s been living off interest and dividends for over a decade. If you exclude the South, Obama is running about even with white working class folks. And I don’t think the Southerners like Romney, either. It’s just that they seem to have decided that there is a white party and a black party. It used to be that the Democratic Party was the white party. Now it’s the Republican Party. I wonder if that will ever change. It’s certainly changing in Virginia and North Carolina, but Gore, Kerry, and Obama couldn’t crack 20% with white voters in the Deep South. I think they’re used to one-party dominance and they like it that way. It’s not too good for accountability though. Once you elect a dolt like Jeff Sessions or David Vitter, you can never get rid of them.

Andrew Sullivan says that Barack Obama, if reelected, will become the left’s Ronald Reagan. He’s right about that. It should be obvious. The only Democratic president to be reelected since Franklin Delano Roosevelt died is Bill Clinton, and he was promptly impeached. Even though Bill Clinton is now wildly popular, and not just among Democrats, he was tarnished by his tawdry affair with a White House intern. Among Democrats, he is revered for his communication skills but not for his policies. His greatest legislative successes were not bills that Democrats could wholeheartedly support, and some of them were downright terrible. Democrats hated NAFTA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Iraq Liberation Act, and the deregulation of the banks. Welfare reform was a worthy issue, but the actual bill that Clinton signed was so bad that he had to promise to fix it at the same moment he signed it. He never did.

These are the reasons that Bill Clinton will never be the left’s Ronald Reagan. But, if Barack Obama is reelected, he will be the left’s Ronald Reagan for a whole host of reasons. Most obviously, he will have created a new winning majority, just as Reagan did by completing Nixon’s Southern Strategy. As a multiracial man with exotic roots, he will be an indelible symbol of the rainbow governing majority that emerges in the early part of this century. And he will not leave a legacy of poor compromises that immediately become ripe for repeal. The project of the left will be to strengthen his reforms, not repeal or water them down. We will attempt to build on ObamaCare and the Wall Street Reforms rather than working to fix NAFTA or repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and DOMA or re-regulate the financial services sector.

Like Clinton, Obama will be immensely popular on the left for the simple reason that he won, twice, but he will be much more likely to serve as the model for future candidates than Clinton. People will definitely be naming roads and schools, and perhaps even airports after Obama, just as they have done with Reagan.

Reading Sullivan’s column, it is interesting to see that he believes Reagan’s positive legacy was mostly accomplished during his second term. I’d disagree with that. For me, the Iran-Contra affair and Reagan’s descent into dementia in 1987-88 made Reagan’s second term a failure. His tax and immigration reforms were lasting legacies, but neither are why he is revered on the right. Likewise, Obama is likely to be revered on the left not for any deal he makes on the budget next year, but for winning with a new coalition and for passing health care reform, saving the auto industry, stabilizing the economy, and making investments in new energy.

And, although they will remain very controversial on the left, his foreign policies and national security stances will be revered because he was the Democrat who finally won over the trust of the American people and made them stop looking to the right for protection.

Provided that Obama doesn’t let the American people down in a second term like Nixon did, and like Clinton did, he will immediately join the upper echelon of American presidents. And, I’d argue that, on the left, he will sit just below FDR in the pantheon of heroes.

Like Reagan, whether he deserves it or not, this is what will happen.

No one could have predicted that choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate and embracing his granny-starving budget plan would hurt Mitt Romney with seniors:

New polling by Reuters/Ipsos indicates that during the past two weeks – since just after the Democratic National Convention – support for Romney among Americans age 60 and older has crumbled, from a 20-point lead over Democratic President Barack Obama to less than 4 points.

Romney’s double-digit advantages among older voters on the issues of healthcare and Medicare – the nation’s health insurance program for those over 65 and the disabled – also have evaporated, and Obama has begun to build an advantage in both areas.

No one likes Mitt Romney. And that’s what you should say to people you meet who express the intent to vote for him.

“What!? Are you kidding? No one likes Mitt Romney.”

“If you want to go down in history as some kind of strange weirdo who actually did like Mitt Romney, that’s your business, but I wouldn’t wish that on your grandchildren.”

This isn’t like admitting that you voted for Dukakis or Mondale. Most Democrats have no regrets about those votes. Most Democrats feel that history vindicated those votes. This is like voting for David Hasselhoff. Or Dan Quayle. Or Sarah Palin. No one is ultimately going to want to admit that they supported jackasses like that.

