The term “Minnewisowa” was invented and introduced in the 2004 presidential campaign cycle. “Minnewisowa” is a portmanteau neologism which stands for the electoral combination of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, three contiguous midwestern states with similar demographics,  and which together have 26 electoral votes. They are  also perennially “swing” states that can go either into the Democratic or Republican column on Election Day.

In 2004, Iowa voted for George W. Bush, while Wisconsin and Minnesota cast their electoral votes for John Kerry. In 2008, all three voted for Barack Obama. But in 2012, all three, especially Iowa and Wisconsin, are up for grabs.

In fact, party registration in Iowa has for the first time in a long while gone from a lead for Democrats to a lead for Republicans. First reported more than a month ago, that lead (while small) has doubled in the latest report.

Wisconsin is a special case this year. A recall election of Governor Scott Walker has been called primarily by union supporters who opposed Walker-signed legislation that limits the power of government employee unions. An earlier recall effort failed to change the balance of power in the state legislature, but Wisconsin Democrats have come back to challenge not only Walker but several state senators. A lot is at stake for both sides, and any outcome is possible. But the risk for Democrats if they fail in this second recall effort, as they did in the first, is that it may cost President Obama the state in his re-election effort here about four months later.

Minnesota leans Democratic this year, and the state Republican Party is mired in scandal and financial problems. The Minnesota governor is a Democrat (called DFLer in the state), and the legislature is Republican. There are few Minnesota close congressional elections this year, and the incumbent DFL U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar has little prospect of a serious opponent. But the forces which propelled such a high DFL turnout for Mr Obama in 2008 are not present this year, and the presidential election could be closer than the ten-point margin in the last cycle.

If Mitt Romney could win Iowa and Wisconsin in 2012, that alone would be a net gain of 16 electoral votes from 2008. Combined with the current Republican lead in Indiana and good prospects for the GOP in Ohio (both these states voted for Obama in 2008), this region could produce just under half the electoral votes the GOP nominee would need to overtake the incumbent president. Most of the other (and larger) half could come from the combined electoral votes of Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, three southern states which also voted Democratic in 2008.

It’s too early to make predictions about all of this, but the electoral college vulnerability of Mr. Obama is already present in the above-mentioned states, not to mention in about a half dozen others.

“Minnewisowa’ went solidly for Mr. Obama in 2008, signaling his decisive nationwide victory. A change in voter sentiment in this three-state “swing bloc,” could signal political trouble for the Democratic president four years later.

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Copyright (c) 2012 by Barry Casselman.  All rights. reserved.

We pundits can’t help ourselves when we try to make analogies between current and past presidential election years. To some degree, the best analogies usually do apply. But I am coming to the conclusion, that apart from some obvious comparisons, the conventional rules of U.S. presidential elections will be largely upturned in 2012.

My reasons center around some simple facts and conditions.

President Obama was the first black president. He will thus be the first black incumbent president to run for re-election. Mr. Obama won the 2008 election primarily for two reasons. First, there was considerable “fatigue” with Republican President George W. Bush, then completing his second term. Second, only weeks before the November election, there was a meltdown in the mortgage banking sector causing an immediate economic crisis. In short, there was a conflation of circumstances which enabled Mr. Obama to win. The election was decisive, but it was no landslide.

Mitt Romney is not John McCain. Although Senator McCain was clearly a much-admired figure for his Viet Nam war experiences as a soldier and prisoner of war, and for his service in the U.S. senate, he lacked ironically the combative nature to wage a tough election campaign against Mr. Obama, There was also perhaps no viable strategy to overcome the mortgage banking crisis that appeared so close to the election; Mr. McCain’s strategy to suspend his campaign might have been one of the worst alternatives available to him.

Mitt Romney is also not John Kerry, Al Gore, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey or Barry Goldwater. Barack Obama is not George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon. Mr. Romney is the first Mormon to be nominated for president. Although he was a governor, he is the first nominee for president since before World War II to come from a successful self-made career in business.

Although the U.S. economy is always going through cycles of prosperity and recession, the current downturn is unusual for its length and its chronic high unemployment. Previously the world’s dominant economy, the U.S. faces historic ad unprecedented trade challenges from China, India, Brazil and the European Union. There is also a growing global economic debt crisis facing Europe and China that has made world fiscal conditions more important to individual Americans than ever before.

Changing rules and new technologies are increasingly and more rapidly altering U.S. presidential campaigns. This is especially so in the key aspect of fundraising, public relations and in identifying voters in the often under-noticed get-out-the-vote campaigns. The internet, even more than before, has changed American politics.

The congressional election cycles have gone through two unprecedented (in terms of their quick reversal) “wave”elections. In 2006 and 2008, the “wave” went to the Democrats. Abruptly, the 2010 “wave” went the other way, to the Republicans. In 2012, Republicans control the U.S. house, and Democrats control the U.S. senate. Not all candidates are known yet, and once-in-a-decade redistricting has taken place, but given the national economic conditions, and the fact that such a disproportionate number of vulnerable Democratic incumbent senators are running, the relationship between the congressional elections and the presidential campaign of the incumbent are extraordinarily, on their face, disconnected.

The influence of non-traditional political forces on a presidential campaign has, seemingly, not been greater. The Old Media, continuing its pattern from 2008, has become a mostly uncritical cheerleader for Mr. Obama. This also includes most of the figures of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. The New Media, including radio talk show hosts, Fox News (its cable viewers total more than all the other cable networks combined), and large-scale websites such as Drudge and Breitbart, have become cheerleaders for the conservative movement.

Further complicating the 2012 elections are the new populist movements of both the right (Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Movement) which have recently emerged. As these pull against the natural gravity of the political center in presidential election, they tend to upend traditional politics and politicking.

Finally, there is more political and ideological division in the nation since the 1930′s. There was perhaps as intensive political emotion in the country in the Viet Nam war period, or more, but the division was not so much between conservative and liberal as it was about the specific war issue (and it was generational).

Of course, assuming what I am contending is true about the unprecedented nature of the 2012 presidential election, the key and obvious question is:  Who does these circumstances help the most and hurt the most in their quest to be elected, or re-elected, president this year?

The answer to that will become obvious right after election day, and no one knows that answer for certain six months away, but we do have some  fascinating clues to the possible answer to this question, and I will discuss them in the weeks ahead.

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Copyright (c) 2102 by Barry Casselman. All rights reserved.

With a title like that, I’m sure I don’t have to try very hard to get people to like this post. But, what the heck, I’ll try, anyway!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho95vcVeFf0&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
Since the Democrats’ policy proposals and positions lend themselves better to simplistic, soundbite-friendly demagoguery, Republicans NEED elected officials capable of refuting these attacks articulately and succinctly, like the great Congressman from Wisconsin.

As the race for the GOP presidential nomination continues to unfold, one of the themes of the race, at least according to Sen. Santorum and his supporters, is that Rick Santorum represents Ronald Reagan in contrast to Mitt Romney’s George H.W. Bush, or perhaps Gerald Ford, and that unlike Gov. Romney, Sen. Santorum would be able to expand the Republican electoral coalition by inviting scores of working class whites into the fold, primarily because of his renewed focus on manufacturing and his embrace of the Holy See’s position on cultural issues. I will submit to you that this line of reasoning is faulty for a number of reasons, and that Sen. Santorum will not only fail to win Democratic converts in the fall as the Republican nominee, but will probably fare far worse than the admittedly flawed frontrunner, Mitt Romney.

