Enjoy.

• WV-Sen: Raese's Residency Issues Continue. (Chuckie Corra)


• Game on, say theyoungturks, spotting the Silver Lining in Corporate Attack on Democrats.


• It seems the President has given up on the mid-terms... (tarheel74)


• It’s Utterly Inhumane writes Forgiven, on the systematic disenfranchisement of young minority men.


• Rescued a day late, but you can still get involved in Blog Action Day: Water. (The Opportunity Agenda)


• The Media Consortium on the financial and human costs of enforcement before reform in Weekly Diaspora: The Burden of Record-Breaking Deportations.

And your bonus: The Mis-Informant, Part 2.

In December 2012, the country will be ruminating its recent election of the first woman, a polarizing survivor. President Obama will welcome Steve Scully, C-SPAN political editor and occasional host of Washington Journal, to the Oval Office for a wistful interview. Mr. Scully may invite the president to admit any mistakes.

That is where Cynthia Tucker’s op-ed, “Obama tried too hard to work with Republicans,” in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution comes in. Tucker’s piece helpfully captures establishment thought. Undue emphasis on the lack of bipartisanship is an almost complimentary critique, and will be articulately embraced by a reflective 44th president in his exist interview with Mr. Scully. Of course it is ridiculous, but Steve Scully is too classy to prod. After all, in his 2008 interview with President Bush, Mr. Scully graciously allowed Bush to credulously ponder how anyone could think of him as mendacious.

Boasts of bipartisanship are a fatuous, but necessary, aspect of electioneering. In handling Republican opposition, President Obama struck an appropriate tone in the early days of his administration. Bipartisanship for the Obama administration has meant peeling off one or two Republican votes, and maybe hailing such as unprecedented unity. And that’s perfectly fine. Generally speaking, Republicans are nihilistic and unserious. For his part, the president is plagued by the failed substance of his policies. That’s the fundamental part that escapes the logic of Cynthia Tucker et al. Various exceptions to his tone, lack of emotional attachment, and his futile attempts to reach across the aisle, are ultimately mild critiques.

Paul Krugman was exactly right regarding the size of the stimulus. To be sure, the Recovery Act was a measure worthy of support. I have seen reports in TIME on the Recovery Act’s administrative success, and they are impressive. (One program to hit a few snags is the weatherization program, but it isn’t devastating.) This is good, but there was never any reason to believe the other hype; specifically the White House’s claim of keeping unemployment below 8% as a result of the Act.

There's more...

Overall, Charlie Cook is predicting that Democrats chances of losing over 50 seats is greater than their chances of holding the losses below 45 seats:

“At the moment, 22 Democratic seats, including 10 open seats and 12 incumbents, sit in the Lean or Likely Republican columns, while two Republican seats sit in the Lean or Likely Democratic columns, for a net of 20 Republican seats. That means Republicans only need to win 21 of the 40 seats in the Toss Up column to win a majority, not even counting many of the 30 Democratic seats in the Lean Democratic column that are rapidly becoming more competitive. At this point, all but four of the Democrats in our Toss Up column have trailed in at least one public or private poll, and Democrats’ fortunes in most of these seats are on the decline."

Larry Sabato is sticking with 47 seats in the House, though he hints that  a few more may be added by election day. Nate Silver is at 45 seats. Pretty much a consensus of a majority, but not by a lot, for the House. I can't imagine that Pelosi stays past 2012 if that's the case, as redistricting is going to make it a long haul.

Also, two papers to dive into. First:

Underscoring the importance of the enthusiasm gap, Republicans lead 50%-41% in the 86 Democrat seats among high interest voters – those who rate their interest as an 8-10 on a scale of 1-10. That is reinforced by the finding that low interest voters prefer the Democrat by a 32% GOP/55% Dem margin. So, the group that Democrats are doing best with don’t care.

In a word- Yep. In that sense, its just like '94. The second:

For the first time in 70 years, Republican turnout in statewide mid-term primaries (for U.S. Senate and governor) exceeded Democratic turnout in a primary turnout season that produced the second lowest turnout ever.

Democratic average turnout in the 42 states which held Democratic statewide primaries was 15,482,969 or 8.2 percent of the eligible electorate, a new low turnout record eclipsing the 9.0 percent who voted in 2006. This continues a trend in which Democratic primary turnout has fallen in almost every year since the 1950s.

2006 did not turn toward the Democrats until after most primaries were past. When Lamont upset Lieberman, in August, it shifted the whole terrain and message to one of anti-war anti-occupation. This cycle has no such late shift, just a long partisan slog of nonsense claims heading into the finale.