Maybe you could talk to the people who supported John Edwards over Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They can tell you how it feels to have supported a charlatan four years down the line.

When it’s all over, no one will want to admit that they supported Mitt Romney. Not even a little bit.

The Republicans will airbrush him out of their history much more thoroughly than they’ve airbrushed out George W. Bush. And the reason is that George W. Bush brought them victory, twice, and that is still worth something. Just look at the federal courts if you need proof.

Romney has won no lasting allegiance or appreciation from any faction of the Republican Party, and he will be discarded like a pathogen.

Did John Bohner give us a Do-Nothing Congress?

Barring a burst of productivity in the lame-duck session in November and December, the 112th Congress is set to enter the Congressional record books as the least productive body in the post-World War II era. It had passed a mere 173 public laws as of last month. That was well below the 906 enacted from January 1947 through December 1948 by the body President Harry S. Truman referred to as the “do-nothing” Congress, and far fewer than many prior Congresses have passed in a single session.

So far, Boehner’s Congress has passed 733 fewer laws than the Do-Nothing Congress of 1947-48. The least productive Congress in history passed more than five times as many bills as Boehner’s Congress. Try to wrap your mind around that.

Harry Truman successfully won reelection by branding a Congress as “Do-Nothing” that was 81% more productive than John Boehner’s Congress. Forget the part about “barring a burst of productivity,” Boehner did less in two years than almost any Congress has done in one year. He and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have ground our government to a halt during a time of record unemployment, and they expect the American people to respond by rewarding them and electing a total dick like Mitt Romney to take the president’s place.

That isn’t going to happen. But the House and Senate Republicans deserve a beating. I hope people realize just how historically awful they have been.

According to Nate Silver’s model, if the election were held today, Obama would have a better than 95% chance of winning. That is something you would not know if you looked just at national polling outfits like Gallup and Rasmussen. And it shows you how important it is to have Nate Silver at the New York Times. It’s true that I liked it better when he was working independently in the new media, but his influence can’t be exaggerated. I do not believe that the Republicans would be stabbing each other with forks and knives if they thought the election was a dead-heat. But they don’t think that because they know Nate is a smart man, and they know those national polls from Gallup and Rasmussen are better used as toilet paper than as accurate reflections of the state of the race. Nate has taken one of the Republicans’ strongest tools and he has blunted its effectiveness by applying cold, hard analysis to the problem. The Republicans don’t just think they are going to lose. They know it. And Nate is the main reason why.

So, the demoralization is setting in. Michelle Malkin throws a knife at Bill Kristol. Peggy Noonan brings a fork down between Mitt’s shoulder blades. Ann Romney chastises the Republican Establishment. Romney throws a tantrum.

And while they’re all busy carving each other up, Team Obama is working the field with total focus and determination.

Good times.

Why he is losing?

Because he’s a dick.

Less than 50 days out from a presidential elections is not a good time to have a reasoned debate about U.S.-Egypt relations. That said, I am mostly comfortable with the comments of President Mohamed Morsi despite his critiques of our foreign policy, our society, and his strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He received a Ph.D from the University of Southern California in the 1980’s and he’s happy to say, “Go Trojans.” I feel better knowing that he has a real familiarity with our people and our culture, because I feel like a lot of folks who are in various Islamist movements don’t have that kind of knowledge, and it can lead to misunderstandings. President Morsi may not like restaurants like Hooters, but I can’t say that I am a big fan of them myself. Perhaps we dislike them for slightly different reasons, but his prudery doesn’t bother me.

I think President Morsi is correct when he says that the United States has a special responsibility to the Palestinians because we signed the Camp David Accords which called for a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the establishment of a Palestinian state. As long as those commitments are not fulfilled, the terms of the treaty are under stress. This comment warrants more discussion:

He suggested that Egypt would not be hostile to the West, but would not be as compliant as Mr. Mubarak either.

“Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he said, by backing dictatorial governments over popular opposition and supporting Israel over the Palestinians.