First, the notion that there still exists a motley crew of “Reagan Democrats” in our nation’s swing regions is, I think, a bit dated. Indeed, last year I penned a piece describing the hunt for Reagan Democrats as a quixotic quest for Republicans given that this group, as it has been historically defined, no longer exists:

But wait. What did happen to those original Reagan Democrats, the white ethnics in the Rust Belt who self-identified as “JFK Democrats” even though they hadn’t voted Democratic since the 1960s? The polls seem to suggest they don’t exist anymore, and I suspect that’s largely because most are no longer Democrats. They’ve either become Republicans or are now affiliated with neither party. It’s important to remember that social pressures for certain demographic groups to join the Democratic Party no longer exist. At one time in this country, to be a white ethnic was to be a Democrat. To be a working stiff was to be a Democrat. To be a Catholic was to be a Democrat. In almost all of those cases, there is no longer any “tribal” rationale for these voters to self-identify as Democrats, especially given the decreasing importance of private employees’ unions, the assimilation of white ethnics into the broader population, and the re-organization of the parties from collections of interest groups into vehicles of ideology. Since most of the aforementioned groups tend to lean moderate to conservative, and since the Democratic Party is now the “liberal party,” there really is no reason for a conservative or moderate-conservative member of these groups to be a Democrat.

I go on to cite a number of high-profile races showing that self-identified Democrats have stuck with their party’s nominee in recent years with near unanimity. Meanwhile, Independents seem to be the voting bloc that has swung back and forth between the two parties in recent history, not a glut of white ethnic Democrats in denial about the state of their party. That’s because those conservative white ethnics aren’t Democrats anymore, and haven’t been Democrats in awhile.

At this point, Santorum supporters may argue that I’m playing a game of semantics, and that no one can deny that there are plenty of white, working class Independents who would be drawn to a Republican who feels their pain. Granted. But is Santorum really the sort of candidate that the doctor ordered for this particular segment of Independents? I would say that he is not. First, there’s a mythology that exists in the political psyche that downscale whites are attracted to Republicans who are economically liberal and very socially conservative. I would say this myth is on par with the notion that upscale, urban Independents tend to be followers of Ayn Rand. In reality, neither of these typologies hold true for the vast majority of Independents. I would guess that most educated, urban and suburban Independents tend to be gently right-of-center fiscally, and gently left-of-center socially. That’s why soccer moms adored Bill Clinton, but also why the Libertarian Party remains sorely underrepresented at every level of government. Conversely, downscale whites without college degrees probably tend to be more socially conservative than not, and more economically populist than not, but are probably not hugging the extremes of either of those issue areas in any regard.

As such, on cultural issues, while being a cultural conservative probably helps with downscale whites, being as extreme on social issues as Sen. Santorum likely does as much damage with this demographic as it does with most demographics. Santorum’s seeming inability to remove his focus from issues relating to sex — such as his foray into the world of porn earlier this week — would likely do to his candidacy among downscale Independents what Republican promises to eliminate entire Cabinet departments does to GOP support among upscale Independents. In both cases, the Independents in question are assumed to hold extreme views on these issues, when in fact they hold relatively moderate views. Upscale white swing voters want a balanced budget and low taxes, but they also want strong public schools. Downscale white swing voters want fewer abortions and traditional marriage, but they also want to be able to slip into the strip club down the street when the wife isn’t looking. The notion that either of these groups can be converted into soldiers for someone’s utopian crusade is folly.

Finally, on the issue of economics, the assumption of many Republican strategists, from those who touted compassionate conservatism on, is that downscale whites by and large agree with Democrats on matters of economic policy, and that the way to win the working class white vote is to move leftward on economic and fiscal matters. This is another assumption that history doesn’t really validate. Going back to the original “Reagan Democrats,” the reality is that Reagan didn’t shake working class whites loose of the Democratic Party by running to the Left of Ford and Bush 41 on fiscal matters. To the contrary, Reagan ran well to the Right of his establishment foils on economic matters. And yet working class whites responded favorably to Reagan’s message of enhancing personal autonomy, expanding individual choice and opportunity, maintaining law and order at home and a muscular foreign policy abroad, and respecting American traditions while leaving Americans free to live their lives as they see fit. This ideology is far removed both from the cynical Compassionate Conservatism of Bush 43, and from the neo-populism of Huckabee ’08 and Santorum ’12.

As such, I fail to see any burgeoning Santorum electoral majority on the horizon, and I suspect that as the party’s presidential nominee, Santorum’s support among Democrats would be non-existent, his appeal to working class swing voters would be largely on paper, and most importantly, Santorum would lose scores of Creative Class voters who are demographically and politically everything Santorum is not. Nominating Santorum would put the Republican Party on the wrong side of each of the nation’s demographic trends. That alone should keep reasonable Republicans from pulling the lever for the former senator in the remaining primaries and caucuses that will decide the nomination.

President Obama has begun to telegraph the type of messaging he’ll use during the upcoming general election:

Given that reality [a sluggish economy], Obama needs to find smaller success stories that allow him to effectively make a “promises made, promises kept” argument. The recovery of the auto industry is sure to be front and center in that argument from the Administration.

“If we had turned our backs on you; if America had thrown in the towel; GM and Chrysler wouldn’t exist today,” Obama said to huge cheers from the UAW crowd. “I placed my bet on American workers…three years later, the American auto industry is back.”

Promise made, promise kept.

But then Obama sought to broaden out the argument — making the case that what he did for the auto industry is what separates him from the men vying to be the Republican presidential nominee this fall.

Said Obama: “You want to talk about values? Hard work — that’s a value. Looking out for one another — that’s a value. The idea that we are all in it together — that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper — that is a value.”

…In the space of a single speech that spanned just over 2,000 words, Obama summed up the entirety of his re-election message: 1) There have been provable successes because of actions his Administration has taken 2) He better understands what it means to be an American than do Republicans and 3) The Republican philosophy toward government represents a step backwards not a step forward.

While the philosophy the president espoused may appeal more to our collectivist than individualistic natures, we cannot deny the appeal of this kind of rhetoric to the broad public, especially the notoriously fickle low-information swing voters.

No matter whether Obama squares off against Romney or Santorum, his argument still has the potential to resonate among enough people to nudge him over the line. In short, Republicans sure have their work cut out for them this Fall.

Since it became increasingly clear, following my candidate (and employer) Gary Johnson’s decision to drop out and run third party, and my second choice Ron Paul’s failure to gain traction after his very-respectable-but-just-not-energizing-enough finishes in the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, that a libertarian would not be representing the Republican Party in the general election, my sense of disappointment, frustration, and burn-out has compelled me to take something of a slight break from politics for a month or two. (I’m sure you were all enormously grieved by my absence.) A lot of libertarians in the GOP have been, and are currently, going through this phase right now. One thing that may be snapping a lot of us out of our funk, however, is the chilling surge in popularity of Rick Santorum–quite possibly one of the most overtly anti-libertarian candidates ever to come within reach of the GOP presidential nomination.
(more…)

While nearly every political onlooker, including yours truly, has expected that the 2012 election will revolve around the economy, recent events have cast some doubt on that assumption. As Rachel Weiner, of the Washington Post, reports:

For months, the Republican presidential candidates have hammered away on the economy — and only the economy — as they crisscrossed the campaign trail. But over the past few days, longtime social issues — contraception, abortion and gay marriage — have taken the stage in the campaign.

First, Planned Parenthood supporters helped force the resignation of Susan B. Komen Foundation executive Karen Handel after the breast cancer organization cut grants to the family planning group.

