Gerrymandered GOP Congressional Districts Became Whiter, More Conservative

Many in the GOP - especial demagogues in the GOP Congressional delegation in the House of Representatives - claim that the 2012 election gave them a mandate since the GOP retained control of the House.  The truth, of course, is something quite different.  Retention of control of the House had little to do with support for GOP policies and everything to do with carefully gerrymandered districts that sought to insure the election of GOP candidates.  A case in point is Virginia's 2nd Congressional district which was redrawn in a ridiculous manner to make sure that hate group founder endorsed Scott Rigell would be re-elected.  But for the outrageous changes to his district, Rigell likely would have lost in 2012.  A story in USA Today looks at how districts were redrawn to package whites and conservatives together to block GOP losses.  Here are story highlights:

Momentum to overhaul the nation's immigration laws is fueled by the growing political influence of Hispanics in America, but in the U.S. House there is diminishing incentive for Republicans to support the effort because their constituents have become whiter, more conservative and less diverse than the nation as a whole.

In 2012, the congressional district lines that make up the 435-seat chamber were redrawn as part of the once-a-decade process to balance out population shifts.

GOP-led redistricting efforts moved areas with high concentrations of predominantly Democratic minority voters out of GOP dominant districts and into Democratic-heavy districts, thereby making both districts less competitive in a general election.

According to the non-partisan Cook Political Report, House Republicans today represent 6.6 million fewer minorities than in 2002 — the last time the lines were redrawn. The average GOP district is now 75% white, up 2 percentage points after the 2012 reconfiguration, while the average Democratic district is 51% white, down one percentage point since 2002.

"What's amazing is Republicans were able to actually make their districts ... whiter in the 2012 round of redistricting even though minorities were responsible for most of the growth of the U.S. population in the past 10 years," said David Wasserman, an election analyst for the Cook Report.

The 2010 redistricting resulted in a stronger GOP grip on the House, but also a political climate where incumbents are more vulnerable to primary challenges than general election battles, election analysts say, boosting the political pressure on incumbents to appeal to base voters. And voters in the Republican base are skeptical of proposals to make immigration easier.
 
Conservative Super PACs are already forming to target Republicans on immigration.
"It must be defeated in its entirety, period," said Lorie Medina, a Tea Party activist who chairs the Real Conservatives National Committee. The group has vowed to find and fund primary challengers to any Republican who supports a legislative overhaul similar to the Senate proposal, which the group considers an "amnesty" bill.

In short, the open racism and toxic nature of the GOP continues to intensify.  

The Republican Party’s Refusal to Make Meaningful Changesings

In the wake of the RNC's report on the reasons why the GOP did disastrously in the 2012 elections, there have been all kinds of recriminations and a denial that the GOP's policies themselves as opposed to "poor messaging" are the root cause of the party's inability to win voters, especially at the national level.  Conservative columnist Michael Gerson at the Washington Post looks at the GOP's shortcomings.  Here are some excerpts:

Recent brutal attacks on the GOP have claimed that minorities often think that “Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” That younger voters are “rolling their eyes at what the party represents.” That former Republicans view the party as “scary,” “narrow-minded,” “out of touch” and populated by “stuffy old men.”

But these were not Democratic attacks. The quotes come from the Republican National Committee’s “Growth & Opportunity Project” report, which, as far as I can tell, is unique in the history of party-sponsored self-reflection. Losing parties generally look in the mirror and see the need for cosmetics. This report calls for reconstructive surgery. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, it describes a party unpopular with the public, fading in must-win states and progressively marginalized at the national level.

The report, inevitably, set off an internal GOP conflict. This is not so much a matter of ideology; a number of politicians with tea party roots, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have fully internalized these political realities. The emerging argument is between political realists and ideological entrepreneurs. 

The RNC report engages this divergence of purposes in a forthright manner: “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.” The role of a political party, the report insists, is different from the pursuit of “universal purity.” 

But the report recognizes that Republicans require more than changed tone or technique; they need relevant, appealing policies. 

The 2012 election revealed insufficient GOP enthusiasm among working-class Americans and plummeting support among rising demographic groups, particularly Asians and Latinos. Appealing to these voters will require more than repetition of the Republican economic message circa 1980. They want the reassurance of a modern, functioning safety net and the realistic hope of economic and social mobility. Republicans have yet to effectively address either priority. 

This is partly an institutional problem. A smattering of conservative policy experts is working on these issues — conservative alternatives on health and education reform or promoting social capital and family stability. But the major conservative think tanks tend to be driven by ideological and donor priorities. Few conservative institutions operate effectively at the confluence of policy and politics.

Major Republican donors seem perfectly willing to support the presidential races of quixotic candidates. They foot the bill for television attack ads. They seem less interested in funding the revival of ideas and policy that is a prerequisite to reestablishing a GOP majority. It is a strategic failure of the first order. 

Those concerned about the Republican future hope for the arrival of a transformational candidate. But he or she will need something compelling to say. 

GOP Officials Already Ignoring RNC Autopsy of 2012 Loss

As noted yesterday, the Republican National Committee released a 97 page autopsy on the party's 2012 loss and an outline of what needed to be done to ensure better results going forward.  It appears that in addition to the Christofascists within the party base there is another obstacle to a revival of the GOP: the racists within the party base and in high elected office.  Yesterday  this phenomenon became apparent as two Deep South Senators attacked Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez who has been nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Labor.  Perez's offense?  Bring laws suits to enforce voting rights laws and acting to protect minorities.  You know, members of demographic groups that the RNC says the GOP must attract even as the party base and GOP controlled state legislatures work to disenfranchise these groups.  Think Progress looks at yesterday's attack on Perez and the continued racism that is a pillar of the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Well, that didn’t take long.  This morning, the biggest political story in Washington was a Republican National Committee “autopsy” of the GOP’s 2012 election loss. In it, the RNC proclaimed that “[i]t is imperative that the RNC changes how it engages with Hispanic communities to welcome in new members of our Party” and that “the Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring.” Within a few hours, three top Republicans already took the first steps to doom this effort.

Earlier today, President Obama nominated Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez to be the next Secretary of Labor. Perez is eminently qualified for this job, having served in a similar role for the state of Maryland before becoming the top civil rights attorney in the Justice Department. As head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Perez restored that office’s historic commitment to protecting voting rights,  .  .  .

Before the President even announced Perez’s nomination, Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) released a statement attacking him for serving as President of the Board of an organization that advocates on behalf of low-income immigrants and Latinos. The words “illegal immigrant” appear three times in Sessions’ statement, which is barely more than a paragraph long.

