The IRS, always friendless, now is a pariah. Republicans can’t stop condemning it. Democrats can’t stop agreeing.

Targeting Tea Party groups for scrutiny, even if through incompetence, not intention, turned the IRS into a nasty carbuncle on the governing body.

Carbuncles are never good. Strength-sapping, painful, ugly, they’re to be avoided. Here’s the thing, though: while every politician in Washington is cursing the carbuncle, hardly one has complained of the cancer killing the patient. Allowing unlimited, unaccounted-for corporate spending in elections is a malignancy threatening the life of the republic. Permitting Tea Party, left-wing, libertarian, middle-of-the-road – whatever – groups to define themselves as untaxed social welfare organizations that may accept unlimited, untaxed, secret corporate gifts and sponsor political ads is a sarcoma on democracy.

Nobody wants the IRS singling out applicants based on politics. The American people do, however, want someone, if not the IRS, someone else, somewhere to do something about the perversion of election finance. The IRS is hardly a good candidate for that job. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could help. A constitutional amendment would be better.

The IRS has some regulatory power. In the Tea Party case, the IRS was examining applications for “social welfare” or 501(c)(4) status, which is commonly used to circumvent campaign finance laws.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of political groups sought “social welfare” status instead. That’s because of a 2001 law requiring political outfits to disclose their donors. “Social welfare” organizations don’t have to do that. Politicized “social welfare” groups sprouted even faster after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the Citizens United case in 2010 that corporations are people free to spend unlimited cash in elections.

“Social welfare” groups provided corporations with the ability to spend untold millions on candidates while keeping that a secret from customers and shareholders.

But here’s the problem: the tax code requires these groups to work “exclusively” to promote social welfare. Regulations permit some political activity but forbid these groups from functioning primarily for politics.

Despite that, many of these groups, from the right-wing Crossroads GPS to the lefty Priorities USA, clearly operate primarily for politics. They spent hundreds of millions in the last Presidential election. Watchdog groups have filed a dozen complaints in the past two years objecting to this apparent violation. The IRS never responded.

Not much enforcement there.

The IRS made a little effort in 2011, but backed off when GOP leaders complained.

Gifts to charities are tax exempt, but those to “social welfare” groups are not. Well, they’re not supposed to be. The IRS sent letters to a group of big donors two years ago informing them that gifts to “social welfare” groups may be subject to tax. Immediately, Republican senators Orrin G. Hatch and Jon Kyl accused the IRS of partisanship. After which the IRS “folded like wet cardboard,” said Sheila Krumholz and Robert Weinberger of the Center for Responsive Politics in a New York Times article.

No enforcement there.

Another government entity that could help cure the dark money disease is the SEC.

No enforcement there either, though.

Languishing at the SEC is a proposal to require publicly-traded companies to disclose the money they pour into these “social welfare” groups – funds described as “dark money” because the source is concealed. The idea is that shareholders have a right to know how their investment is used. And it’s a popular concept, with more comments filed on this proposal than on any other suggested rule in SEC history – half a million – the vast majority in favor.

Citing the IRS scandal, Republicans demanded last week that the SEC kill the proposal to require corporations to unveil their attempts to influence elections. New SEC Chair Mary Jo White refused.

Good sign. But still no actual enforcement.

One method of enforcement is on the move. It is a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would reverse the Citizens United decision that corporations are people with First Amendment rights to free speech, which includes spending unlimited money on politics. Already, 13 states and more than 300 municipalities have called for approval of the Democracy is For People Amendment. It was introduced in Congress by Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch.

It says natural persons who are citizens of the United States may make campaign contributions. Corporations do not fit that definition of human beings, and as a result would be prohibited from making political gifts.

It would allow contributions from Political Action Committees, which are comprised of human beings who get together and donate under the IRS’ political committee rules – Section 527. So groups of union members or wealthy CEOs could continue donating.

Move to Amend activists were heartened by a Pennsylvania judge’s recent decision that corporations are not people and thus do not have a constitutional right to privacy. Washington County President Judge Debbie O’Dell-Seneca is no Supreme Court justice. But she understands that there’s an important distinction in the fact that people can be heartened while corporations can’t be. Her decision included this analysis:

“It is axiomatic that corporations, companies and partnership have no “spiritual nature,” “feelings,” “intellect,” “beliefs,” “thoughts,” “emotions,” or “sensations,” because they do not exist in the manner that humankind exists. . .They cannot be ‘let alone’ by government, because businesses are but grapes, ripe upon the vine of the law, that the people of this Commonwealth raise, tend, and prune at their pleasure and need.”

Corporations can’t “suffer” illness. They can, however, kill democracy.

To stop toxic corporate interference in elections, the American people could demand that the IRS, which is supposed to be non-partisan, decide exactly what constitutes political activity. They could hope the SEC will do the right thing. What they should do, however, is pass a constitutional amendment clarifying once and for all that corporations are not human and can’t usurp the rights of human beings.

Over at The Week, I make the argument that presidential scandal politics usually fail to lift the political prospects of the party outside the White House. No party has reaped a political reward from pushing scandal since Nixon, yet both parties have repeatedly tried.

However, short of impeachment or electoral gains, opposition parties may be sated by simply using scandal to distract the President from advancing his agenda. But today, that doesn’t make sense. Republicans already have the numbers in Congress to block what they want. And the main item on Obama’s legislative agenda for the year is one that leading Republicans now support: immigration reform.

Furthermore, distraction cuts two ways. By flogging scandal, the opposition party risks distracting themselves from developing and selling their own governing philosophy and policy agenda. And Republicans are already in a deep intellectual hole, lacking an agenda that makes a break from failed Bushonomics and might be taken seriously by the public.

Republican might also want to ask themselves: do we really believe there’s any there there?

Does it even make sense that Obama would have lost re-election if he quickly blamed Al Qaeda for Benghazi, having already proven his counterterrorism bona fides?

Does it makes sense that an IRS managed by a Bush administration holdover would allow a plot to prevent Republicans from defeating Obama by deliberately targeting county-level Tea Party groups but blessed Karl Rove’s new machine with tax-exempt status?

Is it even a scandal for the Justice Department to apply current law and subpoena phone records in a sensitive national security leak investigation? Controversial and worthy of debate, but no heads are going to roll if it’s legal.

Meanwhile, there are real scandals out there: festering crises that demand policy solutions and government action. For example:

1. Carbon dioxide atmospheric levels hovering around 400 parts per million. Some argue that we need to be at 350 ppm to avoid the ill effects of global warming. But considering the rapid rate we are putting carbon in the air, and the difficulty involved in removing what is already in the air, we may literally never be able to get below 400, ever.

2. Our crumbling infrastructure needs $3.6 trillion just to reach a “state of good repair,” according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. That doesn’t even count what it would cost to build new modern infrastructure such as high-speed rail or a smart electric grid. One proposal, backed by President Obama, is to help get started is to launch an infrastructure bank, using small amounts federal seed money to attract big private investment. The approach has won the backing of both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but Republicans have failed to embrace it or propose any significant alternatives.

3. The top 1 percent in America holds 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. It was not always thus. Over the last 30 years, the top 1 percent has increased its wealth by 38%, while the bottom 60 percent has seen their wealth diminish. In other words, inequality has gotten worse. And that’s harmful for all of society. As one professor explains: “A wide range of social problems are worse in societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor. These include physical and mental illness, violence, low math and literacy scores among young people, lower levels of trust and weaker community life, poorer child well-being, more drug abuse, lower social mobility and higher rates of imprisonment and teenage births.”

4. More than 4 million Americans have been jobless for more than half a year. The long-term unemployment problem is not only devastating for those directly affect, it’s also a major drag on the recovery of the entire economy. Those out of the workforce for extended periods of time have a much harder time getting rehired than those briefly unemployed. We are risking the creation of a permanent underclass to care for instead of tapping our labor pool to the fullest extent possible.

5. Forty percent of America’s children between 3 and 5 are not enrolled any sort of preschool let alone a high-quality program that research shows can make a critical difference in their ability to perform well in school and find good jobs in later life. This is a major gap in the American promise of equal opportunity for all.

These are all massive problems with no easy fixes. You might think a major political party would have something to say about them, spend some time developing ideas to solve them, and seek to build public support for those ideas.

Or Republicans can chase Benghazi down the rabbit hole.

There are plenty of scandals out there to choose from. What a party chooses to focus on speaks volumes.