Then Catholic bishops began sparring with the White House over a new mandate that all employers cover birth control for women, with very narrow exemptions for Catholic-run institutions.

And on Monday, a federal appeals court in California struck down the state’s gay marriage ban, prompting outrage from the GOP candidates.

…How long this spike in passion over social issues will last is unclear. There were no exit polls from Tuesday night, but in other states the economy is consistently the voters’ top concern.

Still, the longer this wave goes on, the more it hurts Romney, who has supported abortion rights in the past.. He has struggled among evangelicals and voters who oppose abortion in all circumstances.

One can’t help but ponder whether Obama had something like this planned all along. It has become no secret that his greatest vulnerability lies with Independents, who propelled him to election in 2008 but have since grown skeptical of his administration.

Perhaps the President, searching for a means to lure back these pivotal voters without angering the Democratic base and thus risking the progress (no pun intended) his populist turn in the last year has made, figured that he had another option.

Wooing the Center on economic issues would most likely require Clintonesque messaging focused more on growth than “fairness” (read: redistribution) – not exactly what the Left wants to hear. He already enjoys strong approval numbers on foreign policy among Indies, so he can’t really shake up things much in that realm. However, when it comes to social matters – especially issues like contraception and gay marriage – nonpartisan voters increasingly side with the Democrats. So, by bringing social issues to the forefront, perhaps Obama calculated that he could provoke Republicans into caricaturing themselves as champions of the Religious Right, thus scaring Independents away from the GOP and into the Democrats’ open arms.

Maybe I’ve just over-thought this (you don’t say, a political junkie over-analyzing a potentially minor event in a presidential campaign?), and these events have converged merely out of coincidence. Regardless, it appears that we may see yet another piece of conventional wisdom about this election shattered.

In case I haven’t made it blatantly obvious, I like to turn to AEI’s James Pethokoukis when it comes to economic commentary and analysis. He does another number today on the Keynesians’ obsessive focus on the demand side of the economy. He begins with two charts, courtesy of the BLS and adds the following:

These charts are based on the U.S. Job Openings and Labor Turnover report. The first chart shows that with 13.1 million people unemployed, there were an estimated 3.9 unemployed people for every opening. That’s the lowest level since December 2008. Good news.

Yet, as can be seen in the second chart, job openings have been rising faster than hiring. As Barclays concludes: “This suggests that factors such as mismatched skills continue to be frictions in the labor market.”

Or, in other words, people who lost their jobs in the Great Recession will not be able to return to their old jobs or even new jobs in the same industry.

He then points to a recent article in the WSJ, written by Arnold Kling:

Many jobs in home construction, durable-goods manufacturing and distribution, and mortgage finance were dependent on housing markets with ever-rising prices. In the U.S. and the U.K. in particular, the finance industry expanded well beyond its true economic value. Once the property bubbles burst, these jobs were exposed as not viable. Meanwhile, ongoing creative destruction brought about by the Internet and globalization have continued to allow substitution of capital and emerging-market labor for industrialized countries’ labor in many sectors. Together, these phenomena have caused widespread dislocation. … The necessary adjustments can only be made by the decentralized efforts of entrepreneurs. …

The Keynesian story would lead one to expect a recovery to consist of workers returning to the jobs that they held prior to the recession. That is not what happened after the Great Depression. It is not what has happened in recent recessions in the U.S., particularly the one that ended in 2009. Regaining full employment requires significant restructuring of the economy, rather than simply returning to the pre-slump status quo.

We’ve heard the standard arguments from the Keynesnians over and over again: Effective tax rates on individuals and businesses stand at or near historical lows, the Fed has interest rates at rock-bottom levels, and yet the rich and their companies still sit on trillions in cash, so what else can we do except stimulate demand via government spending until the private sector can once again shoulder the burden of driving growth?

Setting aside the Keynesians’ convenient avoidance of the simple truth that without the profit and price mechanisms depended on by the private sector, the government can never know exactly how much to pump into the economy and when to do it, the data and arguments voiced by Pethokoukis and Kling highlight only a fraction of the evidence against central planner orthodoxy and Obamanomics. Now, if only we could get the mainstream media to report this…

A primer of things to come:

Imagine for a moment how Democrats would feel late on the night of Nov. 6 if news outlets began to call the race for Mr. Romney or another Republican. The comedown from four years earlier would be one of the starkest in American political history. The promise of Mr. Obama’s victory would yield to the reality that a Republican president, and probably a Republican Congress, would be likely to undo significant parts of his agenda, starting with aspects of health care reform.

…

If Mr. Obama loses, attention will shift to Mrs. Clinton almost immediately. She brings her own baggage, having run a troubled presidential campaign and been a leading figure in a somewhat chaotic White House. She also sounds sincere when she talks of wanting a break. Arguably, no public figure has had a more intense past 20 years.

But at 64, she remains energetic and politically attuned. With friends and close colleagues, she still talks passionately about how she believes the Republican Party is harming the country. Polls show that she is among the most admired people in the United States. Given all that, turning down the prospect of beating a Republican incumbent might not be so easy.

I continue to believe that Hillary will be similarly positioned for the Democratic nomination in 2016 as was Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1980. If Obama loses in the fall, both will have been rejected by voters of their own party in favor of candidates who ultimately ended up losing the White House to the opposition party. Also, like Reagan in 1980, Mrs. Clinton is a larger than life figure who, aside from being able to run an “I told you so campaign,” seems to be a woman meeting her moment in history.

Coming into the 2012 elections, North Carolina was nearly universally recognized as the GOP’s best chance for a gubernatorial pickup. Governor Bev Perdue (D) is unpopular and is plagued by low approval ratings and fundraising ethics charges. When she announced last week that she would not be seeking re-election, Democrats breathed a sigh of relief.

However, the now-open race isn’t quite shaking out as they had expected. North Carolina voters with buyer’s remorse over Perdue are ready to elect her 2008 opponent Pat McCrory (R) to the statehouse. The Democrats had some potentially strong challengers to McCrory, but one by one they all began announcing that they wouldn’t run, either.

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx announced he wasn’t going to run. Senator Kay Hagan announced she wouldn’t run. Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines said he wasn’t running. The list kept getting shorter and shorter.

Today, however, the two strongest candidates the Democrats could have fielded both announced they would not be running, either: Heath Shuler and Erskine Bowles. Both are well-known, well-respected moderate Democrats who could have put up quite a fight against McCrory. But neither is interested in the task of taking him on.

Which probably means – unless something goes horribly awry between now and November – we can say hello to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory. The only announced candidates at the moment are State Rep Bill Faison, Lt Gov Walter Dalton, and former US Rep. Bob Etheridge. McCrory defeats those three by 19, 15, and 15% respectively.

So congratulations, Republicans, on a solid pickup opportunity. All this news today made me wonder, though, as far as the Presidential race was concerned: does this make it easier for Romney to win North Carolina in November? With little chance to win the governorship, Democratic turnout may decline just enough in a state where Obama only won by a razor thin margin anyway. Add to that the fact that superstar Heath Shuler (D) will not be running for re-election for his congressional seat, either, and you have a situation that the Republicans could have only dreamt of a few months ago.

Republicans in North Carolina should be energized this November while Democratic turnout will most likely be depressed. And that means North Carolina just got a whole lot easier for Romney in November.

Today, Politico had two interesting articles about Mitt Romney’s electoral prospects and the current state of the race in Florida. The first details the recent success Mitt has had in the Sunshine State:

Like they have throughout the primary, the two Florida debates this week played a major role in Romney’s resurgence.

