Firing Up The Bases, Part 1

We are in a phase of the presidential campaigns where it's easy to see each party trying to energize its key constituencies. At this point, each party seems focused more on firing up the faithful than on winning fence sitters. 


On the left, you can see the deliberate mobilization of several key groups over the last few months:


Women - Remember the birth control debate in the early Spring? Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut because she supported mandating insurance coverage of birth control? Granted, Republicans walked right into this one. But that's just who they are. They say crazy stuff so frequently, you can take your pick of which outrage to organize against. And sure enough, Democrats used the moment to mobilize support and remind women that Republicans want to dial back gender equality to at least the 1950s. It wasn't long before the polls started to confirm Obama's big advantage over Romney with women voters.


LGBT Community - Obama's endorsement of gay marriage may have been the single biggest thing he could have done to energize LGBT activists before the election. On some level, it had to be a calculated decision by the White House: energize our supporters at the cost of energizing our opponents. The difference was that the ardent opponents of gay marriage were already excited to vote against Obama, whereas many of the supporters were growing disillusioned with the president. This was a big net win for Democrats. Add to that the repeal of DADT, and this election has become a stark choice for LGBT activists. 


Latinos - Obama's new policy halting deportation of undocumented young people who were brought to America before they were 16 comes with perfect political timing. He's right when he says it's the right thing to do period, but it's also the right thing to do when you're trying to ride the country's shifting demographics to reelection. Romney and the Republicans have no answer for this. They can't appeal to Latino voters without depressing the racist core of the GOP, the source of much of their grassroots energy.


In a follow-up post, I will talk about why it's more challenging in 2012 than in past elections for the Republicans to fire up their own base. For now, check out this graphic that has been making the rounds in conservative circles on Facebook: 

You know, basic Republican stuff! Equating poor people with wild animals. Anything to make the hard-pressed middle class turn its ire against the poor instead of the rich, against the powerless instead of the powerful.

The money gods giveth and taketh away--mainly taketh away.

There's been a lot of hand-wringing on the left lately about Romney's fundraising numbers. The Romney campaign outraised the Obama campaign in May, and progressives are baffled. "What happened to the huge money advantage we had in 2008," they ask.


Reality returned, that's what. If you are a progressive party campaigning to rein in corporate power and make the rich pay their fair share, you can't be surprised when corporate power and the rich don't come running to your aid. 


But why did Obama do so well fundraising in 2008? Because everyone, including big business, knew he was going to win. If the Democrat is bound to win, you might as well try to buy them off, so the thinking goes on Wall Street. But if the race is going to be close, then why not back the Republican, who won't just do your bidding but who believes in doing your bidding?


There are two main reasons why progressives should not mourn the latest fundraising numbers:


1)  If the Democratic Party were to consistently outraise the GOP among big business and the rich, then the Democratic Party would cease to be a progressive party. For a progressive, winning by allying with Wall Street is not really winning. It's the way to slowly lose the soul of your party.  (Some would say this ship sailed years ago.)


2)  We don't necessarily need more money than Romney. In the Fall, the airwaves are going to be saturated with political ads.  There comes a point of diminishing returns. How many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of 30-second spots do you really need? The Obama campaign is not going to fail to get its message out. The president has the biggest bully pulpit in the world, and cheap social media and viral campaigning are going to be many times more important in 2012 than they were in 2008.  


Finally, and I haven't done the research to back this up, but I think the fundraising we are seeing now doesn't include as many small donors as it will in later months.  And I suspect that Obama is going to have a big advantage among small donors. 


But my bottom line is that Obama should win this election with the sweat equity of millions of volunteers, with phone banks, voter registration drives, and canvassing. Gobs of money won't hurt, but in the end it won't matter if Romney has bigger gobs. Besides, we need to be careful where our gobs of money come from and how they can change our party.

"Just Your Average Blue-Collar Dressage Fan"

The Romneys' dressage horse has qualified for the Summer Olympics in London!  This was a lose-lose for Mitt Romney.  Think about it.  If the horse had failed to qualify, well, he would have spent all that money on a loser.  But now that the horse has qualified, the connection between Mitt Romney and dressage will be in the news all summer long.  