Not long thereafter, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) raised the specter of Perez supposedly sticking up for scary black men. According to Vitter, “Thomas Perez’s record should be met with great suspicion by my colleagues for his spotty work related to the New Black Panther case,” an allegation that does far more to discredit Vitter than Perez. Two separate investigations, one of which was released just last week, concluded that DOJ acted entirely without improper motive when it dismissed this case.

It’s important not to exaggerate the importance of these two senators’ statements. Sessions has a long history of opposition to civil rights. Many of his future senate colleagues voted to reject his nomination to the federal bench after a DOJ attorney revealed that Sessions once called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” 

Sessions and Vitter’s crusade against Perez is certain to have powerful supporters among the GOP’s most powerful messengers, however. Rush Limbaugh compared Perez to “Hugo Chavez” on his radio station today, and he claimed that nominating Perez to head Labor is the same thing as a Republican nominating the “Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan a cabinet position where he would be deciding on discrimination lawsuits.”

 The rank ugliness of today's GOP just continues to fester.  So much for renewed minority outreach.

 

Romney and GOP Still Don't Get It: Blame Lost on "Obamacare Attractiveness" To The "Lower Incomes"

As this blog has noted numerous times, the United States is the ONLY advanced developed nation that does not have a plan for national health insurance of some kind for all of its citizens.  This despite the fact that supposedly the most religious of this same grouping of citizens.  Something that one would think would translate into a belief that the sick and uninsured should have health care coverage - at least if self-proclaimed Christians in the GOP base truly believed in and valued the Gospel message of Christ.  Of course, they don't and stand as a remarkable example of the modern day Pharisees that seem everywhere within conservative Christianity.  And this hypocrisy and cluelessness extends to the party of the Christofascists and modern day Pharisees, the Republican Party.  In a recent interview Mitt Romney revealed that he still doesn't grasp why he and the GOP lost last November.  They view countless Americans as disposable trash and still seek to gut Medicare and other programs that benefit the less fortunate and, I would argue are consistent with the Gospel that these falsely pious hypocrites pretend to worship.  A piece in The New Civil Rights Movement looks at Romney and the sickness within the GOP:

Mitt Romney appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and said he lost the 2012 campaign for the presidency because of “the Obamacare attractiveness” to “lower incomes.”  “We did very well with the majority population, but not with minority populations, and that was a failing, that was a real mistake,” Romney told Fox News host Chris Wallace.

“I think the Obamacare attractiveness and feature was something we underestimated, particularly among lower incomes. And, uh, just didn’t do as good a job in connecting with that audience as we should have.”

Aan Millhiser at Think Progress adds:

During the course of the interview, Romney agreed with Wallace that his “47 percent” comment — his claim that 47 percent of the country will vote for Obama because they are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims” — hurt his campaign by leaving the impression that he did not like many voters. Nevertheless, this explanation of his loss is reminiscent of the explanation he gave his donors for his defeat shortly after the election — Obama won because of “the gifts” he gave to African-Americans, Latinos and young voters.

Note that Romney doesn’t use the word “people” in his comments. They are not even “voters,” but, “populations.”  Romney had no moral right to be president of the American people because he never saw them as people.

It goes without saying that since Romney has never had to worry about money or access to health care for his family, he doesn't understand why Obamacare is such a pressing issue for many of us.  As for folks like Paul Ryan, they simply don't give a damn about the less fortunate no matter how hard he tries to wrap himself in his Catholicism.

The Republican Party Needs a Reality Check

In a surprising column in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson - who is typically an apologist for the Republicans - argues that the GOP needs  a transformation and that the party needs to come out of embracing the past and move towards the future.  Obviously, it is not the message that the Christofascists in the GOP base want to hear as they endeavor feverishly to move the country back into the 1950's if not the Medieval period.  No doubt Gerson - like Jon Huntsman - will be viewed as a heretic or a RINO, but sometimes the truth isn't what one wants to hear.  The GOP needs to stop living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist and start to embrace objective reality. Here are some column highlights:

It is the nature of resilient institutions to take stock of new realities and adjust accordingly. In a new cover essay for Commentary magazine, Peter Wehner and I detail the examples of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Clinton broke a long Democratic presidential losing streak by emphasizing middle-class values, advocating the end of “welfare as we know it” and standing up to extreme elements within his coalition (thereby creating the “Sister Souljah moment”). In Britain, Blair went after the “moral chaos” that led to youth crime, abandoned his party’s official commitment to public ownership of the means of production and launched New Labor.

The Republican Party now needs similar transformation. Out of the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats’ 113. 

This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the declining relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious.

Mitt Romney, lost by 5 million votes to a beatable incumbent presiding over an anemic economy. The explanation is not purely technical or personality oriented. At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists.  In retrospect, last year’s Republican primary process was entirely disconnected from the actual needs of the party.

A Republican recovery in presidential politics will depend on two factors. First, candidates will need to do more than rebrand existing policy approaches or translate them into Spanish. Some serious rethinking is necessary, particularly on economic matters. In our Commentary essay, we raise ideas such as ending corporate welfare, breaking up the mega-banks, improving the treatment of families in the tax code, and encouraging economic mobility through education reform and improved job training. Whatever form Republican proposals eventually take, they must move beyond Reagan-era nostalgia. 

Second, Republican primary voters, party activists and party leaders have a choice to make, ruthlessly clarified by recent events. They can take the path of Democrats in 1988, doubling down on a faltering ideology. Or they can follow the model of Democrats in 1992 and their own party in 2000, giving their nominee the leeway needed to oppose outworn or extreme ideas and to produce an agenda relevant to our time. 

As I have noted over and over again, I do not anticipate any meaningful change in the GOP until the Christofascists are driven from having any serious role in the GOP nominating process.  They are fanatics who by definition want to move the country backwards and who ignore a changing reality.