Romney took advantage of both debate audiences. The quiet, smaller crowd in Tampa allowed him to accentuate his sober demeanor. In Jacksonville, the hall was packed with vocal Romney supporters, much to Gingrich’s frustration.

Romney used both occasions to charge after Gingrich who, without the crowd on his side, was visibly off his game and didn’t go on the offensive.

The change was palpable, showcasing a different Romney than the unsteady South Carolina debater, in part thanks to new debate coach Brett O’Donnell, McCain’s and Michele Bachmann’s former coach.

…It shouldn’t be underestimated how much the Romney operation has managed to get into Gingrich’s head. From its first day in Florida, the campaign held daily anti-Newt conference calls featuring campaign surrogates. The calls didn’t break news, but left Gingrich to defend ever more allegations about his time as speaker and post-House career.

And there were the real-time Romney surrogates, tasked with trailing Gingrich from event to event and offering rebuttals to reporters in real time.

This so aggravated and distracted the Gingrich campaign that spokesman R.C. Hammond wound up in a yelling match Friday with Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz at a Delray Beach event. Chaffetz, using the Romney campaign’s buzzword for Gingrich, said Hammond became “unhinged” in responding to him.

…There was no way Romney was going to match the thousands of people Gingrich drew to campaign rallies Tuesday in Sarasota and Naples.

So he didn’t try.

Instead, the Romney advance operation built a series of small, made-for-TV events at the beginning of the week to spotlight the campaign’s message.

One, a Monday roundtable with eight people hit by the mortgage crisis, had as witnesses only the traveling press. The next day, Romney spoke to an invite-only crowd in an empty Tampa warehouse and stood in front of a foreclosed-by-Freddie Mac house to spotlight the mortgage broker for which Gingrich consulted.

As recently as Tuesday, Romney senior aide Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters the campaign would stick to “message-driven” events rather than big rallies.

I came away with two chief conclusions after reading this piece: 1. Romney has surrounded himself with a highly capable staff that knows how to adapt to changing circumstances and handle the cards dealt to them; and 2. It bodes poorly for Newt’s general election prospects if he and his team cannot handle the challenges imposed by a primary race. If they can’t cope with Romney surrogates pressuring them, how on earth can they possibly expect to combat the full weight of the Obama organization and the Democratic machine?

Unfortunately, with the positives, come some negatives, as highlighted by the next Politico article:

Obama’s biggest challenge, the CW goes, is winning back a percentage, however modest, of independents that have deserted him wholesale since 2009. So, it’s with no small degree of satisfaction that they are closely watching Mitt Romney’s recent swan dive with swing voters.

A poll-of-polls analysis of Romney’s recent unfavorable rating with indies, provided to POLITICO by a Democratic strategist, shows that the race has driven him way underwater, with more than 50 percent of unaffiliated voters given him failing grade; Only about a quarter of independents give him a favorable approval rating.

Romney’s staff says that this is simply a product of a ferocious GOP primary, and his numbers will rebound once the tidal wave of negative super PAC advertising recedes; Dems say voters are turned off by Romney’s Eddie Haskell, say-anything-to-get-elected style.

The latest bad news for Romney a Washington Poll poll last week showing him with a 23 percent approval/49 percent disapproval split with independents. Red siren, that: His unfavorables had been in the 30s, not bad, in recent months.

…But Obama, whose health care reform remains as popular with centrist voters as dry rot, will accept misery-loves-company parity. Romney’s unfavorables are also spiking with the larger electorate, up from 42 percent last year to 45 percent this month, according to the Pew poll.

“This is not normal,” the Democratic memo reads. “Republicans may claim that this is typical of a primary process — it is not.”

We Republicans cannot simply brush off this information. With the expanding numbers of Independents in recent years, if the GOP hopes to maintain long-term viability, Republican candidates need to enhance their appeal to these voters. Romney must launch an all-out assault to address this reality as soon as he (presumably) wraps up the nomination.

Democratic union allies are up in Florida with new attacks on Bain Capital, mirroring Gingrich’s line of attack verbatim. Now why on earth would Democrats want to help Newt? Oh right, this is why.

Hat-tip: The Argo Journal

The Drudge Report linked to an infuriating article about how the Democratic National Committee has resorted to financially supporting an individual who got laid off from the company Ampad, which Bain Capital famously owned at one point:

As reporters and Mitt Romney supporters filed outside the gymnasium where the former Massachusetts governor had led a raucous rally ahead of the primary here Tuesday, Randy Johnson, a stooped and bearded man in late middle age, stood silently to the side and watched. Nearby, an operative with the Democratic National Committee directed reporters to him, where one by one, Mr. Johnson told them his story.

The 57-year-old described how he worked at a factory making office supplies owned by Smith Corona, which facing bankruptcy, sold his plant to another company, Ampad, that has recently been acquired by Bain Capital. Ampad promptly fired all of the workers at the plant, and then re-hired most of them. Since they were a union shop, and over half of the employees had been re-hired, the new owners were forced to recognize the union. They tried to renegotiate the contract, but the union eventually decided to go on strike, so Ampad shuttered the once-profitable factory.

…He sat out the 2008 race, but now Mr. Johnson is planning to travel around the country, and wait patiently on the side of Mitt Romney’s campaign events, prepared to tell his story to anyone who wants to listen.

…The DNC, he says, pays for his flights and for a hotel room, and he needled the DNC operative following him around for making him pay for tolls and buy lunch as they travelled around New Hampshire.

My stomach nearly turned when I read this. Sadly, we should expect this nonsense to only exacerbate should Romney get the nomination.

Attacks on Bain Capital as egregious purveyors of Gordon Gekko-style capitalism betray a lack of knowledge of the private equity industry and investing in general. As the esteemed James Pethokoukis explained today:

Well, Romney was really good at what he did. And what he did, initially, was venture capital, providing dough to promising young firms. Then he shifted to private equity, which is a) using investor money and debt to take over a business, b) attempting to improve its profitability (which may mean cutting the workforce), and c) selling the business and, as the WSJ, puts it, “extracting fees and sometimes dividends.”

That a small percentage of the Bain deals supplied most of the firm’s gains should not be surprising. Whether you are a private equity investor or a do-it-yourself stock picker, the key is letting your winners run and limiting the damage from your losers. Recall how famed Fidelity manager Peter Lynch always said he was on the hunt for “ten-baggers”—stocks where he could make ten times his original investment. A good investor is like a good baseball hitter. A .300 average gets you on the all-star team.

See, there is something called the Pareto Principle, which states that “for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.” So 20 percent of customers, taxpayers, and investments often produce 80 percent of sales, revenue, and profits. Bain certainly seems to be another example of the Pareto Principle at play. A few big winners such as Staples, The Sports Authority, and Domino’s may well have provided a good chunk of the firm’s profits and the “over 100,000? jobs created (which Team Romney needs to do better at substantiating).

On the bright side, the emergence of these attacks so early in the campaign grants Team Romney more time to craft a defense.

Gallup recently completed a poll where they measured the “positive intensity” of the various candidates. The details can be found here. How this differs from the usual “favorables”, I’m not sure, but here are the results:

First, Positive Intensity Ratings among Republican and Democrats:

	Rep	Dem
Gingrich	14	-37
Romney	12	-12
Santorum	11	-24
Paul	6	-8
Bachmann	2	-34
Perry	1	-32
Huntsman	0	-4
Obama	-50	27

Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum all three elicit very close to the same level of positive intensity among Republicans. Bachmann, Perry and Huntsman elicit very little. Paul is right in the middle. The big number is Obama’s. The President has a negative intensity rating of -50. That is more than all the Republican candidates’ positive ratings combined!

