Month: September 2012

Trolling for the meathead vote

by digby

Wow. Scott Brown’s going all out to attract the lowest common denominator:

Staffers for Sen. Scott Brown chanted Indian “war whoops” and made “tomahawk chops” during a rally for the Republican senator this week in Boston.

Brown’s Deputy Chief of Staff Greg Casey and Constituent Service Counsel Jack Richard, State Director Jerry McDermott, special assistant Jennifer Franks and GOP operative Brad Garrett are pictured in the video, NewsCenter 5’s Janet Wu confirmed.

“It is certainly something that I don’t condone,” said Brown when asked about the video. “The real offense is that (Warren) said she was white and then checked the box saying she is Native American, and then she changed her profile in the law directory once she made her tenure.”

Right that’s the “real” offense. His staffers putting on a Native American minstrel show in the street is just good fun.

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Gate-gate reverberations

by digby

I am so loving this British “gate-gate” scandal. It shows just how commonplace these top 1% whines are, even among those who’ve been dealing with class consciousness a lot longer than Americans have. It would appear that the ruling elites are starting to unravel a bit.

The British politician who screamed at the cops last week continues to be in the news with revelations that the police logs back up the police testimony:

The police log records that Mitchell demanded to be allowed to cycle through the Downing Street security gates. A female police officer told Mitchell, who insisted that he always cycled through the gates, that it was not policy to open the gates for cyclists.

A colleague of the female PC wrote: “After several refusals Mr Mitchell got off his bike and walked to the pedestrian gate with me after I again offered to open that for him.

“There were several members of public present as is the norm opposite the pedestrian gate and as we neared it, Mr Mitchell said: ‘Best you learn your fucking place … you don’t run this fucking government … You’re fucking plebs’.”

The officer who wrote the log said he told Mitchell he would have to arrest him if he continued to swear at him. The log reports Mitchell as saying “you haven’t heard the last of this” as he left on his bike.

Somebody’s been watching a little too much Downton Abbey.

But really, how different is that from this little tirade by John Kasich?

I’m as critical of the police as anyone, but if that’s what a privileged politician considers “disrespect” he’s living in a very different world from most Americans. Maybe he should get tasered a time or two for looking at the cop sideways and see what “disrespect” really is. (And I doubt very much that Kasich would have had such a problem with the police rousting one of “those people” for exactly the same infraction.)

And Romney’s little tantrum about people who deign to take their votes to politicians who look out for their interests is similarly disdainful of the “plebs”:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them.

Apparently, they don’t “know their place” either.

These are just three examples of comments from the ruling class over the past few years that have betrayed their enormous privilege and downright comtempt for the masses. The just can’t stop complaining about how hard they work and how terrible it is when they don’t get their million dollar bonuses and how terrible it is that poor people aren’t paying enough in income taxes. It’s so stereotypical of out of touch aristocrats that you have to wonder about their basic intelligence.

It might be silly to focus on these verbal outbursts, but they are completely in line with their policies. And when the people hear what they are saying they understand that instinctively. It’s a very foolish thing for them to do.

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Ralph Reed’s big plans

by digby

The NY Times belatedly reported the Ralph Reed electoral machine story over the week-end — the same story Adele Stan at Alternet has been on for months. (Too bad they didn’t credit her.) She’s got an update and a warning today: don’t get too cocky. Reed’s operation is formidable. She talks at length about the operations mechanics and it’s impressive. (It’s based on the Obama 08 model.)

But this is really the key, in my book:

For all of the grousing that right-wingers do about the power of labor unions in elections, there is no parallel liberal infrastructure to the network of evangelical churches that Reed has been organizing since his salad days at the Christian Coalition. Just name a labor group that meets weekly, always on the same day, and enjoys most of its members showing up for the meeting. Churches, with their homey bulletins ripe for the insertion of a purportedly non-partisan Faith and Freedom Coalition voter guide to the candidates’ positions on hot-button issues, are nearly ideal as organizational cells.

At a recent the workshop conducted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., it was suggested that voter registration forms be placed in the pews.

For the most part, people the unions target for voter turnout operations are their own members. But unlike the churches of the Christian right, the ideological and cultural make-up of unions is hardly homogenous: only 51 percent of white union members identify as Democrats, compared with the 65 percent of white Christian evangelicals who identified with the Republican party in 2008. (That number has since climbed to 70 percent according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.)