The GOP's Big Asian-American Problem

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There is much political dialogue about the Republican Party's "Hispanic problem."  But as the last presidential election revealed Asian-Americans showed a similar disdain for Mitt Romney and the GOP in general and, like the Hispanic population, Asian Americans represent another exploding demographic.  By chance and happen stance - as well as respectful treatment and competent legal services - I have built a sizable law practice with Asian American clients, those of Indian descent in particular.   Some know that I am gay, some do not.  Those who do seemingly could care less about who I love.  My perception is, however, they deeply care about the GOP's constant racism and immigrant bashing and the GOP's allegiance to Christofascists who want to trample on the religious freedom of non-Christians and other Americans who do not subscribe to the Christofascists' ugly version of Christianity.  A piece in American Prospect looks at the growing problem that the GOP faces with Asian American voters.  Here are highlights:

Still overlooked in the immigration discussion are Asian Americans, who are the fastest growing demographic group in the country—and one of the most diverse. The bulk of Asian American immigrants (83 percent) come from China, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. At present, they’re 5.8 percent of the total population, nearly half of whom live in the West, with a large concentration on the Pacific coast. Seventy-four percent of Asian American adults were born outside of the United States, and in 2009—according to the Pew Research Center—Asian American immigration outpaced Hispanic immigration for the first time in recent history.

The Republican Party’s standing with Latinos is solid compared to where it is with Asian Americans. A whopping 73 percent of Asians supported Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, up 11 percent from four years ago. When you disaggregate by nationality, the difference between Asian support for Obama and Romney is even more stark and begins to approach African American-levels of support for the president.

Obama won the three largest demographic groups—Chinese, Indian, and Filipino Americans—with more than 76 percent support. Filipino identification with the GOP is as large as you would expect—26 percent are enrolled in the Republican Party—but only 9 percent of Indian and Chinese Americans identify with the GOP.

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Simply put, the Republican Party has an “Asian problem” that rivals their “Latino problem” in size and scope. So far, it’s gone under the radar. But given the pace of Asian immigration to the United States—and the growing Asian populations of states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia—Republicans can’t ignore it for long.

Asian Americans have clearly figured out that if you aren't an angry white conservative Christian or a billionaire, then the Republican Party is not your friend.  Until the GOP can see the common humanity in all of us,  the allegiance of Asian Americans to Democrats will grow - as it has among minorities - who can plainly see that they are despised by the GOP almost as much as gays and blacks.  Long term, the GOP is committing suicide.

Will President Obama Deliver on Gay Rights?

Less than 24 hours after his inaugural speech which gave the impression that he supported nationwide marriage rights for same sex couples, Barack Obama was backtracking and reiterating that marriage is a matter which needs to be left to the states.  Of, course, in states like Virginia dominated at the state legislative level by knuckle dragging Christofascists, that means LGBT couples will have zero marriage rights for the foreseeable future.  But then again, Obama had secured the money and LGBT votes needed to carry Virginia on November 6th, so why should he worry about our fate after that?  A column in The Daily Beast looks at the issue of whether or not Obama will actually try to deliver on gay rights, or if the inaugural speech was simply pretty words that in the grander scheme meant nothing.  Here are excerpts:

When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the March on Washington in 1963, he used an interesting metaphor. He called “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence ... a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” King said he and the hundreds of thousands gathered on the Mall were there “to cash a check.”

In his second inaugural address, on the day we honor Dr. King, President Obama issued a promissory note of his own. “Our journey is not complete,” he declared without equivocation or reservation, “until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

But almost before his words had finished resonating across the National Mall, his press secretary was walking them back. The president, he told reporters, personally supports gay marriage. But the legality of gay marriage itself? “That’s something that should be addressed by the states.” Of course, states determined the legality of interracial marriage for decades, and so the marriage of the president’s parents was illegal in 19 states. We rightly look back at that time with horror, just as our children will look back on today, when 30 states have enshrined discrimination against gays into their constitutions.

But gay-rights activists are looking for quick movement on many fronts, for there is much our president must do to honor his new promissory note:

Join the lawsuit against Proposition 8. The voters of California amended their constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. A remarkable and brave young gay activist, Chad Griffin, who now leads the Human Rights Campaign, has spearheaded an effort to overturn the action as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” Longtime gay-rights activist and former Clinton White House official Richard Socarides is optimistic that the Obama administration will join the lawsuit. “My own view,” he says, “is that the Justice Department and the White House press office are just catching up with the rhetoric of the speech and that the government will in the end enter the Proposition 8 case on the side of gay-rights advocates. They certainly should.”

Use his power to order federal contractors not to discriminate against their gay employees. In 1941 FDR signed an executive order prohibiting any defense contractor from discriminating based on race, creed, color, or national origin. It took 23 years for Congress to enshrine this principle in the Civil Rights Act. President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, but instead of waiting for Congress to act he should use his constitutional power to end taxpayer-subsidized discrimination against gays.

Make sure gay military spouses have the same rights and privileges as straight military spouses. This president and our remarkable first lady have done admirable work shining a light on the service and sacrifice of our nation’s true top 1 percent—the 1 percent of Americans who serve in the military—and their families. Being a military spouse is tough enough; gay spouses should not be denied benefits earned by their loved one’s service.

This president has evolved significantly on gay rights, but he has a distance to go still. If he does not move quickly and decisively, the White House mailroom may soon be filled with stones, to remind him of the promise of Stonewall.

I for one will not be holding my breath.  Every time Obama manages to make me feel like he truly cares about gay Americans,  he then quickly does something to show me that he's actually a cynical politician.  It would be nice to be proven wrong on this assessment this time around.

The GOP's Gerrymandered House Majority

It should come as no surprise that the delusional GOP controlled House of Representatives believes it has a mandate to slash and burn governmental services and social programs because far too many members of the GOP caucus not to mention their Christianist/Tea Party base live in a veritable alternate universe from objective reality.  But the real reason that the GOP still holds a majority in the House comes down to a single word that has nothing whatsoever to do with public approval of GOP policies: gerrymandering.  There is ZERO mandate for the GOP's failed policies and but for gerrymandered districts in the worse sense of the word, Democrats would hold the House.  Sadly, given how redistricting works, the nation will be faced with a dysfunctional GOP majority for some time to come in all likelihood.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this egregious situation.  Here are highlights:

As a new Congress convenes, it has become an unquestioned truth among Republicans that their party has as much of a mandate as President Obama because voters returned them to power in the House. 

The mantra has been intoned by John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist and many other party eminences, and there is a certain logic to saying that the voters, by giving Republicans the House, were asking for divided government.

But the claim to represent the voters’ will doesn’t add up.

The final results from the November election were completed Friday, and they show that Democratic candidates for the House outpolled Republicans nationwide by nearly 1.4 million votes and more than a full percentage point — a greater margin than the preliminary figures showed in November. And that’s just the beginning of it: A new analysis finds that even if Democratic congressional candidates won the popular vote by seven percentage points nationwide, they still would not have gained control of the House.