(more…)

Add Sen. Tom Harkin to the rapidly growing list of Democrats who are begging the Republicans to nominate Newt Gingrich:

“I was in the House with Newt, as a matter of fact, years ago. I can remember him being a bomb thrower at that time. One of those people always lobbing things around. I thought at that time, in his early career in the House, he was irresponsible at that time. I kind of got to know Newt later on, (he’s an) intriguing individual, but perhaps I’ve never met a more undisciplined person in politics in my life and if you’re going to run for president, you have to have discipline. Believe me, I speak from experience on that one and if you’re going to be president you have to have some discipline in how you approach things and how you assess situations.

Newt has never been one to engage mind before opening mouth. He engages mouth before engaging his mind sometimes, most of the time. That doesn’t bode well for him at all. I think there’s some, what I’m picking up around here is there’s a lot of quiet, silent cheering in the Obama Administration and the Obama campaign for Newt to get the nomination. It would be just be heaven-sent if he got the nomination.”

Emphasis added.

Yesterday, Thomas Edsall of the New York Times penned an absolutely vital report on the Democratic Party’s future political strategy. I strongly encourage everyone to read it in its entirety, but I present the highlights:

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

…The 2012 approach treats white voters without college degrees as an unattainable cohort. The Democratic goal with these voters is to keep Republican winning margins to manageable levels, in the 12 to 15 percent range, as opposed to the 30-point margin of 2010 — a level at which even solid wins among minorities and other constituencies are not enough to produce Democratic victories.

…For his part, [Stanley] Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist and a key adviser to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, wrote a memorandum earlier this month, together with James Carville, that makes no mention of the white working class. “Seizing the New Progressive Common Ground” describes instead a “new progressive coalition” made up of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”

…The outline of this strategy for 2012 was captured by Times reporters Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler a few months ago in an article tellingly titled, “Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election.” Calmes and Landler describe how Obama’s re-election campaign plans to deal with the decline in white working class support in Rust Belt states by concentrating on states with high percentages of college educated voters, including Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire.

There are plenty of critics of the tactical idea of dispensing with low-income whites, both among elected officials and party strategists. But Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science at Rutgers, puts the situation plainly. “My sense is that if the Democrats stopped fishing there, it is because there are no fish.”

…A top priority of the less affluent wing of today’s left alliance is the strengthening of the safety net, including health care, food stamps, infant nutrition and unemployment compensation. These voters generally take the brunt of recessions and are most in need of government assistance to survive. According to recent data from the Department of Agriculture, 45.8 million people, nearly 15 percent of the population, depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to meet their needs for food.

The better-off wing, in contrast, puts at the top of its political agenda a cluster of rights related to self-expression, the environment, demilitarization, and, importantly, freedom from repressive norms — governing both sexual behavior and women’s role in society — that are promoted by the conservative movement.

…The political repercussions of gathering minority strength remain unknown. Calculations based on exit poll and Census data suggest that the Democratic Party will become “majority minority” shortly after 2020.

One outcome could be a stronger party of the left in national and local elections. An alternate outcome could be exacerbated intra-party conflict between whites, blacks and Hispanics — populations frequently marked by diverging material interests. Black versus brown struggles are already emerging in contests over the distribution of political power, especially during a current redistricting of city council, state legislative and congressional seats in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.

I had a few immediate reactions after reading this:

1. This could potentially spell big trouble for the Republican Party. It comes as no secret that the Democrats intend to strengthen their hold over many of the fastest-growing demographics in America. This renders it all the more important that the GOP re-focus its efforts to woo back young voters. If we do nothing, and the Democrats refine their pitch to these Americans, we risk losing an entire generation.

2. Thinking geographically, this would result in a Democratic Party even more concentrated on the coasts and in urban areas, with the GOP likely swooping in to the vast interior states. Carried out to the extreme, these dynamics could re-draw the electoral map so that we see states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and/or Wisconsin going red and Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and/or Colorado going more solidly blue.

3. This does not appear to bode well for Mitt Romney, although this strategy may not have enough immediate impact to fundamentally change the 2012 race. Romney’s poll numbers typically increase with the respondents’ income levels, so a party base centered more on the lower end of the scale may not provide as much enthusiasm and fundraising dollars as he would like. Furthermore, Mitt’s potential to reel in suburbanites and more secular affluent types may get countered by the Dems’ full-court press for them.

4. This would play almost perfectly into Mike Huckabee’s hands if he had decided to run. It would have also come as good news to Sarah Palin, had she thrown in her hat.

So, now I ask our esteemed community, what thoughts do you have on this? Does anyone with political knowledge more encyclopedic than mine have any historical comparisons or examples to cite? And how can the GOP ensure long-term viability if the Democrats’ revamped strategy comes to fruition?

The first bubble I ever darkened on an American electoral ballot was that of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney for President and Vice President in 2004.  Being an 18-year-old young conservative, the choice was clear: smaller, more honest government with Bush, versus what would inevitably be scandalous, big government with John Kerry.

Over the next four years, I would watch as the man for whom I had cast my first vote expanded the federal government to its largest size in history, ramped up government spending to its greatest volume in history, engaged in some of the most radical and opaque redistributions of wealth ever undertaken by an American president, and began effectively nationalizing vast swaths of the private economy.

The effects of these actions were a housing bust that never corrected, a recession that turned into a lumbering depression, a dimming and slowing American economy, a new culture of corporatism and dependency, and a social order that has begun unraveling into civil unrest.

Needless to say, I and many others who had initially supported George W. Bush have been seriously disillusioned.  No longer do I (and the majority of grassroots conservatives) merely take it for granted that the individual with the (R) adjacent to their name will necessarily be preferable to the individual with the (D) adjacent to their name.  And it wasn’t just George W. Bush being one bad apple—the entire executive branch, Senate, and Congress, were awash with Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives.  We got government that was larger and more unsavory than anything Democrats had ever delivered us—unprecedented federal regulations on the education system, a huge expansion of Medicare entitlements, and a Great Society program for the entire Middle East under the guise of “protecting us from terrorism”.

I needn’t relate the terrifying numbers to you, which constitute the national debt, the tens of trillions more in unfunded liabilities, and the unfolding population shift that spells crisis for all the entitlement systems.  We have heard these numbers endlessly, and we are all well aware of them.

We are in a serious crisis, and the root of this crisis is a federal government that has stifled the ability of our once robust and well-oiled free market economy to provide for its participants.  The federal government has disoriented and impoverished the individuals comprising the free market slowly, bit by bit, over the course of many decades.  Each additional, little program has contributed a little bit more to the economic and fiscal disaster now upon us.  What the economy needs is not someone who will tinker with, and try to “fix,” all these thousands of poorly-functioning trinkets that, combined, are crushing us beneath their weight.  What the economy needs is someone who will simply throw all of this junk off of our backs entirely.

The charge typically thrown at those who advocate such a massive paring down of federal responsibilities is that we would be “throwing out” these things entirely.  Without federal student loans, we just won’t have college education anymore.  Without subsidies to the arts, we just won’t have any museums.  Without massive entitlement systems, we just won’t have health care in this country.  If the federal government doesn’t do it itself, it just won’t happen.

As conservatives, our immediate response should be, “Bull hockey.”  We know better than that.  We had all these things before the feds got involved in them, and their rate of improvement has either slowed or reversed since the feds got involved.