 

Nationally, the 2010 elections have seen an explosion of money from outside groups.

In the Georgia gubernatorial campaign, for example, three groups not from the Empire State of the South --the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), Republican Governors Association (RGA) and SEIU International-- pumped more than $3 million into the state to influence the election [SOURCE: State Ethics Commission].

The result of all this outside money is an increasingly negative campaign permeated with ads focused on attacks, and not solutions.

A new poll commissioned by the Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College says that both Democrats and Republicans oppose groups like the DGA and SEIU influencing their elections with outside money.

A survey of 1,000 Americans nationwide suggests a wide majority believe it is unacceptable for groups to spend heavily on political advertising in districts where they are not located, a phenomenon dubbed "outside money."

Self-described independents expressed the most opposition to outside election spending, at about 72 percent. Self-described Democrats and Republicans both oppose the practice, at about 65 percent, respectively.

Self-described conservatives, liberals and moderates oppose outside spending by about 65 percent, while a full 75 percent of Americans aged 50 and older oppose it, too. About 63 percent of Americans who earn more than $100,000 and 69 percent of those making less than $25,000 oppose outside spending.

This poll was conducted by Zogby International, and it tells us the obvious. At all levels of government, we need real campaign finance reform. At all levels of government, we need limits on spending from outside groups. We need limits on campaign contributions, and we need more transparency on those disclosure reports.

The full results of this poll can be seen here.

It would be a damned shame if we finally lost a constituency as prized as seniors because of the current Democratic president. And yet that appear to be exactly what’s happening. In the summer of 2009, there were reports of a Democratic “problem” with seniors. Victoria McGrane and Chris Frates, writing in POLITICO, described how the town hall rage was being fueled by senior citizens. Seniors, angered by proposed cuts to Medicare floating around Congress, controversial talk of “death panels,” and the like, promised to be a concern for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. In 2008 they backed John McCain over Barack Obama by 8 points.

More than a year later, the news hasn’t gotten any better according to The Washington Post. A full 66% of older voters are enthusiastic about voting in November, and most of them to ready to cashier the Democrats. And they should be. Since they are free of the responsibilities of governing, the vocal conservative opposition has often been right.

In addition to the ones that exist with private insurance, the possibility of governmental rationing regimes is not beyond the realm of possibility. People often confuse them with the completely innocuous concept of end-of-life counseling, which had been supported by Republicans in years past. The death panels, however, are notions of governmental bureaucrats—full of fulsome praise for the British system of rationing—with the power to deny care for the sake of cost-cutting. Responding to the criticism his work has engendered, bioethicist and administration official Ezekiel Emanuel assured us he was “writing really for political philosophers. [T]he average person, it's not what they're used to reading.”

As far back as 2009, there were new reports contradicting the president’s public statements that there were no cuts to Medicare in any of the proposed legislation. These days you find conservative activists warning us in the pages of The Wall Street Journal that the new reform law will: “Cut $818 billion from Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) from 2014-2023, the first 10 years of its full implementation; [Cuts] for Medicare Part B (physicians fees and other services) brings the total cut to $1.05 trillion over the first 10 years.”

There's more...

So the story going around among the Obama faithful are that the Progressives base needs to get enthusiastic and vote and clap harder and all that. But then you read a story like this in the New York Magazine and you come away with the following impression:

1. The President is resigned to the fact that the Republicans will gain control of Congress.
2. He does not find any mistakes with his legislative method.
3. The problems the Democrats face this season are according to him due to miscommunication (whose?).
4. He actually thought he would be able to heal the ideological divide.
5. He still thinks he can get bipartisan support once the Republicans gain congress.
6. The President is strangely detached and frankly seems uncomfortable and even reluctant to govern.

So those were my impressions. None of them gives me any "hope" or confidence regarding the outcome this midterm elections. But frankly for the President to even talk about the Republican takeover of Congress just reinforces the fact that like most of his legislative "battles", he has waved the white flag even before the fight began.

There's more...

Enjoy.

• Cracks in the Media Frame Propping Up the Tea Party? (Project Vote)


• (Video link) Obama and Black Bloggers at White House.  AAPPundit iscaustiously optimistic.


• An update from Daphne Eviatar Human Rights 1st on the Ghailani trial: Former Gitmo Prisoner's Case Comes Down to What He Knew and When He Knew It.


• Inoljt weighs in on the future (?) of the DREAM Act.


• The Media Consortium's Weekly Audit: Will Obama Save Homeowners From Wall Street’s Latest Fraud Scheme?