If you are quarter-billionaire Mitt Romney, here is a conversation you don't want undecided working class voters in Ohio having in July:

"Romney declared how much of a loss for that horse on his taxes?"

"Uh, that would be $77,000."

Or this one:

"Hey, what is dre... dressage?"

"You know, it's the thing where millionaires and billionaires watch a guy in a top hat and coat ride around on a dancing horse that costs more than my house."

Seriously, I bet Mitt wishes right now that his wife had picked a different hobby. 

Shackled and Drawn

The line comes from a Bruce Springsteen song, "Shackled and Drawn," on the new album, "Wrecking Ball." Give it a listen.

A Memorable Mitt-ism

Mitt just exudes that "guy I'd like to have a beer with" quality, right?

This Is Their 'Most Electable' Candidate?

Ok, here's to jumping right back in...

During the early stages of the Republican presidential primary, I was, like many Obama supporters, rooting for "anyone but Romney." I pulled for Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and most recently Rick Santorum. I agreed with the general zeitgeist that Mitt Romney was the most electable of all the GOP candidates in a general election.

I no longer think this is true. This really has been a bruising primary for the GOP, quite unlike the Democratic primary of 2008, which I think made Obama a better candidate and helped build his national campaign organization. At this point, I think even Republicans are sick of or bored with Mitt Romney. I was surprised to see polls showing that Obama already enjoys an "enthusiasm gap" over all three of the leading GOP candidates. They've been campaigning for months (while Obama's been presiding over a sluggish economy), yet Obama's supporters are still the ones who are more excited about the coming election. That doesn't demonstrate a Republican Party confident about unseating an incumbent president.

But the main reason I'm less impressed with presumptive nominee Romney? He has turned out to be even more awkward and out of touch with ordinary people than I had expected. Granted, it has been part of Team Obama's strategy to play this up. (Remember when Obama campaign staffers talked about attacking Romney for being "weird?") But it doesn't exactly take a political genius to identify the weirdness in Romney.

Here's a quick highlight reel:

• Pretending to be pinched on the butt by women in crowds? Check.
• Strapping his dog to the roof of the car for an hours long highway trip? Check.
• Driving on despite the dog's diarrhea running down the back window? Check.
• Proudly declaring, "Corporations are people, my friend!" Check.
• Calling himself "unemployed" while talking to people who really are? Check.
• Making fun of people for wearing ponchos in the rain? Check. (Maybe he'd never seen one.)
• Generally acting like a man who's lived isolated from the world in a sanitized bubble of richness? Check, check, check. (That last link has a fairly exhaustive slide show of awkward Mitt moments; the "Who Let the Dogs Out" clip might take the prize.)

The Republicans are about to nominate Mr. Wall Street himself in an age that gave rise to Occupy Wall Street. Wrong guy. Wrong year.

Now I think that the importance of personality and individuals in politics is usually overestimated. Bigger forces are at work. Economics, demographics, and social movements are like shifting tectonic plates beneath the electoral landscape. Good candidates have lost, and bad candidates have won for reasons much bigger than whether or not someone is "weird." But in a close election, little things can tip the balance. The weirdness of Mitt may be one of those things.

That's all I've got for now. More to come about the Republican primary and how I see the general election shaping up, so stay tuned.

Any Stick Will Do

There are now Occupy encampments in the center of every major city of the United States.

So given that murders and other crimes inevitably happen in these cities, the corporate press has taken to reporting in its headlines things like, "Man Killed Near Occupy Protest," as though there is a connection between the two events other than things that are happening in big cities right now.

There might as well be headlines reading:

"Skyscraper Going Up Near Occupy Camp," as though the protesters had built it;

"Sewage Construction Begins 3 Blocks From Occupiers," as though the protesters had planned it;

"Cold Front Moves In After Occupiers Demand 'Tax The Rich,'" as though the gods were angry with the protesters.

The 1%, and the establishment that serves them, have failed at other ploys to marginalize the Occupy movement. This is just their latest lame attempt.

When in doubt, kill 'em anyway.

