OK, Republicans, we’ll go over this one last time: I
am Black. I voted for President Barack Obama. I did not vote for him
because he’s Black, and I’m willing to bet my meager paycheck that most
Black politically astute voters didn’t vote for his skin color either.
I voted for the President because he was head and shoulders above the
lying, smarmy, condescending, snake-eyed weasel you Republicans called a
candidate. For most Black folk, and for most Americans in general, it
turns out — it wasn’t even a choice.
Look, we Democrats didn’t complain when our nominee, the jelly-spined
Michael Dukakis, got his ass kicked by George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Dukakis was an idiot, and we knew it. Once we saw the ridiculous photo
of that doofus riding in a tank wearing a battle helmet, we realized the
race was over. But we sucked it up, and took the beating we deserved,
because it was essentially our fault that our candidate was so weak.
Republicans seem to lack even that minimum degree of self-awareness.
In defeat, the GOP has pointed fingers at everyone but themselves.
Mostly, though, they’ve blamed Blacks and other minorities for their own
dismal failures.
Paul Ryan, the phantom running mate — who magically disappeared as
soon as he was named for the VP slot, blamed the loss on Obama’s turnout
in “urban” communities — as if we’re too stupid to figure out the code.
Mitt Romney, still clueless about his own culpability in turning off
millions of potential voters, said Obama bought the election with lavish
“gifts” to the president’s base supporters at taxpayer expense —
“gifts” like health care and student loan forgiveness.
Only Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, attempted to
grasp the message voters were sending the GOP on Election Day — and
even he only got it half right.
Jindal said, rightly, that the GOP would need to reach out to
minorities and disenfranchised voters if the party ever wants to become
viable again. He said they’d have to soften the divisive language on
rape, homosexuality, immigration, and contraception, to name a few — or
perish like the dinosaurs.
Jindal’s on the right track here, but he’s still on the wrong train.
The GOP has got to reach out beyond its base of rich old white men, to
be sure — but not just by softening the language. They’ll have to
completely shift their divisive platform, politics and policies to even
give themselves a chance with the millions of voters who rejected them
last week in disgust. Just changing the tone will only mask their
intentions, and add another layer of hypocrisy to their present pack of
lies.
The fact is that millions of Americans — Black, white, gay, Hispanic,
or whatever — voted for Obama not because they were snookered by a
Democratic snake oil salesman, but because they were justifiably
horrified by the things that actually came out of Republicans’ mouths
for more than two years.
Did the GOP really think that the softer, gentler Romney who emerged
at the very end of the campaign would somehow negate the 47 percent
putdown, or the legitimate rape fiasco, or Rush Limbaugh attacking a
college student as a slut, or invasive ultrasound procedures forced on
women seeking to terminate their pregnancies? Did they think we’d forget
about Newt Gingrich’s “food stamp president” slap, or Rick Santorum’s
vow not to give white people’s money to lazy Blacks?
Were we supposed to
look the other way while Michelle Bachmann blamed the economic
recession on poor Black folks, or ignore Rick Perry’s frequent hunting
trips to the Niggerhead Ranch?
We haven’t even gotten to their unashamed hatred of gays and
lesbians, their plan to build an electrified fence to fry undocumented
workers crossing the border like a giant bug zapper, or their apparent
willingness to let their own grandmothers search through dumpsters for
food scraps in exchange for hefty tax cuts for millionaires.
No, they’d rather believe that somehow Black people conspired to undo
them, because if history has shown them nothing else, it’s that blaming
dark-skinned folks is easier than looking in the mirror.
So go ahead. Call me racist for voting for Obama, while ignoring
common sense and a mountain of damning evidence. Blame everything and
everyone but yourselves — and your obsession with a continuing white
pseudo-Christian plutocracy.
Keep it up all the way until 2016, when you can blame President
Hillary Clinton and all those darned women for your next scheduled ass
kicking.
Daryl Gale is the city editor of The Philadelphia Tribune.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
McCain's about-face
After weeks of questioning Susan Rice's credibility, Sen. John McCain now says he'll listen to what U-N Ambassador Susan Rice has to say about Benghazi. Rice will meet with McCain on Tuesday. In the meantime, one journalist calls out Fox News's politicization of the Benghazi story. Ed Schultz talks with Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast.
Republicans dump Grover Norquist
Republicans and Fox News pundits dump Grover Norquist's tax pledge. MSNBC's
Lawrence O'Donnell analyzes the politics of the fiscal cliff with MSNBC's
Krystal Ball and Ari Melber.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Why rich guys want to raise the retirement age
Posted by Ezra Klein on November 21, 2012 at 2:14 pm
If you’re the CEO of Goldman Sachs – if you have a job that you love, a job that makes you so much money you can literally build a Scrooge McDuck room where you can swim through a pile of gold coins wearing only a topcoat – then you should perhaps think twice before saying this:
If you want talk about cutting Social Security, talk about cutting it. It’s a reasonable point of view.
You’re allowed to hold it.
But “cutting” Social Security is unpopular and people don’t like to talk about it. So folks who want to cut the program have instead settled on an elliptical argument about life expectancy. Social Security, they say, was designed at a time when Americans didn’t live quite so long. And so raising the retirement age isn’t a “cut.” It’s a restoration of the program’s original purpose. It doesn’t hurt anything or anyone.
The first point worth making here is that the country’s economy has grown 15-fold since Social Security was passed into law. One of the things the richest society the world has ever known can buy is a decent retirement for people who don’t have jobs they love and who don’t want to work forever.
The second point worth making is that Social Security was overhauled in the ’80s. So the promises the program is carrying out today were made then. And, since the ’80s, the idea that we’ve all gained so many years of life simply isn’t true.
Some of us have gained in life expectancy, of course. As you can see on this graph, since 1977, the life expectancy of male workers retiring at age 65 has risen six years in the top half of the income distribution. But if you’re in the bottom half of the income distribution? Then you’ve only gained 1.3 years.
If you’re wealthy, you do have many more years to enjoy Social Security. But if you’re not, you don’t. And so making it so people who aren’t wealthy have to wait longer to use Social Security is a particularly cruel and regressive way to cut the program.
It’s also a cut that’s particularly tough on people who spend their lives in jobs they don’t enjoy.
You know what age most people actually begin taking Social Security? Sixty-five is what most people think. That’s the law’s standard retirement age. But that’s wrong. Most people begin taking Social Security benefits at 62, which is as early as the law allows you to take them.
When they do that, it means they get smaller benefits over their lifetime. We penalize for taking it early. But they do it anyway. They do it because they don’t want to spend their whole lives at that job. Unlike many folks in finance or in the U.S. Senate or writing for the nation’s op-ed pages, they don’t want to work till they drop.
As Peter Diamond, the Nobel laureate economist and Social Security expert, told Dylan Matthews:
But you know what they would feel? Social Security taxes don’t apply to income over $110,000. In 2011, Lloyd Blankfein’s total compensation was $16.1 million. That means he paid Social Security taxes on less than 1 percent of his compensation.
If we lifted that cap, if we made all income subject to payroll taxes, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would do three times as much to solve Social Security’s shortfall as raising the retirement age to 70. In fact, it would, in one fell swoop, close Social Security’s solvency gap for the next 75 years. That may or may not be the right way to close Social Security’s shortfall, but somehow, it rarely gets mentioned by the folks who think they’re being courageous when they talk about raising a retirement age they’ll never notice.
Again, I don’t mean to pick on Blankfein here. He’s not saying anything unusual, and he’s one of the CEOs who’s pretty straightforward about the fact that his taxes are going to need to go up. But he and all these folks who like to talk about raising the Social Security retirement age as if it’s a no-brainer need to think harder about why they’ve settled on the cut to Social Security that will concentrate its pain on people who haven’t fully shared in the remarkable increase in life expectancy, who don’t make much money and who don’t love going to their jobs every day.
Note: I made a version of this argument on Tuesday’s Last Word. Watch it!
If you’re the CEO of Goldman Sachs – if you have a job that you love, a job that makes you so much money you can literally build a Scrooge McDuck room where you can swim through a pile of gold coins wearing only a topcoat – then you should perhaps think twice before saying this:
You can look at the history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed. Maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.That’s Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, talking to CBS. And he’s not saying anything that people, particularly wealthier people with desk jobs, don’t say all the time in Washington and New York. So I don’t want to just pick on him. But the cavalier endorsement of raising the retirement age by people who really love their jobs, who make so much money they barely pay Social Security taxes, and who are, actuarially speaking, are ensured a long and healthy life, drives me nuts.
