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A new North Carolina Senate poll from PPP is perhaps the strongest indication yet that voters are not just in an anti-Democratic mood, but honestly in an anti-incumbent mood. Democratic frontrunner Elaine Marshall is way ahead of incumbent Republican Richard Burr among voters who have heard of Marhsall:
Among voters who actually have an opinion of Cal Cunningham or Elaine Marshall- whether it's positive or not- they lead Burr. Cunningham is up 46-44 and Marshall is up 49-40.
Most of the voters with no opinion about Burr are Democrats, which could mean that his approval numbers are even worse than they look.
Elaine Marshall can, and should, win this campaign. Even though she is challenging an incumbent in North Carolina, she is currently polling at a level roughly equal Democratic incumbents in bluer states like Arlen Specter, Michael Bennet and Harry Reid. She is also doing better than Democrats in other purple states, like Florida and New Hampshire, even though those are open seats. And, as the above polling shows, she has a lot of room for growth.
Marshall has the right resume for a Democrat in 2010. Her background is in financial regulations, and her main legislative achievement was pushing the North Carolina legislature to enact tougher anti-lobbying laws. From her website:
The Secretary of State's office today is a key law enforcement agency protecting consumers, investors, and charitable givers against securities fraud and financial scams. Elaine's commitment to protecting investors and combating financial fraud has in just the past year and a half alone lead to the recovery of over $340 million from major Wall Street banks for North Carolina investors and foundations.
Since taking office, Elaine has cut the costs of doing business for companies and individuals -helping small businesses create jobs. She has taken on lobbyists in Raleigh, reforming North Carolina's ethics laws.
Here is to hoping she is willing to run on a populist, anti-Wall Street platform, rather than a more generic anti-big government platform that consumes so many southern Democratic candidates.
Either way, Marhsall is way ahead in the Democratic primary, by 35% according to the most recent poll, and that is a good thing. Her main opponent in the primary, Cal Cunningham, would be another Blanche Lincoln. From a source over email:
Cal just had a fundraiser in DC hosted by a couple of lobbyists one of whom who's proclaims him being a founder of Third Way and involvement with the DLC. The other co-host was Blanche Lincoln's former Chief of Staff. The lobbying firm that held the event, their client roster reads like a who's who of the usual suspects that worked to torpedo HCR (AHIP, Pharma, etc).
Go Marhsall, go!
This is a very winnable Democratic pickup in a purple state in a bad year for Democrats. Further, the strongest Democratic candidate in the general election also happens to be the more progressive candidate in the primary. This is a primary, and a general election, we need to win.
Open Left is supporting this campaign to finish health reform right in multiple ways. Next week, we will be sending out an email to our list asking members to contact Senators. But, before we do that, we will be engaging in a major group journalism event to help provide information on this whip count. To do this, we need a couple dozen volunteers willing to make media inquiries to Senators asking them the following questions:
Hello, my name is [FILL IN BLANK, use real name] and I have a media inquiry from Openleft.com. Can you please put me in contact with the pres secretary / communications director?
[And then, once in contact]
Hi, my name is [FILL IN BLANK, use real name] and I have a media inquiry from Openleft.com. Can you please tell me if:
1--Senator [FILL IN BLANK] supports using the reconciliation process to forge a deal with the House of Representatives and finish health reform?
and
2--Does Senator {FILL IN BLANK] support including a public option in that reconciliation process, including signing onto Senator Bennet's letter on the public option?
If you are willing to make a call like this, either tomorrow or Thursday, PLEASE CONTACT ME OVER EMAIL BEFORE DOING SO. My email is christopher_j_bowers at yahoo dot com. I need to have your contact information, and know which Senator or Senators you are calling, so I can keep an updated count of which offices have received media contacts, and which ones have not. I am maintaining that list here:
Already, we have 18 supporters for question #1, and 6 supporters for question #2. (We will not be contacting any of the Senators who indicate their support for #2, or their opposition to #1.) When we get to 50, we will have accomplished a truly remarkable journalistic feat by proving there are enough Senators to finish health reform, hopefully with a public option, through the reconciliation process.
The basic idea behind this campaign is that, despite our relatively small numbers compared to the other four organizations, we can help the effort more in its early stages through media inquiries than through constituent contacts.
If you are willing to help, send me an email at christopher_j_bowers at yahoo dot com to volunteer!. We need to place all of these calls by Thursday morning, at the latest.