This is very similar to my critique of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, but it’s hopelessly lacking in nuance. In the case of Egypt, the U.S. did not install Nasser, or Sadat, or Mubarak in power. We didn’t squash any nascent democracy movement, as we did in 1953 in Iran. During the 1960’s and early 1970’s it was the Soviets who armed Egypt and dominated its internal politics. And when Jimmy Carter worked with Begin and Sadat to start a real peace process, it was Islamist radicals, not democratic freedom-fighters, who assassinated Sadat. Part of the reason that America supported Mubarak against organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood was because we were trying to protect the peace process that was originated at Camp David.

Things might have been different if Carter had had a second term to consolidate his gains and advance the peace process, but we got Reagan and the invasion of Lebanon instead. While conservative governments in the United States ignored the peace process, the settlers changed the facts on the ground and made both the Camp David Accords and the Oslo peace process much more difficult to implement. By the time President Obama arrived on the scene, the Palestinian government was split and basically Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall.

But it’s too simplistic to argue that America has been supporting leaders like Mubarak because we oppose democracy and Egyptians’ rights. The relationship started with Sadat in the context of the Cold War. It was built up in the context of Camp David Accords. And it later got entwined with anti-terrorism efforts after the first bombing of the World Trade Center.

America has substantial responsibility for its failure to see to it that the Camp David Accords were implemented as designed, but both the Israelis and the Palestinians have plenty of responsibility for that, too.

You can’t just look at the question of Palestine without looking at a larger picture. The U.S. intervened in Kuwait to protect the principle of sovereignty. They intervened in the Balkans to protect Muslims. They intervened in Libya to protect Muslims. And our current president has been treading over very treacherous ground to, as far as possible, support the democratic aspirations reflected in the Arab Spring.

One can point to the 1953 coup in Iran or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the pro-Israeli policies of the United States or to a number of other legitimate irritants to Arab and Muslim public opinion, but the U.S. isn’t responsible for every woe in the Arab world. That’s a cop-out.

Democracy in Egypt makes the U.S. nervous. The Muslim Brotherhood makes the U.S. nervous. But we actually have an opportunity to vastly improve the relationship between our people and our governments. If we learn to live with having less control and less predictability, and Egypt learns to do less finger-pointing and more responsible governing, we can overcome our fear and Egypt can overcome their resentment.

President Morsi will not be visiting the White House on this trip to the United States because Obama’s political opponents will politicize it if he does. That’s the fear talking. That’s what America has to work on. The Egyptians have their own work to do.

I’m all tuckered out today. I think my immune system is stressed from battling all the colds people have been trying to give me. Or maybe I have Lyme Disease again. Damn these woods. In any case, I feel kind of less than good. And that’s not good for writing. So, why don’t you vicariously enjoy the president’s visit to Milwaukee. Compare that to this fool.

Migrant Mother as she was known for over forty years from this photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936.

An image seared into the minds of many as emblematic of the Great Depression and the particular struggles of women in caring for and feeding their children.  Not that such times were in the past and forgotten thirty years later at the beginning of the War on Poverty and don’t continue to exist in destitute Native American communities.

In Migrant Mother, we could see The Grapes of Wrath and what could so easily become the plight of most of us.
Over those decades of her public anonymity, Florence Owens Thompson worked and raised her children.  Those children grew up, worked, married, had children of their own, and they in turn grew up.  All of them would have heard family stories.  Maybe not that their mother and grandmother was the model in “Migrant Mother,” but that Florence was full blooded Cherokee.

Look at her!  Can you not see that she’s Native American?  Yes or No?

Florence was born before Oklahoma was a state but after the deadline for registering as a Native American had passed.  So, technically and legally she wasn’t a member of the Cherokee Nation  Records to establish her ethnic ancestry don’t exist. Only the words that were spoken to her and she in turn spoke to her children who believed them and spoke them to their children.  

“Tom,” one of Florence’s great-great-grandsons, heard and believes those words.  Who’s to say that the white man’s record keeping is right and his relatives are wrong?          

In politics, there are endorsements…and then there are endorsements that win close elections.  Yesterday afternoon, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino gave Elizabeth Warren the kind of endorsement that could help her become the first Massachusetts woman elected to the US Senate.  Let us count the ways:

Timing: The endorsement came at a late afternoon rally less than 24 hours after Warren’s first televised debate with incumbent Scott Brown.  That means Menino (and not just the Warren campaign) wanted it to get a lot of attention.