If you want talk about cutting Social Security, talk about cutting it. It’s a reasonable point of view.
You’re allowed to hold it.
But “cutting” Social Security is unpopular and people don’t like to talk about it. So folks who want to cut the program have instead settled on an elliptical argument about life expectancy. Social Security, they say, was designed at a time when Americans didn’t live quite so long. And so raising the retirement age isn’t a “cut.” It’s a restoration of the program’s original purpose. It doesn’t hurt anything or anyone.
The first point worth making here is that the country’s economy has grown 15-fold since Social Security was passed into law. One of the things the richest society the world has ever known can buy is a decent retirement for people who don’t have jobs they love and who don’t want to work forever.
The second point worth making is that Social Security was overhauled in the ’80s. So the promises the program is carrying out today were made then. And, since the ’80s, the idea that we’ve all gained so many years of life simply isn’t true.
Some of us have gained in life expectancy, of course. As you can see on this graph, since 1977, the life expectancy of male workers retiring at age 65 has risen six years in the top half of the income distribution. But if you’re in the bottom half of the income distribution? Then you’ve only gained 1.3 years.
Graph: The Incidental Economist
If you’re wealthy, you do have many more years to enjoy Social Security. But if you’re not, you don’t. And so making it so people who aren’t wealthy have to wait longer to use Social Security is a particularly cruel and regressive way to cut the program.
It’s also a cut that’s particularly tough on people who spend their lives in jobs they don’t enjoy.
You know what age most people actually begin taking Social Security? Sixty-five is what most people think. That’s the law’s standard retirement age. But that’s wrong. Most people begin taking Social Security benefits at 62, which is as early as the law allows you to take them.
When they do that, it means they get smaller benefits over their lifetime. We penalize for taking it early. But they do it anyway. They do it because they don’t want to spend their whole lives at that job. Unlike many folks in finance or in the U.S. Senate or writing for the nation’s op-ed pages, they don’t want to work till they drop.
As Peter Diamond, the Nobel laureate economist and Social Security expert, told Dylan Matthews:
What do we know about the people who retire at 62? On average, shorter life expectancy and lower earnings than people retiring at later ages. If anyone stood up and said, “Instead of doing uniform across the board cuts, let’s make them a little worse for people who have shorter life expectancies and lower earnings,” they’d be laughed at. Anything that reduces benefits is going to hurt everybody. It’s going to hit people with short life expectancies, it’s going to hit people with high life expectancies. But we should not make it worse for those retiring earliest.That’s what’s galling about this easy argument. The people who make it, the pundits and the senators and the CEOs, they’ll never feel it. They don’t want to retire at age 65, and they don’t have short life expectancies, and they’re not mainly relying on Social Security for their retirement income. They’re bravely advocating a cut they’ll never feel.
But you know what they would feel? Social Security taxes don’t apply to income over $110,000. In 2011, Lloyd Blankfein’s total compensation was $16.1 million. That means he paid Social Security taxes on less than 1 percent of his compensation.
If we lifted that cap, if we made all income subject to payroll taxes, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would do three times as much to solve Social Security’s shortfall as raising the retirement age to 70. In fact, it would, in one fell swoop, close Social Security’s solvency gap for the next 75 years. That may or may not be the right way to close Social Security’s shortfall, but somehow, it rarely gets mentioned by the folks who think they’re being courageous when they talk about raising a retirement age they’ll never notice.
Again, I don’t mean to pick on Blankfein here. He’s not saying anything unusual, and he’s one of the CEOs who’s pretty straightforward about the fact that his taxes are going to need to go up. But he and all these folks who like to talk about raising the Social Security retirement age as if it’s a no-brainer need to think harder about why they’ve settled on the cut to Social Security that will concentrate its pain on people who haven’t fully shared in the remarkable increase in life expectancy, who don’t make much money and who don’t love going to their jobs every day.
Note: I made a version of this argument on Tuesday’s Last Word. Watch it!
Wal-Mart Strikers Prove the 99% Can Fight Back
By Diane Sweet
According to the Organization United for Respect at Walmart, 1,000 protests occurred at Wal-Mart stores across 46 states, with hundreds of workers walking off the job in an unprecedented decentralized, open-source strike at the retail giant. Local Occupy groups supported actions in dozens of cities. OWS joined with 99 Pickets, ALIGN, the Retail Action Project, and others to show solidarity to Wal-mart workers in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Despite attempts by Wal-Mart's propaganda department to downplay the events, the latest massive wave of strikes and solidarity actions at Wal-Mart forced even the corporate media to pay attention, and put the 1% on notice: When we work together, another world is possible. We do not have to accept poverty, low wages, or unfair working conditions with no benefits while six members of the Walton family are worth more than the bottom 42% of American families combined.
However, the struggle is far from over! Today's inspiring actions point the way forward. Please continue to support OUR Wal-Mart and all low-wage workers in the struggle for economic justice and show support for the courageous workers and unemployed people on the frontlines against income inequality.
They say roll back, we say fight back!
[Via OccupyWallSt.]
According to the Organization United for Respect at Walmart, 1,000 protests occurred at Wal-Mart stores across 46 states, with hundreds of workers walking off the job in an unprecedented decentralized, open-source strike at the retail giant. Local Occupy groups supported actions in dozens of cities. OWS joined with 99 Pickets, ALIGN, the Retail Action Project, and others to show solidarity to Wal-mart workers in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Despite attempts by Wal-Mart's propaganda department to downplay the events, the latest massive wave of strikes and solidarity actions at Wal-Mart forced even the corporate media to pay attention, and put the 1% on notice: When we work together, another world is possible. We do not have to accept poverty, low wages, or unfair working conditions with no benefits while six members of the Walton family are worth more than the bottom 42% of American families combined.
However, the struggle is far from over! Today's inspiring actions point the way forward. Please continue to support OUR Wal-Mart and all low-wage workers in the struggle for economic justice and show support for the courageous workers and unemployed people on the frontlines against income inequality.
They say roll back, we say fight back!
[Via OccupyWallSt.]
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Can Democrats Retake the House in 2014?
By Mike Lux
The House results on Election Day 2012 were the only bad things that happened in what was otherwise obviously a pretty great day for Democrats and progressives. The biggest question for 2014 is whether we can find a way of turning that result around. Part of the answer, of course, is dependent on how the economy is doing. If the pessimists are right and things are not looking good, we will lose seats not gain them. But even if the economy is okay, do we have a chance at being the House majority after the 2014 elections?
As many Democratic activists have pointed out, we actually won the overall votes in House races by the same 2% plus margin that Obama did, so re-districting dominated by Republican gerrymandering clearly played a big role in them holding on to the House. Democrats, though, are making a big mistake in attributing our failure solely to gerrymandering and essentially giving up on retaking the House the rest of this decade as many pundits are suggesting. I remember the same points being made after the 2002 and 2004 failures to retake the House, and in 2006 and 2008 we not only retook the House but added considerably to the margin in 2008.
The pundits will be predicting doom and gloom for sure. Not only did we fail to win the House back in a good Democratic year, they will remind us, but in the 6th year of a Presidency the president's party almost always loses seats. But historical trends never would have predicted a lot of things we have seen in politics over the last couple of decades (an African immigrant's son with a Muslim name being elected President for one, and then being re-elected in spite of a bad economy for another), and I've been in the middle of a couple big surprises in terms of the House over the years that are worth recalling here because of the lessons they teach.
The first of these was in 1998. It was the 6th year of the Clinton Presidency, and as every pundit under the sun kept reminding us, no President's party in its 6th year had picked up seats since 1822 (when there was no opposition party). Added to that little historical trend was this wee little thing known as the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Virtually all of the pundits, all the Republicans, and most Democrats were predicting a shellacking for the Democrats- a loss of 30 seats in the House was the average prediction. The DCCC was advising candidates to do anything in their power to change the subject from Lewinsky but an obsessive media and weekly revelations about things like semen-stained dresses made that impossible.
But there was a group of us who had a different idea about how to reframe the election: rather than trying to change the subject, lean into the problem and reframe it. I was working at People For the American Way at the time, a group devoted to, as Norman Lear has always put it, being a PR firm for the constitution. We were disgusted with the idea of impeaching a President over having and trying to cover up an affair, and couldn't believe this was all the Republicans and the media wanted to talk about. In talking to my old colleagues from the '92 Clinton campaign, Stan Greenberg and James Carville, they confirmed that their poling showed the same thing we were feeling: voters were tired of all this obsession with a sex scandal, and didn't get why you would impeach the President over such a thing. We came up with an ad campaign based on the theme that "it was time to move on".