If you want to help, and have already contacted your Senator on the PCCC website, but do not want to make media inquiries, please scour to Internet to find evidence of members of the Democratic Senate. Post anything you find in the comments.
The health care summit is next week. We need to prove that health reform can be passed through reconciliation, with a public option, before them. There is no time to waste-send me an email, and let's get going!
Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) has sided against clean air and her constituents' health by supporting a resolution authored by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and polluter lobbyists that would roll back the Clean Air Act.
The design with the most votes will be plastered across a 14 foot by 48 foot billboard in Little Rock seen by more than 50,000 Arkansans each day.
The rollback proposal Sen. Lincoln has signed onto, is also known as the "Dirty Air Act." (Learn more about how Sen. Murkowski put it together with help from polluter lobbyists.) The proposal would not only prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from moving forward with sensible regulations to cut greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act, but would challenge the agency's finding, that follows from a landmark 2007 Supreme Court decision, that global warming endangers the health and well being of the public. The resolution is an attack on the law, an attack on science, and an attack on our economy that would hinder the transition to clean energy.
Some of the chatter around Evan Bayh's exit has speculated that he is gearing up for a right-wing primary challenge to President Obama in 2012. Bayh did organize a new Senate caucus that has stalled most of President Obama's agenda, and he has $13 million in the bank.
However, it can be safely said that, unless Obama's approval rating declines sharply among Democrats, there is no such room for a right-wing primary challenge. Here is President Obama's approval rating by partisan and ideological self-identification, sorted by the percentage of each group in the 2008 Presidential primary electorate:
Obama job approval by partisan and ideological self-identification, within the Democratic primary electorate
Ideology and Party
% of Dem primary electorate
Presidential Job Approval
Liberal Dem
38%
87%
Moderate Dem
31%
82%
Conservative Dem
9%
75%
Liberal Ind
9%
67%
Moderate Ind
7%
55%
Conservative Ind
3%
27%
Lib-Mod Rep
2%
31%
Conservative Rep
1%
12%
(Source for primary electorate composition: here Source for job approval by partisan and ideological self-ID: here and here)
This amount to an overall approval of 77% among the Democratic primary electorate. Further, only 5% of the primary electorate are self-identified conservatives who not approve of President Obama's job performance, and 10% are self-identified moderates who do not approve of President Obama's job performance.
That gives a right-wing primary challenge to President Obama only 15% of the presidential primary electorate to work with, which is less than one-fifth the percentage of the electorate that approves of President Obama's job performance. Further, it is likely that the self-identified liberals within the presidential primary electorate who do not approve of President Obama's job performance would break significantly against any such right-wing primary challenger. This makes it difficult for such a challenger to even win any delegates, much less actually mount a credible threat to President Obama's re-nomination.
President Obama is going to win the Democratic nomination in 2012, and win it easily. There won't be any other viable Democratic candidates for President until the 2016 primary season starts in late 2014.
Over at AMERICABlog and elsewhere, John, Joe et al are asking folks to call HRC to ask the White House to ask Congress to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell this year. I think increased pressure from HRC is important, though what I'd really like to see is four-fold, and I've called for several for months now:
Increased pushback in the media when items come out like the Pentagon considering segregated shower facilities or the Pentagon memo originally advising the President "now is not the time" (here)
Increased pushback on the one-year "study", like Rep. Sestak did in my interview (here), and emphasizing that Congress must repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell this year while the Pentagon completes its study
Increased pushback by warning, like the labor unions are doing, that angry and apathetic LGBT voters will stay home in droves during the 2010 elections (here)
Mobilization aimed at the White House. The night of the State of the Union speech, HRC launched its Voices of Honor campaign around grassroots mobilization, media events and legislative pressure. This is all important, but what remains to be seen is presidential leadership on the issue. John is dead-on here:
Unfortunately, we've reached a point with the Obama administration where allies have to publicly demand action, or promises are never kept. Just last week, the AFL-CIO was forced to send an action alert to its members, targeting the White House. If it's good enough for the unions, it's good enough for us.
Just like I asked LGBT leaders and activists to take a page out of labor's book on media pushback, HRC could do the same on this front. I'm not going to be satisfied with an official HRC statement "calling" on the White House to ask Congress. I'd like to see grassroots mobilization to do the same.
John et al are right that the momentum is on our side. We don't just need legislative mobilization, we need strong leadership, both from traditional groups and from the Administration, to push this through, and I'd like to see it on multiple fronts.