[T]he Republican House majority is impervious to the will of the electorate. Thanks in part to deft redistricting based on the 2010 Census, House Republicans may be protected from the vicissitudes of the voters for the next decade. For Obama and the Democrats, this is an ominous development: The House Republican majority is durable, and it isn’t necessarily sensitive to political pressure and public opinion. 

This in itself is an extraordinary result: Only three or four other times in the past century has a party lost the popular vote but won control of the House. But computer-aided gerrymandering is helping to make such undemocratic results the norm — to the decided advantage of Republicans, who controlled state governments in 21 states after the 2010 Census, almost double the 11 for Democrats.

[T]he 2012 House results show the redrawing of districts to optimize Republican representation clearly had an impact. Consider three states won by Obama in 2012 where Republicans dominated the redistricting: In Pennsylvania, Democrats won just five of 18 House seats; in Virginia, Democrats won three of 11; and in Ohio, Democrats won four of 16.

Republicans don’t have a permanent House majority, but they will go into the next several elections with an automatic head start. For many, the biggest political threat comes not from Democrats but from conservative primary challengers. 

Locally, it is because of horrifically gerrymandered districts that far right, religious extremists, hate group endorsed candidates like Scott Rigell were re-elected.  Had Rigell's district not been twisted a redrawn like a pretzel, carefully consolidating the most conservative districts across four cities, he likely would have been defeated.  

Can the GOP Establishment Fix the Party's Primary Problem?

This blog has noted frequently the the GOP's descent into insanity began when the Christofascists were allowed into local city and county committees from which they slowly took over much of the GOP primary process like a slowly metastasizing cancer.   The result has been that sane and moderate candidates find themselves unable to get nominations in the typically low turn out primaries that are populated by the religious extremists - here in Virginia, The Family Foundation rallies the nutcases - and their Tea Party cousins.  The result has been that even Ronald Reagan could not win a nomination contest nowadays because he would not be extreme and crazy enough to satisfy the Christianists.  Belatedly, the so-called GOP establishment has realized that their short term expediency of embracing the lunatic fringe is turning into a form of political suicide.  An article in Politico looks at the so-called establishment's first effort to regain control of the primary system.  Here are excerpts:

The disastrous 2012 election and embarrassing fiscal cliff standoff has brought forth one principal conclusion from establishment Republicans: They have a primary problem.

The intra-party contests, or threat thereof, have become the original sin that explains many of the party’s woes in the minds of GOP leaders. It’s the primaries that push their presidential nominees far to the right (see “self-deportation” and “47 percent”); produce lackluster Senate candidates (Todd Akin has almost become a one-word shorthand); and, as seen most vividly in the last two weeks, dissuade scores of gerrymandered House members from face-saving compromise while politically emasculating their speaker.

What to do about the primaries has become Topic A in many a post-election Republican soul-searching session, and now the first steps are being taken to address the issue. For Senate Republicans, that means a modified return to their 2010 posture of openly playing in primaries. A retiring House Republican is starting a super PAC to help House members challenged from the right. And an RNC commission is mulling over changes to the party’s presidential primary.

In the Senate, where at least five GOP losses in the past two election cycles could be attributed to primaries, Republican leaders are planning to intervene in selected 2014 races to ensure preferred candidates win the nomination.

High-profile Senate Republicans are going to try to pre-empt bloody primaries with aggressive, early recruitment and support — effectively trying to clear fields.

Further, top Senate Republicans have made clear to outside groups that they’d like the third parties to not exist simply as entities that air attack ads against Democrats in general elections but to play a more hands-on role in GOP primaries.  .   .   .   .  Translation into non-Senate speak: The big-money establishment Republican super PACs like American Crossroads need to serve as a counterbalance in primaries to conservative outfits such as Club for Growth and former Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund.

In the House, look no further than the Plan B debacle and the 151 Republican “no” votes on the final compromise to understand how primaries have become the chief political threat in a GOP caucus in which more than half the members faced nominal general election opposition this year.

“A lot of the Republican Conference strategy has been to not put members in a difficult primary situation and that makes it tougher for us to sign off on a deal,” lamented former Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), a Boehner ally.

“When a center-right Republican is in a primary and is being targeted by some group as a RINO, we’re going to make sure we have their back,” said LaTourette. “Not just with speeches and press releases but with money.”

There is more that is worth a full read.  Personally, I believe the effort will be difficult since the lunatic fringe is now far too entrenched in the local committees.  The patients have taken over the asylum and putting them back on the fringe will take a great deal of work and money - and calling out the crazies for what they are.

Obama's New Found Resolve

Few things drove me to distraction as much as Barack Obama's continual passivity to GOP obstructionist moves during his first term and his fantasy world efforts to appear bipartisan with an opposing political party with about as much reason and good will as a rabid dog.  Combine that with his refusal to lead and waiting for Congressional Democrats to lead and the result was my many post excoriating Obama.  Thankfully, Obama seems to have learned from past debacles.  A piece in Politico looks at Obama's new resolve - and it's likely impact on the knuckle draggers in the Republican Party.  Here are excerpts:

President Barack Obama’s stiffening resolve during the fight over the fiscal cliff can be traced directly to the lessons he drew from his hard-won triumph of the 2012 campaign.  He whipped Republicans a second time, parried the best attacks they could muster, and is now demanding that they respect the victory, if not the man who won it.

The roots of his new toughness are rooted in the nature of his convincing November win over Mitt Romney. Obama was carried to the finish line by supporters after his epic flop at the Denver debate. That seeded in him a greater sense of confidence and deepened his resolve not to be rolled by a recalcitrant GOP, as he was during the bitter 2011 fight over the debt ceiling, according to interviews with staffers and friends

After his 2008 win, he talked a lot about bipartisanship. This time he’s determined to squeeze it out of Republicans. He believes he owes that to the people who voted for him.  .   .   .   .   the people around the president now see him as a Democratic Reagan, a resilient and popular figure who can unify the country — if only the dead-enders will give him a chance.

So far, he’s staked out a tough position, refusing to get too specific on spending and entitlement cuts, and threatening GOP leaders — whose popularity is tanking — with the bully pulpit of his inauguration and State of the Union speech. But many Hill Democrats, accustomed to seeing Obama give in, remain only cautiously optimistic.  “So far, so good. [But] we’ll see how this shakes out,” said a top Senate Democrat, who is queasy about the administration’s overtures to the GOP on entitlement reform.

But if the 2012 election increased the president’s comfort with public emotion, it also strengthened his desire to ensure that the GOP — a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections — doesn’t get a better deal than they have earned.  And that means Obama is likely to employ the same mindset that won him a second term: a determination to pursue a core political strategy regardless of the news cycle, tactical shifts by the opposition or external pressure.