Meanwhile, literally the same week as we launched our ad campaign, out on the West coast, Wes Boyd and his wife Joan Blades, a couple who had never been involved in politics before, had the same idea, and started an internet petition about it being time to "move on" that caught on like wildfire, picking up 500,000 signatures in a matter of a few days by being spread from person to person. Nothing like that had ever happened before in politics and it was a big deal. Wes and Joan's petition and our ad campaign fed off each other, causing a huge stir in the media, and soon we had joined forces and were organizing hundreds of meetings with members of Congress, and were putting ads up in 9 of the most critical media markets in the country.
On election day, we shocked the pants off the punditry and the conventional wisdom DC establishment. Instead of losing 30 or more seats, Democrats picked up 5. We won the big targeted races in 8 of the 9 media markets PFAW and MoveOn targeted.
In 2006, it was another year where initially the pundits and DC establishment were very pessimistic about Democratic chances, saying Democrats had no chances of taking the House back. Redistricting had made it just too tough, they said, and we would be way outspent. A top operative at the DCCC called me very upset early in the cycle because I had written a memo to donors and allied groups saying that I thought we had a decent chance at winning the House, telling me not to get people's hopes up, that there was almost no chance of victory. But again, the pundits and our own party establishment got surprised.
Rahm Emanuel’s DCCC did some great work, raising an impressive amount of money, pounding away at Bush and the Republicans every day in the message wars, and deploying a great team of operatives who helped targeted campaigns in all kinds of ways. Rahm and his team deserve a lot of credit for the Democratic victory in taking back the House that year. But the broader progressive community charted their own course on strategy in House races in a couple of key ways, and without them doing that there would have been no Democratic takeover that year.
The first was on the issues. Having had tough years the past couple of cycles, Democrats started out the 2006 election cycle being very cautious on the issues. Bush’s first priority was Social Security privatization, and there was a lot of talk initially among Blue Dog Democrats about working with Bush on some kind of compromise bill. When the Terri Schiavo issue popped up, many Democrats initially were going along with the Republican demands to keep her on life support against her husband’s wishes. And on the Iraq war, Rahm was recruiting trying to recruit pro-war candidates thinking that was going to be the better politics in the 2006 elections.
In every one of these cases, the progressive community pushed back and demanded strong stands for progressive policies, and in each case, it turned out that the politics ended up showing the progressive community was 100% right, as taking a strong stand against Social Security privatization, against keeping Schiavo on life support against her husband’s wishes, and against the Iraq war all turned out to be great for the Democratic. These 3 issues, combined with a slowing economy and Hurricane Katrina, combined to create a wave election that swept Democrats in the House, Senate, and Governor’s seats into power.
The other key thing that progressives did was help expand the map. There are two philosophies re how to engage in a venture as big as trying to win back control of the House. The first is the traditional philosophy of the DCCC, one that had been their way of operating for the previous 4 cycles: target the districts which had been the closest in the previous cycle, but keep the targeting pretty narrow and engage in hand-to-hand combat in the districts where everything seems to be coming together in terms of a good candidate, a good campaign manager, and strong fundraising.
Any race that doesn’t fit the formula in the DCCC’s eyes tended to get left by the side of the road to fend for sink or swim, with the vast majority of them sinking. You can see it in the numbers where this strategy had reached its peak, in the years between 1998 and 2004: the number of competitive races (defined as races where the winner got less than 55% of the vote) was 50 in 1998, 58 in 2000, 46 in 2002, and only 34 in 2004. When there are only 40 competitive seats, even if you win 60% of them you’re only winning 8 more of them than the Republicans, and through those heavy trench warfare years, we generally weren’t winning 60% of the close ones.
Early in the 2006 cycle, a group of progressive donors, groups, bloggers, and strategists was looking at these kinds of trends from the previous several cycles, and the lack of success at taking back the House with that kind of strategy, and we felt like we needed to inject something new into the mix. To give ourselves a better shot at winning the House, we decided we needed to expand the list of competitive races. The goal was to double it, from 34 in 2004 to 70 in 2006.
A wave of new candidates got recruited to run; bloggers and MoveOn did early fundraising for House candidates at record levels; progressive donors funded special projects to do different kinds of messaging projects in a wider range of districts around the country. And all the while, we all kept pounding away at the big issues- the Iraq war, Social Security, the Terri Schiavo incident, Katrina, the economy running out of gas, a Republican congress rank with corruption- with the goal of turning the election into a wave election against the Republicans.
In the end, there were exactly 70 House races where the winner had less than 55%, with the Republicans forced to play defense, spending time and money in places like Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, and Kansas while we won the key races in the purple districts we needed to win. The wave had built so much that we picked up 31 seats, more than double what we need to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker.
So why did we lose the House in 2012, given all the success Democrats had this year, and what are the lessons we can learn from these past elections where innovative Democrats and progressives came together to craft a winning strategy? I looked at the numbers, and was pleasantly surprised to see the competitive race number was 66, in the same range as those bigger target years of 2006 (70) and 2008 (64), because I had guessed that the DCCC had gone back to a grind-it-out, narrow targeting strategy, and based on that number it doesn’t look like they did.
One caveat, though: after the last big Republican wave election, there were 90 races that were competitive, meaning Democrats made a serious run in that Clinton re-election year at trying to win a lot of those seats back. The smaller number this time probably has more to do with re-districting than with anything else, but I’m guessing that with limited resources, the DCCC did make a strategic decision to narrow their targeting somewhat.
I was also glad to see the win percentage in the closest races was on the positive side, especially given the huge money edge the Republicans had in House races. Of those 66 most competitive races, Democrats won 35- and of the 20 closest races, the Dems won a very impressive 70%. Kudos to the DCCC and the House Majority PAC for those numbers, it is impressive.
In some ways, though, these numbers are less than comforting: if we had lost most of the close races, or made the mistake of targeting too narrowly, the strategic path to winning a House majority back would be easier to create. To pick up 17 seats given what we have to work with is going to need big thinking, a big strategy. And it will take real resources.
Let’s face it: one of the biggest reasons we lost the House is that most of the groups, bloggers, money, and talent in the Democratic party and progressive movement was focused elsewhere, on keeping Romney and Republicans in the Senate from running the table and taking over every branch of government. Most people and groups had given up on winning the House months ago and were spending their time, money, and brainpower on the Presidential race and those marquee Senate races like Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Sherrod Brown. We need to create a Manhattan Project for retaking the House with the best thinkers, biggest groups, and most influential donors in the party involved.
We also need to stay focused on winning the big picture values debate the way we won it in this election. This election needs to be focused on building a drumbeat as to why House Republicans are so out of touch with basic American values, with everyone on the progressive and Democratic side carrying that message. We need to elevate the battle over the House, make it a case study of the values debate the entire country is having.
And by the way, that will help us in Senate and Governor races, too: the most potent weapon Democrats had in the 1990s at all levels of elections was running against Newt Gingrich and the Republican House of that era. In 1996, we won the re-election campaign far more by running against Gingrich than by running against Dole, who was a nice fellow that most people liked. We tied Dole to Gingrich, and made our campaign about opposing the GINGRICH-dole agenda. (The only reason we didn’t get the House back that year was the last minute campaign finance scandal- before that broke we were clearly on a trajectory to retake the House.)
Finally, we are going to need Team Obama to get involved in a major way. One of the few things I am critical about with the Obama campaign this time around was that they utterly ignored the House. Especially with Ryan on the ticket, they had a chance to run against not only Romney but against the tea party crazies controlling the House, which is the most unpopular brand in American politics. Had they done that, we might have been able to pick up a bunch more House seats.
Obama needs to suit up and get into the game in House races this time around, raising money, using his vaunted field operation. I would think that after four years of dealing with this group of dangerous extremists, Obama would be, as he likes to say, fired up and ready to go. If Team Obama is involved from start to finish, the potential for turning out more Obama voters goes way up as well, and we all know how important the demographics of the electorate is to elections.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, gerrymandering did not end Democratic chances to take back the House. It will not be easy in any way; it will take a huge effort and a big strategic vision for how to pull it off; Obama will have to commit fully to the battle. But absent a bad economy (a variable we just can’t know for a while), we can do this if we as a party and progressive movement commit to it.