… because if he were we could dismiss him as a typical stupid hippie to whom nobody should ever pay attention (particularly when sharp analysts like Newt Gingrich and George Will exist.) But now that people who the mainstream media can respect, like Tim Kaine, are saying it, now it’s respectable:

The two parties are miles apart on how to cut the deficit and national debt: Republicans want to slash spending even more. Democrats want to raise revenue.

And then there are the other Democrats — the ones who reject the entire premise of the current high-stakes fiscal fight. There’s no short-term deficit problem, they say, and there isn’t even an urgent debt crisis that requires immediate attention. This group could make it even harder for President Barack Obama to strike a grand bargain because they increasingly see no immediate need for either new spending cuts or significantly more revenue, both of which they say could further slow the economy.

These Democrats and their intellectual allies once occupied the political fringes, pushed aside by more moderate members who supported both immediate spending cuts and long-term entitlement reforms along with higher taxes.

But aided by a pile of recent data suggesting the deficit is already shrinking significantly and current spending cuts are slowing the economy, more Democrats such as Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen are coming around to the point of view that fiscal austerity, in all its forms, is more the problem than the solution.

This group got a huge boost this month with the very public demolition of a sacred text of the austerity movement, the 2010 paper by a pair of Harvard professors arguing that once debt exceeds 90 percent of a country’s gross domestic product, it crushes economic growth.

Turns out that’s not what the research really showed. The original findings were skewed by a spreadsheet error, among other mistakes, and it’s helping shift the manner in which even middle-of-the-road Democrats talk about debt and deficits.

“Trying to just land on the debt too quickly would really harm the economy; I’m convinced of that,” Kaine, hardly a wild-eyed liberal, said in an interview. “Jobs and growth should be No. 1. Economic growth is the best anti-deficit strategy.”

No kidding.

Look, I’m happy that some of the Democrats are finally beginning to see the obvious. It’s been a long haul. Unfortunately, we’ve already slashed the hell out of government for the past four years because nobody wanted to be seen as a hippie. But better late than never. What this does is give the Democrats in congress the ability to beat back the Grand Bargain and, if we’re lucky, maybe be just a little bit bolder on the sequester. Or bold enough to at least, cut some deals with Republicans instead of just agreeing to reinstate the funding for items that Republicans value. (You know — we’ll reinstate the FAA if you agree to reinstate cancer treatments or something like that …)

Anyway, this return to the “reality based community” is long overdue. And very welcome.

Update: Oh hey, it seems to be “hippies were right” day at Politico (Not that anyone will admit it, mind you.)

Democrats have used a clear and potent attack against Republicans in recent elections: Don’t vote for them because they’ll cut your Social Security and Medicare.

But using that playbook next year, as Democrats had planned, just got a lot more complicated.

President Barack Obama blurred the lines this month when he embraced entitlement cuts of his own as part of his budget plan. And Democrats now fear their leader’s tack to the center could blunt one of their sharpest weapons in the battle for the House of Representatives next year.

The concern is that Republicans will have a ready retort — your own president proposed entitlement cuts — and force Democrats on the defensive. The issue is critical to senior voters, who turn out in disproportionately large numbers in midterm elections.

“I think it does make it more difficult for Democrats in the next election,” said Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan, who occupies a swing district in Minnesota. “I would think that Republicans will say this cycle that if you want your Medicare and Social Security cut, that’s what Obama wants to do. … And I imagine that’s what Republicans will campaign on.”

The president’s shift came after an election year in which Democrats made the GOP’s embrace of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s controversial plan to overhaul Medicare a centerpiece of their campaigns. The offensive, Democrats say, helped them net eight House seats — a respectable figure but short of the 25 they needed to seize the lower chamber.
[...]
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Bill Burton, a strategist for the Democratic public affairs firm Global Strategy Group and a former deputy White House press secretary for Obama, said in an email “there is no doubt that Karl Rove and his allies will spend millions of dollars lying about what the President’s budget means in terms of the economic health of our country. What we don’t know is just how much Democratic donors are going to stand up to those lies.”

While Obama would love for his party to win the House — he has said he would do everything in his power to help Democrats take the speaker’s gavel from John Boehner — his budget highlighted tensions with congressional Democrats. The president has said he wants to reach a grand bargain with Republicans to tame the nation’s $16 trillion debt. And getting there, Obama signaled with his budget, requires taking a whack at entitlements.

“The White House is more concerned about his legacy,” said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster. “It’s the classic dilemma of the second-term incumbent.”
[...]
In the days since Obama released his budget, many of the Democrats who have been quickest to distance themselves from his blueprint are those from senior-heavy districts. California Rep. Raul Ruiz, a freshman Democrat who represents a Palm Springs-area district where seniors compose about half of all registered voters, said “putting the burden of the national deficit on the backs of our seniors is wrong.”

Democrats are even concerned that Republicans could reverse the dynamic and portray Democrats as the bad guys on entitlements.

In an interview with CNN after Obama unveiled his budget earlier this month, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden of Oregon called the plan “a shocking attack on seniors.”

“I’ll tell you when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taken $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country,” he said.

Walden’s remarks drew criticism from some in the GOP, which has come out in favor of chained CPI as a way of reducing the deficit. But the NRCC chairman’s point was made: Republicans had been given a free opportunity to hit back on entitlements, long a Democratic trump card.

Brock McCleary, a GOP pollster and former NRCC deputy political director, said Republicans couldn’t expect to gain an advantage on who’s most likely to defend programs but could try to fight the issue to a draw.

“The president has very clearly shown the way for how Republicans can keep voters in the lurch about which party is going to protect entitlements,” he said.

Indeed. But Democrats in congress have not taken any votes on this and if they’re lucky they won’t have to. I’m fairly sure that won’t stop the wingnut millionaires for tarring them with this absurd proposal anyway, but at least they won’t have to defend it.

If House members want to be very sure to end up on the right side of this one in 2014, they should all sign the Grayson-Takano letter. (And so should you …)

Watching the various Republican responses — official and otherwise — to President Obama’s State of the Union address was a bit like watching a right-wing remake of The Three Faces of Eve, the 1957 classic about a woman who suffered from “multiple personality disorder”, for which Joanne Woodward won an Academy Award. In fact, Woodward was the first actress to take home the Best Actress Oscar for portraying three different personalities.

In an attempt to win big political prizes in 2014, 2016, and beyond, the GOP is portraying itself as three different parties.  But behind what looks like an identity crisis is the same old party.

By my count, there were at least three Republican responses — two official, one unofficial — to the State of the Union address, representing three different faces of the same old GOP: the “Re-Branded” Republican party, the tea party, and the “alienated white men.”

Re-Branded or Re-Run?

The “re-branded” GOP was represented by Sen. Marco Rubio (R, FL), whom Time magazine dubbed “The Republican Savior”, and Republicans selected to deliver the official GOP response to the State of the Union. In the face of defeat and demographic realities of the 2012 election, the party of “old, white people” chose a fresh, young, brown face to represent the party in the SOTU response.

Actually, Rubio is more like the “Re-Branded GOP version 2.0.” Still stinging from defeat in the 2008 presidential election, Republican’s pulled a similar move in choosing Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to deliver the Republican response to Obama’s first SOTU in 2009.   If Michael Steele’s leadership of the RNC counts, then perhaps Rubio’s elevation to GOP messiah represents version 3.0 of the “Re-Branded” GOP.

While Rubio’s speech had its iconic moment, it wasn’t as widely panned as Jindal’s SOTU response, or as abysmal as Michael Steele tenure as RNC chair. But the content of Rubio’s speech hardly represented anything “new” from the GOP. It was the same old rhetoric, and after Jindal and Steele, even hearing it from a non-white male didn’t present a new direction for the GOP so much as it the same old Republican cynicism in a different wrapper. As Dave pointed out, from an economic standpoint Rubio’s speech was a re-run of the same old wrongheaded Republican economic ideas. (Incredibly, Rubio even trotted out the long debunked claim that “the government caused the housing crisis.)

The speech failed in another very important way: Rubio’s SOTU reesponse ignored the concerns of the very voters the GOP needsif it’s to have a hope of escaping electoral oblivion in the future, and instead simply told the same old story Republicans have been telling for decades.

In Rubio’s depiction, America is a wondrous place where capitalism allows everyone to get ahead, and the only major external obstacle to upward mobility is an overbearing federal government. “America,” he said, “is exceptional because we believe that every life, at every stage, is precious, and that everyone everywhere has a God-given right to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them.”