I hope the new tougher resolve will continue.  Today's GOP is indeed like a rabid dog that needs to be put down and stopped from harming the country as it pushes its insane agenda of reverse Robin Hood policies , racism and religious extremism.

The GOP's Botox Solution to Its Growing Dysfunction

As a former Republican - and there do seem to be lots of us even among the LGBT blogger set - I continue to watch for any hint that the GOP has grasp the fact that it is suffering from a systemic illness than cannot be cured by "better messaging" or by using ethnic politicians as front men and women to hide the party's growing lily whiteness and white supremacist inclinations.  While a few conservatives seem to have understood what is happening, most remain in their bubble world drinking the Kool-Aid ladled out to them by the Christofascist/Tea Party operatives.  As a result, the party seems headed towards a slow form of suicide.  The bad news is that the GOP's death will not come soon enough to save the nation and states like Virginia from more batshitery and repackaging of failed GOP policies.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at the phenomenon.  Here are some excerpts:

Some Republicans—and many Democrats—now claim that the writing is on the wall: demography is destiny, which means the GOP is going the way of the Whigs and the Dodo. Across the country, they see an aging white majority shrinking as the US heads for the future as a majority-minority country and the Grand Old Party becomes the Gray Old Party. Others say: not so fast.

In the month since 51% of the electorate chose to keep Barack Obama in the White House, I've spent my time listening to GOP pundits, operators, and voters. While the Party busily analyzes the results, its leaders and factions are already out front, pushing their own long-held opinions and calling for calm in the face of onrushing problems.

Do any of their proposals exhibit a willingness to make the kind of changes the GOP will need to attract members of the growing groups that the GOP has spent years antagonizing like Hispanics, Asian Americans, unmarried women, secular whites, and others? In a word: no.

Instead, from my informal survey, it looks to this observer (and former Republican) as if the party is betting all its money on cosmetic change. Think of it as the Botox Solution. It wants to tweak its talking points slightly and put more minority and female Republicans on stage as spokespeople. Many in the GOP seem to believe that this will do the trick in 2014 and beyond. Are they deluded?

Although most Republicans see hints of future demographic challenges in the exit polls, many prefer to focus on other factors to explain Romney's loss out of a desire not to "blow up the party if there are less radical solutions." (Hence, the delusional quality of so many of their post-mortems and the lack of interest in meaningful change.)

First, they cite the Romney factor: a weak candidate, too moderate—or too conservative—who failed to fight the Obama campaign"s early efforts to paint him as an out-of-touch plutocrat. In other words, his history (Bain Capital and Romneycare) depth-charged him before demographics could even kick in.

Second, they point to the Obama factor. In both 2008 and 2012, he attracted unprecedented levels of minority and young voters, a phenomenon that might not be repeated in 2016. Some Republican operatives are also convinced that his campaign simply had a much better "ground game" and grasp of how to employ technology to turn out voters. (Half of self-identifying Republican voters think, as they did in 2008, that Obama simply stole the election through registration fraud involving African Americans.)

Third, they emphasize the powers of incumbency.  .  .  .  .   2016, they swear, will be different. Nor do they seem to fear a reprise of the 2008 and 2012 primary circuses because the A-listers in 2016, they insist, will all have well-established conservative bona fides and won't have to bend over backwards to cultivate the conservative base.

Fourth, there is the perceived success of Republicans other than Romney, particularly in what white Republicans call the "Heartland."    .   .   .   .  they kept their majority in the House of Representatives, losing only a handful of seats. (That the GOP lost the majority of total votes cast gets less attention.)

Meanwhile, on the Bridge of the Titanic - Avoid it as they may, the long-term picture couldn't look grimmer for the Party. Demographics may well be destiny. Even a cursory look at the numbers exposes the looming threat to the Party's future prospects.

* Whites: About three-quarters of the electorate (and 88% of Romney's voters) this year were white, but their numbers are steadily sinking—by 2% since 2008.

* White Christians: The bulk of Romney's supporters (79%) were white Christians (40% of whom were evangelicals), but this is an aging and shrinking group. Three-quarters of senior voters but only a quarter of millennial voters are white Christians, and the generations in between are much less likely to consider themselves "strong" members of their religion than seniors.

 * The Young: The millennial generation (born between 1978 and 2000) has been voting overwhelmingly for Democrats (66% for Obama in 2008, 60% this year). They are projected to be 40% of the eligible voting pool by 2020. Because they are relatively diverse and secular, the GOP cannot assume that enough will emulate previous generations and swing to the right as they age.

The factions in the party that are not socially conservative see these looming threats as an opportunity to get the GOP to drop the social stuff. But movement conservatives aren't going to cede ideological ground, not when they (correctly) think it's a necessity if they are to attract their base voters. "This country doesn't need two liberal or Democratic parties," is the way Bobby Jindal puts it, typically enough.

There is much more to the piece which deserves a full read.  The point is that do not expect the GOP to change.  At least not until a significant number of Christofascists die off.  By the time that happens, the GOP itself may be dead.

Outside of the GOP Bubble, Americans Believe Obama Has a Mandate

The delusions that continue to exist in the fantasy world inside the GOP bubble are amazing. Take for instance the House Republican's belief that they have a popular mandate to oppose the Obama/Democrat tax and budget proposals.  In the real world, a new Bloomberg survey finds that a majority of Americans, in fact, believe the exact opposite of the alternate reality within the GOP its Tea Party affiliate.  Indeed, Obama's overall approval numbers have increased and some 65% of Americans believe that Obama has a clear mandate.  Here are some highlights from Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama won the public argument over taxes so decisively that almost half of Republicans now say he has an election mandate to raise rates on the rich. 

Majorities of about 2-to-1 also read the election results as an endorsement of Obama’s pledge to protect Social Security and Medicare benefits, according to a Bloomberg National Poll of 1,000 adults conducted Dec. 7-10. 

The president’s job approval strengthened to 53 percent from 49 percent in September. The last time he enjoyed that level of public backing was December 2009, when his job approval was 54 percent. 

The combined findings give Obama “an opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength,” said Ann Selzer, the founder of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm that conducted the poll. “This is what the public is saying he was elected to do.” 

The election “was basically a referendum that wealthy people could and would pay more,” said poll respondent Jim Johnson, 66, of Littleton, Colorado, a retired telecommunications executive and a Republican who voted for Mitt Romney. “It was perfectly clear. That was Obama’s stance throughout the election.” 