Christian evangelicals comprise 26 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, while union members make up 12 percent of all wage and salary workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a still-smaller percentage of the general population.

Liberal pundits often make the mistake of comparing the GOTV efforts of competing Democratic and Republican campaigns, as conducted by the parties and their candidates, concluding that the Democratic efforts are far superior. At the party and candidate levels that may be true, but the Republican turnout operation exists largely outside of the party structure, through organizations such as Reed’s, and the Koch-backed Tea Party group, Americans For Prosperity. Unlike unions, whose budgets are limited by the size and scope of their membership, FFC and AFP could have access to however much money they need to get the job done.

I think it’s incredibly foolish to understimate the possibility that the right could pull it off, despite Romney’s lame performance. I agree that it’s unlikely, but it is possible due to the fact that organizations like Reeds have unlimited money (in fact, everyone on the right has unlimited money) and they have the infrastructure. They are also making it as hard as possible for Democrats to vote. That combination is fairly lethal in a close election.

I also don’t think you can underrate the right’s hatred for Obama. Stan spells out why:

As important as the particulars of Reed’s turnout operation may be, perhaps the most important data point about the constituency he seeks to organize is the temperament of its voters.

Let’s say that 60 percent of likely voters in a given state lean left or liberal, and 40 percent lean right.

“Likely voters,” as the name implies, are not guaranteed to vote. In election 2012, Obama doesn’t enjoy nearly the level of enthusiasm among key constituencies — the very young or the very progressive, for example — that he did in 2008. A bad economy and the heartbreak of drone warfare have taken their toll. And you can shake your finger in the face of a disheartened progressive all you want while you tell them to vote, but for someone with fond memories of her “Question Authority” bumper sticker, that’s not a winning strategy.

But right-wingers, particularly members of the Tea Party and the religious right, the instructions of their leaders matter. According to social psychologist Bob Altemeyer, the Yale-trained author of The Authoritarians, right-wing followers place an undue level of faith in their leaders.

“The followers have a great desire to submit to established authority,” Altemeyer explained in an interview with John Dean. “They’re also highly conventional, and they have a lot of aggression in them, which studies show comes primarily from being fearful. One of the classic reactions to fear is to fight, and the followers will attack when their authorities tell them to.”

So while members of the the Tea Party and the religious right may not love the ideologically bendy, Mormon Mitt Romney, they’re ginned up and ready for an attack on Obama, whom they’e been taught to fear, via all manner of tropes, ranging from the birther conspiracy theory to the lie of the so-called “death panels.”

If, in eight of those nine battleground states, Reed and his allies manage to turn out 90 percent of the right-wing base, and Obama turns out only 60 percent of his, Romney wins.

Add to that formula the concerted efforts in states throughout the nation to disenfranchise voters who are inclined to vote Democratic, and you have a recipe for a Romney victory.

I have always thought that Obama was likely to win. But I would never underestimate a combination of wealthy plutocrats, churches, right wingers with an ax to grind and a willingness among all of them to cheat their way to victory. That’s an American success story in the making.

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Whistling Past Dixie

by David Atkins

Dave Weigel gives an important reminder about the “white working class voter.”

National polls don’t tell us the whole story about white voters. Outside the South, since 2008, the white working class has edged away from the Democratic Party. But it remains open to the Democrats. That’s why the rest of the country’s so competitive! Take the example of Minnesota, where 90 percent of the 2008 electorate was white. Barack Obama split that vote, 49-49, with John McCain. He narrowly lost whites between the ages of 30 and 44, but won all other ages, and won elderly whites by a 17-point landslide.

Compare that to Georgia, where Obama did better than any Democrat since 1996. He won a measly 23 percent of the white vote. He lost elderly whites, aged 65 and over, by 56 points.

This might be obvious, but I think it gets lost in our daily culture war dialogues. To win the election in a squeaker, Barack Obama needs to win around 39 percent of the white vote. But outside the South, if he’s winning, he’ll be basically tying Romney with whites or losing them by 2-5 points. He’s the first Democrat to win national elections in the post-Dixiecrat era. For generations, the Democratic attitudes of the South made it easier for the party to hold Congress, even as ticket-splitters were voting Republican for president — Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes. Now it’s reversed. A Democrat can lose the deep South in a landslide, but win the presidency, as southern conservatives send a massive crop of Republicans back to the Capitol.