The House results on Election Day 2012 were the only bad things that happened in what was otherwise obviously a pretty great day for Democrats and progressives. The biggest question for 2014 is whether we can find a way of turning that result around. Part of the answer, of course, is dependent on how the economy is doing. If the pessimists are right and things are not looking good, we will lose seats not gain them. But even if the economy is okay, do we have a chance at being the House majority after the 2014 elections?
As many Democratic activists have pointed out, we actually won the overall votes in House races by the same 2% plus margin that Obama did, so re-districting dominated by Republican gerrymandering clearly played a big role in them holding on to the House. Democrats, though, are making a big mistake in attributing our failure solely to gerrymandering and essentially giving up on retaking the House the rest of this decade as many pundits are suggesting. I remember the same points being made after the 2002 and 2004 failures to retake the House, and in 2006 and 2008 we not only retook the House but added considerably to the margin in 2008.
The pundits will be predicting doom and gloom for sure. Not only did we fail to win the House back in a good Democratic year, they will remind us, but in the 6th year of a Presidency the president's party almost always loses seats. But historical trends never would have predicted a lot of things we have seen in politics over the last couple of decades (an African immigrant's son with a Muslim name being elected President for one, and then being re-elected in spite of a bad economy for another), and I've been in the middle of a couple big surprises in terms of the House over the years that are worth recalling here because of the lessons they teach.
The first of these was in 1998. It was the 6th year of the Clinton Presidency, and as every pundit under the sun kept reminding us, no President's party in its 6th year had picked up seats since 1822 (when there was no opposition party). Added to that little historical trend was this wee little thing known as the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Virtually all of the pundits, all the Republicans, and most Democrats were predicting a shellacking for the Democrats- a loss of 30 seats in the House was the average prediction. The DCCC was advising candidates to do anything in their power to change the subject from Lewinsky but an obsessive media and weekly revelations about things like semen-stained dresses made that impossible.
But there was a group of us who had a different idea about how to reframe the election: rather than trying to change the subject, lean into the problem and reframe it. I was working at People For the American Way at the time, a group devoted to, as Norman Lear has always put it, being a PR firm for the constitution. We were disgusted with the idea of impeaching a President over having and trying to cover up an affair, and couldn't believe this was all the Republicans and the media wanted to talk about. In talking to my old colleagues from the '92 Clinton campaign, Stan Greenberg and James Carville, they confirmed that their poling showed the same thing we were feeling: voters were tired of all this obsession with a sex scandal, and didn't get why you would impeach the President over such a thing. We came up with an ad campaign based on the theme that "it was time to move on".
Meanwhile, literally the same week as we launched our ad campaign, out on the West coast, Wes Boyd and his wife Joan Blades, a couple who had never been involved in politics before, had the same idea, and started an internet petition about it being time to "move on" that caught on like wildfire, picking up 500,000 signatures in a matter of a few days by being spread from person to person. Nothing like that had ever happened before in politics and it was a big deal. Wes and Joan's petition and our ad campaign fed off each other, causing a huge stir in the media, and soon we had joined forces and were organizing hundreds of meetings with members of Congress, and were putting ads up in 9 of the most critical media markets in the country.
On election day, we shocked the pants off the punditry and the conventional wisdom DC establishment. Instead of losing 30 or more seats, Democrats picked up 5. We won the big targeted races in 8 of the 9 media markets PFAW and MoveOn targeted.
In 2006, it was another year where initially the pundits and DC establishment were very pessimistic about Democratic chances, saying Democrats had no chances of taking the House back. Redistricting had made it just too tough, they said, and we would be way outspent. A top operative at the DCCC called me very upset early in the cycle because I had written a memo to donors and allied groups saying that I thought we had a decent chance at winning the House, telling me not to get people's hopes up, that there was almost no chance of victory. But again, the pundits and our own party establishment got surprised.
Rahm Emanuel’s DCCC did some great work, raising an impressive amount of money, pounding away at Bush and the Republicans every day in the message wars, and deploying a great team of operatives who helped targeted campaigns in all kinds of ways. Rahm and his team deserve a lot of credit for the Democratic victory in taking back the House that year. But the broader progressive community charted their own course on strategy in House races in a couple of key ways, and without them doing that there would have been no Democratic takeover that year.
The first was on the issues. Having had tough years the past couple of cycles, Democrats started out the 2006 election cycle being very cautious on the issues. Bush’s first priority was Social Security privatization, and there was a lot of talk initially among Blue Dog Democrats about working with Bush on some kind of compromise bill. When the Terri Schiavo issue popped up, many Democrats initially were going along with the Republican demands to keep her on life support against her husband’s wishes. And on the Iraq war, Rahm was recruiting trying to recruit pro-war candidates thinking that was going to be the better politics in the 2006 elections.
In every one of these cases, the progressive community pushed back and demanded strong stands for progressive policies, and in each case, it turned out that the politics ended up showing the progressive community was 100% right, as taking a strong stand against Social Security privatization, against keeping Schiavo on life support against her husband’s wishes, and against the Iraq war all turned out to be great for the Democratic. These 3 issues, combined with a slowing economy and Hurricane Katrina, combined to create a wave election that swept Democrats in the House, Senate, and Governor’s seats into power.
The other key thing that progressives did was help expand the map. There are two philosophies re how to engage in a venture as big as trying to win back control of the House. The first is the traditional philosophy of the DCCC, one that had been their way of operating for the previous 4 cycles: target the districts which had been the closest in the previous cycle, but keep the targeting pretty narrow and engage in hand-to-hand combat in the districts where everything seems to be coming together in terms of a good candidate, a good campaign manager, and strong fundraising.
Any race that doesn’t fit the formula in the DCCC’s eyes tended to get left by the side of the road to fend for sink or swim, with the vast majority of them sinking. You can see it in the numbers where this strategy had reached its peak, in the years between 1998 and 2004: the number of competitive races (defined as races where the winner got less than 55% of the vote) was 50 in 1998, 58 in 2000, 46 in 2002, and only 34 in 2004. When there are only 40 competitive seats, even if you win 60% of them you’re only winning 8 more of them than the Republicans, and through those heavy trench warfare years, we generally weren’t winning 60% of the close ones.
Early in the 2006 cycle, a group of progressive donors, groups, bloggers, and strategists was looking at these kinds of trends from the previous several cycles, and the lack of success at taking back the House with that kind of strategy, and we felt like we needed to inject something new into the mix. To give ourselves a better shot at winning the House, we decided we needed to expand the list of competitive races. The goal was to double it, from 34 in 2004 to 70 in 2006.
A wave of new candidates got recruited to run; bloggers and MoveOn did early fundraising for House candidates at record levels; progressive donors funded special projects to do different kinds of messaging projects in a wider range of districts around the country. And all the while, we all kept pounding away at the big issues- the Iraq war, Social Security, the Terri Schiavo incident, Katrina, the economy running out of gas, a Republican congress rank with corruption- with the goal of turning the election into a wave election against the Republicans.
In the end, there were exactly 70 House races where the winner had less than 55%, with the Republicans forced to play defense, spending time and money in places like Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, and Kansas while we won the key races in the purple districts we needed to win. The wave had built so much that we picked up 31 seats, more than double what we need to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker.
So why did we lose the House in 2012, given all the success Democrats had this year, and what are the lessons we can learn from these past elections where innovative Democrats and progressives came together to craft a winning strategy? I looked at the numbers, and was pleasantly surprised to see the competitive race number was 66, in the same range as those bigger target years of 2006 (70) and 2008 (64), because I had guessed that the DCCC had gone back to a grind-it-out, narrow targeting strategy, and based on that number it doesn’t look like they did.
One caveat, though: after the last big Republican wave election, there were 90 races that were competitive, meaning Democrats made a serious run in that Clinton re-election year at trying to win a lot of those seats back. The smaller number this time probably has more to do with re-districting than with anything else, but I’m guessing that with limited resources, the DCCC did make a strategic decision to narrow their targeting somewhat.
I was also glad to see the win percentage in the closest races was on the positive side, especially given the huge money edge the Republicans had in House races. Of those 66 most competitive races, Democrats won 35- and of the 20 closest races, the Dems won a very impressive 70%. Kudos to the DCCC and the House Majority PAC for those numbers, it is impressive.
In some ways, though, these numbers are less than comforting: if we had lost most of the close races, or made the mistake of targeting too narrowly, the strategic path to winning a House majority back would be easier to create. To pick up 17 seats given what we have to work with is going to need big thinking, a big strategy. And it will take real resources.