And your bonus, PPP - Breaking down the enthusiam gap:

Here's a lesson everyone interested in polling needs to get down between now and the election: the enthusiasm gap is not spread evenly across the country.

We've polled 23 different states since switching over to likely voters. Likely voters in those states this year report having voted for Barack Obama by an average of 1 point. Obama won the 23 states by an average of 9 points. So taken as a whole we're seeing on average an electorate that's 8 points more Republican friendly than in 2008.

Via Politico:

JONATHAN KARL review in WSJ of "Roosevelt's Purge," By Susan Dunn (361 pages, $27.95): "In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt trounced Republican Alf Landon by 24 percentage points in the popular vote and won the biggest electoral landslide in American history. ... Yet the popular president soon found that all his political capital wasn't worth much in Congress. 'Just nine months after Roosevelt's landslide election, opposition in his own party had grown assertive, militant, and confident -- and the New Deal had come to a standstill,' writes Susan Dunn ... Ms. Dunn, a professor at Williams College, delves into a fascinating and overlooked aspect of the FDR presidency: Roosevelt's brazen effort to assert control over his own party in the summer of 1938. ... All of the Democratic senators targeted by FDR coasted to victory in their Democratic primaries. ... In the general election, Roosevelt didn't fare any better. Republicans picked up eight Senate seats and nearly doubled their numbers in the House. ... He would never again attempt to intervene in a party primary. He had learned a lesson that needs re-learning from time to time: Political purges are more effectively done by the voters, not by the power brokers in Washington."

This looks like a great book, and those last lines above certainly relay the CW of DC. But hasn't Jim DeMint, in 2010, turned all of that on its head? I look at what the conservative DeMint has done over the past year, from a caucus of 1 or 2 in the Senate, and wonder when, if ever, we will see such a move by a progressive Senator.

In a recent political panel that Chris Bowers and I were on, at the AMP summit, he addressed the question of why there are not more primary challenges, and why for those that there are (Lieberman, Halter), they are met with hostility from the DC establishment. His basic point was that a pragmaticism prevailed as the dominating ideology at the base of the democratic party, as oppossed to a conservatism that exists at the base of the Republican party.

It got me thinking about the progressive label, and the lack of meaning it has for the Democratic party. I can identify three different strands of it:

Pragmatic Progressive-- incremental approach, traditional, status quo.

Liberal Progressive-- establishment, identity and issue politics.

Libertarian Progressive-- individual and collective, radical approach.

Just reflecting on my own political involvement, its been the case that I have worked for politicians that are in the first group, while I try to fathom the thinking of the second group. Mark Warner is a pragmatic progressive, and Crashing The Gate was an attempt to move outside traditional liberal identity and issue politics via partisanship. I think its time to get more radical, and move outside the box.

OK, I won't attempt to tie the post together, it moved into a different direction than I anticipated at the onset. The nice thing about blogging is that that it doesn't matter, so there you go.

Things are not going particularly well for President Obama. Not wanting to contribute to his troubles, there is an area where I think the president deserves a passionate defense: The recent contretemps over his iPod. Like most controversies in the news, this is extremely late. People offended by Jay-Z and Lil Wayne’s place on the presidential iPod should know that Obama betrayed a love for rap some 2½ years ago. On the morning after a particularly bruising debate with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then-Sen. Obama met with a throng of supporters, flipped off Sen. Clinton, and then brushed his shoulders off, a la Jay-Z.  

What do you think of rap? Has it been unfairly attacked for destroying family values?

By definition, rock & roll is rebel music, which means if it's not being criticized, it's probably not doing its job. I am troubled sometimes by the misogyny and materialism of a lot of rap lyrics, but I think the genius of the art form has shifted the culture and helped to desegregate music. Music was very segregated back in the Seventies and Eighties — you'll remember that when MTV first came on, it wasn't until Thriller that they played Michael.

I know Jay-Z. I know Ludacris. I know Russell Simmons. I know a bunch of these guys. They are great talents and great businessmen, which is something that doesn't get emphasized enough. It would be nice if I could have my daughters listen to their music without me worrying that they were getting bad images of themselves.

That was Barack Obama in Rolling Stone on June 25, 2008.

Obama came off as a thoughtful, mainstream listener of all kinds of music, including rap. While almost no one embraces the violent gangsterism of some rap, its more talented promulgators like Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur, and even Lil Wayne, to a degree, are enthralling figures. In other words, they spit catchy stuff.

There's more...

I'm sitting here in San Rafael with John Laird for the California gubernatorial debate post-mortem, starting right now 8 PM pacific and airing for one hour.