Obama serves up this Hallmark-card patriotism too, but he also signals, in ways that many nonwhite, non-Anglo, nonstraight Americans instinctively understand, that America often doesn’t act as if “every life” is equally “precious.” When Obama said early in his speechthat “it is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country—the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love,” he was acknowledging that state-sponsored bigotry still prevents millions of gay and lesbian Americans from “getting ahead” because of who they love.

…Republicans believe they are the party of aspiration, of the all-American yearning to get ahead. And they believe, rightly, that Latinos, African-Americans, women, and gays share that yearning. What they often ignore is the way America’s deep traditions of bigotry still stifle those aspirations, whether by hindering African-Americans’ access to the voting booth, exploiting and brutalizing illegal Mexican immigrants, preventing gays and lesbians from marrying, or denying female workers equal pay.

Republicans need not agree with every remedy Obama offers for these forms of injustice, but they must at least acknowledge them when telling America’s story. Otherwise, at some level, they will continue to ignore the Americans they wish to court. Which is exactly what Marco Rubio did last night. If Rubio ignored those issues last night, it may be because to do otherwise would call attention to his own party’s embarrassing antics; like holding up the Violence Against Women Act again, with objections that the original bill was “unfair to men,” and too kind to Native American women and lesbians. When the Senate finally voted to reauthorize VAWA, Rubio was among the 22 Republican men who voted “No.”

Here’s a hint to Rubio and the Republicans: siding with abusers isn’t going to win over women voters. If anything, it digs the GOP into an even deeper hole with women voters. And when you’re also deep in a hole with women voters, gay voters, African American voters, Latino voters, and Asian American voters, ignoring their concerns underscores the fact that your talk doesn’t match your walk.

 The voters in the diverse coalition that rewarded president Obama with reelection, and Democrats with gains in the Senate and the House, did not vote as they did because of “bribes” or “gifts.” They made judgements based on how government had helped them, and thus would help others, because they believed that’s what government should be about “addressing the needs and desires of people.”

If Republicans think that these groups were merely put off by your “tone,” you guys are fooling yourselves even more than you want to fool voters. Your “tone” in this election only confirmed what women, youth, and minority voters suspected all along. Without a record of even attempting to address their concerns through policies that jibe with your principles, these voters will see right through you.

Your walk won’t match your talk, and it will show. Voters will know that you’re still not that into them, and they won’t be remotely into you.

Bottom line: if the GOP’s task is the make their message understandable (and appealing) to minority voters, Rubio — the party’s latest “spokesman of a different color” — didn’t merely fail to speak to the “Multi-American” coalition that defeated the GOP in 2012. He didn’t even try.

Tempest in the Tea Party

There were two “offical” Republican responses to the SOTU. Not only did Sen. Marco Rubio deliver the Republican response, but Sen. Rand Paul (R, TN) delivered the tea party response. This wasn’t the first time the GOP delivered two responses to the SOTU. Michelle Bachmann famously delivered the tea party response to the 2011 SOTU, but it turned out she wasn’t talking to most of America. (Bachmann either unintentionally or “unintentionally on-purpose” spoke directly to the camera for the Tea Party Express video feed.)

Again, as Dave pointed out, when it comes to economic content, Paul’s speech was essentially the same deficit hysterics and government-bashing that the GOP has been serving up for a while now. What’s significant about Paul’s address is the split it represents in the Republican party.

An alien who landed somewhere in the United States Tuesday night might be forgiven for assuming that ours is a three-party system. But it’s close to the truth that, despite Sen. Paul’s protestations that his speech was “not necessarily divisive,” the GOP is really a two-party party. Paul’s speech serves as a reminder that the tea party “movement” the Koch Brothers and big tobacco created, is at the center of what appears to be a civil war within the GOP.

And apparently, Ronald Reagan’s “11th Commandment” is among the first casualties of GOP infighting. Smarting over the loss of up to five Senate seats, establishment Republicans like Karl Rove and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour are pinning the blame squarely on the tea party, and taking steps to quash candidates like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdodock in 2014 and 2016.  

Rove recently organized major Republican donors under the monicker “Conservative Victory Project,” for the express purposes of recruiting candidates an protecting GOP incumbents from tea party challengers. Barbour is calling on donors to stop giving to organizations like the Club For Growth, that attack incumbent Republicans.

In an interview with National Review Online on Tuesday, Barbour … acknowledged his growing frustration with conservative organizations that target Republicans in primaries.

“We kicked away four or five Senate seats in the last two cycles by nominating candidates who did not have the best chance to win,” he says. “We ought to talk to Republican donors now, in the off-season before the primaries, and discourage them from donating to organizations that will attack good Republicans.”

“Republican groups like the Club for Growth should stop spending money to defeat Republicans,” he adds. “Politics can’t be about purity. Unity wins in politics, purity loses.”

It doesn’t get any prettier on the tea party side of the battle lines. In fact, it’s getting downright nasty. Liberals are not alone in hating Karl Rove anymore. No less than Donald Trump has declared Rove a “loser” and tea partiers of all stripes are declaring war.

“Because of the bad results of the 2012 cycle, I kind of feel like we’re in a state of gang warfare,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a grassroots advocacy group aligned with the Tea Party movement, told MSNBC.com, adding: “The establishment is circling the wagons, and they’re trying to protect their own.”

Kibbe argued that the the energy in today’s GOP comes from the very Tea Party-backed candidates, like Rand Paul and Mike Lee, that Rove has opposed in the past. “What Rove is proposing is a recipe for failure,” he said.

Ben Shapiro, an editor at Breitbart News, accused Rove of “declaring war on the Tea Party.”

Influential conservative blogger Michelle Malkin agreed. “This is war,” she wrote, adding: “Who needs Obama and his Team Chicago to destroy the Tea Party when you’ve got Rove and his big government band of elites?”

Erick Erickson, the influential founder of Redstate.com and a long-time champion of the Tea Party, had a similar take. Rove’s goal, Erickson wrote, is to “crush conservatives, destroy the Tea Party, and put a bunch of squishes in Republican leadership positions.”

That Karl Rove could get the time of day from big GOP donors after blowing $300 million on the 2012 elections and ending up with nothing to show for it is, if nothing else, a testament to what remains of the power of the “Turd Blossom”. But like Frankenstein’s fatal, futile pursuit of the monster he created, targeting the tea party could backfire, strengthen resolve on far right, and finally finish off Karl Rove. (Three words: Koch Brothers’ Money.)

The Alienated White Male

That brings me to Ted Nugent. While Democrats were inviting victims of gun-violence to be their guests at the SOTU, Rep. Steve Stockman (R, TX) invited a washed-up rocker, reality television star, prolific tweeter, and Obama hater Ted Nugent to be his personal guest.

Ted Nugent. This is a guy who once wielded two rifles on stage and basically threatened to kill Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  At an NRA conference in St. Louis, Nugent predicted “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” That remark earned Nugent a visit from the Secret Service. This is the “articulate spokesperson” Stock man invited to the SOTU to “give a balance” to the president’s remarks. 

“He’s a very articulate spokesman,” Stockman told CNN. “I’m excited to have him. I think he gives a balance to what’s being said tonight at the White House. And it will be a balance. The president gives his views and his opinions. And we live in a free country where other people get to speak their opinion.”

Stockman’s characterization of an “articulate” Nugent capable of “balance” might raise eyebrows among the rocker’s critics. Nugent’s presence at the speech struck some as odd, especially considering his claim last April that he would be “dead or in jail” in a year if Obama was elected to a second term. While that remark eventually earned Nugent a visit from the Secret Service, it was just part of a string of caustic and violent comments Nugent has made toward Democrats he disagrees with.

Nugent famously ranted in 2007: “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. … Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch.”

But considering Stockman’s own history of controversy, perhaps Nugent serves as an apt accomplice for the congressman as they prepare to take on what the rocker has called the State of the Union “media orgy.”

What was more surprising than Nugent’s presence at the SOTU, given his history of outrageous statements, was his apparent silence during the president’s address. There were no spontaneous outbursts from Nugent, like Rep. Joe Wilson’ s “You lie!” If Nugents remarks to reporters after the speech are to be believed, the only reason he was so well behaved during the president’s speech is because he didn’t hear most of it.