The biggest portion of federal weight on the private economy is of course not student loans and subsidies to the arts, but rather military spending and entitlement spending.  Once again, the charge of big government-supporters is that if the Pentagon isn’t expropriating and using the wealth we create, then we will be unsafe.  If Medicare and Social Security are not humming with a steady intake of taxpayers’ money, then retirees will waste away in the streets.  On so many other issues, we conservatives readily see and admit that government spending more money on a good or service does not equal a better good or service.  Shoveling more money into the Department of Education does not equal a better educational system, just as shoveling more money into the Department of Defense does not equal a better national defense.  We can and should see huge portions of the defense and entitlement budgets returned to private control.  For every dollar that we take away from a bureaucrat’s pocketbook and return to the individual who earned it, we see an increase in the prudence and ingenuity with which it is put to use.

We need a very, very big change—not only in the size of government, but in the entire attitude and culture that defines the citizenry’s relationship to government.  A President can only accomplish so much, which is why every President accomplishes far less than they promise.  This is why I feel it is so important to risk erring more on the side of small government and individual liberty.  A President who promises to eliminate three federal Cabinet departments will probably only eliminate one—and it will probably be eliminated by joining its staff and budget to other departments in such a way that no net decrease in spending occurs.  A President who promises to cut federal spending by 10% will probably only slow the increase in federal spending by about 10%.  If we really want to see even minor changes in the way the government operates, we need to elect someone who promises to cut federal spending by a full 40%, or someone who will submit a balanced budget to Congress in his or her first or second year in office.  There will be push-back from the legislative branch and other elements of the government, but we will be much farther on the road to a balanced federal budget and an economic recovery with a President who pushes the envelope a great deal and only makes half the progress they intend to, rather than a President who promises to push only a little bit past the status quo and ends up only maintaining the status quo (or worse).

Now is not the time for status quo moderation.  We cannot afford a “safe” (which is not truly safe anyway) presidential candidate that will merely get an “(R)” into the Oval Office without actually making a serious difference in federal spending and monetary policy.  It’s time to move past the red flag / blue flag game we so enjoy playing and actually get serious about changing this government from a huge, limitless one, to a limited, constitutionally constrained one.  Only a libertarian Republican can accomplish this.

If you want an America defined by personal responsibility, free market capitalism, and strong communities, then vote for Ron Paul or Gary Johnson in your state’s primary or caucus.  If you want an America that continues its slow, gravely slide into economic stagnation, uncontrolled government power, and civil strife, then vote for any of the other seven candidates with a great haircut, a perfectly-fitting suit, smooth oratory skills, and a milquetoast commitment to individual freedom and free markets.

Two interesting opinions emanating from the leftists this morning…

First, Patrick Caddell and Doug Schoen, Democratic Party consultants / pollsters, pen an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for Barack Obama to not run for re-election. They want to see Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee:

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.

Stoke that Democratic angst, gentlemen. Nice work…

Meanwhile, former (Bill) Clinton advisor and Carville partner Paul Begala writes an op-ed explaining why he’s praying for Newt Gingrich will be the GOP nominee:

And so, like MacArthur, Newt has returned. I, for one, could not be happier—but then again, I’m a Democrat, so I have to take my political pleasures where I can find them. I seriously doubt Newt will be the GOP nominee. But a guy can dream, can’t he? …

But Newt was a godsend: within weeks of the 1994 GOP landslide—before he’d even taken the speaker’s gavel—Newsweek’s cover dubbed him “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas.” When he whined about his seat on Air Force One coming home from the funeral of the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the New York Daily News’s cover featured Newt in a diaper with the headline “Cry Baby!”

While Dole was looking for ways to avoid a government shutdown, Newt was looking for ways to cause one. He overplayed his hand so terribly that Clinton was able to draw a line in the sand like Col. William Barret Travis. Newt’s intransigence allowed Clinton to show resolve, and the Comeback Kid was reelected by relentlessly attacking what his ads called “Dole-Gingrich.”

I fear the dream won’t last, alas.

Begala, of course, doesn’t have many nice things to say about Romney, but I agree agree with his final analysis: “at some point Republicans will wise up” and nominate Romney as our strongest candidate. If Begala could get a few more of his Democrat friends to publicly pine for Gingrich, that would sure speed up the process…

The following was taken from a blog at MittRomney.Com:

President Obama has accomplished what no other president in modern history has: unemployment above 8% for each full month of his presidency, one million home foreclosures, $15 trillion in debt, and the loss of our prized AAA credit rating. In their desperation to hold onto power, the Obama political machine will say and do anything to distract from President Obama’s abysmal economic record.

In recent weeks, the president’s rhetoric has gone from clueless to divisive. And his campaign machine has turned all of its focus towards their greatest threat: a conservative businessman that knows how the real economy works.

By looking at what the Democrats are saying, it’s hard to misconstrue their obsession with Governor Romney:

• …[T]he Democrats referenced Mitt Romney in 24 of the 31 posts on their debate watch commentary website. No other GOP candidate was mentioned by name (emphasis added).

• Ben LaBolt, Press Secretary for Obama for America, references Mitt Romney in 24 of his last 28 tweets on Twitter.

• Over the last 10 days, DNC Press Secretary Melanie Roussell has made mention of Mitt Romney over 50 times.

• In the last 10 days, over half of all blog posts at democrats.org mention Mitt Romney.

• In recent weeks, the DNC has released 26 attack videos on their YouTube channels. Unsurprisingly, all 26 videos have only one target — Mitt Romney.

It’s easy to see why Mitt is on their mind. With Governor Romney’s record of creating jobs and turning around businesses in the private sector, saving the 2002 Winter Games, and balancing the Massachusetts budget every year as governor, can you blame them? Democrats realize that Mitt Romney is the only Republican who can defeat President Obama in 2012.

Nice logo.

While their rhetorical spin might be debatable — they are the main Romney site after all — the facts they cite are nonetheless quite revealing. It would appear that Obama and his people are beginning to focus their attacks almost exclusively upon Mitt Romney. If you couple that with the fact that Intrade now has Mitt at 71% to win the nomination, one gets the distinct impression that the smart money is starting to coalesce around Romney. Mark Halperin of Time Magazine wrote just today, “As we hit the homestretch, there is a palpable sense (reflected in polling data) among voters, press, pundits, and even late-night comics that Romney is the most likely to win the nomination.”

Crossroads GPS, an arm of the Super PAC American Crossroads, is up with a new television ad today in five key swing states: Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Take a look:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr7HzKug5YM[/youtube]

At first, I was slightly perplexed by this ad. Why was a Republican PAC running an ad entitled “Two Presidents” – about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama? Why was a GOP group setting up Bill Clinton as the foil in this presidential drama? Then the brilliance of this ad came shining through.

To understand the full depth of this ad, we must travel back to the mid 1980s. The Democratic Party was in somewhat of a turmoil after Jimmy Carter’s dismal term and Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980. They nominated uber-liberal Walter Mondale in 1984 and watched, panic-stricken, as Reagan pulled out an even bigger landslide victory in 1984. Deciding that they were done playing to the fringe elements of their party, the Democrats veered toward centrist moderation in an attempt to rebrand themselves and sell themselves to the American people anew.

Senator Gary Hart from Colorado became their poster boy. He placed second to Mondale in the 1984 primaries, and was an appealing, centrist, moderate candidate upon whom the new Democratic revolution could be built. He was on track to win the 1988 primaries before an extramarital affair sidelined his candidacy. Uber-liberal Michael Dukakis ended up winning the nomination, and the Democrats again lost the general election by a large margin.