Location:  The rally was held in Adams Park, a small triangle of green in the center of Roslindale, a neighborhood that first elected Tom Menino to public office nearly 30 years ago in a city council race.  Roslindale’s the kind of neighborhood that’s “urban” enough (50% immigrants, two large public housing projects, lots of “triple deckers”) to appeal to the liberal/urban wing of the Democratic Party, and “nice” enough (over 50% white, nice restaurants and shops, lots of 1 & 2 family houses) to appeal to the more moderate, mostly white, middle- and upper-middle class suburbs ringing Boston.

Turnout:  Several hundred people (on short notice) in a small park makes for good background footage on the 6:00 evening news.  A lot of city workers turned out (another indication this is a serious endorsement by Menino), but so did workers and leaders from the building trades and the big SEIU locals (#1199 and #615), along with a sizable cross-section of the rest of the neighborhood.

The Speech:  When polled, over half of Boston voters report they’ve shaken Mayor Menino’s hand.  Among other things, Menino’s constant traveling around to the city’s neighborhoods and his availability to city residents are a continuing source of his political strength, and a compensation for his well-known, near legendary, weakness with the spoken word.

But when endorsing Elizabeth Warren yesterday, Menino spoke from a prepared text (he often speaks off the cuff), and used several rhetorical devices to signal the seriousness of this endorsement:

   
1. He began by highlighting how long the endorsement has been in coming.  (I know some of you wanted me to make this speech earlier this summer…  I know some of you wanted me to make this speech this spring…  I know some of you wanted me to make this speech last year.*)  It’s an old politician’s trick—shine a lantern on your own weakness.  In this case, Menino’s “weakness” is his longstanding and well-known fondness for Republican politicians like Scott Brown (and former Gov. Paul Cellucci) who are “good guys”, and his corresponding coolness towards “goo-goo” Democrats (like Scott Harshbarger and Martha Coakley).  There weren’t a lot of “good government” Democrats at this rally; but there were a lot of blue-collar and pink-collar Democrats who’ve been enthusiastic backers of Warren for months now, and had been pressing Menino (I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls about this election) to get off the fence.

   

2. Having acknowledged the key tension leading up to this moment, Menino turned it to his advantage.  But I believe when you’re talking about a  job like this, it’s important to get to know the person.  Then he went through a carefully crafted litany, starting with how Elizabeth Warren first got his attention (…when she said, “How come we don’t let companies sell toasters that will burn down our houses, but we let banks sell mortgages that, in effect, do the same thing?”), and continuing with a punchy list of Warren’s credentials and how their relationship has grown as they’ve talked over the months, culminating with…

   

3. And that’s why I’m here today to say she’s got my vote and my help!  For those not attuned to the subtle nuances of Massachusetts politics, “my help” translates to something like “I will deploy my small army of city workers, developers, contractors, and labor unions that rely to a greater-or-lesser degree on my good will to turn out and deliver a substantial margin of votes for Elizabeth Warren in Boston to overcome the margins in the exurban towns that are Brown’s base.  Furthermore, my endorsement is a signal to Democratic Party “regulars” in cities like Brockton, Fall River, Lowell, Lynn, Springfield and Worcester that they should deliver similar large majorities for Warren.”

   

4. Near the end of his speech, Menino declared, “Elizabeth Warren is good people.”  Again, for those not attuned to the particular nuances of the uneasy, sometimes fragile coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party in the Bay State, that means something like, “Elizabeth Warren may live in Cambridge, teach at Harvard, and look like a League of Women Voters activist, but despite that she’s not one of those affluent, politically correct know-it-alls who’s always trying to tell working people how they should think and act and live their lives.  She’s one of us, not one of them.”

Reciprocity:  After Menino introduced Warren and they clasped hands as the crowd cheered, she demonstrated that she is, in fact, “good people”.  Warren was fulsome, even extravagant in her praise of Mayor Menino—citing him as a leader and model for mayors across the country, claiming that every person in Boston has personally benefited from his care and stewardship over the past two decades.  Then she went down an applause-generating checklist of issues on which she stands with Menino and the residents of Boston, in contrast to the way Scott Brown has voted during his two years as senator.

This is still a close race, and Scott Brown is a formidable political campaigner.  But having held her own against Brown in their first debate, and having secured Mayor Menino’s endorsement—all within less than 24 hours—Elizabeth Warren is in a significantly better position to win this race than she was Thursday morning.

*All quotations guaranteed approximate.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com