As reporters found their seats in the House press gallery, they shared a question: Where was Ted Nugent? The 64-year old rock star, who last cracked the charts with 1980’s “Wango Tango,” had been invited to the State of the Union as a guest of Texas Rep. Steve Stockman. Thirty-odd Democrats had invited the families of gun violence victims to sit for the speech, but they were never famous. Not even in 1980.

Buzzfeed’s D.C. editor John Stanton asked a peer to help him find a “tall, crazy-looking” white guy. When President Obama entered the chamber, Nugent stood up, and reporters finally saw him. He spent the entire speech, 13 typed pages, in various stages of physical agony. At the emotional apex of the night, when the president counted off victims who “deserve a vote,” Nugent sat with his arms crossed.

“My favorite part was when I couldn’t hear clearly,” said Nugent to reporters after the speech. “Then I didn’t get angry.”

In a sense, Nugent was at the SOTU as a representative of the “alienated white men” who for the GOP’s last solid bloc.

The image of the “angry black man” still purveyed by sensationalists such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza is anachronistic today, when blacks and even Muslims, the most conspicuous of “outsider” groups, profess optimism about America and their place in it. A politics of frustration and rage remains, but it is most evident within the GOP’s dwindling base—its insurgents and anti-government crusaders, its “middle-aged white guys.” They now form the party’s one solid bloc, its agitated concurrent voice, struggling not only against the facts of demography, but also with the country’s developing ideas of democracy and governance.

Behind the “politics of frustration” is fueled by what call the “Rage of an Unprivileged Class” — rage at the apparently overthrow of what Bill O’Reilly, in an interview with then GOP presidential candidate John McCain, called “the white, Christian male power structure.” (“Of which I’m a part and you’re a part,” O’Reilly went on to add in his conversation with McCain.) 

A Romney victory and inauguration would have represented a return to the previously established order. It would have been a restoration of primacy.

From Republican establishment to GOP leadership, all the way down to the basest of the base, Obama’s 2008 victory represented the loss of primacy, defined above as “the fact of being primary, preeminent, or more important.” The popularity of his candidacy alone represented a particular threat to the primacy of the GOP establishment, and the primacy-by-association of the GOP’s predominantly white base. During the 2008 election, Republican leadership played on both the economic anxieties racial anxieties of its base, and the result was that all the fear and anger that had been bubbling just below the surface threatened to boil over.

… In 2008, many the GOP’s overwhelmingly white, heavily southern, predominantly Christian believed their voices had not been heard. It was inconceivable that one such as Barack Obama could have won the presidency without them. It wasn’t supposed to happen, so it must have been the product of conspiracy that went back perhaps all the way to the day Barack Obama was born, and sustained long enough for ACORN to steal the White House for Obama and steal the country from “Real Americans.”

… That America would be restored to its rightful place with the 2012 election, and the election of Barack Obama would be fluke; an historic moment, but a fluke nonetheless. Everything would go back to “normal” and America would come to terms with its well-intentioned “mistake in electing Barack Obama. One subtly racist Romney/Ryan television spot even seemed to give the country a rhetorical “pat on the back,” and to say — as Bill Maher paraphrased it — “You tried. He tried. Black people are lovely, but this president-ing thing really isn’t for them.”

The problem for Republicans is that the majority of American voters decided that they wanted Barack Obama to continue doing “this president-ing thing” for four more years. That majority is decidedly more progressive on social and economic issues than Republican base of “old white people.” This new majority is likely to become more solidly progressive. Younger voters are part of the “Obama majority” and an increasingly important demographic. They’re also very progressive and on their way to mainstreaming their progressive views.

If you are reading this, you already know the national score from the November election.  The Democrats won the presidency, added two seats in the Senate, and won eight seats in the House by over 500,000 votes – while remaining in the minority.

But 2012 is old news.  Now, in Washington, focus is on the next opportunity, the next election.  In 2014, the goal for the GOP is the Senate. Republicans need six seats to overtake the current Democratic majority.  But the true prize is the presidency, coming in 2016.

Last year, Republicans tried to take back the White House and Senate by gaming the system. They failed, in their terms, because their candidate “too moderate” and several Senate candidates had“little slips of the tongue.” (Although to be fair, somevery prominent voices said just the opposite; that the Republicans made “offensive remarks” and were being “the stupid party”). The voter suppression, er, registration laws that weresupposed to turn states “red” for Romney were struck down before the election, or suspended until after this election.

However, progressives cannot rest on our laurels, and think that just because the GOP failed this time, they won’t try to manipulate their way back on top in 2014 and in 2016.  Already, lawmakers in GOP-controlled states that went blue in 2012 are talking of “hope” and “change.”  As in, “I hope we can compete in 2016 by changing the way the president is elected.”  They will attempt to do this in several ways, as outlined “from the inside” superbly in a “memo” fromthe Democratic Strategist:

• Change the electoral vote allocation system
• Learn why their massive donation advantage failed them, and use funds more effectively
• Continue efforts to lock out voters from the American political system

Subvert

The call for this change came from on high.   Reince Priebus wants Republican-controlled blue states to change the current winner-take-all electoral system, currently in place in 48 states, to a district-by-district or proportional system.  The truly maddening point of the district-by-district plan is that the two votes that come from the statewide seats would come from not the overall winner in the states, but whoever won more gerrymandered, GOP-favorable districts.

In Virginia, state Republicans voted to change this on the day they were sure to have a one vote majority; when a Democratic state senator and Civil Rights activist left Richmond on Martin Luther King Jr, Day to celebrate Barack Obama’s second inauguration. Other states considering this change include Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Notice that there are currently 30 states with Republican-control legislatures, but only six of these are being asked to change the way that they allocate electoral votes.

These proposals were met with immediate criticism from both left and right.  Obviously the Democrats would not stand for it, butRepublican Virginia governor Bob McDonnell andGOP Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan have come out against the proposals. (Perhaps both with an eye on 2016.)  While the attempts to change the electoral allocation system seem to be at a standstill (except inPennsylvania, where it is very much alive), there are still other ways that Republicans could subvert majority rule.

Buy

It should surprise no one that Republicans can raise more private money than Democrats.  While both sides have big donors, in last election season the heavy-hitters were on the Republican side (despite the fact that many of these billionaires still made money hand over fist during Obama’s first term).  Unless Citizens United is overturned, this advantage will persist.

The 2012 election was the first post-Citizens United presidential election. Thus, it was the first time that Republicans got to try out their new toy — unlimited campaign contributions to buy elections.  Ultimately this effort failed, though the reasons why they failed are uncertain.  Karl Rove and the leaders of other GOP super PACs must be asking themselves: “Why didn’t it work this time?”, “Where could we have spent money more effectively?”, and “How can make that money to work for us better in 2016?”

That last question that should have progressives worried.  If Democrats didn’t have a well-oiled machine like Obama for America in 2012, or a candidate who drew voters from all demographics as the president did, Mitt Romney would probably be in the Oval Office today.  I am not sure another candidate like Barack Obama exists in the Democratic Party right now, or any other party for that matter.

To compete with the money that will be thrown around in 2016, Democrats must keep the internal structure of OFA alive to raise similar funds from the smaller donors as we did in 2012. Small donations from many donors did the trick in 2008 and 2012. It must continue if Democrats are to remain victorious in 2016.

Obstruct

Another fun way that Republicans tried to change the Presidential election and elections in general, was to introduce and pass restrictive voter registration laws. The measures were designed to prevent “voter fraud” — such a big problem that a grand total of 633 cases have been prosecuted since 2000, out of approximately 350 million votes cast.  That’s 0.0000018% of votes.  It’s a small number, to be sure, but that did not stop Republicans from trying to enact these laws.

On the surface, it is perfectly reasonable that we make sure everyone who votes is registered and voting in the right district.  However, these laws did target groups that tend to vote Democratic.  Signs bearing helpful reminders such as “Voter fraud is a felony!” popped up in heavily Democratic neighborhoods.

The Brennan Center compiled arundown of all the states that considered restrictive voting laws,  and those that passed them.  Several of these laws were overturned or blunted, limiting their effectiveness in 2012. But some will still be on the books in 2016.  This means that Democrats need to either get these laws overturned, or (failing that) run campaigns to help their voters get IDs.