Poll respondent Gerald Watts, 75, of Lake Quivira, Kansas, a retired engineer and another Republican who voted for Romney, read the election results the same way.  “Every time we listened to him on TV, he’d start talking about raising taxes on the rich -- every news conference, every time he went up in front of a group,” said Watts. “He didn’t want to talk about anything else.” 

Even so, the differences among congressional Republicans on taxes, with Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee the latest to break from his leaders to call for raising rates on high earners, reflect a division among the party ranks. Fifty-three percent of Republicans say the election didn’t give Obama a mandate on taxes.

Public sentiment also strengthens the president’s position on entitlements. A 64 percent majority says Obama can claim a mandate to protect Social Security from “substantial budget cuts” and 62 percent see a voter directive to prevent “fundamental change” in Medicare.  

A 57 percent majority of Americans say voters gave a go- ahead on an overhaul of immigration law to provide a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, one of the administration’s priorities in its second term. Fifty-eight percent of political independents see an immigration mandate. 

Republican respondents’ differ, with 63 percent rejecting the idea that Obama’s victory implies public support for legislation enabling legal status for undocumented immigrants.

Andrew Sullivan has telling remarks on the GOP's refusal to accept reality:

The longer the Congressional Republicans remain in denial about this, the more isolated they will become.  .   .   .   .   These two men[the one's quoted in Bloomberg, above]  are smack in the middle of the GOP's current demographics. And, unlike the foam-flecked mouth-pieces on Fox, they are admirably civic in their understanding of politics. Listen to them, Mr Speaker. And lead.

 

RNC Launches Autopsy on 2012 Election

While it ought to be obvious to anyone sentient why the GOP lost the presidency, lost rather than gained seats in the U. S. Senate, and saw its majority in the House of Representatives shrink, the Republican National Committee is launching an official autopsy on the 2012 election.  God forbid that they have a clue that hate, bigotry, racism, pandering to religious extremists, and engaging in a reverse Robin Hood social policy are not the easiest things to sell nowadays  in light of the nation's rapidly changing demographics.  On the other hand, perhaps an official investigation may cause a few in the GOP outside of the lunatic Christianist/Tea Party base to grasp that the party needs a major overhaul on its positions and that Christofascists and anti-immigrant extremists should not be allowed to draft the party platform.  An article in Politico looks at this effort to discover what ought to be obvious.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican National Committee is rolling out a plan to review what worked and what didn't for the party in the 2012 cycle, appointing five people at the top of a committee that will make recommendations on things like demographics, messaging and fundraising.

The Growth and Opportunity Project is going to be chaired by RNC committee member Henry Barbour, longtime Jeb Bush adviser and political operative Sally Bradshaw, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, Puerto Rico RNC committee member Zori Fonalledas, and South Carolina RNC member Glenn McCall. Priebus, who is running for a second term, is holding a call with committee members to roll out the plan this afternoon.

The plan is to focus on: campaign mechanics, fundraising, demographics, messaging, outside groups, campaign finance, the national primary process and, last but not least, what the successful Democratic efforts revealed about the way forward, and recommend plans for the way forward, sources familiar with the plan said.

Priebus had told a large group of donors in New York last week that the review would be conducted outside the building and would not be led by RNC staff. But sources familiar with the project said that there are 2 RNC senior staffers, Ben Kay and Sara Armstrong, assigned to the project as support staff, saying the goal between them and the RNC members involved was to have, as one source said, "both inside and outside influence" to bring in a several different points of view.  Still, the source insisted that "the GOP has problems but they are solvable. 

Still, given the complaints about the party, the composition of the committee includes at least one Priebus ally - Barbour - and others with ties to Bush-world. It includes demographic diversity, but less so ideologically. Officials said the review will include a broad swath of people within the party, including donors and grassroots members, but it remains to be seen how conservative activists react. The main focus of the review is inclusion of new voters for future victories, the sources said.

The RNC isn’t the only group assessing how 2012 went so terribly wrong. The high command of American Crossroads, the most powerful of the GOP SuperPACs, met last week in Washington, Republican sources tell POLITICO. Heavyweight advisers Haley Barbour, Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove were all in town for the meeting, which featured a discussion of the campaign and the first extensive conversation about how the group should approach the 2014 mid-terms.

Yet even as they attempt to learn from what happened, Crossroads also is preparing to make clear to their donors that they weren’t blind to the difficulties of Romney’s winning the presidency. One of the internal memos prepared for the meeting detailed on a state-by-state basis the group’s final polling in each state and the actual results. Their surveys were closer to the outcome than Romney’s internal data.

Messaging isn't the GOP's problem.  The problem is horrific policies and pandering to religious zealots and white supremacists and robbing the poor and middle class to give tax breaks to the wealthy.
 

Asian Americans Turn Dramatically Towards Democrats

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With all of the chatter among the pundit class about the Republican Party's alienation of Hispanic voters another emerging demographic has been largely missed, especially in areas where its members are not plentiful as yet.  An article in the Los Angeles Times looks at this other demographic that the GOP has lost by dramatic margins over the last two decades: Asian voters.   Not coincidentally, in my view, this dramatic shift tracts directly with the rise of the Christofascists and white supremacist elements within the Republican Party.  It is the same time period that has seen a steady exodus of moderates and non-religious extremists from the GOP.   Here are some article highlights:

As the dust settles on the presidential election, there seems to be a new theory daily as to why Mitt Romney lost and what it signals for the future of the Republican Party. Common to nearly all the speculation are the partisan implications of demographic change. The United States is shifting gradually toward a majority-minority electorate, with ever-growing numbers of Latino and Asian American voters. Notably, these groups are increasingly voting as Democrats. According to exit polls from Nov. 6, 73% of Asian Americans and 71% of Latinos voted for President Obama.

The high levels of Latino support for Obama were in line with expectations.  .  .  .  . But the fact that nearly three out of every four Asian Americans voted for Obama caught most pundits by surprise. Moreover, Asian Americans, who voted in record numbers in 2008, appear to have mobilized an even higher turnout in 2012. Asian Americans are no longer a swing vote or a crouching tiger in the electorate; their political stripes are now distinctly Democratic blue.

Many people have begun to ask: Why are Asian Americans so Democratic, and how did thy get that way? These questions take on greater intrigue when we look at exit poll data over the last two decades. Asian Americans have demonstrated the biggest shift in their presidential voting preferences of any demographic group, whether by race, gender or age.