Let’s face it: one of the biggest reasons we lost the House is that most of the groups, bloggers, money, and talent in the Democratic party and progressive movement was focused elsewhere, on keeping Romney and Republicans in the Senate from running the table and taking over every branch of government. Most people and groups had given up on winning the House months ago and were spending their time, money, and brainpower on the Presidential race and those marquee Senate races like Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Sherrod Brown. We need to create a Manhattan Project for retaking the House with the best thinkers, biggest groups, and most influential donors in the party involved.
We also need to stay focused on winning the big picture values debate the way we won it in this election. This election needs to be focused on building a drumbeat as to why House Republicans are so out of touch with basic American values, with everyone on the progressive and Democratic side carrying that message. We need to elevate the battle over the House, make it a case study of the values debate the entire country is having.
And by the way, that will help us in Senate and Governor races, too: the most potent weapon Democrats had in the 1990s at all levels of elections was running against Newt Gingrich and the Republican House of that era. In 1996, we won the re-election campaign far more by running against Gingrich than by running against Dole, who was a nice fellow that most people liked. We tied Dole to Gingrich, and made our campaign about opposing the GINGRICH-dole agenda. (The only reason we didn’t get the House back that year was the last minute campaign finance scandal- before that broke we were clearly on a trajectory to retake the House.)
Finally, we are going to need Team Obama to get involved in a major way. One of the few things I am critical about with the Obama campaign this time around was that they utterly ignored the House. Especially with Ryan on the ticket, they had a chance to run against not only Romney but against the tea party crazies controlling the House, which is the most unpopular brand in American politics. Had they done that, we might have been able to pick up a bunch more House seats.
Obama needs to suit up and get into the game in House races this time around, raising money, using his vaunted field operation. I would think that after four years of dealing with this group of dangerous extremists, Obama would be, as he likes to say, fired up and ready to go. If Team Obama is involved from start to finish, the potential for turning out more Obama voters goes way up as well, and we all know how important the demographics of the electorate is to elections.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, gerrymandering did not end Democratic chances to take back the House. It will not be easy in any way; it will take a huge effort and a big strategic vision for how to pull it off; Obama will have to commit fully to the battle. But absent a bad economy (a variable we just can’t know for a while), we can do this if we as a party and progressive movement commit to it.
Friday, November 23, 2012
Too White for the GOP?
Paul Ryan was a rising Republican star and a 2016 hopeful. But his brief run
with Romney may have done him more harm than good, writes David Freedlander.
After Mitt Romney disparaged 47 percent of American society in a supposedly private setting among his wealthiest donors, top Republican officials nearly tripped over themselves to create distance from the former nominee.
“Completely unhelpful” scoffed Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.
“Divisive,” added New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
“That unfortunately is what sets us back as a party,” chimed in New Mexico governor Barbara Martinez.
But if there was one person who really wanted Mitt Romney to please stop talking, it was probably former running mate Paul Ryan.
The Wisconsin congressman is himself at the top of short lists for 2016. A number of pundits suggested that the reason Ryan was picked this year was so the party could set itself up for the race four years from now, when presumably the GOP rank-and-file would at last be frothing for the kind of budget-cutting austerity that its donor class has long called for and that Ryan has proposed.
And Governor Romney describing the “gifts” that the Obama administration ladled out to supposed interest groups has only convinced many in the GOP that they need to move on from 2012 as quickly as possible, a taint that for now includes Rep. Ryan.
“It’s going to be very hard now to put up Mitt Romney’s running mate,” said one major donor to the Romney campaign who was on the controversial call last week. “It’s a shame. Paul is really a stand-up guy. And he’s still a young guy, and he’s got a great future ahead of him, but after last Tuesday, after the call, I don’t see how we pick a white guy from Wisconsin.”
Ryan didn’t do himself any favors, either, when he repeatedly blamed the ticket’s loss on high turnout in “urban areas,” an insight which, racial dog whistles aside, isn’t even accurate, and certainly isn’t something a would-be nominee hoping to broaden the party’s appeal should be saying.
“Let’s face it, Sarah Palin did more to broaden the party than Paul Ryan did,” said Vincent Harris, a GOP digital-media guru who nonetheless suggested that the congressman was the front-runner for 2016. “Paul Ryan could look like one of Mitt Romney’s sons.”
Harris suggested that another reason why Ryan may find himself out of synch with the party’s mood goes beyond demographics: his cerebral, wonkish reputation.
“A lot of the more socially conservative, Tea Party voters are going to need to hear certain rhetoric from the congressman—ripping up the president and taking it to Hillary Clinton and talking about the rise of socialism in this country. Paul Ryan is a thinker,” he said.
Going from a losing vice-presidential candidacy to a making a serious run at the top slot has historically been a tough road. Witness John Edwards in 2008, or Joe Lieberman in 2004, or even Dan Quayle in 2000. And Ryan didn’t exactly set the nation on fire as even a flawed candidate like Sarah Palin did during the last election cycle.
“There was a lot of hype in the first couple of days, but he was a non-presence. He was not a national voice. He didn’t change the equation at all,” said Sean Foreman, a professor of political science at Barry University in Florida. “He didn’t carry Wisconsin, they lost all over the Midwest. They lost the presidential vote in his home district! Electorally he was a bust. He is risk of being one of the dinosaurs of the Republican Party at age 42.”
In the short term, Ryan finds himself in perhaps the trickiest spot of all the 2016 hopefuls. He is the only Republican who can’t really distance himself from Mitt Romney—just witness his silence on Romney’s “gifts” comments (his office didn’t reply to an inquiry from The Daily Beast about whether or not he agrees with Romney on this one.) He can’t join in the pile-on taking place now in GOP circles over the misdirection of the 2012 campaign. Plus, he has a messy situation in Congress to navigate. The Republican majority’s austere budget bears his name. If the GOP fails to come to an agreement with President Obama over taxes and spending and the nation falls over the fiscal cliff, Ryan will likely get a large share of the blame. If Ryan does bend, he risks looking like another weak-willed politico to the Tea Party faithful.
“Voters do not react well to someone who comes across as a green-eyeshade conservative,” said Jim Broussard, a professor of history at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania and the chairman of a local anti-tax group there. “Anybody who talks about reining in spending has to make sure that they don’t just come across as a fiscal steward and not as someone who is concerned about people.”
Then there is the matter of whether or not Ryan actually wants to run for higher office. He has twice now turned down overtures from Badger State GOP officials to run for the Senate, and has brushed aside calls to run for the governorship in 2010 and the presidency this year. Yes, he accepted Romney’s offer to run for vice president, but, as Matt Mackowiak, a GOP operative, noted, “It’s one thing to run for vice president for three months, when you are drafted into service and there is an existing infrastructure in place. Running for president is a multiple-year process. I don’t know if that is something he wants to do.”
After Mitt Romney disparaged 47 percent of American society in a supposedly private setting among his wealthiest donors, top Republican officials nearly tripped over themselves to create distance from the former nominee.
Chief among those rushing to condemn the remarks were people positioning themselves to be the party’s standard bearers in 2016.
“Completely unhelpful” scoffed Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.
“Divisive,” added New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
“That unfortunately is what sets us back as a party,” chimed in New Mexico governor Barbara Martinez.
But if there was one person who really wanted Mitt Romney to please stop talking, it was probably former running mate Paul Ryan.
The Wisconsin congressman is himself at the top of short lists for 2016. A number of pundits suggested that the reason Ryan was picked this year was so the party could set itself up for the race four years from now, when presumably the GOP rank-and-file would at last be frothing for the kind of budget-cutting austerity that its donor class has long called for and that Ryan has proposed.
But
instead of a call to follow-up the devastating losses of this November
with a strict return to conservative principles, the loudest voices in
the GOP have been calling for a party more modern, moderate, and
inclusive.
And Governor Romney describing the “gifts” that the Obama administration ladled out to supposed interest groups has only convinced many in the GOP that they need to move on from 2012 as quickly as possible, a taint that for now includes Rep. Ryan.
“It’s going to be very hard now to put up Mitt Romney’s running mate,” said one major donor to the Romney campaign who was on the controversial call last week. “It’s a shame. Paul is really a stand-up guy. And he’s still a young guy, and he’s got a great future ahead of him, but after last Tuesday, after the call, I don’t see how we pick a white guy from Wisconsin.”