How to Keep on Rocking the Vote in 2016

The Republicans message after November’s shellacking was “If at first you don’t succeed, change the rules of the game so you can win the next time.”  These changes could be devastating in the absence of a candidate like Obama.  However, the Democrats still have a major advantage that’s for the American public to see:  The majority of Americans support the progressive message, and Democrats who ran on the progressive message won big in 2012.

The benefit for Democrats in continuing on this path, appealing to the majority by embracing progressive positions, seems obvious. These are also positions that the GOP cannot and will not take.

Democrats must preach a progressive message of pushing forward, whatever the circumstances.  The on the right will always try to halt that progress. This gave me pause as I watched the Inauguration. Even as the president publicly embraced progressive goals, some of those on the podium were already looking to undermine him and his party.

Voter suppression laws and the lack of big funders did not impede democracy this time around, but allowing the Republicans to change the rules in the middle of the game will.  For all Mitch McConnell’s whining over the potential changes to the filibuster, this is truly a nuclear option.

The GOP knows that they cannot compete unless they change. But instead of trying to compete, they’re trying to change. Change the rules of the game, that is.  This is more than a threat to Democrats or progressives. It is a threat to democracy itself.  At every turn, patriots believe in the vision our founding fathers passed down to us must defend that vision against these internal threats to our democracy.

Hey GOP, here’s some friendly advice. You know that diverse coalition that carried President Obama to victory (not to mention sending a number of progressives to the Senate, and delivering an across-the-board victory for marriage equality)? The one that conservatives like Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly have complained about since the election? The truth is, they’re just not that into you.

There’s a good reason for that. You’ve gone out of your way to show that you’re just not that into them.

In other words: It’s not them. It’s you.

The thing is, Republicans, it looks like you haven’t learned anything from the 2012 election. You’re still asking yourselves the wrong question. You’re asking “Why don’t more Blacks/Latinos/gays/young people/women vote fur us?”(OK, maybe you’re not asking that so much about gays. But you should, and I’ll explain why in a bit.) Instead you should be asking “Why have we failed apply our values and principles to address their concerns?”

They’re Just Not That Into You

Let’s break this down, based on exit surveys.

• Obama won the Latino vote by a 3 to1 margin, with 73% of the Latino vote. That’s up from 67% in 2008. On the other hand, you guys lost 17% of the Latino vote, compared to 2004.
• Obama won 70% of the Asian American vote. Twenty years ago, Asian Americans voted Republican 2 to 1.
• Obama won 93% of the African American vote, doing at least as well, if not better, with African American voters than he did in 2008. Despite attempts at voter suppression and long lines at polling places, African American voters turned out in big numbers, and played a big part in Obama’s reelection.
• Forty percent of white voters backed Obama, while Romney only gained 3% of the white vote over what McCain got in 2004. Even though 88% of Romney voters were white, a lot of white voters didn’t want him in the White House.
• Obama won 67% of the women’s vote, compared to 55% in 2008. It wasn’t just single women either. Women who are”married, with children” backed Obama 56% to 43%.
• Obama won 77% of the gay vote.  While they only make up about 5% of the electorate, gay voters were crucial to Obama’s victory — and a growing number of voters identify themselves as gay.
• Obama won 60 percent of the youth vote, which was crucial to his victories in a number of swing states.

Time for some hard truth. It wasn’t hurricane Sandy’s fault. It wasn’t Chris Christie’s fault. You can’t lay the blame solely on “urban voters” who “want stuff,” President Obama handing out more “gifts” than “Santa Claus,” Mitt Romney being a terrible candidate, the Romney campaign’s “bad messaging,” the wrath of God, ORCA, or Karl Rove selling your party and movement a $300 million bill of goods.

Sorry, Republicans, but you have only yourselves to blame for this.

You Were Never That Into Them

The reason that African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Women, gays, young people and a whole lot of white people didn’t vote for your party is simple. You spent much of the last four years insulting these groups with your rhetoric, and adding injury to insult with your policies. The biggest surprise after your shock at losing the election is your anger at all of these groups for not voting Republican. Your expectation that any of these groups would vote your way, and apparent belief that you’d given them any reason to do so, is beyond mystifying.

Let’s unpack this piece by piece:

• Immigration: Passing odious anti-immigration laws in Republican-controlled states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi did not do you any favors with Latinos or Asians, who favor comprehensive immigration reform. Nor did it do much good when prominent conservatives like one-time front-runner Herman Cain (Remember him?) advocated erecting an electrified fence at the U.S./Mexico border.  It doesn’t help that the worst state and local politicians on immigration are almost all Republicans. The DREAM Act offered undocumented young people who showed a desire to work hard and get an education a path to citizenship. Republicans gleefully shut it down. As if that wasn’t enough, you hammered an anti-immigration plank right into your party platform. And one of your own Latina delegates couldn’t even address your convention, because she was drowned out by chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A!” until the party chairman restored some semblance of order.
• Contraception: When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut,” after the Georgetown law student was denied the chance to speak at a congressional hearing about the Obama administration’s contraception policy, women voters watched as Republicans actually came to Limbaugh’s defense. Women voters listened as GOP presidential hopefuls like Rick Santorum spoke  out against contraception, and Santorum’s donor Foster Freiss recommended that women place aspirin between their legs, while Mitt Romney was deliberately vagueon the issue.
• Choice:The contraception debacle was bad enough. Then it turned out the GOP had nominated a raft of Senate candidates who couldn’t stop talking about rape and abortion, in the worst possible ways. They all lost.
• Race: As if the constant slurs against the president’s citizenship weren’t enough, many of you guys seemed to have dog-whistles permanently lodged in your throats. Newt Gingrich surged to front-runner status almost solely based on his not-so-subtle race bating. Rick Santorum mumbled about “blah people” in Iowa, but doubled down on race and “values” in the South Carolina debate. Republicans seemed to go out of their way to depict African-Americans as lazy, welfare-dependent drones who vote Democratic in order to keep the gravy train running.
• Education:Young people across the country were graduating off a cliff, into a dismal job market, while burdened by crushing debt. They called out for relief, and asked for Congress to keep the interest rates on their student loans from increasing. Republicans told them to “drop dead.” Romney made it clear there would be no forgiveness of loans under a Romney administration, and his best advice to students was to borrow money from their parents.
• Vote Suppression: Having already made it clear that you didn’t much want African American voters, Republicans went one step further by passing laws in multiple states to keep as many African Americans as possible from voting — not to mention Latinos , poor people, the elderly, and young people. As the numbers above show, that strategy backfired on you. Instead of suppressing the vote, you awakened a big, brown sleeping giant, and made the very people you tried to disenfranchise even more determined to vote — and to vote against you. No wonder the sight of large numbers of African Americans lining up to vote was cause for alarm to GOP “poll watchers.”
• Gays: You lost on two fronts here. First, your treatment of gays in your own party isn’t exactly inspiring. The loyalty gay conservative groups like GOProud and Log Cabin — both of which endorsed Romney/Ryan —showed the Republican party was unreciprocated, to put it mildly. When I covered CPAC last year, it was encouraging to at least see that a group like GOProud not only had a presence at the conference, but was listed as a co-sponsor. This year, GOProud was purged from CPAC, deemed “incompatible” with conservative principles. (White nationalists were welcomed.) Likewise, while Ann Romney highlighted her “real” marriage to Mitt Romney from the stage of the GOP convention, gay conservatives were relegated to holding their own separate-and-unequal “Homocon” soiree, in support of a party that made opposition to marriage equality an important part of its platform. Second, your presidential candidate had nothing to say gay voters about why they should vote for him.
• Culture Warriors: Your faithful culture warriors went AWOL. White working-class voters were disinterested in culture war issues, and instead displayed a strong tendency towards economic populism. A majority of Black and Latino voters said they supported marriage equality in their states.

Your Talk vs. Your Walk

After Mitt Romney made it clear that he meant what he’d said about 47% of Americans, something that most of the rest of us learned in grade school dawned upon Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says the Republican Party needs to go back to basics to attract the broad coalition of voters credited with putting President Barack Obama back in the White House.

Kindergarten basics.

“If we want people to like us, we have to like them first,” Jindal said on Fox News Sunday.

… Jindal, the incoming chair of the Republican Governors Association and a potential presidential candidate in 2016, on Sunday said slighting people simply isn’t good politics.

“You don’t start to like people by insulting them and saying their votes were bought. We are an aspirational party,” he said.

Jindal said the Republican Party needs to convince voters it is the party of the middle class and upward mobility. Its conservative principles “are good for every single voter” and it “has to campaign for every single vote,” he added.