In late 1991, however, an appealing, young, moderate southern Governor jumped into the Democratic primary – and ended up not only winning the primary but also the White House. The Democratic revolution and rebranding, originally scheduled to take place in 1988, began instead in 1992 with the ascendancy of Governor Bill Clinton to the highest office of the land. Clinton was elected on the backs of the so-called “New Democrats” and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) – both groups rejecting the liberal extremism that the Democrats had turned to over the previous three decades.

Bill Clinton ran a campaign and, ostensibly, a White House based on this new “third way” of centrism in national politics. After Clinton became the only Democratic President to be re-elected since FDR, people really began to sit up and take notice of the New Democrats, and Bill and Hillary gained quite the following in Democratic circles. After Bill’s extramarital follies, sympathy especially went out to Hillary for all she had to endure.

Thus, when it came time for choosing a Democratic nominee in 2007/08 – after eight years of having George W Bush in the White House instead of New Democrat Al Gore – the Democratic Party looked poised once again to choose the DLC candidate in Hillary Clinton. Clinton had chaired the DLC for a while during Bush’s tenure as President. She got endorsements from other DLC chairs, including the highly touted endorsement from centrist Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. But in a long, bitter fight (which produced the PUMA* movement), she eventually lost to the charismatic newcomer Barack Obama.

Fast forward three years now, to present day. The electric atmosphere of hope and change that surrounded Obama’s candidacy – and initially his presidency – has dissipated. The President who once enjoyed sky-high approval ratings (as much as 70 or 80% in some polls) now languishes in the low- to mid-forties. And it makes sense that many of those who are disaffected would be the DLC / Clinton type of Democrats who must be wondering “What if…?” right about now.

And so in comes American Crossroads with their latest ad presenting Bill Clinton as a foil to Barack Obama. In this spot, they make the implicit argument: Obama is too liberal. You’ve been through this before. Remember Mondale? Dukakis? You had your chance to continue the centrist Democratic revolution, but Obama took that away from you. Hillary and Bill in the White House would have turned out so differently…

The goal of this ad isn’t to connect with Republican voters (although labeling Obama as a tax-raiser will have that bonus side effect). It’s not to connect with the shrinking number of vehement Obama supporters. It’s purpose — brilliant in concept — is to connect with those who wanted Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee in 2008. It is to connect with the DLC and New Democrat types who yearn for a vibrant, healthy centrist party. The goal of this ad is to either get those voters to vote against Obama next year, or, absent that, at least get them to not show up to vote for him.

That’s where the placement of this ad comes into play. Let’s look at who won the states where Crossroads is running this ad in the 2008 Democratic primary: Florida? Clinton. Ohio? Clinton. Pennsylvania? Clinton. In fact, those were three of Clinton’s strongest states in the primaries. Obama won Colorado and North Carolina, but those states are going to be very close when it comes to the general election – and depressing the turnout for Obama even a little bit could tip those states to the red column next year.

This ad does a fantastic job of implicitly dredging up the debate over the future of the Democratic Party and making a large faction of the Democrats question their choice of Obama in 2008. Will it be enough to make them question the choice in 2012? Here’s hoping.

*PUMA stood for “party unity my ass” and was an outlet for disaffected Clinton supporters and DLC-types who did not want to fall in line behind Obama after Hillary lost the nomination. Eventually, the movement died out as the DLC and Hillary herself finally endorsed Obama and Bill Clinton gave a much-touted unity speech at the DNC. This ad seeks to tap into any angst that remains from that movement, and stoke its fire once again.

Amidst all the (deserved) hoopla over the Ohio initiative and (misunderstood) hoopla over the Mississippi personhood initiative, it’s worth taking a look at some of the other local elections last night. In particular, I draw your attention to Virginia and Pennsylvania. If current trends hold, Republicans look set to gain two seats, thereby tying the state senate, and making Lieutenant Governor Bill Boling the tie-breaking vote in the senate. Republicans also picked up at least half a dozen seats in the VA house of delegates.

This was a pretty decent night for VA Republicans, and this includes Republicans in suburban and exurban communities. Republicans ran a couple of very close senate races in the Northern Virginia suburbs, and it’s also worth noting that, in suburban/exurban Loudoun county, the board of supervisors increased from 5-4 Democratic control to a 9-0 Republican blow-out. In Pennsylvania, Republicans also improved their local representation in all of the “five counties” around Philadelphia accept Montgomery, and a number of local office-holders threatening congressional runs against Republican freshman Mike FitzPatrick suffered electoral bruising (H/T red racing horses). What this indicates to me is that the suburbs, a source of real strength for Obama, haven’t yet returned to the Democratic fold.

Granted, it wasn’t as bad a night for suburban Democrats as 2009 or 2010, but the fact that there really wasn’t much of a suburban drift for Democrats should still worry the President’s reelection campaign. For Republicans, suburban voters will be a necessary target this election. We need a candidate who can appeal to these swingy folks, keep white working class voters on-board and, for the future if nothing else, chip away at Obama’s support among Hispanic/Latino voters. I’ve previously been skeptical of the argument from cultural cues, but if the suburbs are really in play, it might behoove Republicans to nominate a candidate who is at least difficult for the Obama campaign to demonize in affluent, culturally moderate areas. And it would be good to pick a Vice-President with a similar broad appeal. As much as I don’t want to lose him as my governor, could this be Bob McDonnell’s hour? And as much as conservatives have qualms about settling for him, might Mitt Romney be the only candidate left standing who can win in the suburbs?

(This post has been updated to remove inaccurate information about VA senate seats picked up by Republicans).

In a bit of news that is sure to warm the cockles of MWS’s* heart, the word is out that Jon Huntsman has won a poll. His total more than doubles Mitt Romney score, who came in second. In fact, his score was better than the next five people combined. That is quite the decisive victory for the former Utah Governor.:

Which ONE of the following people do you think is most qualified to be president?

• Jon Huntsman — 49
• Mitt Romney — 22
• Rudy Giuliani — 10
• Ron Paul — 9
• Chris Christie — 3
• Newt Gingrich — 3
• Herman Cain — 2
• Sarah Palin — 1
• Rick Perry — 1
• Rick Santorum — 0
• Michele Bachmann — 0

Where did Huntsman make his breakthrough? It was in the straw poll taken during the “Take Back the American Dream Conference 2011″ put on by the Democracy Corps/The Campaign for America’s Future people this week.

(more…)

Rasmussen reports that membership in the two parties is for all practical purposes dead even with the Republicans maintaining a miniscule 0.2% lead. Here are their results:

• Republicans: 33.9%
• Democrats: 33.7%
• Neither one: 32.4%

This cannot be good news for the President and his party only thirteen months from the 2012 elections. It’s not all peaches and cream for the Republicans, either. The number of people not affiliated with either party is almost one third of the electorate. We have to sell more than half of those on our nominees if we want to emerge victorious Nov 7, 2012.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has apparently ignored the advice of our fearless Commander-in-Chief to employ “civility” in our politics:

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” the California congresswoman told constituents in footage that appeared on ABC affiliate KABC in Los Angeles, not backing down from comments made about President Obama earlier in the week. “This is a tough game. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened. And as far as I’m concerned — the tea party can go straight to hell.”

Of course, the entirely objective mainstream media will overlook this example of hypocrisy in the Democratic Party. After all, only the Tea Party bears the guilt of devolving the public debate into anger, discord, and disrespect.