Modern Republicanism is a largely older, Southern white phenomenon. Nationalized politics is allowing that culture to creep somewhat into the midwest (Missouri being a prime example), while states in the Mormon triangle and the plains are also deeply conservative for similar reasons, but lack the population prevents them from doing much damage outside of the undemocratic Senate.

By and large, though, the cultural divide that has plagued this nation since its founding remains with us today. We fought a war over it that cost many lives, but should have been decisive. In the end, it will be demographic changes that draw the 250-year-old simmering battle to a close not with a bang but with a whimper. And I hope to be there when Texas votes Democratic for President in 2024, playing the world’s smallest violin for a peculiar culture that at last can do little further damage to America and the world.

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QOTD: Tory whip Andrew Mitchell

by digby

It’s from a couple of days ago, actually:

British Prime Minister David Cameron’s new chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, yelled at police because they wouldn’t let him pedal his bike out of Downing Street, The Sun reports.

Said Mitchell: “Best you learn your fucking place. You don’t run this fucking government. You’re fucking plebs.”

An eyewitness said Mitchell also branded them “morons”.

The elites’ inner Marie Antoinette is just bursting out all over, isn’t it? He denies using the word “pleb” but there were a bunch of witnesses. Apparently the “best you learn your fucking place” is undeniable.

In case you were wondering:

Right-winger and keen cyclist Mr Mitchell is a former shadow police minister and was until recently International Development Secretary.

A former investment banker, he is worth at least £2.2million and owns a number of swanky homes.

He lives in one of the most fashionable squares in Islington, North London, with his GP wife Sharon and their two daughters.

He also has a house in his Sutton Coldfield constituency in Birmingham and a property in the French ski resort of Val d’Isere.

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Remember the ladies

by digby

Also known as the moochers, looters and parasites:

National polling averages, like Huffington Post’s own model, show a 3-point race. Other polls show a wider race, and in some, like Gallup’s tracking in swing states, the race is tighter. Individual swing states, like Virginia and Ohio, also show a clear Obama lead.

Most of this movement has come from women voters. The chart below shows Obama’s margin over Romney broken out by gender in public polls from August 20 through today (all telephone or IVR public polls I could easily find are included; none were left out). Not only do women consistently give Obama the edge, the gender gap in Obama’s performance seems to be widening.

According to the article it’s possible that this may end up being the biggest gender gap in history.

I suppose you can swagger around talking about people being victims and refusing to take personal responsibility, but to a whole lot of women that’s a myopic view of how daily life is actually lived in this country. Many of them are caring for kids and ageing parents while working at shit jobs and trying to make ends meet in this dead economy and the idea that they are parasites is ridiculously insulting. They tend to be much more involved in the day to day struggles of the vulnerable people in our society and know intimately what the stakes are. (And a whole lot of them would dearly love to take personal responsibility for their reproduction, but these people won’t let them!)

I’m sure many women have all the same qualms about the Democrats as the men do and wish they had more choices. But on virtually every level, there is simply no doubt that given free rein, the Republicans will make their lives demonstrably worse than they already are.

It’s just a practical choice. When you see a presidential ticket bragging that they want to cut off every level of support that many of these women, regardless of their economic status, understand is necessary to keep the young, the old and the disabled from total penury, it’s not surprising. Most of them don’t have time to listen to Rush and watch Fox News to learn how this offends their sense of personal freedom. They’re too busy working, cleaning, caregiving and otherwise exhausting themselves.

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No, underpaying progressive campaign workers isn’t a good thing

by David Atkins

A bunch of people in left-leaning circles are passing this around, as if it were good news:

One of the big challenges Mitt Romney faced after effectively clinching the GOP presidential nomination in late April was ramping up his campaign to match the behemoth operation President Obama already had in place across the country.

The Republican challenger finally caught up last month – at least when measured by money.

The Romney campaign spent $4.04 million on payroll in August — nearly twice as much as it spent in July — while the Obama campaign spent $4.37 million, according to campaign finance disclosures filed last week with the Federal Election Commission.

But the president appears to be getting a much bigger bang for his buck.