That’s a good start, but there are still a couple of problems.

First, let’s be honest about the nature of the insult. It starts, as I said before, with you guys asking yourselves the wrong question.

It occurred to me that I’d heard the kind of stuff before, most recently in the comments resulting from a brouhaha that recently broke out about the portrayal of certain black Republicans. It’s the same basic rhetoric I’ve heard in just about every discussion I’ve been involved in over why there aren’t more Black Republicans. My point has always been that Republicans — like other predominantly white organizations — spend more time asking why more black people aren’t joining them than they do asking themselves why they aren’t attracting more black supporters.

In other words, they avoid the reality that the reason they don’t attract more black supporters is because they don’t address — and aren’t seen as addressing — the needs and concerns of many in black communities. The analysis never gets further than that because it would probably undermine their current base of power. So every discussion I’ve had ends up with the other side’s argument boiling down to this: the reason more blacks don’t support the Republican party is because they don’t know what’s good for them.

That’s the nice way of putting it. The more blunt way of putting it would be much closer to the way the conservative blogger above put it. Because they are dumb. The blacks who don’t vote Republican are dumb. The anti-Bush supporters in Latin America — or anyone else in Latin America who doesn’t support the U.S. Agenda — is dumb. The folks marching against Bush and the U.S. agenda in Latin America just don’t know what’s good for them.

Or do they?

You guys repeated that insult to just about every group mentioned above, over and over again. When Mitt Romney told NAACP members, “I believe that if you understood who I truly am in my heart… you would vote for me for president,” he was basically saying to African Americans, “If you knew what was good for you, you’d vote for me.” Or, more bluntly, “You’d vote for me, if you weren’t so dumb.” Ann Romney lectured Latino voters about what what good for them, and told women voters they need to “wake up” and realize what was best for them.

Not doing stuff like that would be a good first step. But if you guys think all you have to do is change your tone, then you still aren’t getting it.

Republicans said they also have work to do with single women and younger voters, many of whom tend to be more liberal on social issues than the current Republican Party. These Republicans said a change in tone is needed, though not a change in principles such as opposition to abortion.

“We need to make sure that we’re not perceived as intolerant,” said Ron Kaufman, a veteran Republican strategist who advised Romney’s campaign. “The bottom line is we were perceived to be intolerant on some issues. And tone-deaf on others.”

Democrats were successful with Latinos, African Americans, Asians, gays, young people, and a considerable chunk of white voters because they didn’t have to change their tone or their principles to reach out to these constituencies. They won support from these constituencies, because voters could see that Democrats’ walk matched their talk.

On a range of issues including health care, education, immigration, reproductive choice, equal pay, and LGBT equality the President Obama and the Democratic party made a convincing case that they shared and prioritized the concerns of the groups that ultimately comprised their winning coalition. Then they backed it up with movement on specific policies. No constituency was completely satisfied, either. Some thought the Democrats’ efforts on policy didn’t go far enough, or were too long in coming. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough.

It wasn’t the transactional politics many Republicans have described, but transformational politics in progress.

A final point: President Obama backing the DREAM Act or contraception coverage is not a nakedly political gesture, it is a matter of policy difference. Addressing the needs and desires of people is not a bribe or a government gift to be exchanged for a vote. It is part of the purpose of representative government as conservative forefather Edmund Burke himself once envisioned: “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.”

Romney’s distance from this perspective about government shows how far the conservative conversation has drifted from original principles. His impulse to rationalize defeat as victory for liberal special-interest bribery shows again that it is probably best for the country that he was not elected president this November.

The voters in the diverse coalition that rewarded president Obama with reelection, and Democrats with gains in the the Senate and the House, did not vote as they did because of “bribes” or “gifts.” They made judgements based on how government had helped them, and thus would help others, because they believed that’s what government should be about “addressing the needs and desires of people.”

If Republicans think that these groups were merely put off by your “tone,” you guys are fooling yourselves even more than you want to fool voters. Your “tone” in this election only confirmed what women, youth, and minority voters suspected all along. Without a record of even attempting to address their concerns through policies that jibe with your principles, these voters will see right through you.

Your walk won’t match your talk, and it will show. Voters will know that you’re still not that into them, and they won’t be remotely into you.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

—Warren Buffett

In 2012, class warfare broke out in American politics. And from the president to key Senate races, the middle class won.

Today the Campaign for America’s Future launches a new website – WageClassWar.org – to detail the new terrain of American politics. The site tells the story of key races, and compiles copies of ads, speech and debate excerpts, new stories that highlight critical moments.

Here is our take:

When the 2012 campaign began, the lousy economy made President Obama vulnerable. Republicans were favored to take back the Senate, given retirements in conservative states. Republican billionaires – the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and others – put up big money in the effort to have it all. Instead the president swept to victory, and Democrats gained seats in the Senate and the House.

Many factors contributed. Republicans learned once more the shortcomings of a stale, male, pale, Southern-based party in a nation of diversity. The GOP “legitimate rape” caucus helped give away two Senate seats. But too little attention has been paid to the new emerging reality. This was the first class warfare election of the new Gilded Age – and the middle class won big.

The Republican nominee Mitt Romney was inescapably the candidate of, by and for the 1 percent. He came from the world of finance and carried their agenda. He won the primaries, as Newt Gingrich complained, because he had more billionaires than anyone else. And the rich right were on a wilding, not only funding the Romney campaign, but also filling the coffers of superPACs and their offspring with hundreds of millions of dollars.

The class war, ironically, broke out in the Republican primaries. After Romney’s victory in New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry savaged Romney as a “vulture capitalist,” the “man from Bain” who profited from breaking up companies, shipping jobs abroad, and leaving a broken carcass behind. Romney’s negatives soared, reaching the highest on record.

And of course Romney reinforced the impression with revealing moments that exposed his yacht club cluelessness: “Corporations are people, my friends”; “I like firing people”; elevators for his cars; the $10,000 bet; $375,000 in speaking fees “isn’t a lot of money”; trying to appeal to Bubba because he knows a lot of NASCAR owners. He secreted his past income tax statements, while the one he revealed exposed a 14 percent tax rate on over $20 million in income, with, in the imitable phrase of former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, his money “wintering in the Cayman Islands and summering in the Swiss Alps.”

Needless to say, Obama is neither by temperament nor predilection a populist class warrior. But faced with potential defeat, he turned to what works. The depths of the Obama presidency came in the summer of 2011 after the debt ceiling debacle, in which the president was roughed up by Tea Party zealots, and emerged looking weak and ineffective.

Obama came back by deciding to stop seeking back-room compromises with people intent on destroying him and to start making his case. In the fall, he put out the American Jobs Act and stumped across the country demanding that Republicans vote on it. His standing in the polls began to rise. Then Occupy Wall Street exploded, driving America’s extreme inequality and rigged system into the debate. In December, the president embraced the frame: He traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, revisiting a campaign stop Teddy Roosevelt had made in the first Gilded Age. He indicted the “you’re on your own” economics of Republicans while arguing that “this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”

In the run-up to the election, the president’s campaign employed two basic strategies. First, the president consolidated his own coalition. He defended contraception and pay equity while his campaign attacked the Republican “war on women.” He reached out to Hispanics by ending the threat of deportation for the Dream kids. He not only ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but also moved to embrace gay marriage. Widely described as socially liberal measures, these were also profoundly bread-and-butter concerns. Could women choose when to have children? Could Hispanic children be free to pursue the American dream? Could gay people gain the economic benefits of marriage?

At the same time, the president’s campaign made a risky but remarkably successful decision. Their opinion research showed that painting Romney as a flip-flopper had little traction, but the attacks on vulture capitalism hit home. They decided to spend big money early in such key states as Ohio on a negative ad barrage defining Romney as the heartless vulture capitalist from Bain. Both campaigns believe that Romney never recovered.

But rhetoric and attack ads alone would not have sufficed. In critical Ohio and the Midwest the president was buoyed by one of his most activist – and controversial – interventions: the rescue of the auto industry. Unpopular at the time, opposed by many of his advisors, the auto rescue was risky, painful and messy. But it became the president’s closing argument, for workers knew that he had their backs when they were in trouble.