Despite 7 of 9 prosecution eyewitnesses changing their stories after the trial and one of the remaining witnesses bragging that actually he committed the murder, Troy Davis was killed last night at 11:08pm by lethal injection. Welcome to America, where you are presumed executed until proven innocent. You can bet that Rick Perry would be proud and that an audience at a Republican presidential debate would applaud wildly (see this article if you don't get the connection).

We've become a nation of bumbling idiot executioners. Is there strong evidence of your innocence? We'll execute you anyway. Were you a juvenile at the time of your crime? We'll execute you anyway. Are you mentally retarded? We'll execute you anyway. And then your governor will say he's proud of it and run for president as "tough on crime."

For some international perspective, here are the world's top ten executioner countries based on total number of executions in 2010:

1. China

2. Iran

3. North Korea

4. Yemen

5. United States

6. Saudi Arabia

7. Libya

8. Syria

9. Bangladesh

10. Somalia

What great company we keep! Right up there with the world's most brutal and grisly regimes, even putting Saudi Arabia to shame.

Here are Troy Davis' last words, as he was strapped down on the gurney last night in Georgia:

I'd like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I'm not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent.

The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun. All I can ask ... is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth.

I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight.

For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls.

I was out in front of the US Supreme Court last night with a couple hundred people when it was reported that the execution was going forward and then when it was reported that Davis was dead. There was stunned silence. And a realization that the world is an even darker place than we had thought.

If I Were A Betting Man

One of the sites I check compulsively each day is Intrade.com. I like to look at the political prediction markets, which give what are essentially the market-determined odds of someone winning an election or a bill passing. I've been watching Obama's odds of re-election for a while now. After Osama bin Laden was killed, they temporarily jumped up to about 70%. The odds stayed above 60% for most of June but then began a slow slide down to around 56%. In August, the numbers plummeted to around 50%. And for a couple of days at the end of last week, for the first time, the market was predicting Obama would probably not be re-elected, with his odds at 49%. (As of this writing it's at 50.5%.)

It's fun to watch how the news affects the numbers, but let me tell you why I think Obama is still a good bet: The Field of Republican Candidates.

First of all, I think there are only three candidates with decent shots of winning the nomination: Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann. I think the primary will boil down to Romney, who seems to have lots of establishment support, versus an anti-Romney candidate who will have the Tea Party and the Religious Right. I think Perry will end up being the anti-Romney candidate. And I think Perry will be the nominee. Romney disappoints too many people on the right, whereas everyone on the right can find something they like in Rick Perry. He executes innocent people, is literally crazy about guns, kicks thousands of kids off S-CHIP insurance, champions a low-wage high-polluting economy, isn't very bright, and has ties to the neo-Confederate movement. What's not to like?

But it's not just that Perry is too far right to win the general election, it's that he will have to move farther right and put his wing-nuttiness on display for the next six months in order to win the nomination. That could be quite a display, because the Republican Party has moved even farther away from mainstream America in the last several years.

For example, remember how George W. Bush used to call himself a compassionate conservative? He knew he needed to present a humane side to independents and moderates to balance out his right-wingery. Republican politicians today don't give a damn about that! If a candidate brought up "compassion" in a Republican presidential debate, one of the other candidates would whack him over the head with some Ayn Rand quote about compassion being the utmost evil. They wear nastiness as a badge of honor now. They no longer talk about just "reforming" Social Security and Medicare. Rick Perry says Social Security and Medicare should be repealed. Even with unemployment above 9%, today's Republicans want to eliminate unemployment insurance altogether. Why? "Because it makes people lazy." Oh, and according to today's Republican orthodoxy, global warming is a hoax and the Earth is 6,000 years old. That's the party in which Rick Perry has to appeal to the most rabid activists.

All the while, Obama will be "negotiating" and looking for "grand bargains" with the House Republicans and generally looking like a reasonable and good intentioned (if weak) problem solver. That won't excite people on the left like me, and it certainly won't get the economy back on track. But it will allow him to pitch himself to a very broad swath of the electorate in 2012.

Of course there are still questions. Will left activists be so depressed that they don't turn out and volunteer? Will the economy be so bad that independents are willing to try anyone else, even Perry? We will see. But for now, if I had any cash laying around, I would be buying "Barack Obama to be re-elected President in 2012" at Intrade.