So the Obama campaign is getting the same level of commitment from staff while saving $330,000 dollars money. So celebrate, right? Well, maybe not.

According to an analysis by the Times Data Desk, part of the Los Angeles Times, the Obama campaign had 901 people on its payroll last month, and paid them a median salary of $3,074 a month, or $36,886 a year.

The Romney campaign, in contrast, had 403 people on its payroll, and paid them a median salary of $6,437 in August, which would mean $77,250 a year.

This isn’t a good thing. First, Democrats are supposed to be about helping regular workers and the middle class. But more importantly, one of the key challenges that progressives face is a high level of burnout from our core volunteers and activists. People have to be able to make a living, and passion for the issues only goes so far. Republicans and conservatives are able to train and keep their best and brightest because they pay them enough to stay in the fold. Democrats and progressive organizations expect talent to work for peanuts.

Eventually, what happens is that good people burn out and quit when it comes time to build for retirement and raise a family.

Is it really worth it for the Obama campaign to underpay its staff to save $330,000 a few million in election expenses, just to buy a few more TV ads and be lauded as a better businessperson than Mitt Romney? No, it isn’t. Not even for the campaign itself, and certainly not for the future of the progressive movement. Of course, left-leaning organizations aren’t as well funded as right-leaning ones. But there’s more than enough money there to pay good workers a decent wage.

But don’t just jump on Barack Obama. This is a chronic culture problem within the entire Democratic infrastructure. Young people lean progressive, and the politically interested are often desperate to work in Democratic campaigns. Limousine liberals are able to send their kids to work for free on “internships.” And then there is a huge swath of Democrats and progressives who believe that payment for political services is somehow unclean, and that if any payment is granted for working on progressive politics, it should be at a minimum subsistence level.

This foolishness has to be fixed for the sake of the future of the movement. And it certainly shouldn’t be celebrated.

Update: Obviously, I got my math wrong through a clumsy reading of the details. The President’s campaign is saving millions of dollars in staff expenses, not $330,000. But the general point remains the same.

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Chained CPI of fools

by digby

A good friend questioned my cynicism the other day about Obama’s newly aggressive defense of Social Security at the AARP meeting and I thought hard about that. I’ve been extremely hard on the administration for their stated desire for a Grand Bargain long before the fiscal cliff was even hatched — in fact, since the beginning of the first term. And I guess I just tend to be suspicious any time a President suggests early on that he has a grandiose plan for his legacy and then uses “problems” that come along later to justify it. If Obama hadn’t said straight out that he wanted to solve all the problems of the world with his Grand Bargain I might not be so cynical.

Well it turns out that I’m not the only one. This guy is cynical too:

One of the most progressive voices in the caucus, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), said he was heartened to hear Obama tell the AARP last week that he’d be open to raising the cap on income that’s taxed for purposes of paying into the Social Security trust fund. Sanders also applauded the president for taking off of the table any reform language that resulted in the “slashing” of benefits (several Social Security advocates, disagreeing with Sanders, said they were worried such language was counterproductive, as it opens the door for cuts that could be deemed minor).

But the Vermont Independent worried that all of this could be posturing for the lame-duck session immediately after the election, when lawmakers are expected to rush to find another “grand bargain” on tax and entitlement reform to stave off the so-called fiscal cliff.

“That’s exactly what’s going to happen,” Sanders said of Social Security being on the proverbial table, “Unless someone of us stops it — and a number of us are working very hard on this — that’s exactly what will happen. Everything being equal, unless we stop it, what will happen is there will be a quote-unquote grand bargain after the election in which the White House, some Democrats will sit down with Republicans, they will move to a chained CPI.”

If he’s worried, I’m worried. The Chained CPI is a benefits cut. And it’s one that will hurt those who remain on Social Security the longest, usually elderly women in their 80s and 90s. I suppose they can try to go out and get a job to augment their inadequate incomes, but I can’t think of who will hire them. This is a prescription for catfood for these very old people.

Sanders asked Huffington Post to get the president on the record saying that he would not do this. And this, predictably, was the result:

By Monday morning, the Obama campaign had moved slightly in the opposite direction, with top adviser David Axelrod refusing to unveil any specifics about what the president had planned for Social Security reform.