Ryan didn’t do himself any favors, either, when he repeatedly blamed the ticket’s loss on high turnout in “urban areas,” an insight which, racial dog whistles aside, isn’t even accurate, and certainly isn’t something a would-be nominee hoping to broaden the party’s appeal should be saying.
“Let’s face it, Sarah Palin did more to broaden the party than Paul Ryan did,” said Vincent Harris, a GOP digital-media guru who nonetheless suggested that the congressman was the front-runner for 2016. “Paul Ryan could look like one of Mitt Romney’s sons.”
Harris suggested that another reason why Ryan may find himself out of synch with the party’s mood goes beyond demographics: his cerebral, wonkish reputation.
“A lot of the more socially conservative, Tea Party voters are going to need to hear certain rhetoric from the congressman—ripping up the president and taking it to Hillary Clinton and talking about the rise of socialism in this country. Paul Ryan is a thinker,” he said.
Going from a losing vice-presidential candidacy to a making a serious run at the top slot has historically been a tough road. Witness John Edwards in 2008, or Joe Lieberman in 2004, or even Dan Quayle in 2000. And Ryan didn’t exactly set the nation on fire as even a flawed candidate like Sarah Palin did during the last election cycle.
“There was a lot of hype in the first couple of days, but he was a non-presence. He was not a national voice. He didn’t change the equation at all,” said Sean Foreman, a professor of political science at Barry University in Florida. “He didn’t carry Wisconsin, they lost all over the Midwest. They lost the presidential vote in his home district! Electorally he was a bust. He is risk of being one of the dinosaurs of the Republican Party at age 42.”
In the short term, Ryan finds himself in perhaps the trickiest spot of all the 2016 hopefuls. He is the only Republican who can’t really distance himself from Mitt Romney—just witness his silence on Romney’s “gifts” comments (his office didn’t reply to an inquiry from The Daily Beast about whether or not he agrees with Romney on this one.) He can’t join in the pile-on taking place now in GOP circles over the misdirection of the 2012 campaign. Plus, he has a messy situation in Congress to navigate. The Republican majority’s austere budget bears his name. If the GOP fails to come to an agreement with President Obama over taxes and spending and the nation falls over the fiscal cliff, Ryan will likely get a large share of the blame. If Ryan does bend, he risks looking like another weak-willed politico to the Tea Party faithful.
“Voters do not react well to someone who comes across as a green-eyeshade conservative,” said Jim Broussard, a professor of history at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania and the chairman of a local anti-tax group there. “Anybody who talks about reining in spending has to make sure that they don’t just come across as a fiscal steward and not as someone who is concerned about people.”
Then there is the matter of whether or not Ryan actually wants to run for higher office. He has twice now turned down overtures from Badger State GOP officials to run for the Senate, and has brushed aside calls to run for the governorship in 2010 and the presidency this year. Yes, he accepted Romney’s offer to run for vice president, but, as Matt Mackowiak, a GOP operative, noted, “It’s one thing to run for vice president for three months, when you are drafted into service and there is an existing infrastructure in place. Running for president is a multiple-year process. I don’t know if that is something he wants to do.”
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Macy’s CEO to American People: Drop Dead
23 COMMENTS
Macy’s CEO to American People: Drop Dead
November 21, 2012
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
Macy’s
is a powerful symbol of Thanksgiving, with its festive parade and
freakishly large floats. But Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren is part of a
group of greedy, unpatriotic CEOs who would like to seize this moment of
American hardship and tear the rug out from under hard-working
families. Moms, dads, grandparents, kids—he’d like to take a little
something from each of you. Especially if you're poor: he’d really like
to get into your purses.
Lundgren and a coalition of other big-time CEOs are lobbying Congress to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits so that they can enjoy tax breaks. Obviously, Lundgren did not take Econ 101, which would have demonstrated to him that reaching into the pockets of people will leave them without enough dollars to buy your products. It’s very simple, Mr. Lundgren. Your job and your stores are supported by the spending power of the American consumer. Robbing that consumer by hacking away at hard-earned retirements and healthcare is not going to help your bottom line.
Jobs, not austerity, is the path to a healthier economy. Just ask Europe.
Lundgren and his band of reverse Robin Hoods, part of a campaign called Fix the Debt founded by "catfood commissioners" Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, have ganged up to influence post-election policy by spreading the myth that our main problem is long-term debt and deficits, rather than high unemployment. They actually like high unemployment, because it keeps their workers in check. They’re out holding town halls, trying to buy or rent members of Congress, and otherwise throwing their weight around.
Such is the spirit of giving in the world of big business. Many Americans are outraged and cutting up their Macy’s cards and signing petitions in protest. You can actuallly choose among petitions. There's the Macy's v. Medicare petition, or if you prefer, there's also a petition urging Macy's to end its partnership with the race-baiting Donald Trump. The "Dump Trump" petition has already collected over 650,000 signatures, but Lundgren stands by the loopy real estate mogul .
The Fix the Debt coalition, unsurprisingly, features a heaping helping of fat-cat financiers:
Lundgren and a coalition of other big-time CEOs are lobbying Congress to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits so that they can enjoy tax breaks. Obviously, Lundgren did not take Econ 101, which would have demonstrated to him that reaching into the pockets of people will leave them without enough dollars to buy your products. It’s very simple, Mr. Lundgren. Your job and your stores are supported by the spending power of the American consumer. Robbing that consumer by hacking away at hard-earned retirements and healthcare is not going to help your bottom line.
Jobs, not austerity, is the path to a healthier economy. Just ask Europe.
Lundgren and his band of reverse Robin Hoods, part of a campaign called Fix the Debt founded by "catfood commissioners" Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, have ganged up to influence post-election policy by spreading the myth that our main problem is long-term debt and deficits, rather than high unemployment. They actually like high unemployment, because it keeps their workers in check. They’re out holding town halls, trying to buy or rent members of Congress, and otherwise throwing their weight around.
Such is the spirit of giving in the world of big business. Many Americans are outraged and cutting up their Macy’s cards and signing petitions in protest. You can actuallly choose among petitions. There's the Macy's v. Medicare petition, or if you prefer, there's also a petition urging Macy's to end its partnership with the race-baiting Donald Trump. The "Dump Trump" petition has already collected over 650,000 signatures, but Lundgren stands by the loopy real estate mogul .
The Fix the Debt coalition, unsurprisingly, features a heaping helping of fat-cat financiers:
- Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman & CEO, Goldman, Sachs & Co.
- James Gorman, Chairman, President & CEO, Morgan Stanley
- Jamie Dimon, Chairman & CEO, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
- Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman & CEO, General Electric Company
- Brian T. Moynihan, President & CEO, Bank of America Corporation
- Josh Bekenstein, Managing Director, Bain Capital
- Richard Anderson, CEO, Delta Air Lines, Inc.
- David Barger, President & CEO, JetBlue Airways Corp.
- D. Scott Davis, Chairman & CEO, United Parcel Service, Inc
- Arne M. Sorenson, President & CEO, Marriott International, Inc.
- Frits van Paasschen, President & CEO, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.
Wal-Mart worker on why she’ll protest after 3 years as a manager: ‘I’m just not making a decent living’
Guest co-hosts Michael “Epic Politics Man” Shure, Michael Hastings
(BuzzFeed and “Rolling Stone”) and Brown University professor Tricia
Rose talk to Wal-Mart manager Sara Gilbert about why after three years
on the job she’ll join other workers in protesting the mega-chain on
Black Friday.
“I’m just not making a decent living,” Gilbert says. “I do have to get subsidized help from the government, which is not something that I like to brag about, but unfortunately that’s the way it is, working for Wal-Mart.”
“I’m just not making a decent living,” Gilbert says. “I do have to get subsidized help from the government, which is not something that I like to brag about, but unfortunately that’s the way it is, working for Wal-Mart.”
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Hey Donald Trump: You're Fired
If you’re wondering why half a million people have signed the
petition urging Macy’s to stop spending the holidays with Donald Trump,
this clip clears it up.
Join in! Sign the petition here:
http://signon.org/sign/urge-macys-to-dump-donald?source=sharemachine-dumptrump
Join in! Sign the petition here:
http://signon.org/sign/urge-macys-to-dump-donald?source=sharemachine-dumptrump
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
A chastened AARP fights Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid cuts
By Joan McCarter
Last year, the AARP inexplicably left the door open for possible cuts to Social Security. That didn't go over so well with AARP members, or with other organizations the group works with. So this year, in the face of potential grand bargaining over the fiscal curb, they're retrenching, and working with other groups to oppose any cuts at all to programs for retirees.