Clintonista Ed Rendell says it will be so:

Gov. Cuomo can for get running for pres ident in 2016 be cause Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to beat him — and everyone else — in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination, predicts one of the nation’s best-known Democrats.

Cuomo’s presidential prospect are “dim” because “it’s going to be Hillary Clinton in 2016,” said former Pennsylvania Gov. and Democratic National Committee Chairman Ed Rendell.

Democrats rarely nominate their losing candidates from a previous presidential year, so Hillary would be sailing against the tide of history. That said, the fact remains that the Clintons’ ability to communicate with mainstream America is second to none among Democrats, and a populist Democrat like Hillary would prove an interesting challenger to a GOP president like Mitt Romney.

In case you haven’t heard, Standard & Poor’s just announced that they will downgrade the U.S.’s credit rating:

S&P dropped the ranking one level to AA+, after warning on July 14 that it would reduce the rating in the absence of a “credible” plan to lower deficits even if the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit was lifted. The U.S. was awarded the top credit ranking by New York-based S&P in 1941. It kept the outlook at “negative” amid the failure to end Bush-era tax cuts.

“The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics,” S&P said in a statement today.

…S&P said it may lower the long-term rating to AA within the next two years if spending reductions are lower than agreed to, interest rates rise or “new fiscal pressures” during the period result in higher general government debt.

Well, we can’t act surprised. Ratings agencies have warned us for years that our elected officials needed to enact structural entitlement reform to maintain top-quality credit. One can’t help but assume that the Obama administration convinced S&P to wait on making the decision official until the markets closed today.

In a shameless abdication of reality, the media has already begun attempts to lay the blame on the Republican Party or the ratings agencies themselves. Just look at some of these headlines: “Is the U.S. Credit Rating a Victim of GOP Sabotage?” (written by none other than Yahoo! Finance’s economics editor) and “S&P Downgrades the U.S. – But Why?”

How will President Obama try to wriggle out from under this one? Sure, he can lean on his tried-and-true tactic of blaming the opposition party, but the fact remains that he has bowed to political considerations and avoided entitlement reform (other than adding an additional entitlement, of course…) as much as possible, in an attempt to force the GOP to “make the first move” and thus create more fodder for the negative attacks he vowed to cast aside but has instead embraced.

Simply put, the President had his chance; with the stratospheric amount of goodwill he carried when he entered office, he could have harnessed the opportunity to advocate true entitlement and tax reform. However, he passed. Instead, he opted to pour his political capital into an ill-begotten “stimulus” plan that did more to safeguard public union jobs than it did to fund the infrastructure projects Democrats so love, in addition to a frighteningly complex and opaque health care bill.

Try as he might, I can’t see how anybody other than hardcore Democratic partisans and the lowest of the low-information voters can let Obama slide on this. The problem didn’t start with Obama, nor with George W. Bush (although both did their part to contribute), but he sure didn’t do anything to help.

CNN/ORC Debt Ceiling Survey

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president?

• Approve 45% (45%) [48%] {54%}
• Disapprove 52% (54%) [48%] {45%}
• No opinion 2% (2%) [5%] {2%}

Note: Results in parenthesis taken July 18-20. Results in brackets taken June 3-7. Results in curly brackets taken May 24-26.

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?

• Approve 14%
• Disapprove 84%

As you may know, an agreement between Barack Obama and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress would raise the federal government’s debt ceiling through the year 2013 and make major cuts in
government spending over the next few years.

Based on what you have read or heard, do you approve or disapprove of that agreement?

• Approve 44%
• Disapprove 52%
• No opinion

As you may know, the agreement would raise the debt ceiling through the year 2013. Regardless of
how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of raising the debt ceiling
at this time?

• Approve 48%
• Disapprove 51%
• No opinion

As you may know, the agreement would cut about one trillion dollars in government spending over
the next ten years with provisions to make additional spending cuts in the future. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the cuts in government
spending included in the debt ceiling agreement?

• Approve 65%
• Disapprove 30%
• No opinion 4%

And as you may know, the agreement does not include any tax increases for business or higher-income Americans. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the fact that the debt ceiling agreement does not include tax increases for those
groups?

• Approve 40%
• Disapprove 60%

Do you think that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by Tuesday would create a crisis for the United
States, major problems, minor problems, or no problems at all?

• Crisis 14%
• Major problems 38%
• Minor problems 31%
• No problems at all 15%

Who do you think is more responsible for the debt ceiling agreement? Do you think Barack Obama
and the Democrats in Congress are more responsible for that agreement, or do you think the Republicans in Congress are more responsible for that agreement?

• Obama/Democrats in Congress 34%
• Republicans in Congress 42%
• Both equally 18%
• Neither/no opinion 6%

Next, please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way each of the following has handled the negotiations over the debt ceiling in Washington over the past few days.

Barack Obama 46% approve/53% disapprove (-7%)
The Republican leaders in Congress 30% approve/68% disapprove (-38%)
The Democratic leaders in Congress 35% approve/63% disapprove (-28%)

Interviews with 860 adult Americans conducted by telephone on August 1, 2011. The margin of error is +/- 3.5%

A few follow-up points:

1. Ouch. These numbers certainly don’t look good for Republicans. Apparently, the majority of the public views our Republican leaders’ performance as childish, unreasonable, and selfish (maximizing political gain at the expense of “reasonable compromise”). Prepare to see the Democrats paint their Republican counterparts with this brush well into the future.

2. After seeing this, the decision of all the Republican presidential candidates except Jon Huntsman to oppose the deal make more sense (at least from a political standpoint).

3. This poll gives the Dems even more ammo to wax poetic about the need for a “balanced approach”, filled with “shared sacrifice” and “millionaire and billionaire corporate jet owners paying their fair share” in future deals. In fact, we’ll probably hear the words “balanced approach” so often from Democratic leaders, they might as well tattoo them on their foreheads.

By TwitterButtons.com

Sorry to spoil the President’s victory lap and throw some cold water on his fire, but the issue of the day – the economy – still looms large:

Manufacturers had their weakest growth in two years in July, a sign that the economy could weaken this summer.

The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing executives, said Monday that its index of manufacturing activity fell to 50.9 percent in July from 55.3 percent in June. The reading was the lowest since July 2009 — one month after the recession officially ended.

…The disappointing report on manufacturing is the first major reading on how the economy performed in July. It suggests the dismal economic growth in the first half of the year could extend into the July-September quarter.

…The economy expanded at a dismal 1.3 percent annual rate in the April-June period after an even worse 0.4 percent increase in the first three months of the year, the government said Friday.

…The index fell in May to 53.5 from April’s reading of 60.4. That was the sharpest one-month drop since 1984.

Employers have responded by pulling back on hiring. The economy added just 18,000 net jobs in June, the fewest in nine months, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent. Hiring by manufacturers was nearly flat in the April-June period.

Of course, when the economy continues to sputter into 2012, Obama will most likely suggest that the spending cuts contained in the debt ceiling/deficit agreement contributed to the malaise.

Typical of Keynesians, the President wants to have his cake and eat it, too; he stumps for increased government spending to end the recession, calls for even more when these measures fail to have their desired effects, and then rails against the massive federal deficit largely caused, of course, by spending.

When it comes down to it and people challenge Kenynesians on why their policy prescriptions rarely, if ever, achieve their expected growth effects, they often take the easy way out and argue that they simply didn’t go far enough.

By TwitterButtons.com