“[T]he approach has to be a balanced one,” Axelrod told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We’ve had discussions in the past. And the question is, can you raise the cap some? Right now Social Security cuts off at a lower point. Can you raise the cap so people in the upper incomes are paying a little more into the program? And do you adjust the growth of the program? That’s a discussion worth having. But again, we have to approach it in a balanced way. We’re not going to cut our way to prosperity. We’re not going to cut our way to more secure entitlement programs — Social Security and Medicare. We have to have a balance.”

So what is the president’s proposal, asked Time magazine’s Mark Halperin.

“Mark, I’ll tell you what: When you get elected to the United States Senate and sit at that table — this is not the time,” replied Axelrod.

I love how it’s always this “pay a little bit more” like we couldn’t possibly ask these job creating Galtish heroes to kick in more than a pittance lest something really terrible happen.

Feeling optimistic? I didn’t think so. After all, it’s not as if the Republicans aren’t going to demand their pound of elderly flesh so they can run against the Democrats for cutting Social Security. (Their adoption of Mediscare should finally relieve the Democrats of any assurance they won’t.)

No, the best case scenario for a “balanced approach” on Social Security is a tiny raise in the cap for the tiny percentage of zillionaires who own this country in exchange for catfood eating old women. That’s the “balanced approach”.” they’re seeking.

The only thing we can hope for is that either the left or the right wings of the congress — perhaps both — say no. It will be a lot more likely if they have a chance to organize in the new congress than if this is all done at lightening speed to avoid going over the fictional fiscal cliff in the lame duck.

Lame duck gridlock is in out best interest in so many ways. This is definitely one of them.

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Depends on what the meaning of “hide” is

by digby

It looks like Paul Ryan let the cat out of the bag:

As we all know, Romney has parked a boatload of money in the Cayman’s although they claim it’s not personal, it’s strictly business. Not that it matters. Either way, it saves the Romney fortune a fortune.

But yeah, one way or the other, he’s hiding money from the IRS. And there was a time when Paul Ryan pretended to be against it.

But I’d be willing to bet one of Mitt’s millions that he doesn’t actually give a damn.

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Emergency medicine

by digby

So Mitt Romney now believes that everyone should use the emergency room for their health care needs if they don’t have insurance. Or, at least, it sounded that way. (Bold Progressives caught him saying something quite different back in 2007, before health care became a dirty word to conservatives.)

Remember when Alan Grayson was vilified for saying that the Republican plan was “Don’t get sick and if you do get sick, die quickly”? Well, that sounds an awful lot like Mitt’s new program to me.

Allow me to share a personal story that shed some light on emergency care — for the insured. We have a high deductible plan, because it’s all we can afford. And since we’re decrepit baby boomers, it’s ridiculously expensive even so. It’s our second highest monthly bill after housing. Luckily, we’re both in surprisingly good health and we’re just hoping against hope that it stays that way until we can reach Medicare age.

However, my husband was traveling recently and had to go to the emergency room with a kidney stone. The “out of network” hospital billed us nearly $5,000. Since we have insurance, they were kind enough to bill them directly instead of requiring the payment up front, but since our deductible is so high, we will end up paying the whole bill anyway.

Here’s the rub. We would have been better off saying we were uninsured and negotiating with the hospital directly for a lower rate. Our insurance company has no interest in negotiating a lower rate because we have a high deductible. So, they just paid the bill and are now passing the whole ridiculously high charges on to us. It’s almost at the end of our policy year and unless we both have heart attacks in the next month, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to “take advantage” of the fact that our deductible is met. So we’re stuck.

Insurance companies only help themselves. They do nothing that doesn’t benefit their bottom line unless they are required to do so. And even under Obama care, (which will be an improvement for us in the preventive care realm) we’ll be paying about the same, with the same deductible and the same profit motive for the insurance company. In fact, I’m guessing they’ll be even greedier wherever they can get away with it. Greed is like water — it always finds a way.

Medicare for all would solve this problem since it would cover you no matter where you get sick. But we don’t have that. And if the political establishment in both parties has their way, we won’t have Medicare much longer either at least in any recognizable form. Sure, their fabulous, Rube Goldberg “market solution” will probably be fixed up in the long run, piece by agonizing piece. Unfortunately, in the long run, a whole lot of American guinea pigs will be dead before their time while they work out the kinks.

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