On one front, Social Security, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has vowed hands off. He's got a somewhat surprising ally in Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), who is up for reelection in two years. Begich has a new proposal to strengthen Social Security by adjusting the cost of living for seniors with a Consumer Price Index that actually reflects costs and spending of seniors, and also by lifting the payroll tax cap so that higher income earners would pay Social Security on all their earnings.
That's not just protecting Social Security from cuts now, it's actually making it better, stronger for current and future retirees, an awfully smart position to kick off the 2014 campaign with.
Last year, the AARP inexplicably left the door open for possible cuts to Social Security. That didn't go over so well with AARP members, or with other organizations the group works with. So this year, in the face of potential grand bargaining over the fiscal curb, they're retrenching, and working with other groups to oppose any cuts at all to programs for retirees.
AARP’s rejection of any significant changes to the nation’s safety net could be a major factor as policymakers seek a deal to put the government’s finances in order through raising taxes and cutting spending on federal programs, possibly including popular entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security. [...]
“We’re fighting to stop cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that will hurt beneficiaries,” said AARP’s top lobbyist, Nancy LeaMond. “We want to ensure that Social Security is not part of this deficit discussion.” [...]
A recent issue of the AARP Bulletin — the largest circulation magazine in the world, sent to all its members — warned seniors that the proposed change to Social Security previously embraced by Obama and Republicans could cost “a potential cumulative loss of thousands of dollars.” The organization followed that with a letter to all members of Congress cautioning against Social Security changes.The group is also opposing an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare, and shrinking Social Security cost-of-living increases with the so-called chained CPI, both proposals that were on the table in the negotiations last year between House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama.
On one front, Social Security, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has vowed hands off. He's got a somewhat surprising ally in Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), who is up for reelection in two years. Begich has a new proposal to strengthen Social Security by adjusting the cost of living for seniors with a Consumer Price Index that actually reflects costs and spending of seniors, and also by lifting the payroll tax cap so that higher income earners would pay Social Security on all their earnings.
That's not just protecting Social Security from cuts now, it's actually making it better, stronger for current and future retirees, an awfully smart position to kick off the 2014 campaign with.
Originally posted to Joan McCarter on Mon Nov 19, 2012 at 12:54 PM PST.
Also republished by Social Security Defenders and Daily Kos.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Why Republicans Want Mitt Romney To Go Away
Romney will carry the party's baggage off stage. “Toxic assets” into the bad bank of Mitt.
Ben Smith
Posted
Ten days after at least some Republicans were surprised to see Mitt Romney lose the presidency, the candidate is gone without a trace.
There appears to be no Romney Republicanism to propagate. No Romney strategy to emulate. No Romney technology to ape. No generation shaped by his failed effort. And no Romney infrastructure to inherit, though he may still be asked to write and bundle quite a few checks. Romney's bewildering post-election explanations of his defeat — Obama, he said, had bought off Americans — drew almost universal condemnation from leaders of his party, but the comments were more excuse than cause; party figures from Ari Fleischer to Bobby Jindal appeared to be waiting to kick Romney to the side of the road. The candidate did them a favor when he complained that Democrats had simply bought off young people and minority voters, a churlish line that erased any lingering Republican affinity for him as, when all else failed, a good-hearted guy.
Romney is being erased with record speed from his party's books for three reasons. First, many Republicans backed him because they thought he had a good chance of winning; that appeal, obviously, is gone. Second, Romney had shallow roots, and few friends, in the national Republican Party. And those shallow roots have allowed Republicans to give him a new role: As a sort of bad partisan bank, freighted with all the generational positions and postures that they are looking to dump.
"Romney is now a toxic asset to unload," the historian Jack Bohrer remarked Saturday. "The only interesting thing left to his story is how they dispose of him."
The simplest reason for Romney's quick fadeout is that his central promise was that he could win. He delivered immense fundraising prowess and ideological flexibility. He was never going to win partisan hearts like the two iconic, beloved losers of his father's generation, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern.
"This is ever the sad fate of the 'electability' candidate who fails to get elected," tweeted Red State editor Dan McLaughlin.
But other electability candidates have not been subject to the sort of forced amnesia already washing over Romney. John Kerry and John McCain both faced, perhaps, even more bitter recriminations on questions of tactics and strategy from inside their parties —but they returned to important Senate roles, positions of respect in Washington and in their parties, and Kerry may join the next Cabinet.
Other losers can draw, similarly, on deep wells of loyalty at high levels of the party structure. Bob Dole and Walter Mondale got crushed by the last two-term incumbents to serve two terms. They faded fast from the American public imagination, too. But they also retook their seats on the party dais. Mondale, a former Vice President with deep ties to a key constituency, organized labor, became his party's Senate nominee after Paul Wellstone died in 2002. Dole, a beloved war hero and longtime party soldier, received the Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1997, and was appointed by George W. Bush to chair a commission a decade later.
Romney was a party outsider who bought his way in. The campaigns he came up working for — his father's — operated in the essentially defunct moderate Republican tradition he abandoned, though a few of its stragglers staffed his headquarters in ... Boston. Much of his inner circle consisted of people whose loyalty was to Romney, not to his party or even his platform; that was also true of his most enthusiastic volunteers.
Now Republicans don't even seem to want to pile on Romney. Karl Rove and the SuperPAC infrastructure have absorbed as much disgust from donors and activists as Romney's campaign, which found a message in the fall after a dismal summer. Recriminations, such as they are, have focused on the collapse of a glorified digital list called Orca. Republicans just want to forget Romney.
That's because many of the Republican Party's leaders are, in fact, eager to change. Parties and politicians pivot faster than their friends or enemies ever imagine, and the Republican Party of Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio is pivoting very fast. And for all the reasons that Romney is easy for Republicans to forget, he offers them the ideal sacrifice. Conservatives were always too fond of Barry Goldwater to write him off as the "extremist" Democrats successfully cast him as; they never liked Mitt Romney anyway, and will gladly remember him for his most odious comments.
There is an irony that Romney, the moderate, will be forced to carry off Todd Akin's baggage on reproductive rights; Joe Arpaio's on immigration; and James Dobson on gay rights. But when he cast popular policies as "gifts" to Obama voters (ignoring both his and Obama's expensive promises to older voters), his decision to, as Bobby Jindal put it, "insult" the demographic groups who are a larger part of each successive electorate offered the Republicans the pivot they had been looking for toward presenting a younger, more diverse, and more inclusive party.
Now Romney's own party will gladly let him, and his reputation, carry off the values for which he is only now, for the first time, really the spokesman.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Human failure Joe Walsh threatens to run for office again
By Hunter
Please go, Joe.
When last we checked in with human failure Joe Walsh (R-No Longer A Deadbeat Dad) he had just lost his reelection bid to Tammy Duckworth, thus significantly reducing the odds that any of us would ever have to think about him again. Alas, that thought does not sit well with him, and so he is now threatening to run for something else, something like, oh, what the hell, a governorship:
"You know that I believe fervently in that vision. I don't know of many other candidates who articulate that vision. Am I going to do something? Oh gosh, I don't know. People approach me every day and ask, 'Walsh, are you going to run for the governor? Are you going to run for Senate?' I want to do my part to lead a movement to present a vision to this. I'd rather go down fighting. Democrats have ruined this state but they've been able to do it because the Republicans have allowed them to."I'm not sure what vision Walsh is talking about here; his reelection bid seemed to be based mostly around the "vision" that his opponent was mean to him because she existed, and talked about her service too much, etc., etc.
Sorry, Illinois, Joe Walsh says he wants to govern you. If it's any consolation, I don't actually think he'll follow through with it. He's just pouting.
A Confederacy Of Dunces
By Silly Rabbit
When you stop and think about it, it's not really surprising that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are having so much trouble coming to terms with their recent loss(es).
After all, it's been four years since John McCain got his ass kicked by President Obama, and he's still bitter about it; to say nothing of his former running mate.
However, this time is different.
In the wake of McCain's defeat, teabaggers (née Republicans) dedicated themselves to a single goal—"taking their country back" (even if they had to kill a few hostages in the process); and the mid-term elections showed some signs of success.
But now, having failed to achieve their goal, many of these same über-patriots are petitioning to secede from the country they claim to love so very much.
This is great news for Chuck Norris, who now stands one step closer to becoming the president of Texas.
When you stop and think about it, it's not really surprising that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are having so much trouble coming to terms with their recent loss(es).