First, it is no accident that the move toward the Democratic Party started during Bill Clinton's presidency. Although detailed polling data on Asian Americans in the 1990s are lacking, this is a period when the Democratic Party developed a new pro-business image, economic growth was strong, Asian Americans naturalized in unprecedented numbers and Clinton made public efforts to woo them, including nominating the first Asian American to the Cabinet.

Since 2000, the Republican Party has moved more sharply to the right than the Democratic Party has to the left, especially on issues that resonate with Asian Americans. For example, Republicans in Congress escalated their heated rhetoric on immigration and, despite the Bush administration's efforts, consistently scuttled efforts toward comprehensive immigration reform. Our 2008 National Asian American Survey also found very strong support among all Asian American groups for universal healthcare and for bringing a quick end to the Iraq war, two issues on which the Republican Party did itself no favors with these voters.

[T]he Republican Party has not been helped by its close liaison with the tea party movement, which received low favorability ratings in our 2012 survey, nor by presidential candidates and party activists emphasizing Christian values. Thus a Pew report on Asian American religion showed the highest Democratic Party support among Hindus and the religiously unaffiliated who, together, account for more than 35% of the Asian American population.

As noted many times on this blog, the GOP sold its soul to the Christofascists (and their close cousins, the white supremacists) and now social moderates, non-whites, and non-Kool-Aid drinkers are fleeing in droves.  Yet, as reflected by Ken Cuccinelli's rise to apparent GOP standard bearer here in Virginia, the GOP apparently has not gotten the message that extremism loses voters and loses elections.

Joe Scarborough Is Part Of The GOP's Problem

While he has on occasion refused to drink the Christianist/Tea Party Kool-Aid (as has Kathleen Parker at times) that is so widely consumed among today's Republicans, Joe Scarborough nonetheless continues to be part of the conservative pundit class problem that is continuing to allow the GOP to slide to ever increased insanity.  Partisanship should never trump the best interests of the nation and the vast majority of Americans.  Likewise, partisanship should never trump logic and objective reality - especially in the case of those who hold themselves out as "expert political observers.  Yet that is what has happened to to many pundits who mindlessly cheer lead for the Republican Party.  And it's just not Scarborough who has thrown away common sense - former compatriots from my old GOP days seem to have consumed Kool-Aid by the gallon.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this frightening phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

If you recall, Scarborough's original, slanderous words against Nate Silver were the following:

Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.

Scarborough called Nate Silver an ideologue and a joke. Instead of copping to his slander and his foolishness, he now writes a Politico column that is so brimming with, well Politico-style Village media horse-shit you need a medical mask to keep breathing to the end. First off, he starts with mockery of Upper West Side limousine hippie liberals and all the usual, lazy, exhausted boomer tropes that make Scarborough and all his flunkies as irrelevant as they are desperate for attention:

Just as the Beatles had the Maharishi to guide them through the tough times after the death of their manager Brian Epstein, progressives had Silver’s New York Times blog to comfort them after the first presidential debate.

Even if that analogy isn't itself stupid and lazy ... so fucking what? Mr Scarborough, you were wrong because you have no understanding of statistics, and you slandered someone who was sincere and transparent and smart. So where's the apology? Not there yet. Instead we get this:

The Obama-Romney race proved to be the least fluid in a generation. As Mr. Silver noted this morning, public opinion surveys remained consistent from June through Election Day.

 Notice the old MSM I-Never-Screwed-Up crap. Notice the "I'm not really apologizing" - but I'll add in a generic mea culpa to insure myself. Notice also that Scarborough is still too stupid to understand that Silver's model included Gallup and Rasmussen and all those "Dr Nick" pollsters, showed considerable fluctuation in the race, and yet also correctly predicted the demographic mix and state polling consensus in ways that revealed the structural advantage Obama had throughout.

I didn't call Nate a fool who should be banished from the Internet. I saw him as a fantastic breath of fresh air in a tired, discredited and fathomlessly self-important commentariat. Of which Scarborough is an almost text-book case.

It is time for those in the pundit class to start calling a spade a spade and condemning GOP insanity on a regular consistent basis.

The GOP's White Christian Strategy - A Growing Death Wish

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As noted many, many times on this blog, the descent of the Republican Party into something foul and ugly tracks directly with the Party's selling of its soul to the far right white Christian crowd who can be best defined by who they hate - which is virtually everyone other than themselves.  As a new Public Religion Research Institute study shows, the GOP's and the Romney/Ryan's reliance on aging white far right Christians has dire future consequences for the Party.  And even more troubling for those who would like to see the GOP return to sanity and decency is the difficulty that will be involved in wrenching the party back from the Christofascists in the nearer term.  A piece Mark Silk, Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, in Religion News Service analyzes the GOP future.  Here are highlights:

Republicans should be more worried about appealing to Nones than to Latinos. That's the message of PRRI'S stunning new graphic showing how the respective religious coalitions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on election day relates to the religious demography of age groups in the U.S.

It's hard to argue with the headline: "The End of the White Christian Strategy." White Christians--evangelicals, mainliners, and Catholics--made up fully seventy-five of Romney's coalition but only 38 percent of Obama's. It's the age distribution, however, that tells the deeper story.

Romney's coalition most closely matches the over-65 crowd, only older. It's whiter and less religiously diverse than seniors are. Call it your great-grandfather's Oldsmobile.

By contrast, Obama's coalition fits snugly in between the youth cohort of 18-to-29-year-old Millennials and the 30-49-year-old Gen-Xers. It's unsurprisingly overrepresented among African-Americans and a little light on evangelicals and "other Christians," but generally presents a fair picture of where America's religious layout is headed in the coming decades.

What's most striking is how evangelicals and Nones change places through the four age cohorts. From old to young, the evangelicals go 30-25-18-9, while the Nones go 9-14-19-32. Romney's coalition was composed of 37 percent evangelicals and eight percent Nones. Obama's coalition had 9 percent evangelicals and 23 percent Nones.

If I were a Republican, that would scare the hell out of me.

One comment on the piece summed things up well:

This election was the Republicans’ last stand, before being swamped by demographics. And there really is no way they can appeal to the Nones, America’s fastest growing “religious group” who are completely out of sympathy with the social conservatism Republicans have been playing for the past 3 decades. The only hook is Libertarianism—and only a minority want to go with that.

And to be honest, I’d rather see the end of religion if that’s the only way to get what I understand as a good society—the society promoted by secular leftists.

It is the far right Christians who ultimately will kill Christianity in America.  They have made the brand stand for hate, bigotry, selfishness and pretty much everything Christ purportedly opposed.  Will the GOP get the message?  Not likely, in my opinion.