And when Romney put Rep. Paul Ryan on his ticket, Medicare became central to the debate. Republicans labored to portray themselves as the defenders of Medicare, attacking the president for cutting “$716 billion out of Medicare to pay for a health care plan no one wanted.” But in the Democracy Corps/CAF election night poll, the president had a greater margin on who would do better on Medicare than on any other issue.

And of course, perhaps the most telling bit of class attack was self-inflicted: Romney’s infamous scorn for the “47 percent” of Americans who are “victims” who “don’t take responsibility for their lives.” Many Americans took the comments, uttered in a private setting before deep pocket donors, as revealing Romney’s true feelings. The Obama campaign took full advantage and opened up the largest lead of the campaign going into the first debate.

The president’s listlessness in that debate showed how vulnerable he was. Voters wanted change. They overwhelmingly think the country is on the wrong track. The president’s campaign – from its slogan “Forward!” to its closing argument – perversely refused to offer anything than more of the same. As Bill Clinton pled at the Democratic Convention, his policies just need more time.

That left Romney an open field to be the candidate of change. But the Bain attacks countered his central argument, “I’m a businessman; I can fix this.” His agenda – a warmed over stew of conservative staples – let Obama argue that we can’t go back to what got us in this mess. The Republican convention, with its disingenuous “we built this” thematic, gave Romney no boost. In the end, voters gave Romney a small edge on who would do better on the economy, but they gave Obama a big edge on who better understands “people like me,” or who will do better restoring the middle class.

Most important, “God, guns and gays” didn’t work this time. The socially divisive tricks that political operatives Lee Atwater and Karl Rove perfected to divide working people and counter populist appeals backfired. The Republican effort to suppress the vote aroused insulted African American and young voters. The harsh anti-immigrant posturing of the Republican primaries drove Hispanics and Asians into Democratic arms.

Class warfare also benefited Democrats in Senate races. Elizabeth Warren, the scourge of Wall Street, used a powerful economic populist message to beat Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, a popular incumbent and Tea Party poster boy, running a smart campaign that sought to label her an elitist “professor” who manipulated affirmative action to get ahead.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown faced over $30 million in outside negative ads, as Karl Rove made him his leading target. He won as a consistent champion of working people, for the auto rescue, against corporate trade accords, for taking on the big banks. Tammy Baldwin, the only openly gay woman in the Congress, took down the favored former governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson, largely by painting him as a lobbyist for special interests divorced from the concerns of working people. And Heidi Heitkamp produced the biggest upset of all in North Dakota, running an old-time plains populist campaign, for Medicare and Social Security, against corporate trade deals, while savaging her opponent for mistreating tenants in his housing projects.

America’s growing diversity and its increasingly socially liberal attitudes played a big role in this election. But looking back, we are likely to see this as the first of the class warfare elections of our new Gilded Age of extreme inequality. A besieged middle class is increasingly aware that the rules are rigged against them. They are increasingly skeptical of politicians and parties, and believe – not incorrectly – that Washington is largely bought and sold. But they are looking for champions.

For years, conservatives in both parties have warned against class warfare. Americans, we’re told, don’t like that divisiveness. They see it as the politics of envy. Inequality should, as Mitt Romney said, only be talked about in back rooms.

Nonsense.

More and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare – only this time with the middle class fighting back. And candidates are going to have to be clear about which side they are on. Politicians in both parties are now hearing CEOs telling them that it is time for a deal that cuts Medicare and Social Security benefits in exchange for tax reform that lowers rates and closes loopholes. Before they take that advice, they might just want to look over their shoulders at what will be coming at them.

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping,
Brother John? Brother John?
Morning bells are ringing! Morning bells are ringing!
Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

Early in the morning, the day after Americans awarded him four more years in the White House, President Obama gave his acceptance speech then sought détente immediately by calling GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Johnny and Mitch rebuffed him. They were asleep, Barack Obama was informed. They would not be rousted to speak to the likes of the President of the United States.

Then, the day after Americans voted to reject Mitt Romney’s plan to reduce the deficit on the back of the middle class, Johnny and Mitch insisted that Congress must reduce the deficit on the back of the middle class.

Johnny and Mitch need to wake up to the new reality. Ding, dang dong. Republicans lost. They lost the Presidency. They lost seats in both the House and the Senate. The American people smacked Republicans down and trounced the GOP’s darling Tea Party. Losers don’t disrespect the victors. And, Johnny and Mitch, just FYI, losers don’t dictate the terms of armistice. The victor in the 2012 Presidential election ran on a pledge not to renew those expiring Bush tax cuts for the rich. American voters validated those terms.

President Obama and Mitt Romney reveled in their differences. The choice was clear for Americans. For his part, Romney dismissed 47 percent of Americans as lazy, irresponsible “takers” and promised to decrease taxes for the nation’s wealthiest by 20 percent beyond the Bush cuts.

President Obama, by contrast, promised he would let expire the Bush tax cuts for everyone earning more than $250,000 a year, which would include himself and Mitt Romney. As Republicans carped about the nation’s debt, Obama said it was time for those who had benefited most from America to fulfill their responsibilities to their country.

Not only did voters choose President Obama and his fiscal plan, but they also said in exit interviews that those Bush tax cuts for the rich have gotta go. Here’s what an infamous number – 47 percent – told the exit pollsters about the rich: Anyone earning more than a quarter million should pay more taxes. An additional 13 percent said everyone’s taxes should be raised.

Those results are consistent with the way Americans voted on local tax measures. They increased their own taxes repeatedly on Tuesday.

Residents of California and Arkansas, San Antonio and Austin voted to pay more in taxes for specific purposes such as education and infrastructure. In Oregon and Florida, voters rejected limits on and elimination of certain taxes.

The vast majority of Americans are willing to do their part to support their country. And they expect no special exemption from that responsibility for the nation’s richest. They sent that message Tuesday through their ballot choices.

John Boehner must have snoozed through that missive. On Wednesday, after speaking with fellow Republicans on a conference call – apparently he was awake for that one – Boehner announced that he would refuse to allow the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire.

He also said any deal with the White House to avoid the automatic budget cuts and tax increases dubbed the “fiscal cliff” that will occur Jan. 1, 2013 barring action by Congress must include overhauls to the tax code, Medicare and Medicaid.

The American people rejected all of this while Boehner was unconscious on Tuesday.

Romney chose as his vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who proposed voucherizing Medicare to shift costs to seniors and butchering Medicaid by shoving responsibility for it to the states. The Romney-Ryan team proposed cutting income taxes by 20 percent for everyone, including the rich, and recouping the revenue loss by closing loopholes they kept in a special secret lock box.

Non-partisan economists said this plan did not compute unless Romney and Ryan raised revenue from the middle class by eliminating deductions vital to them, such as those on mortgages. Romney and Ryan insisted they could, in fact, magically make the numbers add up without adding to the tax burden of the middle class.

But they refused to disclose that super-secret formula. For some reason, the American people didn’t believe them. They chose President Obama instead – the guy who flat out said he’d raise taxes on the rich and whose health care law broadly expands Medicaid. They chose the guy whose vice president pledged that the administration would not cut Social Security.

Thanks to the right-wing Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing unlimited contributions to super PACs, a handful of the nation’s richest – including Kenneth Langone, founder of Home Depot; billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch; gambling kingpin Sheldon Adelson; Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts; Texas industrialist Harold Simmons, and Texas homebuilder Bob Perry – spent hundreds of millions in an attempt to buy a President for themselves.

They failed. The feet of hundreds of thousands of volunteers beat them. Jonathan Collegio, the spokesman for one of those Republican super PACs, American Crossroads, admitted it. He told reporter Amanda Terkel at Huffington Post:

“If you look at the exit polls, the way that Obama won was on the ground in Cleveland with a lot of the minority voters. . .I just don’t know that’s a job for super PACs.”

The voters who re-elected President Obama celebrated on Tuesday, rested on Wednesday, then went back to the streets on Thursday. They demonstrated at more than 100 sites across the country to demand protection for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, to demand that some stinking “grand bargain” to avoid the fiscal cliff does not include cuts to crucial programs promised the middle class. They re-elected President Obama and now they going to make sure he can keep his promises to them.

Hey, John Boehner: Morning bells are ringing. And if Republicans don’t wake up and listen to the middle class, what they’ll hear is mourning bells tolled after they lose even more seats.

“The one word description of this election is spelled J-E-E-P,” said a friend early Tuesday evening. “This proves you can’t keep giving the finger to the American people and be elected president,” he said, with evident relief.