After all, it's been four years since John McCain got his ass kicked by President Obama, and he's still bitter about it; to say nothing of his former running mate.
However, this time is different.
In the wake of McCain's defeat, teabaggers (née Republicans) dedicated themselves to a single goal—"taking their country back" (even if they had to kill a few hostages in the process); and the mid-term elections showed some signs of success.
But now, having failed to achieve their goal, many of these same über-patriots are petitioning to secede from the country they claim to love so very much.
This is great news for Chuck Norris, who now stands one step closer to becoming the president of Texas.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Mitt Romney was a terrible presidential candidate
By GAIL COLLINS
It appears that Mitt Romney was a terrible presidential candidate.
O.K., some people have known that ever since the story broke about
strapping his dog on the car roof. But now we seem to be reaching a
consensus.
First, there was that matter of losing the election. Then this week
Romney told some of his donors that while he was pursuing the “big
issues,” President Obama had purchased the support of blacks, Hispanics
and young people with goodies like college loans and health care reform.
College-age women, Romney claimed, traded their votes for “free
contraceptives.”
Show them a birth control pill and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Romney said all this in a private conference call, so he couldn’t have
suspected that it would wind up in the media. There is no precedent
whatsoever for reporters getting hold of remarks presidential candidates
make to private groups about the inherent greediness of American
voters.
Nevertheless, quite a few Republicans thought it was a bad idea to
insult the integrity of American youth and minorities at a moment when
everybody agreed that the electoral future belonged to American youth
and minorities.
“Romney, take responsibility for being flawed candidate, w/delusional
campaign w/no vision,” tweeted Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist.
“I don’t want to rebut him point by point. I would just say to you, I
don’t believe that we have millions and millions of people in this
country that don’t want to work,” said Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
Florida is flooded with potential Republican presidential candidates,
the top two being Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush. That’s reasonable —
except, have you noticed that things in Florida always have a tendency
to get a little weird? Is it an accident that the woman at the center of
the Petraeus scandal — the one with the financial troubles and the
glamorous twin — is from Tampa? This week former Gov. Charlie Crist
officially repudiated reports in a London paper that he and the twin
used to date.
For Republicans, the mood after the election was so bad that — I know
you will be shocked to hear this — a Republican Party official in Texas
advocated leaving the Union. “We must contest every single inch of
ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every
opportunity,” wrote Peter Morrison, treasurer of the Hardin County
Republican Party. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every
morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein
lies our opportunity.” (To be fair, you can’t judge an entire state by
one county political official. Although Bud Kennedy, a columnist for The
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, pointed out that Morrison had once been
chosen to help screen public school textbooks for the State Board of
Education.)
Romney supporters couldn’t believe that they had lost fairly. The Maine
Republican chairman was breathlessly reporting that “dozens, dozens of
black people” had mysteriously shown up to vote in rural areas.
Now things are calmer — perhaps because, if they want to, Republicans
can just blame everything on Romney’s poor campaign skills. Really
terrible skills! Maybe the worst presidential candidate in American
history! Well, possibly not worse than Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who
got only 8 percent of the electoral vote against Thomas Jefferson. But
Thomas Jefferson had the Louisiana Purchase. If Barack Obama had bought
Manitoba, Republicans would have understood his winning.
And actually not quite as bad as John McCain, who got fewer electoral
votes when he lost in 2008 than Romney just got. But at least McCain has
gone on to provide service to the country in the Senate, such as his
current attempts to warn the nation that we haven’t been told enough
about what happened during the tragic attack on Benghazi.
McCain was so desperate to sound the alarm that he missed a classified
briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference complaining that he had
not been given enough information. Which clearly he hadn’t. He knew
nothing! Nothing whatsoever! And what was the administration going to do
about that?
“It is essential for the Congress to conduct its own independent
assessment,” said the senator, demanding that Congress form a special
committee to look into Libya. This would be a double benefit, helping to
inform all the members who missed their normal committee briefings
while also addressing the continuing national crisis over the shortage
of congressional committees.
Afterward, McCain was his normal even-tempered self. (“Because I have
the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to
tell me if I can or not?”) But you did have to wonder. McCain. Then
Romney. Now, all these guys from Florida and Paul Ryan, who when last
heard from was blaming his ticket’s defeat on the “urban” vote.
Somewhere, there’s a right-wing Michael Dukakis waiting for the phone to ring.
Filibuster Reform Now Official – Reid Presents New Filibuster Rule
This is the most important piece of legislation the Senate will debate all year.
If they don’t pass filibuster reform, we will simply have gridlock.
And the American people want governing.
‘To understand what is happening, you first need to understand the issue at hand’.
‘Right now, to pass a cloture measure, that is to close a bill to debate and then vote on it, you need 60 votes’.
‘In the past Senators wishing to block bills had to by debating endlessly. To address this, a rule was put into place in 1975 which allowed a 3/5 majority of senators sworn in to end debate’.
‘It rarely caused issues, until recently when the GOP began invoking the rule of cloture on every single piece of legislation, but then did not stand up to debate’.
If they don’t pass filibuster reform, we will simply have gridlock.
And the American people want governing.
‘To understand what is happening, you first need to understand the issue at hand’.
‘Right now, to pass a cloture measure, that is to close a bill to debate and then vote on it, you need 60 votes’.
‘In the past Senators wishing to block bills had to by debating endlessly. To address this, a rule was put into place in 1975 which allowed a 3/5 majority of senators sworn in to end debate’.
‘It rarely caused issues, until recently when the GOP began invoking the rule of cloture on every single piece of legislation, but then did not stand up to debate’.
‘In other words, they abused the rule intended to stop endless debate without actually debating’.
‘They would force a cloture vote, but there would be no debate for which to invoke cloture at all.
‘In 2011, when the new Senate was convened, Senator Reid met with the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and made a deal to limit the abuse of the filibuster in the new session’.
‘The handshake deal lasted for 40 days, with Senator Hutchinson of Texas invoking the rule on February 15′.
‘After that, 108 more cloture motions were filed, and of those 109, 70 had the majority vote. In the end, only 38 passed cloture and the bills voted’.
‘So much for the handshake deal’.
‘After Mitch McConnell lied to Harry Reid’s face, violating the agreement, the Senate Majority Leader will use the transition in January to the next congress as an opportunity to fix the rules so blatantly abused by the Republicans’.
‘They would force a cloture vote, but there would be no debate for which to invoke cloture at all.
‘In 2011, when the new Senate was convened, Senator Reid met with the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and made a deal to limit the abuse of the filibuster in the new session’.
‘The handshake deal lasted for 40 days, with Senator Hutchinson of Texas invoking the rule on February 15′.
‘After that, 108 more cloture motions were filed, and of those 109, 70 had the majority vote. In the end, only 38 passed cloture and the bills voted’.
‘So much for the handshake deal’.
‘After Mitch McConnell lied to Harry Reid’s face, violating the agreement, the Senate Majority Leader will use the transition in January to the next congress as an opportunity to fix the rules so blatantly abused by the Republicans’.
‘The new rule would change this simple bit. When the rule of cloture is invoked, a vote is taken on the measure and should it not pass a simple majority, the bill is killed. If, however, a Senator invokes the rule of cloture, and when the vote is taken it does not pass on the 3/5′s majority, but does on simple majority, the floor is immediately opened up for debate. Four calls for debate will go out, and if nobody steps up to debate, the cloture would be voted on again, this time only needing a simple majority to pass’.
Some are calling this the Mr. Smith rule, after the classic movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
starring James Stewart. This simple rule change, the tying of cloture
to the debate, is one long needed in Washington. As a result, now if a
minority party wishes to block a measure, they will have to go on the record as being against it, with footage of it. Now they just can go “no cloture” and can avoid the political fallout of things like blocking the jobs act or stimulus bill.
To remind people what a filibuster properly is, below is an example of a true filibuster, at 8 hours, 34 minutes, Senator Bernie Sanders took to the floor on December 10th, 2010, to filibuster the tax-cut extension deal. This is what a filibuster will mean now, not the farce it has become:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SandersF
To remind people what a filibuster properly is, below is an example of a true filibuster, at 8 hours, 34 minutes, Senator Bernie Sanders took to the floor on December 10th, 2010, to filibuster the tax-cut extension deal. This is what a filibuster will mean now, not the farce it has become:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SandersF
http://thelastofthemillenniums.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/what-congress-does-filibuster-reform-now-official-reid-presents-new-filibuster-rule/
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