How Significant Was GOP Gerrymandering in Congressional Seats?

The answer, as shown by the chart above, was that GOP retention of House seats was significantly enhanced through gerrymandering.  As debate over budget issues progress, it is important that Americans realize that the GOP held the house not because of significant support of GOP ideas or policies but solely because of gerrymandering - or cheating in my view.  A case in point is Virginia where the popular vote went slightly in favor of Democrats yet the GOP holds nearly 75% of the seats.  The GOP is morally and ethically bankrupt at this point and they need to be continually exposed.  Here are highlights from Andrew Sullivan's blog: 

After Republicans swept into power in state legislatures in 2010, the GOP gerrymandered key states, redrawing House district boundaries to favor Republicans. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates received half of the votes in House contests, but Republicans will claim about three quarters of the congressional seats. The same is true in North Carolina. More than half the voters in that state voted for Democratic representation, yet Republicans will fill about 70 percent of the seats. Democrats drew more votes in Michigan than Republicans, but they'll take only 5 out of the state's 14 congressional seats.

The Inconvenient Political Truths of 2012

With yesterday's press conference Barack Obama began the post-election agenda in earnest and one can only hope that both political parties, but especially the Republican Party and its members, will put the best interests of the nation ahead of partisan bickering and efforts to score points with their bases.  As noted before, I am not optimistic about the GOP given the alternate universe too many party leaders and members seem to inhabit.  A column in the Washington Post looks at where we find ourselves as a nation politically and, in my view correctly speculates where it all will lead to.  Here are excerpts:

Human nature and politics being what they are, Republicans will underestimate the trouble they’re in and Democrats will be eager to overestimate the strength of their post-2012 position.

Begin with the GOP: As Republicans dig out from a defeat that their poll-deniers said was impossible, they need to acknowledge many large failures. 

Their attempts to demonize President Obama and undercut him by obstructing his agenda didn’t work. Their assumption that the conservative side would vote in larger numbers than Democrats was wrong. The tea party was less the wave of the future than a remnant of the past. Blocking immigration reform and standing by silently while nativist voices offered nasty thoughts about newcomers were bad ideas. Latino voters heard it all and drew the sensible electoral conclusion.

Democrats are entitled to a few weeks of reveling because their victory really was substantial. Obama won all but one of the swing states and a clear popular-vote majority. The Democrats added to their Senate majority in a year that began with almost everyone predicting they’d lose seats. They even won a plurality of the vote in House races; Republicans held on because of gerrymandering. 

Just as important, the voters repudiated the very worst aspects of post-Bush conservatism: its harsh tone toward those in need, its doctrinaire inflexibility on taxes, its inclination toward extreme pronouncements on social issues, and its hard anti-government rhetoric that ignored the pragmatic attitude of the electorate’s great middle about what the public sector can and can’t do.

Yet Obama and his party need to understand that running a majority coalition is difficult.  .   .  .  .  
Obama needs to think about economic policies that deliver benefits across this wide spectrum of less well-to-do Americans. A longing for balanced budgets is not what drove these voters to the polls.

At the same time, there was a substantial middle- and upper-middle-class suburban component of the Democratic coalition that is moderate or liberal on social issues and sees the GOP as backward-looking.  .  .  .   But they are certainly not classic New Deal or Great Society Democrats.

Such voters are central to what has become known as the “Colorado strategy.” It’s a view that the Democrats’ long-term future depends on moderate, younger and suburban voters, especially women, combined with the growing Latino electorate. And in Colorado itself, this strategy worked exactly as advertised.

Democrats need to recognize that some of their core constituencies — young people, African Americans and Latinos — typically vote in lower numbers in off-year elections. The party requires a strategy for 2014. 

But these are happy problems compared with what the GOP and the conservative movement confront.  .  .  .  Many conservatives seem to hope that a more open attitude toward immigration will solve the Republicans’ Latino problem and make everything else better. It’s not that simple.  .  .  .  .  weaknesses among both Latinos and women owe not simply to immigration or to social issues, respectively, but also to the fact that both groups are more sympathetic to government’s role in the economy and in promoting upward mobility than current conservative doctrine allows.

Romney Proves That He's A Small Minded, Lying Ass Even in Defeat

How someone deals with defeat often tells a lot about them as a person.  And sadly Mitt Romney has confirmed the many negative opinions that many of us developed as the campaign season progressed: pathological liar, flip flopper extraordinaire, out of touch plutocrat, etc.   In a conference call to supporters, Romney basically claimed that Barack Obama won the election only because of the "things" - i.e., bribes - that he gave to minorities and younger voters.  The shallow Romney just cannot admit that is own moral flaws - e.g., wanting to take from the poor to give to the rich - blatant dishonesty, and his prostitution of himself to the Christofascists, not to mention his math challenged budget "plan," had anything to do with a majority of Americans rejecting the Romney/Ryan ticket.  And let's not forget the rejection of the legitimate rape crowd in the current GOP.  The New York Times looks at Romney's refusal to look in the mirror and admit his own deficiencies and I would add, moral bankruptcy.  Here are article highlights:

A week after losing the presidential election to President Obama, Mitt Romney blamed his overwhelming electoral loss on what he said were big“gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies — including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift,” he said.“Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

The president’s health care plan, he added, was also a useful tool in mobilizing African-American and Hispanic voters. Though Mr. Romney won the white vote with 59 percent, according to exit polls, minorities coalesced around the president in overwhelming numbers — 93 percent of blacks and 71 percent of Hispanics voted to re-elect Mr. Obama
 
Mr. Romney also echoed a theme from the campaign trail, saying that while the Mr. Obama “made a big effort on small thing,” his message had been about “big issues.”

“Our campaign, in contrast, was talking about big issues for the whole country—military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth,” he said. “And by the way, as you’ll hear from Neil, our strategy worked well with many people, but for those who were given a specific gift, if you will, our strategy did not work terribly well.”

On the call, described as a “spin and grin” by someone who dialed in, Mr. Romney also made sure to thank his national finance team.

Fairly early on in the campaign Romney convinced me - and apparently many others -  that he is a spoiled, self-centered, narcissistic, out of touch rich brat who has no empathy with those not born into wealth and family position.  Worse yet, he continues to have an over weening sense of entitlement and, as demonstrated during his speech to millionaire donors in Boca  Raton, holds many Americans in nothing less than contempt.  Americans like my active duty son-in-law in Afghanistan who pays not income tax while deployed.