True enough, in the final days of the campaign, Romney’s oily shape-shifting, etch-a-sketch prevaricating sales pitch finally exceeded the credulity of the American people and the cravenness of the mainstream media, particularly in Ohio and the Midwest.

But Romney’s defeat was far more telling than that. With the lousy economy, voters wanting change and an incumbent president curiously intent on selling progress and continuity, this was an election that Republicans should have won. In our Gilded Age of extreme inequality, with a middle class that increasingly understands the rules are rigged against them, this was the first election in what is likely to be an era of growing class warfare. And Romney’s defeat was a clear repudiation of the revolt of the rich.

Romney, after all, was of, by and for the 1%. With his 14% tax rate on 20 million in annual income, elevators for his wife’s Cadillacs, scorn for the 47%, a fortune that, in the classic phrase of former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, summers in the Swiss Alps and winters in the Cayman Islands, he was the poster candidate of the Gilded class. He won the Republican nomination because, as Newt Gingrich complained, he had more billionaires than anyone else. His company, Bain Capital, epitomizes casino capitalism, profiting from financial finagling and shipping jobs abroad. His platform came down to one claim: “I’m a businessman; I can fix this.”

With the president refusing to tell people what he would change, Romney did better on the economy than he might otherwise. But voters knew that he wasn’t on their side and had no clue about the struggles they faced. His remedy for the economy might work for the few, but it wasn’t likely to trickle down to the rest of us.

And the deformed populism of the right, the foul congeries of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, couldn’t overcome this. Voter suppression seemed to backfire, the insult apparently goading more young and African American voters to the polls. Anti-immigrant bashing only built Democratic margins among Latino voters. The war on women helped Obama back into the White House and gave Democrats at least two upset Senate victories in Missouri and Indiana.

Middle class populism triumphed. The president swept key states in the Midwest because his campaign scoured Romney for his Bain record and produced for workers in the rescue of the auto industry. Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin won by standing clearly with working people against the money interests. Progressives also made gains in the House, but there clearly a flood of late big money helped Republicans stave off many strong challenges.

We’ll provide more detailed analysis when the results are finally in. Our election night poll results will be released on Friday. Stay tuned.

The Romney campaign has turned to a strategy of swamping the public with flat-out, blatant lies, one after another, again and again, endlessly and lavishly repeated. They do this because they are making a calculation that it will work! So what is going on? And can democracy survive this assault?

The Growing List Of Lies

This week’s lie is the “Obama gutted welfare reform” nonsense. See Bill Scher’s must-read response, Romney’s Welfare Lie: A Betrayal Of Conservatism. The reporting conveys the Romney message, like this: Romney accuses Obama of dismantling welfare reform. The lie is driven home by a massive $$-driven carpet bombing of ads.

The next-most recent lie was the “Obama is trying to keep military families from voting” lie. This lie, repeated over and over, coordinated with outside groups, reinforces the “Democrats are anti-military” narrative.

Before that was the “You didn’t build that” lie, where the Romney campaign doctored audio to make it sound as though President Obama said something he didn’t say. (And got away with it.) This lie, repeated over and over, reinforces the “Democrats are anti-business” narrative.

This one on welfare reinforces the “Democrats take your money and give it to black people” narrative. “We will end a culture of dependency and restore a culture of good, hard work,” said Romney, promising to make them work good and hard.

Rachel Maddow’s blog has been keeping track of the Romney lies, and it is a loooooong list.

How It Is Done

Here is how it works. Each lie is developed in the right’s machine, using something currently in the news to reinforce an ongoing narrative about “liberals.” The lie percolates up through a well-worn process where the germ of the story is planted in smaller outlets, and variations of it are tried out until one seems to resonate. Next, larger right-wing media operations pick up the developed “story” and drive it further. It gets amplified on the radio, FOX News and the right’s newspapers. Finally the corporate media takes it out to more and more people, covering themselves with the claim they are just “reporting” on a “story” that is “already out there.”

One way or another the lie is repeated and repeated and repeated (and repeated) in various forms through various channels that reach various target groups, until it becomes a “truth.” Once it has become a “truth” the Romney campaign uses this “truth” to claim Democrats and President Obama are harming the country.

The Solyndra story is a good example. The right developed a lie about “cronyism,” claiming that a Democratic donor is “tied to” solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra because a foundation with his name on it was an investor in the company. Because a foundation was the investor there was no possibility for the donor to benefit. But that doesn’t matter, they used this “tie” to spread a lie the Obama administration was steering money into someone’s pocket, and they repeated it and repeated it and repeated it.

After months of repetition of this lie, the Romney campaign understood that the lie has become a “truth,” and is using that “truth” themselves in campaign ads and Romney’s stump speech! Romney talks about “cronyism” in the Obama administration, understanding that much of the public now believes this is established fact.

The Calculation

The Romney campaign is limiting media access to the candidate and offering little in the way of substantive policy proposals. They are instead using press releases, advertisements, message-trained surrogates, cooperative media like FOX, Drudge, talk radio, allied newspapers and the right’s blogosphere, while coordinating with massively-funded outside groups like Crossroads GPS, Americans for Prosperity, Heritage Foundation and others.

This is a key thing to get, the Romney campaign believes that they can win this election using lies and propaganda as “truths” to drive their campaign story. They are making the calculation that the right’s media machine has become sufficiently powerful for their version of reality to reach enough of the public, and that it is sticking in their minds as “truths!”

They are also making the calculation — so far validated by the media response — that there will be little if any pushback from “mainstream” media. They trust that the media will look the other way, report lies as “one side says X, the other says Y,” tell the public “both sides do it,” and say this is just par for the course.

But if there is media resistance, they are calculating that the right’s own media power can override any pushback that might come. They might also believe they can turn media resistance to their advantage. Decades have been spent convincing their followers to see potentially objective information sources as “the liberal media,” enemy of conservatism, and any pushback for lying could just increase support for their campaign.

So the Romney campaign, like the recent Bush administration, are conscious that they do not need to work with facts. Instead they believe they can “create truth” through the manipulation of perception. This is hardly new in Repubican circles. The phrase “reality-based community” came out of the previous Republican administration’s calculations of what the public will and won’t learn about. This famous quote from Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush by Ron Suskind, explains,

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

What Does The Public “Know?”

If you are reading this you are likely very well-informed. You pay attention to the mainstream news, as well as read various progressive sources. But much of the public is not very well-informed, and faces the problem of not knowing what sources to trust. Subjected to a constant battering of corporate/conservative propaganda and disinformation, they are busy, and not ready or able to do the extensive research needed to make informed decisions.

Progressives and “liberals” try to solve this problem by trying to help people get informed. Conservatives, however, try to use it to their advantage, spreading self-serving misinformation.

The well-funded propagandists study and understand the shorthand methods people use to determine what to believe. This is the reason for the ongoing attacks on the credibility of what would normally be seen as trustworthy sources, like PBS, NPR and what the rest of what has been disparaged for decades as “the liberal media.” This is also the reason for the establishment of so many corporate-funded conservative “institutes” and other academic and authoritative-sounding organizations that issue “studies” and “reports” that always echo the corporate-conservative positions.

The “mainstream” corporate media has also undergone a change over recent decades. Many outlets now see themselves as businesses with a product that has to appeal to “the market” to make money. They no longer see their mission to be informing the public so citizens have the information that is needed to function in a democracy, but instead as “maximizing shareholder return,” by “driving traffic” and whatever else it takes to sell advertising. And many people working as “journalists” understand that advancing their own careers means not making waves by being perceived as “leftist” or “anti-business.”

The Test

Steve Benen calls this a “test for the political world,” writing,

How are we to respond to a campaign that deliberately deceives the public without shame? This lie about welfare policy comes on the heels of Romney’s lie about voting rights in Ohio, which came on the heels of Romney’s lies about the economy; which came on the heels of Romney’s lies about health care; which came on the heels of Romney’s lies about taxes.

The Republican nominee for president is working under the assumption that he can make transparently false claims, in writing and in campaign advertising, with impunity. Romney is convinced that there are no consequences for breathtaking dishonesty.

The test, then, comes down to a simple question: is he right?

This is a test for the political world, as well as a challenge to the viability of our democratic system. We can expect this to continue and accelerate until election day, driven by hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaires and their huge corporations. The question is, will enough of our misinformed public be tricked by the lies? If this succeeds, what kind of country will we become? What will be left?