Two organizations I helped co-found and sit on the board of, Americans United for Change and American Family Voices, have launched a new ad campaign today going after Wall Street on the issue of unregulated derivatives.
I have been delighted to see how much attention it's getting- from Sam Stein here at HuffPo, from the Washington Post's The Plum Line, from Ben Smith at Politico, from ABC News' The Note, among other places. The story- of Wall Street traders placing "bets on bets on bets", as our ad puts it, in almost completely unregulated markets- is at the heart of the worldwide economic collapse of the last two years. The big banks on Wall Street made tens of billions of dollars on these derivative bets, and their recklessness caused millions of workers to lose their jobs and millions of homeowners to lose their homes. And they've done so with virtually no negative consequences for their own outrageous behavior.
Incredibly, banker money is now paying for an ad and PR campaign that claims no new regulation or protection for consumers or workers is needed. Frank Luntz wrote a memo for the bankers and their Republican allies on how to beat financial reform legislation, and its rank hypocrisy is remarkable: he suggests tying financial reform to the bailout the banks demanded, and to lobbyist inserted loopholes Republicans supported.
Financial reform will be the defining issue for the 2010 elections. Along with health care and figuring out a better solution to our unemployment crisis, taking on these big banks and stripping them of their power to destroy our economy will be the defining fight of our generation. These financial behemoths are oligarchs with way, way too much power in our economy and political system.
In an interview, Mr. Bayh said he was startled at how much the Senate had changed since he arrived in 1998
To prove this point, Bayh cited two incidents that took place during the first two weeks of February:
There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress, too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people's business is not getting done. Examples of this are legion but two recent ones will suffice.
Two weeks ago, the Senate voted down a bipartisan commission to deal with one of the greatest threats facing our nation: our exploding deficits and debt. The measure would have passed. But seven members who endorsed the idea, actually co-sponsored the legislation, instead voted no for short-term political reasons.
Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create new jobs -- our nation's top priority today -- fell apart amidst complaints from both the left and the right.
Guilty or Not Guilty (Art II, Articles of Impeachment v. President W. J. Clinton )
The Senate has surely changed to become more partisan since Evan Bayh first entered those hallowed halls. If only there was a way we could get back to that time period, such as, say, having heavy Democratic favorites for re-election from red states retire rather than seek another term. Then, the Democratic nomination in those states can go to candidates who have no chance to win any election ever, but who are the only ones who gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot. Is that still possible?
Update: Both Greg Sargent and Hotline are now reporting that d'Ippolito has failed to meet the ballot requirement. What's more, she needed to exceed the minimum requirement by a long way, since many will be ruled ineligible when the Indiana state party challenges her signatures (which they will).
I'm no fan of the Denver Post's conservative columnist Vince Carroll, nor am I a fan of the recent Supreme Court decision on corporate political spending, but there's an important point in this column:
Speaking without a hint of irony, Congressman Jared Polis, the gilded Democrat from Boulder, took to the House floor last month to denounce "corporations with their dollars, using them to confuse and trick people with their massive and misleading public relations attacks."...
Money is corrupting, you see, but not when it's his money.
Political committees are to be spurned and condemned, but not when they're his committees. Outside influence on politicians is often venal, but not when he generates it...
Just this week, The Denver Post's Burt Hubbard outlined how Polis' political committee, the Jared Polis Victory Fund, gave out more than $400,000 to fellow members of Congress and national campaign groups last year...
So it's fine - noble, even - for a plutocrat to throw his money around in the pursuit of power, but it's grubby trickery for, say, a trade association to spend money opposing hostile candidates or defending themselves from legislative assaults upon their very livelihoods...
In 2008, (Polis) would dump more than $5 million of his fortune into his congressional campaign while criticizing his main opponent, who lacked his limitless resources, for taking money from political action committees.
Carroll's overreach is trying to personalize this to Polis - but he hits on an important point. Without public financing of elections, money will play a decisive and distorting role in our politics, particularly in a country whose wealth is so concentrated in the hands of so few, whether those few are individual millionaires or wealthy corporations. That's a truism, with or without the recent Supreme Court case.
Of course, Carroll, a libertarian, likely doesn't support public financing of elections. But his column makes a good case for it by indicting the hypocrisy and inequalities of the current system. Sure, recent Democratic proposals to deal specifically with the Supreme Court case are decent steps - but until we have the discussion about public financing, everything else is nibbling at the edges of the problem.
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